X-MEN: Days of Future Past and the Fight for a Dying World

by Christopher Barr

“Mutation, it is the key to our evolution.  It has enabled us to evolve into the dominant species on the planet.  This process normally takes thousands and thousands of years.  But every few hundred millennia, evolution leaps forward.”

– Professor X (X-Men 1), Jean Grey (X-Men 2)

X-Men: Days of Future Past was a fantastic, fun extravaganza to be hold.  Its story was complex with time jumping and memory swapping and its action scenes have something fresh about them.  Director Bryan Singer had a lot to make up for after bowing out of X-Men 3 to do the not-so-bad Superman Returns.  The problem is the third installment of a comic book franchise, that was just coming off the mass success of the masterful X2: X-Men United, was put in the hands of mediocre filmmaker wannabe Brett Ratner.  As a result the momentum that the first two garnered was all but a corpse after the first screening of X-Men: The Last Stand.  The CGI was sloppy; the action scenes were contrived and the story was horrible.  Not to mention all the main characters that were killed off in unmemorable and unnecessary ways.

This last installment, a sequel to X-Men: First Class, a prequel to The Last Stand and a reverse crossover, hybrid of The Wolverine, was Singer’s way of dealing with damage control for The Last Stand and to undo some of the comic book blasphemy that was in it, restoring the balance back to the X-Men universe’s future and past.  Singer brought the narrative back to its fundamental human problem, discrimination resulting in extermination.  This marvelous movie has its fun moments with one in particular involving Quicksilver, in the best action scene in the film, and a number of security guards firing upon himself, Xavier, Magneto and Wolverine, the moment was priceless, it was also reminiscent of the Nightcrawler scene at the beginning of X2 .  But the real achievement was Singer brought the seriousness that Ratner shamelessly did away with back. 

We see this seriousness right from the start when a cargo box is tipped up and dead humans and mutants roll out into a pile, while a number of other mutants and mutant-sympathizing humans are escorted to a likely death chamber, in a very dark despotic future circa 2023.   This is a bleak world that is overrun by Sentinels, huge powerful robots that have been originally designed to track and eliminate all mutants.  This scene was also throwback to the first film and a reminder of the fact that something simply don’t change, even if we want them to.  This post-apocalyptic wasteland is all that remains as humans and mutants are well on their way to extinction.    

The first X-Men movie started off with rain pounding down on a large number of Jewish people being herded off to the gas chamber during the atrocities of World War 2.  The screen was bled of most of its color leaving a pale, grim suitable atmosphere as a young Erik Lehnsherr is separated from his parents who are among the number of sad souls off to their deaths.  Understandably angered by this, he draws upon a seemingly foreign ability held deep within him, and generates a magnetic field between him and the closed metal gate that divides him and his parents.  The angrier he becomes the more powerful the magnetic field becomes and manipulates the metal gate, violently bending it toward him until a guard hits Erik in the face with the butt of his rifle, knocking him near unconscious to the muddy ground.

“You’ll have to kill me, Charles – and what would that accomplish?  Let them pass that law and they’ll have you in chains with a number burned into your forehead!” 
- Magneto

This opening scene did a number of things; it let its audience know that we are entering new territory here when it comes to the superhero movie.  It said that this movie is going to be the polar opposite of the horrible 1997 movie Batman & Robin, but it also made the statement that we are going to take this material seriously.  Clearly the unfortunate events that occurred in concentration camps during World War 2 were appalling to say the least.  So for a comic book movie to start out reminding its audience of these events is saying a lot. 

This scene, our first look into the world of the X-Men on the big screen, was to set the tone for the entire series.  It was making a bold statement about the madness of division, about fearing what we don’t understand and hating what we fear.  It’s saying we can’t just kill what scares us; first we must understand why we are scared in the first place.  The result has been proven over and over again; if you begin to understand you become less afraid and if you do that, you become less likely to resort to violence as a result.

Difference has always scared the hell out of humanity, and at an earlier point in our history, that fear of difference was understandable.  It’s natural for a person to be afraid if they don’t know what is going to happen next.  Our defense mechanisms assure us of this on a daily basis.  But whether it’s the religious differences that led to the genocide in Rwanda or the extermination of 6 million Jews during World War 2, it is clear that as we grow as a civilization, we grow fearful of all the change that is out there.

