I arrive in LA in the early evening. After being whisked out of LAX in a stretch limo provided by the TV show to Valencia, a distant LA suburb, I clean up and walk around outside to see where I am. I seem to be nowhere — there isn’t a soul on the sidewalks and the buildings are all relatively new condos in fake this or that style. Across the street are indoor-outdoor malls that imitate streets, but streets with no people on them.
A bronze statue of a mother and daughter couple in mid-shopping spree is anchored to the sidewalk. I walk on and feel more scared that I do in a bad NY neighborhood. There is lush sprinklered vegetation and everything is clean. It seems to be a physical manifestation of the Little Richard quote “He got what he wanted but lost what he had”. It’s a dream come true — everything we say we want, but when we get it, it turns out to be a nightmare. A corny cliché, I know, but true.
In the morning I am driven to the combined offices and set which are housed in a sort of suburban industrial park. We chat about the direction of the new season and then I get a short tour of the interior sets, the homes of the show’s 3 sister-wives. I love these places — you’re in the set and it’s completely believable as a suburban home or an office and then you look up and there is no ceiling and huge AC hoses loom outside and the view through the window is a massive photo backdrop of the mountains that ring suburban Salt Lake City.
These jarring juxtapositions are beautiful. In some ways they make what we consider homes, offices, bars — anything that can be turned into a set — seem completely hollow and superficial; they are mirrors of the real that make the real in turn seem fake. As if our comfortable notions of what constitutes the spaces that make up our lives are just made out of a familiar play of colors and shapes upon our retinas. Well, in some ways of course that’s all our visual reality is, but we think of some of those spaces as “real” and we feel they are filled with the stuff of our real lived lives — but they are no different than these carefully faked copies. Especially out here where the built landscape is made of structures that are barely made to outlast a movie set. The mental dislocation is a wonderful feeling. It’s somehow liberating.
