Why was Californication, the Showtime series that debuted
last August starring David Duchovny as an author who moves from New
York City to California after optioning his best-selling novel, renewed
for a second season? Surely literate grown-ups, the show's target
audience, have better things to do with their free time, and yet they
kept tuning in. Why?
Were they that happy to see Duchovny break out of his post–X Files muddle or just titillated by Californication's
sex-heavy pilot? Or did the show's portrayal of entertainment industry
angst, combined with the odd allusion to Nabokov and Flaubert keep them
coming back? Certainly the original characters can't be responsible.
Hank Moody, the writer Duchovny plays in the show, is just a stubbly
Hollywood cliché (New York novelist sells out and walks around feeling
miserable about his writer's block) with a twist (as a result of
selling out, he falls into a rock star's dream of beautiful women,
drugs, and booze).
Perhaps the most addictive thing about Californication
is that it lets non–Golden State viewers feel superior to writers like
Moody, who are completely hobbled by life on the West Coast. They think
they're watching for the glamour and showbiz decadence, but what keeps
them wanting more is how smug the show makes them feel. ("We may have
made compromises, we may sometimes feel miserable," one can almost hear
the masses mutter, "but at least we're not living like Hank Moody.")
Serious
readers and writers have long condescended to California, specifically
Los Angeles, the place John Updike called "the capital of organized
unreality" in his novel Bech at Bay (Knopf, 1998). The
problem isn't the city's fabled fruitiness, nuttiness, or phoniness,
but the fact that writers have been known to do extremely well out West
(notwithstanding the issues at stake in the Writers Guild of America's
decision to strike after their contract with the Alliance of Motion
Picture and Television Producers expired last November).
After
all, California is where generations of Barton Finks flock to pick up
paychecks the size of the Hollywood sign. As novelist and short story
writer James Salter once told the Paris Review, "Movie
writers…are among the most overpaid people on earth. In a certain sense
you would do a movie for nothing, just for the fun of doing it. In
addition to that, you are lavishly paid." (Under the terms of the
Writers Guild's expired contract, the New York Times
reported, "the six major film studios must pay a minimum of $106,000
for an original screenplay, while networks must pay at least $20,956
for a teleplay or a prime-time comedy show and $30,823 for a prime-time
drama.")
The truth is, Californication's
hackneyed view of California—surprise, surprise—isn't true. The state
isn't made up entirely of malcontent sellouts. Take, for example, Los
Angeles–born, Sacramento resident William T. Vollmann, whose new
nonfiction book Riding to Everywhere, in which he chronicles
life on the rails as a twenty-first-century dharma bum, is being
published this month by Ecco. They don't make writers more serious,
literary, or Californian than Vollmann, who won the 2005 National Book
Award for his novel Europe Central (Viking).
David
Mamet recently relocated from Massachusetts to Los Angeles, and is no
less a genius for it. The West Coast has failed to damage the talents
of either Robert Hass, winner of the 2007 National Book Award in poetry
for Time and Materials (Ecco), or Michael Chabon (who did some screenwriting on Spider-Man 2).
Joan Didion, a sometime screenwriter herself, has produced brilliant
work in and about California. And Charles Bukowski, whatever else can
be said about him, stayed remarkably true to himself, even in
Hollywood. To show their appreciation, a group of fans banded together
last summer to declare Bukowski's East Hollywood bungalow—where he met
his publisher, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press—a historic monument.
(Bukowski fans should note that "Hank" is the name their author often
employed for his autobiographical characters.)
Compare Hank Moody to Richard Lange, a fiction writer in Los Angeles whose recent collection, Dead Boys,
was published by Little, Brown last August. Lange writes subtle,
realistic stories about people who live in Southern California: a
salesman traumatized by the rape of his sister; a likeable middle-class
bank robber; a failed, alcoholic actor who grows up while drying out at
his mother's house. These stories don't make readers feel superior to
the characters; they convey the truth that actual human beings live in
the City of Angels.
Better yet, consider T.
C. Boyle, who has been teaching at the University of Southern
California since 1978 and has produced an important—and hefty—shelf of
fiction. He survived the adaptation of his book The Road to Wellville
(Viking, 1993) into the Alan Parker film of the same title, and Fox
nearly made a group of his stories into a television series, with Boyle
as a host. "They put Anthony Hopkins and Bridget Fonda on the cover of The Road to Wellville,"
Boyle said in an interview with Robert Birnbaum in 2003. "And I resent
that. To a degree. But it sold lots and lots of copies."
In
California, there's no question that authors are less powerful than
actors, directors, producers, and even screenwriters. In her essay
collection Married to the Icepick Killer (Random House, 2002), Carol Muske-Dukes, whose first novel, Dear Digby
(Viking, 1989), was nearly made into a movie starring Michelle Pfeiffer
and whose late husband, David Dukes, was a successful actor, writes
about living in the same neighborhood as not just Ellen DeGeneres and
her then-girlfriend Anne Heche, but the man who voiced Carlton the
Doorman on Rhoda. Think, for a moment, about what living in
such a neighborhood might mean to a serious literary artist. ("Maybe
screenwriting's not such a bad gig. Maybe I should try to write a more
commercial novel—I've got bills to pay!")
Most
writers hope for fame and money, but what happens when you produce
serious work among neighbors who are busy churning out sitcoms for the
boob tube and have accumulated considerably more of both as a result?
What's it like to keep up with Carlton the Doorman?
Perhaps the success of Californication
says something about how literary people simply feel beaten by the
influence and power of television. Of course, Hank Moody isn't a real
writer, in any sense of the word. His life is just a fantasy grounded
in longing and envy—something to distract us from the fact that,
wherever we live, most of us will never even have the chance to sell out to Hollywood.
Ken Gordon, the editor of JBooks.com, contributes to such publications as the Boston Globe Magazine and the New York Times. He lives in Newton Centre, Massachusetts.
“Serious readers and writers have long condescended to California, specifically Los Angeles.”
