When Two Authors Turn Hollywood’s Dark Mirror on Modern America’s Soul
In Los Angeles, truth is a rumor. Power floats on fantasy. Writers David Angsten and Jonathan Leaf know this world from the inside—each dissecting it in new noir novels that look past the sunlit surfaces of Hollywood toward the darker, older questions that never die: faith, deceit, ambition, and evil.
Table of contents
Angsten’s The Medievalist follows a friar-turned-art historian lost in modern Los Angeles, his conscience at war with the city’s shallow appetites. Leaf’s City of Angles turns the mirror outward, into the glittering smog of the film industry, where ambition devours everything it touches. Both men wrote their books as moral autopsies on a civilization that mistakes therapy for confession, approval for salvation.
From Chicago Dreams to Hollywood Realities
Angsten, once a filmmaker in Chicago, came west in 1989. “I had been doing documentaries, corporate films, commercials. Then I started writing coverage. Nobody wants to read scripts—so they hire twenty-two-year-olds to decide which stories live or die.”
He spent years inside that machinery before writing his own. “Hollywood became a perfect contrast,” he said. “My protagonist is a medievalist surrounded by the self-centered, obsessed people of this city. His world is faith; theirs is mirrors.”
The Psychology of Ambition: Normal Behavior in Tinseltown
Leaf, a playwright and critic in New York, caught Los Angeles from afar. “Everyone’s living based on what everyone else thinks,” he said. “There’s a huge element of fantasy and deception. And no one thinks lying is wrong—it’s normal behavior.”
His novel opens with a young actress who finds a corpse in her car trunk, then heads to her audition anyway. “People thought that scene was absurd,” he said, “but in Los Angeles that’s realistic. Ninety-eight percent would do the same.”
The Lost Art of Confession vs. The Rise of Self-Esteem Culture
Both men saw Hollywood as a secular temple where confession has been replaced by self-esteem. “David Chase said psychotherapy never tells you you’re wrong,” Leaf noted. “Confession does. That’s the difference.”
Angsten agreed. “People think guilt is bad. But guilt is what keeps us human. The church teaches restraint; without it we’re animals with phones.”
Their talk drifted from noir to metaphysics. Angsten spoke of Catholic childhood and transcendence. “I’ve done Transcendental Meditation for fifty years. You have to be able to look at yourself. That’s what’s missing now—self-examination. Christianity is about asking, ‘Why am I doing this? Am I hurting someone?’ It’s freeing.”
When the Intelligentsia Lost the Word “Evil”
Leaf replied, “The intelligentsia can’t even use the word evil anymore. They want everything psychological. But some things are just evil.”
Both men see their fiction as moral record-keeping in an age allergic to judgment. Angsten’s friar-scholar, wandering through sin-drenched Los Angeles, becomes a mirror for readers too. “He keeps asking what’s real,” Angsten said. “The spiritual world was more real to the medievals than this one. They had unity—a shared value system. We’ve lost that.”
From Gutenberg’s Press to Digital Dissolution
Leaf agreed, tracing the break to the printing press and the slow eclipse of belief. “For most of Western history, Christianity wasn’t a belief system—it was a fact. Water is wet. The sun rises in the east. Christ lived and died and rose again. That certainty gave meaning to art, to civilization itself.”
Hollywood’s Feudal Economy: Servants and Wannabes
Their conversation returned, finally, to the city that still claims their imagination. Los Angeles, Leaf said, “has enormous inequality—almost feudal. There’s a wealthy elite and a servant class of new immigrants. People stop noticing. They think it’s normal.”
Angsten added, “And above it all, the wannabes—actors, writers, thousands of them chasing the same mirage. The whole place runs on wanting.”
Both men laughed grimly at the word “exploitation.” Leaf said, “You can quit anytime. But the business attracts sociopaths. People behave cruelly if they can.”
Angsten countered, “Most of it’s transactional. Everyone’s polishing apples to get noticed. That’s Hollywood.”
A Theology of Human Weakness
By the end, their noir vision of Los Angeles had fused with something older and starker—a theology of human weakness. “Evil isn’t in any race or class,” Leaf said, quoting Solzhenitsyn. “It’s in every human heart.”
Angsten nodded. “You have to see it to fight it. The death of Satan was a tragedy for the imagination.”
The Hyper-Reality of Writing: Prayer Made Flesh
Both writers keep faith, in art if not in dogma. “Writing is absorbing,” Angsten said. The story becomes more real than your life. It’s a kind of hyper-reality, like prayer.”
Leaf’s reply was dry but tender: “If anyone in Los Angeles still knows how to read, they should buy the book.”
About the Books
The Medievalist by David Angsten follows a former friar and art historian navigating the moral wasteland of contemporary Los Angeles, where his medieval values collide with Hollywood’s shallow materialism.
City of Angles by Jonathan Leaf exposes the film industry’s glittering corruption through interconnected characters all pursuing their ambitions in a city built on fantasy and deception.
Both novels continue the LA noir tradition established by Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West, using the city as a lens to examine faith, morality, and the human soul in modern America.
Key Takeaways
- Hollywood operates as a secular temple where self-esteem has replaced confession and moral examination
- LA noir fiction continues as vital moral literature exposing civilization’s spiritual crisis
- The film industry attracts both sociopathic exploitation and transactional relationships normalized by ambition
- Christianity’s decline has left Western culture without shared values or unified worldview
- Writing and storytelling remain acts of faith-keeping in an age that rejects moral judgment
- Los Angeles exemplifies feudal inequality with wealthy elites, immigrant servants, and desperate wannabes
- Self-examination and acknowledging evil are necessary for human restraint and civilization
Genre: Literary Fiction, Noir Fiction, Hollywood Fiction, Philosophical Fiction
Themes: Faith and Religion, Hollywood Culture, Moral Philosophy, Good vs Evil, Confession and Guilt, Christian Fiction, Cultural Criticism
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