White Girl Problems
Clueless, Joan Didion, et al.
Valley Girl is on hiatus for the US holidays. We will resume with new essays in the New Year. Over the next couple of months, I’ll be sending some digests promoting past Valley Girl newsletters to get you properly prepped for next year’s installments. This week’s digest focuses on the over-the-hill snobbery about the San Fernando Valley.
Although the modern reputation of the San Fernando Valley began as “respectable” and middle-class, this shiny suburban sheen had dulled by the 1970s. While still heavily suburban, it was ultimately the perception that had changed: the Valley was now seen as woefully provincial and even somewhat sordid by the more urban or moneyed areas of Los Angeles. For the more glamorous communities over the hill1, like Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, the Valley represented a substantial downgrade in respect to both fame and money—two enduring currencies for local white elites.
This shift in the Valley’s respectability is documented in books and film through the 1990s and beyond. Joan Didion captured this changing perspective well in her LA-based novel Play It As It Lays, in which her main character, a pretty white actress who ricochets from Beverly Hills to Saks Fifth Avenue in a Corvette, must go to Encino2 to access an illegal abortion. (Peak squalid.) Twenty years later, author Bret Easton Ellis distilled a similar seediness in his novel Less Than Zero, depicting bored, wealthy, white teenagers who use the Valley as their unsupervised playground for rampant drug abuse, sexual violence, and sex work.
By the 1990s, these themes had ramped up from sleaziness to full-fledged danger, particularly for middle- to upper-class white women. Films from this time, like Clueless and 2 Days in the Valley, consistently communicated that the Valley was an unsafe place for women like Cher Horowitz, a sheltered teenager from Beverly Hills, or Helga Svelgen, a Norwegian model. It’s in the Valley that their plot lines get hazardous and the characters are threatened with violence, sexual harassment, robbery, and men with guns. This on-screen depiction continued through the early 2000s when Sex and the City characters Carrie and Samantha fearfully venture into the San Fernando Valley to seek out fake designer bags from the trunk of a car. What’s implied here is that class won’t protect these women in the San Fernando Valley as it does over the hill; they aren’t in Kansas anymore.
Ironic, considering that this type of white elitism was a part of the Valley in the 1960s as segregation was being challenged. Reporting from the time period captures white, suburban mothers and wives (who fancy themselves very well educated), using their education and their class to justify racism. Scary white people, many of whom were women, identified openly as pro-segregation and believed ardently in keeping the Valley a solidly white community. To quote one reporter, they were “junior league type[s].” One was written as having “tasteful dress and accompanying poise.” Like a Cher Horowitz of Tarzana3.🌴
Next week: this girl’s life.
“Over the hill” is an expression I used to hear my grandmother use when referencing anything over the Santa Monica Mountains.
Encino is a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.
Tarzana is a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley.