3 - Hollywood’s Bay Area

Summary

The writer Nathaniel Rich opens his San Francisco Noir (2005) by wrestling with the apparent paradox at the heart of cinematic representations of San Francisco: how can ‘one of the happiest, most beautiful, and romantic cities in the world’ also be ‘so sinister and dark’ onscreen? Obviously, Rich's genre focus defines this paradox: after all, as the film scholar Edward Dimendberg notes, the film noir metropolis ‘seldom appears … [as] a space of genuinely enhanced freedom’. But Rich's curiosity at the disjuncture between what might be termed image and reality raises important questions for students of the relationship between cinema and the cities it depicts, not least because Rich hints here that two ‘San Franciscos’ exist: the physical one, in which young folks gambol in sunlight-dappled parks, and the cinematic one, where evil forces, enshrouded in fog, lurk at the corner of every building. Of course, this is an oversimplification, both of the ‘real’ and the ‘cinematic’ city: there is no single, unified cinematic (or indeed, real) San Francisco – as Rebecca Solnit suggests in her book of the same name, it is an Infinite City. Instead, we must consider the ways in which San Francisco-set films metaphorically create the city and inscribe it with values, ideas and emotions that deepen their plot, mises en scène, atmosphere, post-production and perhaps even distribution. Thus, the Hollywood reimagining of the city encourages the active cinema viewer to interrogate the ‘real’ and the ‘cinematic’ city in order to develop a richer understanding of both. As such, the two partake in a dialogic relationship: the real informs the cinematic, while at the same time the cinematic informs and helps shape our understanding of the real.

The variety of cinematic representations of San Francisco runs from the sunny modernist city, full of wide boulevards, chic residencies and lavish hotels of What's Up Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich, 1972), to the ruined post-apocalyptic wasteland of The Book of Eli (Allen Hughes and Albert Hughes, 2010). Most germane to Silicon Valley cinema are films that present San Francisco as a location for struggles over the future of society, or even over the potential end of the world.