Change has always scared the hell out of humanity because we seek comfort and avoid predators, just as our early ancestors did.  We are hardwired to survive long enough to have off-spring and raise them through cautious means of survival.  So when a foreign ship lands at our shores, we rightfully become fearful, not only for ourselves but for our young, for others that may be part of our group or tribe.  As a direct response to that fear, we naturally become defensive and it just depends on the group whether they kill and then ask questions or they take the more civil other way around.  

“…and there are even rumors, Miss Grey, of mutants so powerful that they can enter our minds and control our thoughts, taking away our God-given free will. Now I think the American people deserve the right to decide if they want their children to be in school with mutants. To be taught by mutants! Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that mutants are very real, and that they are among us. We must know who they are, and above all, what they can do!”

– Senator Kelly (X-Men 1)

Mutants have a variety of powers and Senator Kelly at the beginning of the first film does make some valid points about the potential dangers of that fact.  What’s to stop one that can walk through walls, from entering a bank vault or the White House, which Nightcrawler does during the magnificent, spectacular opening scene to X2: X-Men United?  He is under the chemical control of William Stryker but never the less; Senator Kelly’s point is that it is possible.

Persecution is the resulting effect of not understanding another group of people and more horribly, not attempting to understand another group of people.  Magneto was that young boy who watched his parents carted off to certain death while lying helpless on ground.  Later we find out that his mother lived only long enough for Sebastian Shaw to shot her because Erik was unable to use his powers at will, during the opening scenes of X-Men: First Class.  Magneto has struggled over the years to realize his goal of mutant supremacy.  In the first film he tried assimilation, the second annihilation and the third mobilization, all in an attempt to not be that scared little boy, lying in the mud, helpless.

Scottish philosopher David Hume saw societies being run by passion and emotion and not reason and logic.  The X-Men live in such a society, one where people’s feelings about change and difference outweigh their critically reasonable side.  Because most societies are governed with an emotional purview; problems with equal rights, same sex marriages, racial differences, cultural differences, stem-cell research, terrorism, genocide, climate change and media, governmental and corporate propaganda will always exist.  These are not logical problems; these are not problems that when you apply a little reason cannot be solved.

I would never want humanity to dampen the flame of its passionate, emotional side and become Vulcans, where logic is their only means of understanding, but I ideally would like it see a society, and certainly live in one, that applied actual logic to its foreign policy, one that would see that same sex marriage is not a problem and that it’s a waste of everyone’s time even debating about it.  Clearly most of the above so-called problems listed are religiously traditional tenets that a healthy, growing society should be ashamed to admit that they advocate, but yet here we are, in a world that is a troubled place, because it is feeding off its immature emotional side and not growing up to the necessity of reason and logic.

The X-Men are a Marvel comic book creation by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby.  These men created these characters to have purpose, to mean something, to reflect a problem they saw in society that was and still is, tearing it apart.  We are unable to get over our differences and instead of dealing with that unavoidable fact and grow with it; we stick our precious little heads in the sand and say, ‘kill anything that isn’t like me’.  Apathy, ignorance, racism, nationalism and intolerance all stem from our fear of the unknown. 

X-Men: Days of Future Past was dealing with a lot of those same problems as the previous films, where the ignorant only desired death to the mutants.  So it was humans vs. mutants but it was also mutants vs. mutants.  Magneto is a tragic figure that is unable to get over his bitterness of his childhood.  Some would rightfully say why should he but his lifelong friend Charles Xavier only wishes for him to take the compassionate path of righteousness.

Charles is truly a noble figure, a guru of a man that wants peace above all but isn’t afraid to fight for it.  Essentially he’s a very smart man trying to convince all the ignorant people that what they are doing is wrong, that there is a better way to do it and that is through knowledge.  Tolerance on a massive scale requires a sleeping population to wake up out of their mind-controlled slumber and live their lives in a more productive, open-minded, fulfilling way.

This is what was so great about X-Men: First Class; is we got to see Charles and Erik’s relationship develop and we got to eventually see their ideologies separate.  We got to see how one man’s strength was not enough to save his friend from the fall of dispair.  Charles never had the opportunity to tell Erik that his way of thinking, mutants above all, was quite similar to the way of thinking Hitler employed during his extermination campaign in World War 2.

