"My name is Poppy, and I'll try and remember all yours: Charlie, Geraldine, Wilford, Peggy, Suzy, Jacky, Willy, Nicky and Franky. Is that it? Have you all got your tickets? Will you please raise your hands and show them to me? And now, please, put on your happy Disneyland smile, and enjoy yourselves."

She is a Disneyland hostess. Her face is that of a woman in her thirties, but she is dressed up like a 13 year-old: mini tartan kilt, jaunty beret in matching tartan and bunches sprouting at right angles from her head. My ticket costs four dollars and entitles me to a guided tour and to 10 out of the 50 "adventures" on offer from Mister Disney.

We kick off in the tropical rainforest where we stalk the (plastic) elephants and are attacked by a tribe of cannibals (also in plastic, but accompanied by real war cries on tape). Then we embark on the Mississippi riverboat (two-thirds life-size, like everything at Disneyland: it's the golden rule in the Land of Dreams). On the banks of the (artificial) river, we see Frontiersmen conquering the Wild West whilst under attack from Sioux Indians (in plastic, two-thirds life size, sound effects on tape). Riding on the back of a (real) pony, we visit the Grand Canyon (rendered in plastic), where we are pursued by coyotes (also in plastic) and are sprayed by a geyser (convincingly simulated). We climb up the Robinson Tree, which is 90 feet high and boasts 25,000 leaves (made of plastic) and lots of orchids (also plastic, with added synthetic perfume). Aboard the miniature Train of Dreams, we tour Fantasyland and encounter Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, etc. In the Great Artificial Lake of the Land of the Future, the Nautilus submarine takes us on an Underwater Tour around the World, in the course of which we pass beneath the polar ice cap and witness a battle between the Giant Squid and the Sea Serpent (both in plastic). High in a chairlift we watch The Two Mountaineers (real) climb a 180 feet high Matterhorn (of plastic); they scale it every day at quarter past four sharp, except on Mondays. In the Circular Theatre we admire Landscapes of America projected by six cameras onto a 360 degree screen. And, to finish, we go on a Lunar Orbit aboard a rocket and narrowly escape colliding with a meteorite and being attacked by Soviet Death Rays. Mister Disney has thought of everything.
Blonde-haired Poppy, whose smile has accompanied us throughout, brings us back safe and sound to the Disneyland plaza. There she offers us a farewell Coca-Cola and takes her leave, calling each of us by name and assuring us that Mister Disney will be thrilled to see us again soon.

I was forgetting something: in this group composed of Peggy, Suzy, Willy, Mickey etc, I am the youngest. The average age is over 50 and accords with statistics published by Walt Disney Inc. which show that half the visitors are past retirement. I find this mildly reassuring because I think the effect of Disneyland is especially harmful to young people. In any case I am determined that my children will never set foot here.

Los Angeles is the most sprawling conurbation on Earth. It has a population of six million and one can drive along its freeways for two and a half hours without seeing an end to it. Yet I wouldn't call it a city. People don't say, "I live in Los Angeles," but "I live in Santa Monica" (or Beverley Hills, Hollywood, Venice, Santa Ana etc). Each of these communities has its own town hall, schools, shopping centres and leisure areas. Between one and the next, the freeway (the toll-free motorway) skirts along fields, airports, industrial zones, oil wells and even deserts. You have to dial the long-distance code to call from one to another. Los Angeles does not have a common transport system and you don't see pedestrians except in shopping malls. There is indeed a downtown area called Los Angeles with a few skyscrapers (quite pathetic by American standards) surrounded by slums populated by blacks. If you mention "Los Angeles" to a resident of Beverley Hills, he will think you're referring to this district rather than to the whole.

A European, on the other hand, tends to imagine Los Angeles as an extension of Hollywood: a universe where buxom blondes serve cocktails in bars as they wait to be discovered by some cigar-chewing producer. But that universe seems to be disappearing. When I visited the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, only seven out of 30 film sets were still in operation, being used mainly for television.

But this does not mean that Los Angeles is on the decline. These days the Los Angeles Times prints from four to six pages of job vacancies daily. A typical example might read "exciting careers: contribute to the defense of America and the Free World. For our top secret research into new weapons systems, we need electronics engineers, mathematicians, statisticians, psychologists, biologists, public relations experts." These ads are placed by Douglas, Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed, General Electric. Since the Second World War, Los Angeles has become the centre of the American aeronautics industry, also producing ballistic missiles and space buggies as well as the computers for controlling these gizmos.

