Don’t Stop Believin’

Jack Nicholson cheers on the Lakers during a 1985 NBA game at the Great Western Forum. Edited from Image by Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE

I’m watching the NBA Finals, the cameras keep cutting to celebrity row, and for me it doesn’t count. Ben Stiller and Timothée Chalamet are not the heroes we need right now. Chalamet keeps telling us he’s a great actor, so perhaps he is, but he’s not Jack Nicholson at the Forum in 1988 with a drink and a smirk and the absolute certainty that this city belonged to him and he to it. Only now it’s the New York Knicks on the court at MSG, a team named after a Dutch colonial pants style that nobody under seventy could explain.

But the Lakers aren’t the Lakers anymore. And Los Angeles isn’t Los Angeles anymore either.

I'm not a particularly avid basketball fan. But I am a fan of entertainment and Los Angeles. At the Los Angeles we've lost.

But that's not quite right. We didn't lose anything, we gave it away. The studios sold their monopoly to investors chasing quarterly returns, and nobody here noticed. We were not usurped by Netflix or some lesser algorithmic gods hiding in a server farm in Oregon. We got embarrassed by what we were, and we handed it over voluntarily.

Hollywood wasn’t just our industry, it was our creation myth. LA told the world its stories while telling itself what it was, or at least what it was trying to be. I am not a screenwriter, but I have known a few. Screenwriters thrive on premise lines. Concise statements that tell us who the hero is, what she wants, and what stands in her way.

LA has lost its premise. There are no more movie studios. Movies are financial instruments now, like stocks or bonds, chasing tax credits in whatever dusty corner of Albuquerque or Albania that offers them. We decided that making dreams was less serious than making content. And everything is content now.

Empires peak and their citizens do not notice. They keep holding ceremonies and rolling out the red carpet long after belief has left the building. Los Angeles believed in itself once, genuinely and extravagantly, with the kind of painful sincerity that looks naive in retrospect but was actually the source of our power. Today, irony reigns supreme, but you cannot power anything on irony.

Jack Nicholson was a movie star not only because he was a great actor but because he believed he was. And he didn’t have to tell anyone, because he lived it. Jack didn’t just believe in himself. He believed in the Los Angeles Lakers and in the premise of the City itself. Win or lose, Jack sat in the same seat, invested in the outcome, for decades. That’s not celebrity, that’s citizenship.

I have no idea how Los Angeles will reinvent itself, but I believe that it will. Both the premise and promise of this city have always been reinvention. That’s how a kid from Neptune City, New Jersey became the most famous basketball fan in the world. Not because he was born here, but because Los Angeles convinced him he could.

I realize that the Kicks are likely to win the championship. Of course, Timothée Chalamet may be a great actor. He keeps telling us so.

xAP