Stan Lee said that he based Charles Xavier on Martin Luther King Jr. and Erik Lehnsherr on Malcolm X, both men who had their hearts in the right place, but one that couldn’t escape his anger over how his fellow African Americans were being treated.  I do think that noble men like Xavier and King are rare indeed and I would argue that most would likely not have the strength to look their enemy in the face and grant mercy.  True strength is not to see your enemy as an enemy at all but as misguided.  A true teacher would only want to guide such a person or group onto a path that grants equality for all.

The real fantasy of Days of Future Past is the chance to make it right, the chance to go back and correct a mistake that created a ripple effect to the destruction of us all.  It’s something that would have passed through the minds of most people because most people harbor regret for some of the things they have done, but didn’t have the wisdom at the time to see that.  If only wisdom came before we all got so afraid of most of the things around us.  What a world that would be, a world that would finally realize that fear is an illusion that the mind creates to sound the alarm bells, and that alarm doesn’t always mean something is wrong.

There is a new timeline in the X-Men universe, much in the same way as the new Star Trek franchise.  I certainly would've liked to have seen more moments from the future, but I also see that its purpose was to let us know of the devastation that was being fought there and not to explore its detail.  Essentially we just needed to know enough to feel the weight on Wolverine’s shoulders once he went into the past, what was at stake and what would have been lost, salvation for all was the goal.  The next film is called X-Men: Apocalypse, so maybe this timeline change will cause more problems than they bargained for.  

The X-Men will continue to fight the treachery of evil men in order to maintain their place as an evolutionary leap for the future of mankind.  They will fight those that only wish to hold us all back from growing and expanding our view of the world, and all those that inhabit it.  The X-Men will fight for what most free-thinking people should fight for; the future of our species, because if we let the warmongers and politicians have their way, we might well be heading toward a post-apocalyptic wasteland of our very own.

“I’m looking for hope.”

– Professor Xavier

GODZILLA: The Embodiment of a Living Atomic Bomb

by Christopher Barr

“The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control... and not the other way around.”

- Dr. Ichiro Serizawa

……….Let them fight.

Godzilla ゴジラ is back in theatres and for the most part, it was a pretty decent version of the Japanese icon.  There were some wooden characters, the only character that was three dimensional and had potential was killed off less than half way through the film.  But aside from some minor plot holes and a little silly dialogue, Godzilla was a thrilling ride at the movie theatre.  The special effects were top notch, realizing the mammoth creature in all his potential.  I enjoyed the tension that was created, especially in the first act of the film.

Godzilla's visceral roar vibrated through the city buildings the way we lovingly expected it to, like the god we portray him to be, a deity figure for us all.  The film dealt with its unrealistic narrative with a mature form of pacing, allowing its audience to properly suspend their disbelief long enough to relish is the magnificent battle of the monsters at the end of the movie, and what a great time that was.  But it still wasn’t on par with Jaws and Alien, both films effectively concealed their creatures until the end, but the difference with them was the human characters were so worth watching.  Chief Brody and Ripley were interesting, fleshed-out people that you cared about, especially when they were on their own, in their respective films, at the end and faced their nightmare head-on.  Side note; it is clear the family’s last name Brody, in Godzilla was a nod to Jaws.

Poseidon’s behemoth slumbered for eons before being woken up to fight a battle that ends up destroying cities.  Godzilla is covered in tumorous-looking scars intended to resemble those experienced by victims of radiation.  He is truly a massive creature clocking in at 350 feet.  He is a wrath of nature that has come to punish those that have abused it; this is certainly odd when you look at it literally within the sense of the movie.  Godzilla is an environmentalist?  No, Godzilla is and will always remain a metaphor against the misuse of radiation technology to benefit greed and power.

This American version brought the monster out of the culture of Japan and onto the streets of San Francisco.   There is a somewhat disturbing irony found here, Godzilla is a Japanese creation to help disseminate the atrocities that the country underwent in WW2 to their Japanese viewers.  Now the very nation responsible for these atrocities in the first place has co-opted the Asian beast and made it their own.

