The Santa Clarita Valley, 30 minutes north of Los Angeles and totally isolated from it, is considered a suburb of the famous metropolis. I don’t know how or why. After my family and I moved from South Florida to Southern California in August 2003, driving five days cross-country, I signed up for courses at College of the Canyons in Valencia in order to finish getting my associates degree. In my first few weeks as a student, I could have claimed its two-story library as a residence with how I lived deep in its stacks. I was looking for literary anthologies, history books, memoirs, anything to help me understand what Santa Clarita and Los Angeles were, something I could grasp onto so I could feel connected, to make this sudden move easier.
As soon as my mother and father had returned to Pembroke Pines, Florida from Los Angeles that late July, my father having been hired at La Mesa Junior High, a school in the William S. Hart Union School District in Santa Clarita, as a computer and business education teacher, we had a scant few days to pack up and move out of our condo so we could get to our new apartment in Valencia for Dad to begin his job and my sister Meridith to start 9th grade at Valencia High. Mom and Dad had described our new apartment to us over the phone, and I thought it was like our old condo in Coral Springs, where the developments were wrapped around the central pool and mailbox area, the mailboxes in a wall facing the pool. I was wrong. Mom described to me the Metrolink, the train system that has Santa Clarita as one of its stops before going on to Union Station in downtown Los Angeles. I thought that everything in Los Angeles was so close together that I could take the train every weekend to Union Station, go to the library nearby, get the books I wanted, and take the train back to Santa Clarita. I was dead wrong. There is no library nearby, and Los Angeles is not so much a city as it is a massive sprawl.
In nine years in Santa Clarita, and thankfully no more in the next few weeks, I have not connected with anything here. I have found that Santa Clarita has no tangible history, no identity of its own because not only is it considered a bedroom community for those who work in Los Angeles but don’t want to live there, but so many TV and movie productions film here that it can be anything to anyone else and nothing to itself. The Middle East on the Showtime series Homeland is in Santa Clarita. Different planets on the original Star Trek series were locations here. 24 was filmed here as well, and so was Weeds. Before NCIS filmed a few scenes at College of the Canyons, which I saw, JAG also filmed there a few times, which I also saw. A year before we moved, I e-mailed Chris Gore of Film Threat, hoping to be able to get on his movie review panel show, The New Movie Show with Chris Gore, which aired on FX when the channel was in its infancy. He told me that I had to be in Los Angeles in order to audition, and I thought to myself, “Los Angeles? Isn’t that on the other side of the universe?”
Seeing those productions filming at College of the Canyons felt like that at first. I didn’t get starstruck because it’s a business like anything else in this valley. But the novelty quickly wore off, and the realization that Santa Clarita has no identity of its own became even more acute.
I realized a few years after my frantic College of the Canyons library search that the books I checked out were all about Los Angeles and nothing about Santa Clarita. Andrew Marr is right. I wouldn’t want to live in that kind of city either. Los Angeles isn’t the only city without a sense of its past, as Marr presents in Megacities, his trek through five cities that represent the growing trend of populations leaving the countryside and cramming together. Those five cities are Shanghai, Dhaka, in Bangladesh, Tokyo, London, and Mexico City. The views of Mexico City that Marr’s crew captures are breathtaking because I thought Los Angeles was the only city with that much sprawl. Mexico City stretches and stretches and stretches to the point that you wonder why it doesn’t split off into different cities, different towns. It’s so intimidating, and not just because it’s so dangerous, with 500 kidnappings a month. Where do you go in a city like this? How do you even hope to establish yourself, to make any kind of life there, when there is already so much friction between the middle class and the poorer social classes? The massive population shows that some do try to make it, try to find a life there. But how much longer can this go on? How much longer will our planet’s resources hold out with such cities as this and the sleek, technologically cool Tokyo, and the vastly multicultural London with sewers that choke on the fat funneled out from fast food restaurants and stands?
Andrew Marr has become one of my favorite journalists by this presentation alone because he’s an immersive journalist. Looking like a cross between John Waters and Dylan Baker, he gets into everything in his quest to explore how these cities run, how its populations live. In Shanghai, he talks with Tang Chung, Shanghai’s richest man, who has made his fortune in karaoke machines, Shanghai being the karaoke capital of the world. In Dhaka, he stays with a family in the city’s slums, learning how they live, how they eat, how they go to the bathroom, with is a wooden stall with a hole at the bottom that empties right onto the ground. When Dhaka floods, as has happened before, there is the greatest risk of disease. In London, he climbs up to the construction crane working on The Shard, which is Europe’s tallest building. At the time of this broadcast, The Shard was halfway completed, and the crane operator Marr talks to says that every time the building rises, new pieces have to be added to the crane to make it taller, but he has to attach it himself. It’s dangerous, life-threatening work, yet it is done because London grows larger and larger.
Marr is actually interested in all this. He’s not just doing it to try to get ahead, unlike many American journalists, perhaps because he’s already gotten to where he wants to be. Nevertheless, no one experiences a London riot school for police officers, or an evasive driving course in Mexico City run by a former United States Air Force special agent who’s Mexico City’s kidnapping guru, or a Life Learning Center in Tokyo that simulates earthquakes and other disasters if they’re not genuinely interested. Marr puts himself right on the earthquake platform at the Center, which shakes him at a 6.4 on the Richter Scale. “This is now not funny,” says an unsettled Marr under a padded table while the platform shakes harder and harder.
Megacities is an epic journey in under three hours, showing us the world as it is, as it likely will be, and triggering in us many questions about the sustainability of all this. It’s a big question as to whether humanity can survive like this, if the next global pandemic will come from Dhaka because of all that waste, if Mexico City will become more dangerous or even less dangerous, which doesn’t seem possible. Acorn Media, through its Athena label, has included a nine-page booklet which also documents cities that were planned, such as Washington, D.C., as well as a short history of cities in general. There’s also an onscreen biography about Marr, and altogether, this is one of Acorn Media’s greatest DVD releases. The sheer scope of it is incredible, and I’m sure I won’t be Andrew Marr’s only new fan. He wants to tell stories of all kinds, but also wants to live them. And he does, a fascinating storyteller for the 21st century. Marr’s impressive travels don’t make me feel any differently about Los Angeles, but I understand more about why it is what it is. It’s just not my place. Neither is Santa Clarita.
