Highway 666 Revisited

I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.  — Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely

Los Angeles is a transient city, a series of facades that serve as scenery that’s as disposable as the culture. Why else did the best noir fiction set itself up in this “last city” where the desperation to get anywhere is confounded by the fact everything is always an hour away from where you are. It’s this gimlet-hazed mindset that Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe maintains while driving, observing the “gaudy neons and the false fronts behind them, the sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colors, the circular drive-ins as gay as circuses with chipper hard-eyed car hops, the brilliant counters and the sweaty, greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad.” In a place where most of the time is spent viewing your surroundings through the windows of a vehicle — one long tracking shot that goes on into ennui and entropy — it can only heighten the feeling of detachment, what the late British novelist J.G. Ballard diagnosed as the “death of affect.” If anything, the sight of a long stretch of freeway can only inspire misanthropy…

On a recent trip to that infernal land of dreams, where speakers are concealed in the trees lining the sidewalks to provide a faux-jazz soundtrack á la Sweet Smell of Success to even the most aimless strolls, we — my friend Q and I — decided that we needed a guide to sidestep being ensnared in such B-movie Hollywood tropes or end up in labyrinthine plot twists on our journey that ultimately would lead nowhere. To navigate this territory, to monitor our descent, we needed a Virgil to our collective Dante. And it just so happened that the car we were using had just that: a GPS.

The Global Positioning System or GPS is nothing new. According to Wikipedia, it is a “space-based global navigation satellite system that provides reliable location and time information in all weather and at all times and anywhere on or near the Earth where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites” and can trace its development to as early as the early 1940s. It was in 1983, after Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by the Soviets for straying into their airspace, that then-US President Ronald Reagan “issued a directive making the system available free for civilian use as a common good.” Freely accessible to anybody with a receiver, the “GPS has become a widely used aid to navigation worldwide, and a useful tool for map-making, land surveying, commerce, scientific uses, and hobbies such as geocaching (which can be described as merely a “game of high-tech hide and seek”)…(and) is maintained by the United States government.”

But, most of all, it spoke in a nice human voice. A woman’s.

After we typed in our destination, “she” would inform us that calculations were being made and shortly would begin to instruct us exactly where to go to get to where we wanted. It was as if we’d been given our own Stepford Wife that would not nag but only ask us to prepare to turn one way or the other in, let’s say, 300 meters. Or to take the second left, and then remind us again exactly when that left was supposed to be turned into. Best of all, “she” never reprimanded us if we made a mistake. Nope, just a couple of recalculations and, no worries, we were back on the right path. Never was there any hint of irritation or rebuke in her tone. It only seemed proper to say, “Thank you,” whenever we reached our destination. It was seductive to say the least.

The quote of Chandler’s that opens this piece, though, is a warning. As I’d get out of the car and start to close the door, another thing his detective Marlowe said sprang to mind: “I looked back…Slim, dark and lovely and smiling. Reeking with sex. Utterly beyond the moral laws of this or any world I could imagine.” This was alien. Illicit.

In his book Aliens: Why They Are Here, Bryan Appleyard writes about Steve Jobs and how he brought “humane values and high aesthetics to his products in contrast to such seemingly faceless monoliths like IBM and Microsoft.” He says it was highly idealistic in principle but points out that it comes with another cover-up, a “huge step towards the admission of the machine into our inner lives.” Furthermore, the author writes, “The whole point of the Mac was the concealment of its machinehood beneath a friendly mask. The mask was the screen domesticated into a ‘desktop.’ A ‘mouse’ moved an arrow around this screen. The user pointed this arrow at an object and clicked on the mouse to make something happen. The complex of mouse-arrow-click was a kind of theatrical prosthetic designed to convince you that that this was just like using your hand. This did not require you, as all previous machines had done, to talk machine language; it required the machine to talk yours.”

In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer, HAL, talks in the most pleasant of tones, full of empathy and a subdued bonhomie. Of course, he turns out to be psychotic and tries to kill all the humans aboard the space shuttle. Of course, still calm and reassuringly, he explains to Bowman, the remaining crew still surviving, that it was only necessary for the success of the mission. Even then, HAL had intelligence; “he” had personality — being the most “human” of all the characters in that film, even more than the beleaguered crewmembers — and exudes a certain charm in his unflinching dedication to duty. (Compare that to a Nazi war criminal such as Adolf Eichmann, a totally unremarkable man for whom Hannah Arendt coined the term, the “banality of evil.” During his trial in Israel, he defended his participation in the “Final Solution” by stating repeatedly that he was merely “doing his job,” which only further indicted and damned him as being more of an automaton like HAL. Less charming but just as murderous.)

It must be said that the “lady” in the GPS sometimes led us astray. Instead of the Sunset Strip, we’d find ourselves in downtrodden neighborhoods that could be considered “rough.” Like gentlemen, we of course blamed ourselves, kidded that our lack of sophistication was not unlike the hapless Nixau in the seminal classic film series, The Gods Must Be Crazy. Straight outta the movies rather than Compton perhaps. Technology, much like us humans, is fallible.

But in a city like L.A., where as novelist Megan Abbot writes, “even the quality of light seems unreal,” it’s become harder to distinguish surface from substance, machine qualities from human virtues. After all, this was a place whose most famed export is illusion. And everything is harsh under the sun. With nothing to differentiate us, we find ourselves married to the automobiles we drive, both marooned on a highway that goes on further than we can see.

No matter. By the looks of it, we’ll get where we will no matter what.