Sunpist: Exploring the alienation resulting from Orange County's post-World War II development

Orange County, California, occupies an eminent place on America's contemporary cultural map. The area's historically high standard of living has traditionally made Orange County the "happiest [real] place on earth." There exists, however, a sense of alienation that contradicts Orange County's utopian claims, an alienation that within recent years has become more pronounced in the wake of the county's massive landscape transformation, its hyperreal development, and its relationship with affluenza, or the drive for overtly conspicuous consumption. The cultural artifacts of the music group No Doubt, science fiction writings of Kim Stanley Robinson, the county's endeavors with Transportation Art and the depiction of Orange County in various films, such as Life as a House, Better Luck Tomorrow, and Orange County, and television programs such as The O. C., Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, and Arrested Development, register and publicly project the psychological dislocations that living in this simulated utopia causes.