L.A. Confidential
1997, directed by Curtis Hanson
L.A. Confidential opens with a voice-over inviting the listener to “come to Los Angeles.” In addition to the city’s many attractions, “you could even be discovered… become a movie star… or at least see one.” The ironic gap here between becoming and seeing won’t be the last acknowledgement of Hollywood’s deceptive allure. Pierce Patchett’s prostitutes and failed actor Matt Reynolds belong to the masses who’ve come to Los Angeles “off the bus” with dreams of stardom that won’t materialize. The story is about the police department, but Hollywood hovers over everything, an unavoidable background in the city of entertainment. The film industry may feel peripheral, but L.A. Confidential says as much about Hollywood as it does about police or crime.
Within a minute of the halfway mark, the famous Hollywood sign makes its sole appearance. It’s only a wall mural at a campaign event, a replica like Patchett’s movie star look-alikes, but its central position hints at the central role that Hollywood occupies. The movie constantly alludes to the entertainment industry: Sergeant Jack Vincennes moonlights as an advisor to the “Badge of Honor” television show, and he’s rumored to be the cop who busted Robert Mitchum for owning weed; Pierce Patchett finances B pictures; Lana Turner makes an appearance; the Pantages movie theater appears twice; we see clips from Roman Holiday and This Gun for Hire; and when the captain asks, “Do you follow my drift,” Bud White answers, “In Technicolor, sir.” It’s telling that in the first scene, when White radios for back-up, he calls the Hollywood station: “Hollywood, this is 6-Adam-7,” as if equating the police department with Hollywood. This metaphor will define the film.
A police force is not an obvious metaphor for Hollywood, unless we put both in context and realize that both are projections of a moral standard. The job of the police is to separate bad from good, and U.S. cinema, ever since The Great Train Robbery in 1903, has been heavily invested in reinforcing a moral code inherited from the country’s peculiar blend of religious influences. L.A. Confidential introduces us to a deep-rooted corruption at high and low levels of the police department. Its characterization is thorough enough, and familiar enough to anyone who follows the news, to let us understand that this corruption is a symptom of the original premise. Trying to separate the bad from the good is a fool’s errand, because what we call “bad” and “good” have always co-existed within every individual. The ideal of forcefully eradicating crime only creates a vacuum… “and it’s only a matter of time before someone with balls of brass tries to fill it.” It’s unsurprising that these “balls of brass” would come from a socially legitimate seat of power, just as it’s unsurprising that Hollywood’s relentless evangelism for its simplistic morality would have a corrupting effect.
The protagonists of L.A. Confidential are three cops – Bud White, Jack Vincennes, and Ed Exley – who come to resist the corruption around them. In the film’s metaphor they correspond to a socially constructive side of Hollywood that has always co-existed with the studios’ blind moralism. Each of them, however, starts out by personifying a particular side of Hollywood morality. Bud White, savior of women and “muscle job” enforcer for Captain Dudley Smith, represents the retributive morality of a generic crime film or Western. Jack Vincennes, the narcotics cop who arrests bisexual Matt Reynolds, represents the puritanical morality of the Hays Code. Ed Exley, the straight-laced rising detective and whistleblower, represents the moral integrity of a Frank Capra movie or countless other social dramas.
In a subversive twist, each protagonist grows up when he abandons his respective brand of morality. Bud White forgoes vengeance on Exley for sleeping with Lynn Bracken, instead opting to cooperate with his colleague. Jack Vincennes is moved to seek justice for the murdered “homo” Matt Reynolds. Ed Exley loosens his principles to shoot Captain Smith in the back when the latter leaves him no alternative but to uphold the police mafia that Smith leads. The change in each man is not a turn toward “immorality” but rather an act of maturity, motivated not by selfish principle nor by some god-like calculation for “the greater good” but by a kind of social empathy. Exley’s turning point is especially delicate because it involves killing another human being, but the essential point is that Smith has put him in a diabolical bind – either kill him or be forced to participate in a murderous organization.
In yet another filmic reference, the three cops match the template of Dorothy’s three companions in The Wizard of Oz. Bud White (“I’m not smart enough. I’m just the guy they bring in to scare the other guy shitless.”) finds his brains when he realizes there’s something wrong with the Nite Owl case. The normally callous Jack Vincennes finds his heart when he takes up Reynolds’ murder, and he’s killed “by a .32 slug to the heart” as if to emphasize that he has gained a heart by that point. Ed Exley, whom Bud White had called a “coward” in private conversation with Lynn Bracken, finds his courage, first when raiding the escaped Nite Owl suspects but then more importantly in the final showdown.
