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The Line Between Illusion and Reality Grows Thin

Author: Steve Erickson

They have gone too far.

We almost cannot know any longer what is real and what is not.

Down from that part in the hills between Westwood and Encino where L.A. leaks into the rest of the world, there comes a runnel of cars along the highway which once, in oatmeal nights when we were all 5, looked like a waterway of lights. Like a stream. Maybe you were one of those who called it a snake. That doesn't matter. The point about the lights. The lights.

There was a recent story about Salvador Dali and Alice Cooper, in which Dali unveiled his new portrait of the rock singer. However, the portrait was not one of Dali's by now yawning tapestries of melted time and such; rather it was light. Light which, without a lens but with simply a negative, produced a portrait of Alice. True to life and one does not even need those green and red #-D glasses. But put your hand out to touch it, and it will pass through the picture. Dali chose Cooper, he said, because the rocker was "the best exponent of total confusion I know." The light picture turned within a revolving cylinder, and the technicians call the picture a hologram. That doesn't matter. The point was the confusion.

What makes the least sense about any of it is that it didn't happen in Los Angeles.

Fifty years ago this place began changing out sense of things; the machine with the congested snore dreamed to packed houses; the movie business was on. Los Angeles has ever since been in the business of confusion, and the object of that confusion has been the fine line between the real and the illusory, a line the likes of Dali and Cooper have crossed many times, as well as others; Hollywood faces formed in the celluloid spit on the walls, the ones whose lives were spent in the process of making movies, of merging the real and fantasy.

Now, all around us spins crazily a world that is theater, and the theater moves in on the neighborhood. Once the usefulness of our fantasies was that they defined what we perceived outside ourselves. But where once illusion extended itself to reality, now illusion intones reality.