In the above quote, Dr. Serizawa in the film talks about the arrogance of man thinking nature is in their control.  I would take that one step further and state; the arrogance of an American movie studio to take a Japanese icon, that's genesis was the result of the United States fire-bombing and dropping two atomic bombs on their soil, and then turning him into an American hero.  Only in this day in age is this not laughable if not disrespectful to a nation that suffered plenty at the hands of the American military industrial complex.  I would note that the Japanese military was not innocent during WW2, in fact quite literally the contrary.  The Japanese army was out of control and did have to be stopped for the atrocities that they were unleashing on the Chinese.  It’s known now that the United States government was well aware of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour prior to December 7, 1941, but at the time the American people and the average fighting soldiers were unaware of that fact and rightfully wanted revenge.  That being said, the citizens of the Island of Japan did nothing wrong to anyone and certainly didn’t deserve their hellish fate.

The 1954 original Japanese version of the film Gojira (Godzilla) helped lift the Japanese out of their past World War 2 depression, by restoring a portion of their national pride and began a healing process from the festering wound sewn into the fabric of their society.  The film was obviously bad, save the spectacular score, but that was fine because it ended up becoming an instant cult classic as a result.  It was also unflinchingly bleak, dark and deceptively powerful, it was a film by a wounded filmmaker living in a wounded country that could still feel the pain of hell on earth.  The film portrayed the first mass media character that warned us of the horrors unchecked by atomic weapons.  The opening scenes of the film show the monumental force of such a holocaust.  An American reworked version of the film called Godzilla: King of the Monsters was released in the states in 1956.  Their version removed a lot of the blatant atomic connections to the beast simply because they were responsible for that connection in reality a decade earlier.        

On August 6^th 1945, the American Military Forces dropped “Littleboy” a uranium atomic bomb on Hiroshima.  Three days later on August 9^th they dropped “Fat Man” a plutonium implosion-type atomic bomb on Nagasaki.  Within the next couple of months of the blasts, upwards to 166,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki; half of which were annihilated on the first day and the remaining victims suffered agonizing deaths as the months passed by while the effects of burns, radiation sickness and other such injuries slowly claimed the rest of them.

Prior to these Atomic bomb drops, United States’ Operation Meetinghouse saw the firebombing of the city of Tokyo along with a number of other cities being napalmed, releasing a scourge of disaster across the island of Japan.  There never has been a city in the history of warfare where as many bombs on Tokyo were dropped.  But after all this devastation it wasn’t until March 1^st of 1954, when the United States’ Castle Bravo thermonuclear device test at Bikini Atoll, near the Marshall Islands, that a lonely tuna fish ship called Daigo Fukuryū Maru, otherwise known as the Lucky Dragon 5, got hit with the fallout of a nuclear blast.  The ship, with its 23 seamen aboard, was inside the danger zone which the U.S. government had declared in advance, that being said, the test ended being twice as powerful as expected and the fallout, in the form of fine ash went outside the danger zone.  The following months after the blast the men started to die one by one of radiation poisoning.

This incident, along with the last decade of devastation to their country, showed the Japanese that man has gone too far, man can now willfully tear apart and destroy the fundamental particles of the universe.  It showed them that ‘the bomb’ was still very much alive and that the atomic nightmare, they have been just through, wasn’t relegated to World Wars but was an omnipresent threat to their nation.  This tragedy galvanized an emerging movement in Japan against the future use of these potential global killers, eradicating them for good.  This movement was a symbolic protest against the proliferation of weapons that are capable of annihilating all life from the surface of the Earth.

Japan was occupied by the U.S. Army up until September, 1952.  Before their departure the American forces banned any information about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs and their aftermaths, namely the radioactivity-induced diseases, from getting out.  It was to remain quiet that millions of civilians that weren’t directly connected to the war were the bulk of the massive casualties.  The metaphor for this disparaging scientific revolution was in the form of a daikaiju, a massive green monster named Godzilla, a catharsis for a limping nation.

Godzilla, in 1954, is awoken from his underwater sleep by a nuclear detonation and travels to the city of Tokyo and unleashes his fury just as the atomic bombs did, crumbling Hiroshima and Nagasaki.   He was to become the first major expression in pop culture of the unspeakable tragedy Japan suffered during the war.

Today the threat of annihilation hasn’t gone away with the disaster of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011.  Radiation at the restricted site to this day is pouring underground water that has been mixed with contaminated material into the Pacific Ocean by the millions of gallons.

