One of the strongest themes of twentieth century fiction is paranoia. Goodness knows it’s not in everything, but strong echoes of it power quite a lot of the genres that came to full force over the course of the century. Noir, for example, and no little science fiction. Thrillers and non-noir detective stories. These are also all stories that are routinely set in San Francisco. Not just the shiny, safe San Francisco of Star Trek but the grim, shadowed San Francisco of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
This is because San Francisco is the best city in the United States for paranoia. Mind you, it’s a lovely city. It’s charming. It’s a fascinating combination of the tourist trap and the genuine—a city where real people live real lives, of course, but also a city that’s deliberately artificial. Chinatown isn’t supposed to resemble China in its outward-facing aspects; it’s supposed to resemble China as white tourists imagine it. (And limit the actual Chinese residents of the city to the smallest, most cramped few blocks possible, but that doesn’t negate the point.) Fisherman’s Wharf is so removed from real fishing that you couldn’t even moor a boat there now.
What’s more, one of the things the city is most noted for is its fog. Fog is good paranoia weather. Especially the thickest kind. There’s a reason paranoia fiction is frequently set in London, too. The idea that you can barely see anything, and when you do, you can’t make out details until someone is very close means that anything could be there, and you wouldn’t know. It’s easy for a relatively normal movie like The Love Bug to do good atmospheric stuff with the fog. The mists off the Bay are great for setting up atmosphere.
What San Francisco does even better than London is add the steepness of the hills to that. Even on a clear day, you’re limited in your visibility, simply because you can’t see over the hill. Even if you’re at the top, you’re limited, because you can’t see into all the valleys. There are all kinds of places where you just have no way of knowing what’s there. The topography of the city is keeping you from awareness, and you know there are things you can’t see no matter how hard you look. If the sky is crystal blue, the way it sometimes is, you’re still missing things, and how much worse in a thick fog or a moonless night?
Heck, the land itself is out to get you. Beyond the fog, there are earthquakes. The ground underfoot isn’t steady. The Marina District is built on Gold Rush-era ships covered in excavation dirt. The bedrock shakes. In fact, it turns out that quite a lot of the city believed to have been safe was part of an insurance scam. After the 1906 earthquake, people claimed their buildings were still standing when the fires took them, because the insurance companies paid fire loss but not earthquake loss. So you said you had only suffered fire damage. So the records said that there was no earthquake loss in that part of the city, and the very official records were lying.
The Bay is full of sharks and dangerous currents. Three men from Alcatraz remain unaccounted for, and it’s entirely possible we’ll never know what became of them. They might have escaped, and they might have died in the icy waters. If they died, they left no trace. Either three hardened criminals—and Alcatraz was not for everyday convicts—managed to live the rest of their lives without ever being recognized by the law or else they were swept out to sea, eaten by sharks, or in some other way taken by the hazards of the Bay.
From Vertigo to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, San Francisco is one of the best settings for the tale of paranoia. It’s not the only kind of story you can tell in the city; the things that make the city so easy to be scared of are part of what makes Inside Out work, honestly, because you get Riley’s own unfamiliarity and uncertainty. Although of course nothing is out to get Riley. But in San Francisco, it could be, and you don’t have to strain your imagination much to think that it is.
Help me afford some of the city’s famous chocolate by supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!