Place / industry / myth
“Hollywood” frequently shifts scale without warning: it can mean a street corner, an apartment, a train station, a hotel pool, the entertainment industry, an inherited image-system or a degraded civic mythology. This is a particularly clear geographic example of Focal-Length Mutation.
Literal streets still matter
The abstraction never fully replaces the district. Hollywood Boulevard, East Hollywood, North Hollywood, Las Palmas and street-level transit remain concrete enough to resist the word becoming pure metaphor.
Fictional leakage
The later Hollywood Hollows demonstrates the opposite motion: recognizable Los Angeles material crosses into Lost Eros and becomes explicitly fictional civic geography.
Source audit: 49 published source documents / 71 direct string hits in the August 11, 2026 archival snapshot. Representative sources: ADVENT 1.7: Seven Veils · ADVENT 1.12: VITALI & I · ADVENT 1.14: Yves, of the Apocalypse · "5!, 4!, 3!, 2!," — [*enormous blood splatter*] — "HAPPY NEW YEAR!".
The star as trapdoor
The two-work King Baggot arc turns Hollywood's commemorative infrastructure into a reality test. First, Old Hollywood expertise fails to recognize a real former star. Then INSTRUCTIONS NEVER TO DESTROY VIEW OR DUPLICATE has A and B physically cut Baggot's Walk of Fame star out of Hollywood Boulevard and discover a ladder beneath it. The district becomes an archive whose plaques do not merely label the past; they conceal another one.