The city is like a post-apocalyptic landscape frozen in time, a place where the radiation is deadly and land uninhabitable, the Janjira disaster in the new film has clearly drawn comparisons to the real life Fukushima meltdown.  Radioactive isotopes are spilling into the ocean and having a drastic effect on the sea life as it travels with currents across the ocean to Canada, the US and as far as Mexico.  All the Japanese have been able to do to slow the radioactive flow of water into the ocean, is to pump it into leaking, monstrous holding tanks.  These tanks are quickly built and filled within a day and half leaving the remaining overflow into the sea.  This is only an inadequate immediate solution to a long term problem that, as far as experts are concerned, is unfixable, it is also believed that the technology required to fix the problem is years away from being realized.

The threat seen by the Japanese at the end of World War 2 still exists here today and still on their soil no less.  Godzilla over the years has thus possessed a bit of a schizophrenic attitude toward atomic power.  Nuclear bombs are destructive, but yet atomic power can also produce electricity; radiation from the bombs killed more people than the actual blasts but radiation therapy can save lives by killing cancer cells.  I suppose the obvious question which outweighs the other?

The problem here is as a society; we are messing with the forces of nature and increasingly confronting the unfathomable consequences of that power.  Godzilla is a manifestation of that global killer, that if unchecked, if unleashed could devastate the very world we inhabit.  Godzilla is the hellfire that man let out of Pandora’s Box and as an allegory he cannot be killed.  Maybe that’s why he appears in just under 30 sequels or maybe he doesn’t die because of our ambitions for power, literally and figuratively, are unflinching.  Maybe we are the very Godzilla that we all wish to stop, unless another towering beast comes along in the movie ‘arms race’ for the biggest monstrosity, then we’ll need Godzilla to kill it for us.  I’m not sure if that is poetic or madness but like the spectacle of life; we all want to stick around and see what monster wins at the end of the day, even if that may mean that we all lose in the long run, because we can’t win this fight.  Nature will always win that battle and that is the heart of these movies, Godzilla is the punishment we all deserve.

“Power does not corrupt.  Fear corrupts….perhaps the fear of a loss of power.”

 - John Steinbeck

L.A. Confidential and Navigating the Moral Landscape

by Christopher Barr

“Civil disobedience is not our problem.  Our problem is civil obedience.  Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders… and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.  Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… and the grand thieves are running the country.  That’s our problem.” 

- Howard Zinn

Reciprocity, Mr Hudgens, is the key to every relationship…

L.A.Confidential is a magnificently shot and visually stunning noir-ish film, based on a wonderful book by James Ellroy, about seeing the world as it is presented, and then seeing it for what it actually is.  In the tradition of the masterpiece Chinatown, it’s a crime story that takes place within the façade of the glitz and glamour of sunny California’s most notoriously corrupt city, Los Angeles.  The 1950’s, which this film takes place, was a time for cleaning up appearances in the wake of a devastating dirty, world war and a depression.  The world wasn’t going to change and the sleazy powers at the highest levels knew this, so the 50’s were a brand new shiny paint job masking the decadence of the human project, to form a civilization for all to share and participate in.  This paint job didn’t last because in the 1960’s the rust started to come through, spilling all over the city streets.

The film starts with a prologue voiced-over by slimy tabloid newshound, Sid Hudgens about the false face of Los Angles.  “Come to Los Angeles!  The sun shines bright, the beaches are wide and inviting, and the orange groves stretch as far the eye can see.  There are jobs aplenty, and land is cheap.  Every working man can have his own house, and inside every house, a happy, all-American family.  You can have all this, and who knows…. You could even be discovered, become a movie star… or at least see one.  Life is good in Los Angeles… it’s paradise on Earth….. Ha ha ha ha.  That’s what they tell you anyway.”

Sid then reminds his ‘dear readers’ that there is a dark side to this seedy fairy-tale land, as there often is, and that - what is being seen is simply the selling of an image and underneath all that glamour and all the stars on the walk of fame in organized crime.  We begin to see the viscera of the city, the mud, the blood, all of it.  

“In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded.  Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.  That was all.” 

