Lookers

LA's candy-colored decadence

by Andrey Slivka

FAST FORWARD: GROWING UP IN THE SHADOW OF HOLLYWOOD, by Lauren Greenfield, with an introduction by Carrie Fisher and an afterword by Richard Rodriguez. 79 color photographs. Alfred A. Knopf, 128 pages, $35.

"There is something brown and holy about the East," wrote Jack Kerouac in one of his more credible moments, "and California is white like washlines and empty-headed." It's as charming a passage as the sporadically talented fellow ever wrote. But it's historically interesting, too, since at this point it's hard to conceive of California -- particularly Southern California -- as pure. That's assuming, of course, that the passage is exclusively evoking blithe innocence. As Melville knew, whiteness can suggest the ominous; and empty-headedness is as much the domain of the sociopath as of the bleached-out Californians who populate our cultural mythology.

Lauren Greenfield's Fast Forward: Growing up in the Shadow of Hollywood, a collection of photographs of Los Angeles's young people, implies that what's so fascinating about Southern California is its conflation of innocence and knowledge, of purity and utter corruption. There's nothing new about this observation, of course: commentators on the West have been spinning it out in one form or another since at least Mark Twain's time. And though Greenfield is neither philosopher nor sociologist, her collection is a brilliant document of the candy-colored decadence of LA's privileged precincts. It's also an evocation of how elite values play on the deprived far side of that city's tracks. Greenfield's photographs are accompanied by their young subjects' personal narratives, which are occasionally heartbreaking and confirm a sense of cultural free fall.

Several of Greenfield's generally middle-distance, color-saturated photographs are posed, and in them her subjects engage in what the book suggests is their birthright: the exploitation of our image-driven culture.

On first glance, a grungy, pretty girl who wears butterfly wings as she perches on the back of a car in front of her Santa Monica private school invites admiration. Here's one adolescent who's unafraid of flaunting her eccentricities or of eschewing the damaging stupidities that America, not to mention LA, inflicts upon its young women. But there's a hard, cynical smirk in the girl's 12-year-old face, and one wonders whether her stoner role-playing is less liberating and creative than simply a learned and empty reflex performed without irony, without control.

In another photograph, a boy sports black tie, yarmulke, sunglasses, and a million-dollar smile as he strikes a shredder's pose on a photographer's mock-up of a surfboard; he's as eerily at home before the lens as a five-year-old has any right to be. It's a stunning photograph, because it's impossible to know how much of the pose draws artlessly on the normal, unselfconscious fantasy life of a typical five-year-old, how much is directed at a viewer, and whether there's any longer a difference between the two.

This is Greenfield's central theme: to what extent are these children being allowed to develop their own personalities, and how much have they already been -- or have they always been -- implicated in the reflexes of the surrounding culture? Adam, for example, stares stupidly at the breasts of the hired go-go dancer at his bar mitzvah reception, while an adolescent girl in a white leotard falls out of her tiny skirt in the background. Is this penny-ante decadence something that Adam wants, or is he as much a slack-jawed victim as his pronouncements -- "I don't think it's good for a child to grow up in LA" -- suggest? Does 13-year-old Alison really want her own trainer, counselor, nutritionist, singing coach, and driver? Her comments seem to indicate that she's not sure: "Lately I have been thinking of going to boarding school, because I really just want to get out of here."

Though Greenfield is primarily concerned with LA's affluent, she also offers affecting portraits of kids in South Central, Compton, and other poor neighborhoods. East LA party crew members come across as testosterone-soaked morons as they throw signs at the camera, and an aspiring rapper named G-mo, who seems to have the whole scam figured out -- "I want to have thangs " -- probably isn't as wise as he imagines. But there's something appealing about Enrique, a poor kid who appears apprehensive as he hands over a wad of cash for a limousine on prom night. Like his Westside counterparts, Enrique is implicated in the culture of money and the image, but he seems to have some sort of humane understanding of what participation in that culture can mean.

Fast Forward includes an introduction by Carrie Fisher and an afterword by Richard Rodriguez. Fisher dithers about her troubled, privileged Southern California existence; Rodriguez, who's one of our most interesting commentators on California and the West, is on autopilot here, spinning out familiar riffs on the American cult of adolescence. Greenfield's photographs are strong enough that they should have been left on their own.