In December, I visited the Magic Castle. A notable Hollywood landmark infamous for its exclusivity, the Magic Castle has been called “the most unusual private club in the world” and is one of the final outposts for the magical arts. The Academy (of Magical Arts) takes this responsibility very seriously. Photographs are not allowed anywhere in the building, save for the entryway. Reservations are required, and only available to members and select guests. The dress code is black tie. Because photography isn’t permitted it’s a respite for the rich and famous, and virtually all of the most well-known magicians have walked its halls (they even offer a “Houdini séance”). I was lucky enough to visit because my boss secured an invitation for our team holiday dinner. We watched three shows and spent the rest of the time exploring and ordering gin martinis. My coworker brought a pendulum, and at one point we all huddled in a stairwell and attempted to interview a ghost.
The castle lives up to certain expectations. Upon entering, there is a sense that you’re being transported to a different time. The building itself is over 100 years old, opening the doors for its current iteration in 1963. The black-tie dress code transforms everyone there into an interloper. We joked that we felt like guests on the Titanic, sneaking up from steerage. We weren’t supposed to be there, but the castle’s exclusivity is reinforced by making such exceptions; allowing us to bear witness to opulence beyond our means. The whole place feels “very L.A.”, and like L.A. it is largely observed from the outside, taken to be identical with how it represents itself. The castle is grand, old, and haunted, and a little disappointing in the way things become when they’re relegated to reality.
Most cities dream of being eerie. Eeriness is a marker of longevity. For something to be sufficiently eerie, it must hover right above dissolving, staking its claim on the present from a time that precedes it. An eerie place has started somewhere else, perhaps as something intangible like an idea, and then undergone a shift in identity.
At some point since moving here, I decided that L.A. is not weird but uncanny. This declaration was less informed by my understanding of the two terms, and more by a difference I perceived but otherwise struggled to articulate. Essentially, weirdness is a resolute, but expected, strangeness whereas uncanniness emerges when normalcy is thwarted.
L.A. isn’t normal, but it is a place where the conceptual image exists before the physical location. For many, LA is an idea first; a woven landscape of neighborhoods peopled by stars and fragrant with jacaranda. Encountering the real place does the opposite of actually grounding it in reality. Before I lived here, when I had only visited a few times for short spurts, moving through the city felt like something from a dream. It was like gaining access to an exclusive unreality, a city to witness by invitation only, both supplanting and symbolizing the mythical place invented in collective memory. This expectation is a memory we have absorbed through images, movies, and mythology, such that when you visit L.A., you are visiting a place you have already met. L.A. is a representation of itself, which rends it into two places: the one that is imagined and the one that greets you upon arrival. It is not “anywhere” because it is impossible to unify expectation and the reality that hinges on it. And so there is a version of L.A. that is being continuously destroyed.
The Magic Castle similarly fluctuated between expectation and reality. In the bathroom of the Magic Castle, I saw a girl holding a fork with the tines bent out of shape in each direction. A prized piece of evidence. No explanation except attesting that you saw it happen, which becomes a sort of evidence itself. At one point, my coworker turned to me and said she felt as though she’d been there before. Maybe it was the contagion of deja vu, or the multiple gin martinis, but I began to feel something similar. When the unknown inhabits the known, you find yourself the witness to a possession.
While watching one of the magic shows, I was reminded of the pivotal scene from David Lynch’s supremely uncanny Mulholland Drive. In the scene, the film’s two protagonists visit a late-night performance nestled in the abdomen of Downtown L.A. A man comes onstage and declares “No Hay Banda.” There is no band. He is inexplicably furious. He calls out a trumpet player, who mimes playing and then lets the music continue in the absence of movement. His hands are still. The two men leave the stage, and a woman emerges and begins singing an aria. Her makeup is heavy and her eyes begin to stream, her voice trembling. We sit in rapt attention with the audience, watching her body move to produce this sound, watching the force of her voice move through her. Then suddenly, she collapses. The voice continues, uncannily powerful, and it begins to dawn that it does not belong to her at all. The eeriness of the moment hangs in the air; the emotion of her performance becomes a rug pulled out from under us. The strangest thing about it, however, is that we have no right to be surprised. The man was explicit in warning us that we were about to experience an illusion. There is no band. But we — the audience within and outside of the film — still believe what we see.
The man onstage at the castle — like Lynch’s emcee — is confident in the illusion he produces, even as it hangs by a fragile thread. The performance distracts us (I think as I watch: it’s almost like he’s doing standup) from seeing what’s really happening. The performance pretends to be magic, we pretend to be amazed.
In dissecting the dreamlike uncanny of Mulholland Drive, Mark Fisher writes, “it is not so much that dreams become taken for reality, as that any apparent reality subsides into a dream.” Places like the magic castle, or L.A. as a whole, offer a version of reality that is obscured by expectation. Either you agree to the contract, transfix your eyes on the stage, and give yourself over to the relief of dreaming, or you look for the glint of a hidden string, some invisible pulley system on which the whole illusion hinges. Finding it will not result in satisfaction.
When I arrived in Los Angeles, I expected it to be a place like the one I remembered. Instead, I found myself waiting for the other shoe to drop; to watch the shell of the body fall and leave the voice curdling the air. I feel as though I could have arrived yesterday. I feel that no time has passed since arriving here. The place watches itself, perhaps because that is what is expected of it. I move through each morning, I drink the coffee dregs at the bottom of the cup and put on a light jacket, and I pretend to worry about going to work. Every now and then I get lucky: I spot someone rare, something lavish and expensive falls into my hands, I’m invited to the magician’s final frontier. I’m cloaked by some understanding of the body moving under me, permitted to indulge in the performance as long as I agree to look away at just the right moment. I move my possessions between different handbags, and the place watches itself. The trick is performed in front of me — the illusion obvious at its core — and I believe it anyway. ☞
As someone who grew up there I have a strange relationship with L.A. as a city. I love some of it, some of the ideas it stands for, but always hate it whenever I spend any time there. It's interesting to get outside perspectives on the city from people that moved in more recently, which is pretty much everyone in LA.