- Oscar Wilde

Detective Wendell “Bud” White is a policeman made of steel and muscle but is sentimental when bad things happen to woman.  He is a realist; he sees the world for what it is and not what he’d like it to be.  Unlike most people around him who buy into the joke or don’t care to know otherwise, Bud has no interest at having the wool pulled over his eyes much in the same way as a lion in wild doesn’t.  Lion’s for the most part will leave you alone if you leave them alone but if you decide to cross the line, like Bud, they bite much harder than you do.

Sgt. Jack Vincennes is a slick well-dressed narcotics officer that is pretty much out for himself.  He’s a man that has been caught up in all the fame, fortune and celebrity that reigns through Hollywood.  He drinks the Kool-Aid like champagne bottles of Dom Perignon.  He’s also a technical advisor on a detective show called Badge of Honor, a position that he holds dearly because it keeps him in-the-in of Hollywood entitlement.  Jack has no problem living in the wings of fantasy as long as he gets his cut of the profits and has fun doing it.

Sgt. Ed Exley is an ambitious up-and-comer at the Los Angeles Police Department who is the heart of this story.  He’s a man governed by rules, regulations and idealism.  He’s a believer in the prevalence of justice and is unyielding about bringing those that disobey it in for prosecution.  He’s a black and white thinker in a multi-shaded world.

Ed, the police department’s new golden boy, wants to make detective but his Captain, Dudley Smith asks him tough questions about what he’d be willing to do to insure a conviction.  Whether it’s planting evidence, beating a suspect to get a confession or shooting a criminal, which he knew to be guilty, to insure that he never victimizes another innocent person again?  Ed tells Captain Smith that he’d never do any of these things.  Those solutions exist in gray areas that Ed, through moral principle, couldn’t see himself cross into.

The film is about the moral landscape and the ethical boundaries one is willing to break or in the case of Ed, not break, to live in a society of uncertainly.  What are we as individuals and as a community willing to do to maintain order within the chaos of greed and corruption?  From a utilitarian stand point; who are we willing to kill to protect the innocent?  When does that line begin to blur to the point that the police officer that’s chasing the criminal is indistinguishable and more horrifying; interchangeable?

Ed has conviction and in this film as in life, that could get a person killed while surrounding oneself by the culvert of corruption.  What makes this film so brilliant is; it’s right even if we all dream that it isn’t, that it’s just a movie and people aren’t really that corrupt, pass me a Big Mac.  We do live in a corrupt unjust world, where the rich and powerful benefit themselves by lying through their teeth to the population they rule over, about the nature of their reality. 

Religion in society maintains its ruse in order to survive within its corrupted institutions.  Governments are in business with corporations to seize the world’s resources for both their beneficial gains.  Climate change continually gets falsely debunked on the airwaves of corporate controlled, governmentally surveilled ‘news’ networks in order to keep the machine moving while the Earth, our only home in the universe, is put through a form of global chemotherapy.  The belief in the afterlife and the creator of the universe is a hoax perpetuated by businessmen who want to maintain a high level of power over the people of the world. 

Corruption is so pervasive that its dreadful, ubiquitous nature nullifies it’s often ‘rare case’ prognoses reported by the media.  It is the air we breathe even if most of us only wish to suffocate in the fantasy of a superstitious belief systems furnished with an invisible god and a one way ticket on the afterlife train.   Righteousness is as a result, one of the bravest philosophies one can incorporate into one’s own constitution.  Why is this?  Whistleblowers are condemned in society and seen as treasonous radicals thanks to the propagandized corporate puppet media.

Politics and war can be quite complicated to follow and understand which is likely the point made by those that execute them.  But in elementary school politics, the world is run by bullies who want your lunch, your weekly allowance and the keys to your parent’s car.  But instead of getting a black eye (war) and having lies told about you (propaganda), nations in the world have their lands invaded by bullies that lie about people and accuse them of being bad (terrorists).  This is about getting power and running the ‘school yard’ as you see fit, this is about fear, the fuel that scares us all to death. 

L.A Confidential questions the laws that we hold dearly and those that have been tasked to uphold them, while we all try and live productive fulfilling lives.  The perilous boundaries here isn’t that the cops are corrupt but rather mankind is corrupt, starting from the top down.  Like unfortunately only few in life, this film does explore the bravery of the incorruptible; those that have fell through the cracks of mind controlled assimilation of the fantasy of society, these few only wish to fight for justice.  Not for profit or reward but because they wish to do the right thing even if the established order does not.    

