Dreamscapes

This weekend saw the opening of the much-anticipated action thriller, Inception - the biggest non-sequel, non-adaptation box office hit since... Avatar? Inception tells the story of a rogue group of good-looking "dream investigators" who pry the secrets of unsuspecting victims through their highly architectural dreams. Ellen Page, of Juno fame, plays the Paris architecture student charged with designing the labyrinthine (but rarely surreal) landscapes where the high-speed illusory pursuits take place. Among the backdrops for the action are a Soviet-era arctic military base, a placeless cosmopolitan hotel, and a post-apocalyptic Waikiki beach. While the majority of the plot occurs in an in-flight dream en route to Los Angeles, many of the shooting locations, where named and not, are within our city limits.

While Los Angeles is certainly not new to appearing on screen, her scenes in Inception are used not to establish any real life locale or support a preconceived stereotype about this city, but to represent a dreamscape - a building or a place so amorphous or unreal that we might conceive something similar in our own dreams. The architecture of Los Angeles has long been identifiable in this way: with its longs stretches of Wild Wild West ramshackle monotony punctuated by look-at-me displays of ostentatious if not always intelligent landmarks. Now, one of the film's shortfalls (spoiler alert) is that, aside from liberal shows of antigravity and a compellingly tensile Paris skyline, there are conspicuously few scenes that make full use of the absurdity and total unreality that we know dreams are so often capable of. But to the film's credit, a large part of its thrill is that we never quite know when we are in a dream and we are in reality - a testament to the frightening lucidity that we also know dreams are capable of.

Among the most identifiable of the Los Angeles shooting locations are a downtown street corner (Hope and Wilshire), the Music Center and DWP headquarters, and the sleek 2000 Ave of the Stars in Century City. The first of these is used to represent a presumably New York City street, lined with skyscrapers and filled with yellow taxi cabs. In fact, an entire chase seen is filmed at this intersection alone, but is meant to read like a continuous series of urban intersections. If not for the distinctly eye-catching Famima!! that appears constantly in the bottom left quarter of the screen, we might never know we weren't actually hurtling down the monotonously urban New York City blocks. The second is perhaps the best example. The music center and the DWP are possibly the two most distinct of our mid-century modernist palaces. The cold, wide emptiness and the unrelenting repetititon of steel and glass reflecting off the shallow moat waters somehow feel equally at home in our nightmares as they do as our civic centers. The last of these represents more the hulking bravado that has come to characterize the contemporary office building. But the glass tower with a gaping hole through its center, better known as the home to the CAA talent agency, plays the sexily anonymous hotel where our dreamers rub shoulders with billionaires and high-rent prostitutes.

But aside from the brief dream-like glimpses of our city inserted alongside more majestic profiles of Tokyo and Paris, Inception has also brought architecture back into the discussion of cinematic spaces, and along with it, the more complex and intriguing question of what the spaces in our dreams look like.

The Grove, still our city center

In an eye-catching display combining social media, outdoor advertising, and pedestrian involvement, the Canada Tourism Bureau has set up shop in vacant storefronts in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, to show a new generation of prospective American travellers all the wonders of our northern neighbor, via live Twitter and Facebook updates from actual visitors. The choice of our three largest cities is quite obvious, but their locations therein less so. They would have to choose locations that not only feature the most pedestrian traffic, but the ones that are most high-profile, in order to garner wider attention, like from the media. So Times Square for obvious reasons in New York, and Chicago's Michigan Ave is that city's main ritzy shopping thoroughfare.

And for LA? None other than the Grove - that much-debated yet much-loved outdoor mall cum public place that is still a huge metric of our urban identity, eight years after its completion. The Canadian bureau's decisioin to invest there poses a great reminder that the Grove is the sort of place we Angelenos like to spend our time and our money, especially given the recent high-profile openings of pseudo-urban mega-places like LA Live and the Hollywood W hotel TOD. The Grove is a civic space as much as it is a shopping mall - we go there to people-watch, to walk our dogs, to work on our laptops, and to grab a bite to eat. But it is a privately built and privately maintained civic space - devoid of the riff-raff we might find at actual public places, and unfortunately devoid of much of the character as well.

When Caruso Affiliated proposed the project early last decade, there were many questions - what would happen to the farmer's market? (it is flourishing), do people actually want to live above shopping centers? (largely no), and what's next? Well, to date the Grove has easily been Caruso's greatest success, with the Americana of Glendale a fairly big disappointment. And the formerly drab Santa Monica Place will reopen this Summer to resemble more closely its crowded but breezy neighbor, the 3rd St. Promenade, another popular urban space in the hands of national chain stores. So if it takes profit-minded developers to build our city's places, and if we are content paying for these places ourselves, through spending rather than taxes, then I see no problem with our urban spaces looking or feeling different from the more traditional ones in older cities. So it goes - what's good enough for Canada is good enough for us.

Missing the Target

If you've been keeping up with the real estate development headlines lately, you might have noticed that every big, ambitious LA development plan includes a Target as its desired anchor tenant. Projects at various phases of development in Mid-City, Crenshaw, Hollywood, Westwood, and Downtown all tout Target as their crowning retail centerpieces. Some actually have the stated support of the Target Corp., while others merely crave the discount store's shiny urban appeal or its supposed potential to spur surrounding retail growth. The CRA has been lusting after Target for years in its attempt to turn a stretch of Washington Blvd south of Downtown into a dense big box haven. Oxymoron?

But why target Target? Perhaps developers point to the success of the West Hollywood Gateway, a project that has seen enormous traffic for its own tenants but has done little to turn around that languishing stretch of Santa Monica Blvd in eastern WeHo. Or perhaps they see Target much in the way the rest of us see it: as the hipper, cleaner alternative to those other trashy discounters we are loathe to visit. But the truth is that as a company, Target is in no position to expand its retail locations as aggressively as these developers might like. Neither is the Los Angeles customer base large enough or desirable enough to support a wealth of new stores.

Wal-Mart on the other hand, may take the cake on both these fronts. It is Wal-Mart, not its snooty rival, that has benefitted most from the recession, as many consumers seek deep discounts on their purchases rather than cut them out altogether. Secondly, Wal-Mart is aggressively studying a plan to roll out a new retail format that is much smaller than its traditional supercenter, and better fitted for urban real estate and the urban consumer. With Wal-Mart's small town and suburban locations built out, and no signs of slowed growth, that company is turning to a new potential demographic - a smart move considering the increasing costs of suburban living and the languishing retail opportunities there. Furthermore, Wal-Mart has but one location in our city limits (albeit a successful location), housed in a stately multi-story Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Mall location that was once home to a Sears. Should their new urban shop implementation work, I see no better place for a roster of mini Wal-Marts than Los Angeles. And as long as our developers are scrambling to attract their treasured Target, Wal-Mart is sure to score some good rental deals.