The Oz parallels go further. Like Dorothy, Lynn Bracken is an innocent woman from the American interior (Bisbee, Arizona) who’s come to Los Angeles seeking a glamorous life “over the rainbow” and who goes home at the end. Dudley Smith is the powerful man who proves a fraud, like the Wizard. Pierce Patchett is like the Wicked Witch in his criminal activity and his hillside mansion, akin to the witch’s castle, but also in his association with the West. He builds the Santa Monica Freeway, linking downtown with the west coast; his “B” pictures would likely include Westerns; and his prostitutes bring the fantasy of Hollywood to paying customers, symbolically opening up “the West” the way his freeway and the American frontier had done.
The point here is that virtue in L.A. Confidential does not reside in following a code or “getting the bad guy” but in becoming a complete person. If the three protagonists stand for a side of Hollywood that was always more enlightened than Hollywood’s moralistic element, The Wizard of Oz (which was a culmination of Irving Thalberg’s influence) is a leading exemplar of that better side.
There’s another big movie reference in the opening scene when Bud White, peering into a living room window, catches a parolee beating his wife. The setup recalls Rear Window, but so does the motive of the man looking in. Like the oedipal L.B. Jefferies, Bud White’s family history leaves him with an obsessive quest to punish a violent father figure. Like so many cases of oedipal rebellion, White nearly becomes like his hated father when he strikes Lynn Bracken across her face, but he’s mature enough to realize what he’s done and check himself. On this point Ed Exley is opposite to Bud White, being motivated by reverence for his martyred father. For this reason it’s critical that Exley and not White kills the villainous captain at the end – otherwise the act would be a relapse into White’s history of oedipal vengeance.
In a film that takes aim at the self-righteous moralism of Hollywood, these psychological insights suggest that that moralism is rooted in childhood concepts. In the first line of dialogue after Sid Hudgens’ introduction, Dick Stensland tells Bud White, “You’re like Santa Claus with that list, Bud, except everyone on it’s been naughty.” When White subsequently yanks the decorative Santa and reindeer off the perpetrator’s roof to bring the man outside, the symbolic downfall of Santa, with all of the figure’s moralistic associations, foretells the direction of the movie. L.A. Confidential aims to pull down the cheap, showy moralism of Hollywood as decisively as Bud White pulls down that sleigh.
A juvenile moralistic framework that tries to draw clean lines between “naughty” and “nice” is not merely an imperfect basis for justice. In the world of L.A. Confidential, it’s an engine for injustice, both in law enforcement and in the popular media. Although Jack Vincennes forgets why he became a cop, the film suggests that every policeman originally joined the force with some idea of setting things right, but we see how that self-justifying motive slides into cruelty, racism, and betrayals of justice. Likewise, behind a mask of morality, Hollywood sells its audience a fantasy of righteousness. In today’s society, onlookers of political cruelty often wonder whether the sadists in power rooted, for example, for the evil Empire in Star Wars. Of course they didn’t… the point is that the moralizing frame of a movie like Star Wars is part of the problem.
L.A. Confidential is set in 1953 and 1954, toward the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age when the studio system was in decline. Even then, Hollywood stood for more than just movies. A peripheral industry of fan magazines and other media amplified the worst of Hollywood’s messaging. The initial narrator of L.A. Confidential is Sid Hudgens, writer for a scandal tabloid called “Hush-Hush” who’s interested above all in the sins he can dig up, again concerned with morality but reducing it to a yet more juvenile level. Toward the end, as the story brings its characters to a more adult outlook, Hudgens’ narration is no longer fitting, and his character is killed off. It’s important though that his yellow journalism gives the movie its title. The word “confidential” implies dirty secrets in the City of Angels. The twist here is that the real scandal is the underpinning moral code, the very last thing most people would regard as scandalous.
CONNECTIONS:
The Wizard of Oz – Trio of male characters who discover their brains, heart, and courage; character with a castle or mansion associated with the west; innocent woman who came to a glamorous city and returns home; powerful man who turns out to be a fraud
Mildred Pierce – Metaphor for Hollywood in the more mundane side of Los Angeles; symbolic allusion to the Hollywood sign
Rear Window – Male protagonist spies on a couple through a window and avenges the violence done to the woman
Mulholland Drive – Character(s) who come to Hollywood seeking glamor only to meet failure; meaningful insertion of the Hollywood sign