I don’t know if this is a pet peeve for others the way it is for me, but I absolutely detest when a piece of fiction insists upon a real life location and then does nothing to factually represent that location.
My short story, Extra’s Pizza, written this summer, takes place in Sacramento. And it respects the setting as a character, unlike a lot of other fiction streaming these days.
The most guilty thing I’ve ever seen is Clickbait (2021), which makes a big show of taking place in Oakland, while being clearly half-shot outside of California, while not representing the relationship Oakland locals would have with police, while even having the background actors be predominantly white, while inventing a college campus in order to not just … move the story to Berkeley?
That said, almost anything Hollywood that uses Sacramento clearly knows nothing about Sacramento, or doesn’t think it matters.
We have a very specific culture, as I suspect any city does, and it is not interchangeable with any other non-LA, non-SF California city.
Almost forgot, Clickbait also goes to Sacramento for a second.
“Sacramento.”
It looks suspiciously like Atlanta.
Obviously, Sacramento was a character in Lady Bird (2017). However, Greta Gerwig’s Sacramento is not my Sacramento.
Don’t get me wrong, it was absolutely realistic. I’ve known lots of people in Sacramento for whom Lady Bird represents their Sacramento. It just wasn’t mine. Because, Sacramento can be where I live now, literally in Sacramento, on the grid Downtown, or where Lady Bird lived, probably 30–40 blocks east of me now.
But!
Sacramento can also be including but not limited to: Natomas, Rio Linda, Carmichael, Citrus Heights, Orangevale, North Highlands, Oak Park, Land Park, Arden, Fair Oaks, Rancho Cordova, and of course, Gold River.
Every single section of this city has a phenomenon that I have not experienced when I have lived or visited elsewhere.
So, I mentioned Clickbait and its bizarre depiction of Oakland earlier. The writing there bumped extremely hard for me because I lived in Oakland for two years for college.
Oakland has a massive class strata, there are roach motel apartments and there are mansions. However, that strata is contained. You aren’t gonna find a mansion in Fruitvale. There’s no apartments in the Oakland Hills, let alone neglected ones. Hell, it’s hard sometimes to just find something to eat if you aren’t in a business district.
Sacramento also has a massive class strata. I live in one of the cheapest apartments on the grid. I am in about six hundred square feet with no dishwasher, no garbage disposal, sharing two washer/dryer sets with at least twenty three other neighbors, but probably more like fifty. I share this apartment with my partner, and despite it being really cheap for the area, we are literally only able to make it work here because his family put money aside for him to attend school.
I will not deny that being on the grid is not the cheapest part of Sacramento in general, but for our place, our rent is probably only two or three hundred dollars higher than an apartment somewhere else in town.
I am literally two blocks away from a small mansion. A couple blocks from there is an apartment complex twice as expensive as ours. To go to the doctor, also on the grid, I have to pass a tent city. Apartments are next to restaurants are next to family homes are next to hospitals are next to the freeway are next to apartments. That means that the poor, the rich, the middle class, the service industry and the biggest assholes they serve, all live and work within spitting range of each other.
It is really common for me to meet Sacramentans who do not understand what class they are. Not rare in the United States, where everyone thinks they’re middle class, but it’s exaggerated in Sacramento.
It is infinitely easier to underestimate what you have, or overestimate what you have, because you’re assuming you’re on par with your neighbors, who can have little to no financial commonality with you. And not just if you’re living on the grid, but in every suburb, city, census-designated place, etc. that colloquially makes up Sacramento.
Lifelong Oakland citizens, in my experience, were not befuddled like that.
So Extra’s Pizza is about a pizza restaurant with a cockroach infestation, that delves into the social contexts of Sacramento cities, and is simultaneously absurd and sad.
I put it online for free with the option to donate: READ IT HERE.
It is also about a Sacramento, ironically not even my Sacramento, but definitely not a Sacramento that was filmed in Atlanta.
—melony ppenosyne
Flommist Melony Ppenosyne is a writer and weird artist type. In the last year alone, she’s traveled to Virginia as a competing poet, co-written a play on mental illness that is presently being produced, and crafted a published essay checking the privilege and scope of art galleries. Copyright © 2021 Melony Ppenosyne. 10th Street photo source.
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