If Soviet Russia and China ever ditched communism and became America's allies, two-thirds of Los Angelenos would be out of a job: hence the virulence of Californian anti-communism.

(Here I must digress with a detour that takes me back to Disneyland. During his recent trip to the United States, Comrade Khrushchev expressed the wish to visit the Disney empire-but Mister Disney refused to let him in. This seems to me especially regrettable as, had he been admitted, the First Secretary would have come face to face with a fat bald man dressed in red that Mister Disney has placed at the helm of the Moon Rocket, and who looks like an exact replica of the Soviet boss.)

Of course I don't know exactly where America's war industry is located. But I reckon that what is produced every year in Los Angeles would be enough to annihilate a large section of the planet. I wondered whether local people were aware of this and what they thought about it.

Dr T., a mathematician, is employed by Douglas as a computer programmer. He has two children, his young wife is expecting a third, they have a house with a garden near the beach, a big American sedan and a small English sports car. Dr T. regards himself as a liberal, which in the USA is the equivalent of being left-wing: he frequents the artists' cafés in Venice, and often goes on black rights marches. I asked him if his work for an industry capable of destroying the planet didn't give him cause for concern.
"But I don't work for the war machine, " he replied, "I just design programs. And Douglas doesn't only manufacture missiles. I don't know how my programs will be used, but it may be for civil aviation or space exploration."

Through Dr T. I obtained a pass to visit the Douglas factories. Not the missiles section-which is of course top secret-but I was able to see and photograph a fighter plane assembly line. The hangar is so vast that the foremen use bicycles to get from one place to the next. The atmosphere feels almost cocooned, the walls are painted pastel green, the loudspeakers play soft music, smiling female workers occasionally leave their posts to have a cup of tea or a coke. I took a portrait shot of one of them: she was carefully made up, scrupulously groomed with bleached hair and very proud to pose for my camera. She had nearly the same features as the plastic vamps stuck on the benches in the amusement park opposite Disneyland, which Californian husbands pretend to kiss under the kindly kodak gaze of their lawful wives.

As I photographed this worker, I began to see more clearly why I hated Disneyland. Like the rest of her fellow citizens, this charming woman undoubtedly spends some of her weekends wandering around the Land of Dreams, getting her fill of plastic, deodorised, antiseptic "adventures" delivered with surefire happy endings. The thrill of cannibals, sea serpents and meteorites is that much more agreeable as she knows in advance that Mister Disney is watching over her. And on Mondays, she returns to building fighter planes or missiles, probably telling herself that these weapons are no more real than Disneyland's illusions and convinced that the future of the planet is in good hands, as Mister Disney's got it all thought out for the best. All things considered, Disneyland could well prove the decisive weapon. No wonder it had to be kept secret from Comrade Khrushchev.

The woman with bleached hair and slightly over-muscular arms whom I had photographed in both her plastic version on the park bench and in the flesh at the Douglas factory, appeared to me once more in Hollywood, in a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard. This incarnation is called Pat Collins and appears on stage swathed in a tight-fitting white dress. She begins by reciting a ditty to a rock'n'roll beat in which the words "hypnosis" and "fun" keep recurring. Then she gives a short speech, inviting the spectators to come up on stage and take part in an amusing and harmless scientific experiment which will free them of their inhibitions, reveal their hidden talents and maybe even cure them of their tobacco or alcohol addictions.

There's not a single vacant seat in the small hall. Apart from a few movie stars whose names are whispered in my ear, the spectators are ordinary people similar to those who work at Douglas or visit Disneyland. About 20 volunteers climb up on stage. Pat Collins demands silence, asks for the lights to be dimmed and begins her incantations. "Your eyelids are drooping, drooping, you feel your arms becoming heavier, heavier, heavier." She squeezes the muscles of her subjects to make sure that they are properly relaxed, and sends the least susceptible back to their seats.
Some who had remained at their tables have spontaneously gone into trance. She summons them to the stage as well, and ends up with a dozen volunteers. Then she announces that the lights and music can come back on, that the waiters can start serving again, that customers can move about the auditorium. She does not object to me taking photos, she is not afraid of being disturbed, she's got her subjects well in hand.

Of course music-hall hypnosis is not a Californian speciality. And yet Pat Collins is quite characteristic of Los Angeles, if only for the kind of female type she represents: muscular, seductive, maternal and aggressive all at once. But there is another aspect which strikes me and leaves me perplexed: Pat's subjects always end up being humiliated and ridiculed.