There have been many threats to the established order, the very order that will discredit or kill anyone or any entity that gets in their way.  A couple examples of individuals that threatened this order of bankers and elite families are; John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln and Malcolm X to name only a minute few.  The invasion of hundreds of countries, leading mass genocide and nationwide destruction all came as a result of power struggles over resources and sending messages to other regions.  Again, like in the school yard, you beat up one kid and that sends a message to the other kids if they try to overthrow your power, they too will be punished.  Your kids do this, your neighbors do this, your city officials do this, governments do this and you do this. 

Territoriality is common in the wild kingdom just as it is in the ‘civilized’ kingdom filled with ‘evolved’ primates.  Power, corruption and more money hide behind a vale of humanitarianism and the belief that we are all ‘good at heart’ and we only wish to help our fellow man.  I would agree that there are many people that do wish to only help their fellow man but it’s likely to find these people, you would need to go to the more impoverished parts of the world, where people by survival alone must unit, often together fighting the very corruption that oppressed them in the first place.

The primary role of government is to protect its citizens.  I would argue that their desire for power fuelled by their greed for money has contaminated their ability to effectively administrate at the highest levels of office.  What’s right and wrong for these people has selfishly transformed into what’s right for me and what’s wrong for me.  The animal that rose up from the jungles of Africa still holds sway for how we see the bigger picture.  Animals are self-serving only to the extent of survival for themselves and their young.  There interests beyond that, falls to the immediacy of gathering food, water and navigating the predator-filled terrain.  We are these animals but live in skyscrapers, fly planes around the world and drop bombs annihilating whole cities.   

In the film, while at the police station celebrates Christmas, a group of Mexican men are brought in and booked for allegedly assaulting a couple of police officers.  After a number of cops, who’ve been having many festive drinks, hear that they are down in lock-up, they decide to pay them a visit and execute their own brand of justice, swiftly.  The lines between right and wrong and the oath to uphold the law are crossed here.  While these inebriated cops feed off their emotions, prior to investigation, and beat the Mexican inmates, Ed is stuck in the middle fighting and losing for what he believes to be the right thing to do.  Reason rarely ever prevails when faced with the irrational force of a mob mentality.  Displacement of anger is the fuelling force often found alongside our own fear of death and conversely, certainly more peculiar; our own fear of life.

The crux of the story is a mass murder that takes place at a downtown café called the Nite Owl that Ed enthusiastically investigates.  Food burns on the grill, Ed enters the crime scene, as he walks through he finds a number of dead bodies that have been shot and dragged into a backroom.  Among the departed was Bud White’s old partner Dick Stensland, who was just recently let go from the police department due to his unprofessional conduct at the Christmas police party riot.

As the investigation gets underway three black men are brought in as suspects for the Nite Owl murders.  In one of the most suspenseful, clever interrogation scenes ever committed to film, Ed discovers an unsuspecting thread to the case.  One; it’s likely that the three black suspects did not commit the Nite Owl murders and were likely framed to quickly close the case and two; in spite of their innocence with regarding the murders they are not entirely innocent of a crime.  They have kidnapped a young girl, completely independent of the current charges laid against them for murder, and had her tied up on a bed, raped and beat her for who knows how long to fulfill their own sick amusements.  

With the rage of a fractious beast, Bud goes to the house where the girl is being kept and murders the kidnapper in cold blood, and then makes it look like the kidnapper shot at him first and he had to shoot in self-defence.  Bud untied the beaten girl as Ed and the other cops arrived at the scene.  Bud murdered a molesting piece of shit for doing who knows what to that young girl but was he right to do so?  Captain Smith earlier asked Ed if he could do such a thing to which Ed replied ‘no’.  Bud clearly draws from a different moral compass because his philosophy is swift justice rather than formal prosecution and the red tape of bureaucracy.

The Nite Owl suspects have escaped lock-up and Ed tracks them down to a dilapidated apartment complex.  Through the absence on proper communication, shots get fired and Ed for the first time in the film has to cross that line and shoot his way out, shooting the Nite Owl suspects dead.  Unlike Bud’s murder of the kidnapper, Ed really didn’t have a choice but to shoot them or he could have been killed.

