Even though I love the hysterical contempt of Nathanael West above almost all other things, I can equally enjoy Tom Carson’s wonderfully worded Paul Thomas Anderson consideration at Grantland, which makes quick work of The Day of the Locust characterizations of Californians in the service of exalting the great filmmaker as a Wellesian master of the region. There are gorgeous, knowing passages like this one: “[There Will Be Blood] is the unofficial prequel to Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, almost the only other movie to remind us that Southern California was a paradise won, not lost, by capitalism’s version of original sin — the destruction of the natural order. The same is true of America itself, of course, but California’s role in our culture is to incarnate the New World’s own, hyperbolized promised land.” The opening: 

Is it going too far to say that Southern California is to Paul Thomas Anderson what North Mississippi was to William Faulkner? Possibly. So maybe we’re better off playing it safe and going with Flannery O’Connor’s home turf instead.

Not to worry, people. As novelistic as PTA can be, which is plenty, this isn’t about giving him some kind of misbegotten upgrade by proclaiming his movies are Just Like Literature. The point is that he’s a regional artist in a way that doesn’t have many screen equivalents. If East Coast critics often overlook this in spite of loving him to death, no wonder: Not many Americans outside the zip codes in question think of SoCal as a real place to begin with.

Neither do most of the transplants, for that matter. Reality wasn’t the attraction when they moved, after all; liberation was. One of Anderson’s great strengths is that his understanding of Los Angeles as a teeming vat of self-actualization projects doesn’t make him feel obliged to depict the volunteer lab rats as bizarre or foolish, in the hysterically contemptuous way that we’ve been used to since The Day of the Locust. Good old American transcendentalism just got all modern and DIY in SoCal, and the results are a travesty only if you mistake different methods for changed goals.

Being the local boy that most of his fellow filmmakers aren’t — he was born in Studio City, pretty much the definition of deglamorized glamour — has the effect of turning everybody else’s Oz into Anderson’s evocatively vivid Kansas.•