Digital Echoes of Los Angeles
Towards the use of Videogames for Psychogeography — with a focus on L.A.
I’m driving down Wilshire Boulevard, through the heart of Los Angeles, looking for the copper green tones of a particular tower. The last time I was here, an Angeleno friend told me Kendrick Lamar had played a gig there just before his career went stratospheric.
But this time, the tower in question is nowhere to be seen. I should level with you: It might be because I’m not really in L.A. right now. Not physically, anyway. It’s 1947, which means another 40 years or so will have to elapse before Kendrick or I will even be born. In fact, my own parents haven’t been born yet. Still, here I am, cruising down Wilshire, hoping to catch a glimpse of this elusive emerald tower, and with it a memory of when I was actually in L.A., two years back, trying to get a handle on the city.
I am playing a videogame called L.A. Noire, and I’m using it to time travel in a specific way. In essence, I am shining my own recent past through the prism of an imaginary one — a time and space that is noire-tinged and hard boiled. In this L.A. my own past is, technically, the future, as yet unrealised. And of course, it never will be. The events of L.A Noire don’t extend beyond the 1940s, and exist on a different timeline to my life altogether.
Confused? Probably not as much as I am, here in 2020, 2018 and 1947, all at once.
Still, even all this dissonance can’t overwhelm the pervading sense of familiarity. An uncanny deja vu glows from the street and buildings as I glide past. Their layout, their arrangement and physical presence, stokes memory in me. At the far end of Wilshire, on the corner of Westmoreland Avenue, a jutting hulk tinged with that same copper green suddenly looms into view, snaring my attention — the Bullocks Wilshire Department Store. I get out of the car to survey, weighing that sense of familiarity inside. But it’s quickly apparent that, even through the haze of memory, this isn’t the building I want.
City of fantasy
The truth is, I had been to L.A. many times in fantasy before I went there for real. There were many stories framed by the city of angels, and most of them violent: Falling Down, Training Day, Boyz n the Hood, Die Hard. Various Raymond Chandler novels and shorts. Brett Easton Ellis, House of Leaves. This in itself is nothing unusual — how often does the idea of a place, its archetype and stereotype, precede our actual knowledge of it? How often do we imagine a city before we go there?
But this phenomenon seems especially true for L.A. This is a city, after all, that has long made an artform of fantasy, of reinvention, of dreaming. It specialises in disappearing into itself, like a magician who vacates the stage by way of their own trick. As David Ulin puts it in his psychogeographic exploration Sidewalking, L.A.’s self image is rooted in the ruse that ‘the past is a blank slate and the future its own fantasy’. Thom Andersen’s 2003 film Los Angeles Plays Itself makes a similar point, both in title and substance. The film is composed entirely of footage of L.A. cribbed from other moving pictures.
L.A. as vanishing point. L.A. as mirage. L.A. as self-devouring metaphor. Such illusory credentials make the city a uniquely slippery candidate for psychogeography, especially if we consider the goal of psychogeography to be an engagement with the spirit of a given place, its genius loci, its soul.
In Sidewalking, Ulin does something that’s simultaneously obvious and radical in order to reach a dialogue with his city: He walks. This, of course, is standard practice in the psychogeographic heartlands of London and Paris, those old guard cities where the fabric of place seems attuned to the passage of feet past and present. But in autopian L.A., where distance seems to be measured by hours spent in traffic, walking has a far more radical currency. The act of drifting, the art of la derive, frames the walker in a particular way here, as an outsider, an anomaly who seems out of sync with the city’s essence, its code.
I too walked when I visited L.A. And yes, there is history at street level, associations and observations waiting to be made. The texture one needs for psychogeographic inquiry is there, even if the place itself likes to pretend it isn’t. Self-sustainingly eternal the idea of L.A. might be, but at some point the mirror still cracks.
However, as with the San Andreas fault, this city is built around and over that crack. It seems to resists it, deny it — and maybe that’s part of its fascination. Even once you’ve punctured its image, that heady patchwork of fantasy is sure to reassemble, reassert itself — because this is the idea at the heart of L.A. The borderline between fact and fiction must remain fuzzy.
Perhaps that’s why a video game like L.A. Noire makes perfect sense for doing psychogeography here.
That uncanny valley
In a city that constantly plays itself, what does it mean when an outsider takes up the role and plays Los Angeles instead?
L.A. Noire was released in 2011, then remastered for the current (soon to be last) generation of consoles in 2017. Its developers, Team Bondi, meticulously recreated their 1947 Los Angeles from aerial photos and other primary source material, with the result that some 90% of downtown is, as far as the claim can be made, accurately realised. It was, and is, a staggering feat, a painstaking labour of love that speaks of almost slavish dedication to the capturing of a particular moment and locale in history. I use the word ‘slavish’ quite deliberately here too, because the story of L.A Noire sadly can’t be extricated from the story of Team Bondi’s punishing development schedule. Things got so bad that it led to a series of complaints from staff, accusations of unethical practice, an investigation by the International Game Developer’s Association (IGDA)and, ultimately, the developer’s severance from Rockstar Games and its subsequent downfall. There is more than a hint of irony that L.A. Noire’s glorious midcentury ambience, the fidelity to history I’ve been describing, is owed to alleged labour abuse — like a beautiful portrait made in a sweatshop.
