A Film Canon

Most of Steve Martin's writing indulges his fantasy of himself as a misunderstood, sentimental intellectual, but it's peculiarly compelling in L.A. Story, perhaps because it's as much a portrait of a cityscape as a person. Taking their cues from Manhattan, Martin and director Mick Jackson present L.A. as a romantic topography, the contours of "wacky weatherman" Harris K. Telemacher's (Martin) search for love, which encompasses partner Trudy (Marilu Henner), English journalist Sara (Victoria Tennant), and salesgirl SanDeE* (Sarah Jessica Parker). However, whereas Woody Allen's gridded, centralised cityscape finds its romantic corollary in well-oiled marital machination, Martin is presented with a very different kind of urban-romantic paradigm. As Harris' opening short cut to work makes clear, Martin conceives of L.A. primarily as so much connective tissue - tissue that is, for convenience's sake, identified with the sprawling, amorphous freeway system, but continually gestures beyond this to something sublimely inconceivable. Not only does this explain the movement towards a kind of technological magic or mysticism - it's one of the few films to use Enya's music thematically, rather than dismissively - as well as the corresponding comic reliance on fantasy sequences (or "performance art", as Harris terms them), but it offsets what could have been a relatively staid parody of bourgeois insularity with something closer to courtly love, objects of worship rather than objects of affection. Again, this is a particular predilection of Martin's that works here by virtue of being subsumed into a wider, urban romance; or, alternatively, by recovering what could have been a kitsch lynchpin, the highway sign that gives Harris romantic advice. Introducing itself with an invitation to 'Hug Me', it crystallizes the film into a technological romance worthy of Spielberg - a sign taken for wonders - and L.A.'s "constant busyness" into a breathless, constant apprehension of "readiness"; an exquisite, immanent nostalgia for the present: "I was deeply unhappy...but I didn't know it because I was so happy all the time."