Marcel Winatschek

The City That Eats You Alive and You Go Back Anyway

Thirty Seconds to Mars made a video for City of Angels that functions less like a music video and more like a deposition. Kanye West, Selena Gomez, Lindsay Lohan, and a rotating cast of famous and anonymous faces sit down to talk about Los Angeles with a frankness the format doesn’t usually permit. What comes out is a portrait of a place that operates simultaneously as promise and predator—handing you exactly what you came for and billing you in ways you didn’t read in the contract.

The celebrity cameos could have made this feel like a vanity exercise, but something in the editing saves it. The ordinary people’s testimonies run alongside the famous ones, and the effect equalizes everything. Everyone who ends up in LA arrives with the same dream and leaves with the same scar tissue, more or less. The city doesn’t care who you were when you got there.