Everything is cheaper than it looks....

Ladies and Gentlemen, Los Angeles....

So when we think of pulp fiction stories and film noir, L.A. comes to mind for two reasons:

#1 – A new genre needs a new location. New York was already happenin’ and L.A. was just getting started.

#2 – L.A. had a certain mystique and mystery surrounding it, partly due to the film industry and partly because of the myth. “Hollywood, where dreams come true”.

Now John Leland has a great point too:

“The [west] coast was a place to contemplate the failure of the open road. Playing against the popular image of California as a land of sunshine and opportunity, pulp writers recast the state as a dark, violent place where the outcasts, drifters and grifters dug in after they ran out of room to run”.

~ So if life on the road was a symbol of masculine freedom, than by the time you reached California, it’s almost as if the road had changed these men into mysterious, dark figures.

~ Identity is out the window. No one really knows who’s who, because people can reinvent themselves by the hour.