by Justine Brown

(New Star Books) $16

I can't decide if it makes better American sense for the sun to travel as it does, or whether it should rightfully go in the reverse direction. Shouldn't the sun rise over the Pacific coast, the optimistic coast, the birthplace of most improving American trends?

That many of our healthy impulses (vegetarianism, yoga, Zen) come from California, or seem to, isn't just a relic of the '60s, according to Justine Brown's Hollywood Utopia, a luminous and intelligent portrait of Hollywood's early days. The film colony rose contemporaneously--and not quite coincidentally--with two Theosophist utopian communities, but Brown is careful with the term "utopia," noting that Sir Thomas More merged two Greek words when he created it: one meaning "a good place," and another meaning "no place." The combination quite accurately captures even the connotations of present-day California--a bright, sun-bright landscape strewn with unreality and a tendency for allegory.

It's more hip to talk about Southern California noir--and I would add Joan Didion's ambivalent parade of California dreamers (Joan Baez, John Wayne, the Reagans)--but it is not, as is often thought, that the New Age rose in contrast to or defiance of the rampant, dark cynicism felt in Hollywood. The New Age, Brown notes, was there all along, in the first Pre-Raphaelite-style bohemia of the Theosophists, who created one of the original blueprints for spiritual self-improvement.

There was a colony at Point Loma that Brown likens to Emerald City--full of pageantry and ceremony and "spangled domes and spires and pillars," for those who wanted to point themselves toward Theosophy's "achievable future bliss." Hollywood was not immune to the idealistic promise of the Bright Coast, from D. W. Griffith's passionate belief in the unifying capability of film to the virtuous allegorical qualities of Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish.

In the best books that explore the idea of place (A Passage to Juneau comes to mind), common stereotypes and misapprehensions aren't scorned in favor of more "authentic" information, but plumbed for their roots and their home truths. Brown understands how the strands of geography, ideology, history, and sheer accident twine together, whether by intent or coincidence: the feeling, at the end of the 1800s, that mankind was at the brink of a spiritual leap; the bright and consistent California light that freed filmmakers from having to shoot on New York rooftops (and the flight from East Coast thugs hired by Thomas Edison to enforce patents on machines he hadn't invented); the concomitant success of Frank Baum's Oz books; and, not least, the end of the continent and the frontier.

That California should eventually be home to the most pervasive theme park in the world is hardly surprising (see, for example, Paramount Studio's map of Southern California showing which parts of the state could be used for locations as various as Wales and the Malay Coast). The end of the physical land, Brown writes, gave way to an aspirational frontier: "Western civilization had unrolled itself as far as the Pacific shore.... The coast itself embodies the question: now what? It makes the problem concrete.... At the end of the West's trajectory, at the edge of the continent, literal space is replaced by figurative space." Brown's Southern California is as artfully natural as Rem Koolhaas' Coney Island is deliberately false, another extreme boundary turned into a transformative frontier (the latter unforgettably described by Koolhaas as "a clitoral appendage at the mouth of New York's natural harbor"). It seems about right that in the east, such an Arcadia celebrated its own outright falseness, while the western version was fervently and optimistically believed.

Hollywood Utopia is an entirely surprising book, written in a conspicuous absence of self-conscious urgency that I can only attribute to Brown's Canadianness. She has no identity issues riding on her argument; it radiates calmness, with calm, lapidary Canadian prose that stacks up short, plain sentences, as if patiently telling a bedtime story to an inquisitive child. A story that shimmers with bright unreality, like a mirage fueled by a heated road.