"Jack, is your wife in the audience? I want her to join us on stage. Jack, you haven't seen your wife in a year, you missed her, you love her to bits, you kiss her passionately-but Jack, what are you doing? Why are you kissing this lady? You don't know her, and anyway she's dirty and her breath stinks!"

"Bill, come and join me for a glass of champagne! Cheers! But what's wrong with you? Your glass is glued to your lips, you can't get unstuck!"

"Maggie, you're a dog, look under that table, there's a bone for you!"

"Charlie, you're a typewriter!"

"Suzy, why are you stark naked? You should be ashamed of yourself!"

"Leslie, you've gotten 40 years younger, you're a turbo teenager. Actually, you're Elvis Presley and there are lovely girls all around you. Go on and sing them something!"

"Oh, my poor Bill, I'd forgotten you! Get that glass off your lips!"

The seance lasts an hour and a half. After a brief interval, Pat Collins repeats the show. This time there are twice as many volunteers: some of the spectators who watched the first sitting want to be hypnotised in turn. I don't think Europeans (or even New Yorkers) would react the same way. Are they masochists? Or do they think that ridicule and humiliation are a small price to pay for the reward of submitting to such a strong, maternal, provocative female who promises to free them from their complexes and unveil their hidden talents?

I only stayed eight days in Los Angeles. I don't think I saw enough (and still less understood enough) to cast judgement. But I couldn't help thinking "this is where intercontinental ballistic missiles are made: people like the ones I met might let them off."

Still, I had enough time to see that there was another side to the coin and to realise that Disneyland, Douglas, the three variants of the blonde archetype with peroxide hair and the nightmares I associate with them, are nothing other than facets of a more complex reality. At the other end of the spectrum I had the chance of meeting someone like Chuck Wilson.

I was introduced to him in a café in Venice, where beatniks spend their days in discussion, exchanging drugs or playing chess. I was looking for someone with a car, who was familiar with Los Angeles and who wanted to earn 20 dollars a day driving me around. Chuck had an old jeep, a lot of free time and needed money. And, as the distances meant we'd spend a good part of each day on the road, he had the time to talk about himself and his ideas.

Chuck is 20 years old. He was born in a small town in Ohio. His father was alcoholic, his childhood was difficult. In Germany, where he did his military service, he discovered a different universe which changed his outlook. Once demobilised, he moved to Los Angeles because he had heard it said that you could sleep on the beach and live on a pittance.

He likes talking about America and life in general. The thoughts he expresses are not his alone, they're the same ideas that get churned round the small circle of beatniks all day long. They may be extreme, but they are not without logic.

Chuck says, "They're all hooked. All my fellow citizens are drugged by the system, by the needs they create for themselves which in turn produce other needs. When they love a dame, they immediately think in terms of marrying and having kids with her, so they need a house with a garden, one or two cars, good schools, good insurance and so on. Once they're caught up in the system, the cogs keep turning and the war industry has to keep going, producing a few more weapons every year, till the day it blows up the planet because of some madman's calculation or some fool's mistake."

Chuck does not think communism provides a better system. "I guess they have their own problems," he says, "but it's up to them to solve them." As for him, he just refuses to join the rat race: he doesn't want a family or a job, he'll live by his wits. He's learnt to be satisfied with the bare minimum, in a state of what he calls controlled starvation. Some of his friends have wanted to start families and try out controlled starvation in groups: but refusing the American way of life is more difficult for a family than for an individual. Chuck thought of emigrating, but it won't do because his idea is to set an example so others will follow him and one day the system will collapse by itself.

Chuck has enough youth and faith to reject the system. But there are also those whom the system rejects. You can see them in the small downtown square between the slightly pathetic skyscrapers and the slums. With its park benches, lawns and trees, this green space brings to mind the squares of London or Paris. But it's only an illusion: five feet down, the tree-roots come up against the concrete of an enormous underground car park. Human wrecks lie about on the benches and lawns. Their rags are like those of the tramps in Paris but the likeness ends there. Parisian down-and-outs have their identity and even their own mythology, they form groups which meet under bridges or on the metal grates of the metro, they know where to find cheap food and wine. The human wrecks of Los Angeles are alone, their condition has no name and no legend. Some of them think they are the Messiah: they stand on benches for hours at a time preaching gospels which only they understand, and to which nobody pays attention.