'Sugar' Reminded Me Why I Love LA Cinema So Much

Last week, as my 33-year-old body lay half-dying in bed, in the throes of a maleficent viral fever, I did as someone had told me earlier that day, and started watching Sugar. The Apple TV show’s Season Two finale just premiered but that wasn’t my cue to watch it. Starring Colin Farrell, who I’ve been in awe of since In Bruges (2008), and Amy Ryan, who I’ve unashamedly liked purely for her The Office turn, the show follows an enigmatic PI who delivers the missing.

Those two weren’t my reasons either.

I’m not going to tease you. Sugar, as it happens, is a show about a place I’ve bust countless mental nuts to. That place is Los Angeles. It’s about a subject that gets me bouncing around like an annoying high-schooler who has an encyclopaedia on stars and who goes around annoying everyone with his fascination with the stars.

I haven’t been to LA. But I have sat across the table from a Visit California representative once, pathetically familiarising her with how hours and hours of exposing myself to LA on screen has made me a walking advertisement of Hollywood’s glamorous heart. I told her that I was once on a flight to Bhutan but all I could watch was Curb Your Enthusiasm. No other place screamed destiny to me like the LA of La La Land (2016), whose opening traffic-jam song is the switch that takes me back to happier days right out of nowhere. When even the crime dramas I loved were Training Day (2001) and 1997's L.A. Confidential (of course, then, I wasn’t familiar with Mean Streets).

Sugar drops Farrell in a mould he’s rarely been associated with before. The show takes a gifted actor known for playing excusably silly schoolboy types and puts him in a black Savile Row suit. It gives him a deep-voiced narrator track, a spy-like demeanour and a cracked past, and somehow it all works. In the first season, the eponymous John Sugar, used to the good life and fat cash wads, is enlisted to track down a hotshot Hollywood filmmaker’s granddaughter. He uses all his worldliness, penchant for connections and conversational manoeuvres to uncover a dark secret.

Truth be told, all of that is happenstance and, as you will discover, heading towards a reveal you will never truly be able to predict or process immediately. What Sugar is really—or what I see it as—is about a man in possession of reasonably rare skills and a profession straddling the worlds of violence and crime, somehow still holding on to his Billy Wilder. His choice of vehicle is established discernibly early in the plot: Sugar drives an aquamarine Corvette that makes him feel like detective Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly (1955). For every situation in his own life, no matter how high the stakes may be, no matter how near an ugly revelation may lurk, Sugar has a cinematic parallel at the ready, flashing for a couple of seconds on the screen. I am sure that what these screen moments are to Sugar is what Sugar reliving them would be to me moving on.

This pathological cinephilia couldn't have found a better home than in LA. After all, didn’t Polanski leave his noxious truths in the corruption of Chinatown (1974)—the film that I choose every year to be my pick for if there were to be only one film I can watch for the rest of my life? I wouldn’t be surprised if more viewers came up admitting they could see an instant ring of Noah Cross in Jonathan Siegel. LA signifies the death and danger of Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).

In the first episode, Sugar quotes Frank Lloyd Wright: “Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles”. Wright was the man who shaped LA architecture a century ago. His Mayan Revival houses, featuring flat roofs and textile-block concrete designs, form the majority of the architectural visual language that one has come to find synonymous with the place.

From whatever I’ve known of this cauldron of glamour and razzle dazzle, Wright’s prognosis has proven to be true. Even if only on screen—because most stories set in LA seem to agree on the kind of impact they want it to have on lives and characters. From the disorienting discombobulation of Mulholland Drive (2001) to the depersonalising alienation of The Substance (2024), it was the heady seduction of LA that Sugar reinjected into my life.

Sugar is also an unabated tribute to film noir (check out cinematographer Richard Rutkowski’s disorienting camera angles), my introduction to which was a crucial phase in my adoption of cinema as an empowering, edifying force. Films like The Big Sleep (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) fast-tracked my education in reading themes and following patterns in genre cinema. This was most amenable under the sun-drenched and wide-open spaces of Los Angeles, where often crimes and moral decay festered undetected until someone probed a bit.

