LA of the Mind

Starlet, 2012

It's interesting to encounter versions of the city you live in before you lived there. I'm not even talking about deep history—the LA that existed in 2005 or 2012 or even 2015 is a different LA to the one I'm currently living in—fire-battered, COVID-minimized, but still standing.

When I first saw Sean Baker's Starlet I was living in New York, still employed at my first full-time media job, neurotically attending screenings for random movies that usually never ended up amounting to anything much. A screening was irresistible: a free way to watch movies that also served as an excuse to leave the office? Twist my arm. I didn't know who Sean Baker was, and his groundbreaking iPhone feature Tangerine was still a few years in the making. But I knew who Dree Hemingway was—the last name says it all. I figured sure, a movie about a porn star living in the valley, why not? I didn't know what the valley was yet. Now I live there and rewatching Starlet—much of which is set in the kind of aggressively carpeted, white vertical blinds and mirrored interiors I've now become deeply familiar with—is an uncanny experience, almost a vision of the future from the past.