Los Angeles has always been better at producing images of itself than at understanding what it actually is. Few books have made that gap more understandable than City of Quartz.

There is a version of Los Angeles that the city has always been very good at producing: sunshine, possibility, the promise that reinvention is available to anyone who arrives with sufficient determination. It is an image with genuine roots — the city did offer, to successive waves of migrants, something that older and more settled American cities could not. But it is also, Davis argues, a construction — one that has required the systematic concealment of everything that contradicts it, and that has been maintained, across decades, by a combination of real estate speculation, political violence, and the cultural machinery of Hollywood operating in its own back yard.

City of Quartz is an act of counter-reading. Davis brings to Los Angeles the full apparatus of political economy, literary history, urban geography, and cultural criticism — and what emerges is a city that functions less as an exception to American urban logic than as its terminal expression. The mechanisms visible elsewhere in softer form — the privatisation of public space, the militarisation of poor neighbourhoods, the use of zoning and infrastructure to enforce racial and economic segregation — operate in LA with a nakedness that makes them, paradoxically, easier to analyse. The city's contradictions are so large and so unresolved that they become legible in a way that more successfully managed cities conceal.

The Frankfurt School exiles who arrived in Los Angeles during the Second World War found in the city something that confirmed their darkest theoretical conclusions. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, working on Dialectic of Enlightenment in Pacific Palisades while the dream factories of Hollywood operated a few miles away, saw in the film industry the most advanced example of what they called the culture industry — the systematic production of distraction, the conversion of genuine human longing into consumable product. That they were doing their most important intellectual work in the city most committed to that project was an irony Davis savours. LA gave the Frankfurt School its most vivid evidence precisely because it was the place where the logic they were describing had been most completely realised.

The cultural texts Davis assembles around the city range from Nathaniel West's Depression-era Hollywood nightmare to the blood geography of the Bloods and Crips, but two cinematic examples carry particular weight. Blade Runner's dystopian Los Angeles — its vertical segregation, its racialized geography, its architecture of fear — is usually read as science fiction. Davis reads it as extrapolation: a projection of tendencies already present in the city's actual development, rendered visible by being pushed thirty years forward. Roger Rabbit is the stranger and more precise case. Set in an alternative 1940s Los Angeles, its villain's scheme — to destroy the city's public tram network and replace it with freeways, in order to profit from the car dependency that follows — is presented as malevolent fantasy. It is also, Davis notes, a reasonably accurate fictional account of what actually happened: the dismantling of one of America's most extensive urban rail systems, replaced by the freeway infrastructure that defines the city today. The cartoon villain turned out to have real counterparts.

Thom Andersen's documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) extends Davis's argument into film history. Andersen's subject is the gap between the city Hollywood depicts and the city that actually exists — the systematic substitution of a fictional Los Angeles for the real one, with its specific social geography, its working-class neighbourhoods, its history of displacement and resistance. Like Davis, Andersen is performing an act of restoration: insisting that what has been edited out of the frame is precisely what most needs to be seen. Together, the book and the film make the same methodological argument: that reading a culture requires learning to see past the image it has constructed of itself, toward the city — or the society — that image was built to obscure.

Falling Down (1993), released a decade earlier, occupies a more ambiguous position within this framework. The city is seen through traffic jams, convenience stores, fast-food counters — the everyday spaces that are not neutral but marked by deindustrialization and spatial segregation. The film captures both a precise moment — the aftermath of the 1992 riots and the end of the Cold War that marks the contraction of the defence industry — and a more durable structure of capitalist alienation, in which systemic transformations are lived as individual injustice.

This ambiguity explains its afterlife, as it keeps circulating, readily appropriated by the culture war rhetoric that takes this perspective at face value. The film itself never endorses it. By gradually exposing the protagonist’s entitlement and capacity for violence, it points instead toward a more troubling continuity: the passage from diffuse frustration to targeted resentment and to the search for scapegoats. In this, Falling Down appears as an early sketch of a form of radicalisation that has since become mainstream.