Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 45

BEYOND THE FAULT LINE:
THE MYTH OF CALIFORNIA
Your idea of what California is may be along the lines o f an ad
in the San Francisco Examiner: “Premium cultured white fur
Christmas trees. Any size.” Whatever your idea of California is,
even if you live there, you probably have derived it from film, TV,
journals, and road signs. California is both the source and the
subject of most of those myth-making media.
My argument is that California is our greatest invention. That
idea of California as the land beyond the fault line is the dominant
center of American culture. It creates, markets, and exports itself,
subsuming all our “places.” Phillip Marlowe’s Laurel Canyon is
more real to me than the town I live in. So are North Beach,
Monterrey, and Bel Air. The California in our minds is the supreme
land o f illusion and the ultimate land of desire, America’s— and the
world’s— best dream.
California is paradise, the meeting place o f all that is good, a
land without death, a plentiful garden hanging with fruits; but it is
a place of irony as well. It is a paradise, yes, but also a place to retire
to and die, a garden in which to die of hard-to-identify hungers. The
Day o f the Locust spelled it out.
The Garden of Eden lies beyond the fault line, a myth; the
dream of Eden— a real dream— flows in all our veins. The dream
of California as paradise goes wherever Hollywood has reached.
Through Hollywood California is the chief producer o f our dreams,
and we have become used to seeing bits of California representing
places specifically NOT California. Elliot Lewis in Bennett’s
World (1982): “The setting was a small town in New England,
somewhere in Maine or Vermont or New Hampshire, although,

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