That is why Los Angeles cinema is where cinematic references–the easter eggs, needle drops, hat tips we so love–constantly erupt. It is the crucible of that delightful intertextuality. Part of that comes from the context: it is practically Hollywood and any story you’re telling from here comes from more than one frame of composition. In Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019), of course you’re following a fading television actor and his stunt double, but the contours of the place itself shape the story’s arc in a thrilling sort of way. Each time Rick Dalton is driven up to his house up on the hill, each time the hippie commune and its contents are brought up, there’s an entrancing familiarity that creeps up on you. 

Some of that lustre and lore are borrowed for the other stories and characters. Ordinary worlds become cinematic. Take, for instance, the protagonist of Punch-Drunk Love (2002). Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) is a novelty-plunger salesman with seven overbearing sisters and a temper he can’t metabolise—by any measure, the least cinematic man alive. But director Paul Thomas Anderson drops him into a Los Angeles of lens-flare blues and inexplicable harmoniums, sends him chasing a woman to Hawaii and back, and lets a phone-sex extortion racket collide with something close to grace. Egan’s life is small and anxious and real, and LA still can’t help mythologising it.

In Nightcrawler (2014), small-time thief Lou Bloom (a magnetic Jake Gyllenhaal) realises the worth of violence on camera and sets off crazed, coyote-like, on his photojournalistic enterprise, night after night, to manufacture crime. The vortex sucks him in deeper and deeper and the sprawling, nocturnal city looms around him. Bloom is a pre-content-era predator and the city of Los Angeles, which Robert Elswit shoots like a fever dream, is the larger, more surreptitious predator.

LA f**ks you with glamour. That’s the consumptive power of this place—a city that closes in on you in the most ominous ways. In Coralie Fargeat’s masterful body horror The Substance, Elisabeth Sparkle is an aging actress who’s been freshly let go from an aerobics show by the slimy producer. Sparkle lives on her own in a brutalist penthouse overlooking the city, her youth long past her and her beauty fighting a losing battle with a world that punishes the passage of time. As she is ousted from what appears to be her only remaining screen assignment, Sparkle receives an invite to be part of a cell-splitting magic-realist gimmick that will yield a biologically young twin sharing her consciousness. Nothing is a better reminder of the possibility that LA on screen is not a physical place but a temporal one. Things must change, but things must change in a familiar sort of way. 

A little while ago, I got addicted to watching Californication, the seven-season Showtime comedy-drama about a gifted novelist who follows his girlfriend from New York to LA, hoping to woo her back and marry her. The trouble is, Hank’s an alcoholic and likes being high, has a low threshold for agreeing to casual sex and has a self-destructive streak. Over seven seasons, he pursues Karen, the mother of his daughter, through disastrous sc**w-ups and scandals, always wearing his wayfarers and all-black fits. Throughout his misdemeanours, LA, a relentless party of substance abuse, sexual scandals and intermittent fame, is his companion.

The show adopts the trope fully, as you will see in its opening credits and needle drops, decorating Hank’s despair and failures with the sun-drenched days and cocaine-addled nights of his existence. The man Hank idolises (and is based on) is the novelist and paragon of alcohol-fuelled cynicism Charles Bukowski, who wrote unforgivingly about the city’s underbelly—its gritty streets, dive bars and cheap apartments—delivering the source material for LA’s darker realities. Without the circus-like Venice beach and You Can’t Always Get What You Want playing in the background, I don’t think Hank’s loneliness would be as relatable. 

Every place has stories, but LA is tint upon tint of these pasts, captured on film in an irresistible marriage of danger and nostalgia. For me, it’s not just dark realities, like I just said above, but resolutions full of romance and optimism, expressed surprisingly in the last film Quentin Tarantino directed, where he constructed delicious intrigue and thrill around an actual incident in history. Tarantino used the unreliable veneer of LA glamour and rearranged the lead-up of a famous tragedy to stage a story of amusement.

Likewise, the destinies of Mia and Sebastian in La La Land (2016) turn out the way they do precisely because they’re drawn over the palimpsest of a time and place we’re familiar with. A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet, but the lore of Los Angeles was what Damien Chazelle punctured from the heights of Griffith Observatory.

Jazz, the dying art form Sebastian wants to save in the film, was born two thousand miles away in the city of New Orleans. Yet, in La La Land, it becomes the whimsical stage of this very tussle between traditionalism and modern, more acceptable pop fusion. In Chazelle’s treatment of its precariat protagonists’ striving, LA finds itself amused at their ambition and naivete. It has seen striving, it has seen noble intentions, it has seen it all come to the most unglamorous outcome.