Grayson Kelly

With the rise of video hosting and streaming platforms like Youtube, the medium of the video essay has dramatically modernized over the past few years. According to Wikipedia, a video essay, much like a written one, is a film that takes advantage of the structure and language of film to advance an argument. Today, one can find hundreds of video essays across Youtube, covering everything from true crime and police interrogations to influencer drama and takedown pieces. This is where I was introduced to the medium--and fell in love with it. So, when I was tasked with watching Thom Andersen’s 2003 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself and writing about my reaction to it, I felt more than excited. 

What started as an idea that came to Andersen after giving a lecture on his objections to the film L.A. Confidential would eventually become the mammoth video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself. The essay isn’t so much a documentary as it is a lens through which one can peer at the dark, grimy history of the city of Angels. The scope of the research is truly grand, and the stars of the film itself are the litany of edited-together clips from the entirety of movie history. The subject matter is rich and interesting, the imagery is important and mostly beautiful. 

But that’s about it. In fact, Los Angeles Plays Itself is a wonderful film to fall asleep to. With its clunky, monotonous and contradictory narration. Andersen’s commentary is drab and boring, and when boiled down, can really be summed up as the essayist’s personal nitpicks about LA architecture and city planning. These reasons range from "those two streets don't connect" to "that airport terminal is really a train station" to "that building wasn't built when this was set" to "why are this architect’s buildings always owned by bad guys?" Normal people do not look into architectural styles and what they “were designed to invoke,” and furthermore, as a critic, shouldn’t the instinctive usage of something (in this case, architecture) in a way other than it was designed for be interrogated as artistic and not stupid? 

Andersen’s commentary throughout the film comes across as ignorant, insipid, cynical, and pompous, and the one thesis he seems to be pushing is that, well, movies lie and aren’t always honest. What you see on the screen isn’t always reality, and there is usually some dark shit behind everything. This is something that I learned at age 8 or 9 when I saw an animated Scooby Doo solve a mystery at a resort on “Spooky Island” in 2002’s Scooby-Doo.

Andersen’s P.O.V. is one that I absolutely could not relate to and one that I didn’t feel like I learned anything from at all. After watching the film, all that I took away from his opinion was that the only parts of Los Angeles history that matter are the ones that have been perfectly represented on film to his exact liking. Anything else, he hates, and he lets us know--oftentimes without any smart or intelligent justification. “Los Angeles is a city with no history,” he says at one point in the essay. What? Then what are we doing here? Why is this three hours long? Andersen’s inferiority complex about L.A. seems to be derived from his hang ups on what other people think about Los Angeles, and these opponents seem to exist solely in his mind.