I’ve played a lot of open world, sandbox games, and L.A. Noire isn’t the best by any stretch. Frankly, there’s much that is lacking. The streets never crackle with the energy or unpredictability of a Grand Theft Auto title, for starters. Often, it’s very clear you’re playing a well-crafted simulation — a clockwork world rather than a living, breathing system. You can see the cracks, and an artificial quality dogs the realism.
And perhaps, in one sense, that is why the game is so fascinating.
The value of L.A. Noire for psychogeography is precisely the atmosphere produced by that disconnect; the rendering of an idea of 1947 L.A. that again exists somewhere between film noire fantasy and true realism; a clumsy imitation and an immersive, true-to-history simulation.
When I play L.A. Noire it’s that eerie presence of a lost time that draws me in, and which brings me to reflection. At one level, this is a clunky open world game, without much to offer in the way of real sandbox ingenuity. At another, it’s a depiction of L.A. that defies precise categorization, suspended somewhere between fact and fiction, just like the city it depicts. It burns its way out from the screen with uncanny effect — and opens up a space that is ripe for psychogeography.
In a funny way, I think it’s all a matter of time.
In pursuit of time
As we learn from Ulin’s various perambulations in Sidewalking, psychogeography has a lot to do with time. In his effort to seek out some foundation on which to engage with L.A., Ulin resorts to that which has already happened, and therefore, ostensibly, is already known — the past.
But not just the city’s past. His own. This is what makes Sidewalking psychogeography, rather than straight history. Ulin’s own memory and reflections gain access to the city and are, in fact, inextricable from his experience of it.
As he writes: ‘This, in turn, brings me back to why I walk here, as an act of creation, of mutual creation, in which I remake L.A. in my image…even as it remakes me.’
Our inner and outer worlds overlap. When we truly grasp the idea that our relationship with space, with the world, is dynamic, everything changes. It is not hubris to say that the world makes us, and we make the world; it’s humility. It is a recognition of the fundamental interconnectivity that shapes our existence. A recognition that power is always a set of relations. And that everything is relational.
The same is also true of time. Our own relation to memory, to the past, is endlessly shifting. It creates us in the present, even as we create it.
Could it be that this explains the allure of L.A., and my own wish to return there in L.A. Noire? There is something elusive and enticing about a city that exists in flux with its own history — perhaps because it also expresses a very human impulse to reimagine oneself, one’s own history. And yet, by playing Los Angeles in L.A. Noire, I am able to insert myself into this flux of time in a different way; to slow it, to interrogate it through a different lens. As the player, I find myself suspended within this contradiction.
Of course, walking the streets as Ulin does — the classical approach — allows for a similar tightrope act between past and present, self and city. But returning to L.A. via a videogame adds a third layer to the act of psychogeography — one that’s rooted in fantasy. A new layer of complexity, for sure…but also one of meaning. A strata that seems particularly relevant to L.A.
Because, when I play L.A. Noire, I play an idea of Los Angeles. I apprehend an image of the city — a vision, a hallucination that is realistic but also cannot be judged as truly hyperreal.
Do I also play an idea of myself?
After all, in L.A. Noire the player becomes upstanding detective Cole Phelps. Much like the fantasy image of Los Angeles he inhabits, I too am inhabiting an image, a body double. If Los Angeles constantly plays itself, eats itself, disappears into itself — then, in the act of playing Los Angeles, I do the same to myself.
In a sense, I perform the very trick which Los Angeles has coveted itself throughout living memory. I disappear into myself. My self becomes abstracted across the digital canvas. I get lost between images, between the warp of space and time.
Chasing echoes
When we get lost, naturally, we look for something familiar.
Perhaps that was why I sought the copper green tower on Wilshire, too. The sense of it as being somehow elemental, a conduit for a past that the city seemed to deny even as it celebrated it.
And of course, for my own past, grounded through the lightning rod of the dreamed edifice. After all, hadn’t I been struck by its forceful elegance the first time I had seen it, spiking up over the traffic on Wilshire? Yes, and it was precisely that elegant statement — that sense of it as historic, that I had responded to. Its smoky jade colouring had brought associations of Aztec or Mayan civilisations, pre-conquest. There was a link in my mind to masks and two-headed snakes in the British Museum, impossible relics of somewhere, sometime, that was lost — nevermind the fact that the building wasn’t nearly the same shade of turquoise. At the same time, its art deco ostentation conjured a sense of an older American metropolis; the Big City, bristling with vaunting skyscrapers as high as the eye could see. Some dreamlike wish for a dense, industrious urban hustle, the relentless flow of its streets bisected by the intense verticality of stone towers.
A lot of what Ulin touches on in Sidewalking is continuity. The way we imagine a place, and the way that imagining stitches different times and places together. A storytelling impulse to echo, to join up, to weave into symmetry that seems irresistible, even when we try to reject it.
It seems to me that, in L.A. Noire, I was tracing back both my own, personal memory and the fantasy of what Los Angeles used to be in tandem. The two became interwoven, inseparable. A dense, perplexing fabric came into being.
So, where does this leave us? Everywhere and nowhere, I suppose. A final statement becomes as elusive as the green tower — real, yet somehow unreachable.
But here is an attempt, at least. In the act of playing Los Angeles in a videogame, I would suggest a new kind of experience can be reached; one which, perhaps, subverts time to uncanny effect.
Through the intersection of personal memory, L.A.’s self image and digital play, we come to a strange new frontier. Ironically, it may bring us closer to the heart of the city than actually being there.