In this film there are prostitutes that endure plastic surgery to look like movie stars like Lana Turner, where politicians are caught using nefarious escort services to get their rocks off only to become easy targets for black mail, the blurry lines of right and wrong in idealism versus right and wrong in reality play very different roles in public and private life.  The platitudes of people that drone on with their daily lives unvarnished while some simply can’t row-with-the-slaves and decide to step out; becoming the sordid underbelly and the façade of society that it doesn’t want anything to know about.

It is clear that justice in life and justice in law are often on opposing teams.  Bud tells a woman that he’s seeing, Lynn Bracken, while in bed, that as a child he watched his father beat his mother to death with a tire iron.  Officer White as a result helps any woman in need from officious men.  To Bud that is justice, that is his justice.  Lynn clearly sees much pain in Bud but also she sees a big heart hidden under mounds of rock within his chest.  This film truly explores how complicated the human psyche is, it explores the often untameable nature of a person when confronted with violence given and violence received.

“A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.”

 - John Stuart Mill

We all live by two rules of law, society’s and our own, and like a see-saw, when one side is up physics demands that the other side be down.  Society’s laws are rightfully and understandably broad in scope where one’s own laws are specific, and are subject to their own unique perspective on life as it is for them, how they see it in their own mind.  The problem here is this reality causes one’s code of ethics to often be out of alignment with the people around them.  This can easily cause misunderstanding which can result in fear of the other.

The true problems that society faces within the halls of justice are; it can’t stop people from suffering an injustice that alters their own personal state of justice.  Such is the case with Bruce Wayne, where he was a witness to his parent’s murder and the inevitable lack of justice as a result.  So he took it upon himself to instill his own brand of justice because he grew up to realize that justice is in fact not blind.  Justice can see perfectly, justice in society is a business like everything else in the world; justice is accountable to its ‘stockholders’ so to speak.

Rollo Tomassi is a made up name Ed tells Jack, a title he gave a purse snatcher that murdered his father, while Ed tries to convince Jack to help him with his case.  Rollo has become the ambitious driving force behind Ed’s need to always catch the bad guy because he is the guy that gets away.  Society is full of these men of power, these men that are above the law but like in the case of Ed, we want justice as well.  We want these men to face the same prosecution that anyone else would have to face if they committed a crime.

The reality is; that’s never going to happen.  Sure some of the elite get pulled from the shadows and are punished for various crimes but almost in every other case, they walk freely between the right and wrong that the average person has to navigate to avoid going to prison.  These privileged leaders have their malcontents trying to expose their corruption but usually, to no avail.  I would like to admit to being cynical here but the evidence shows this not to be cynicism. The only place you can see the ‘man behind the curtain’ get caught or killed for his misdeeds is in the simulations on TV and at the multiplex.  These forms of entertainment give a deceptive sense of relief that the small guy can make a difference.  But when you turn off your TV or leave the theatre the reality of the world picks up where fantasy has left off.  The big guy gets to keep his money and power; he gets to run his company and even gets to become President one day if he chooses.  

Ed Exley, Jack Vincennes and Bud White toward the end of the film pretty much stop doing what they want and start doing what is right.  The Nite Owl killers are still at large at this point and these police officers become reinvested in their own justice and the greater good.  Ed was doing what it took to climb the promotion ladder at the LAPD, Jack was looking out for himself and financial gain and Bud was muscle for hire.  Now Ed is putting his career on the line, Jack is no longer working for money and Bud is using his brains rather than his brawn to find the actual killers.    

For Jack’s growth it costs him his life.  Captain Smith shoots Jack after it’s clear that his investigation exposes Smith as the bad guy.  In one of the greatest death scenes in cinema, Jack, gasping what few breaths he has left, says Rollo Tomassi to Smith as life falls from his face.  The Captain later mentions the name to Ed unknowingly admitting to Jack’s murder and his involvement in police corruption.

Ed and Bud haven’t seen eye to eye at all throughout the film but when Bud finds out Ed was fooling around with his lady friend, Lynn Bracken, Bud confronts her, slapping her around and doing what he’s always protected other women from, a physically abusive man.  Bud then gets into it with Ed, beating him up pretty good, before finally realizing that this case isn’t about them.  It’s bigger than them so they must work together to bring down Captain Smith.

Ed and Bud find out that Smith was involved in shutting the mob down in LA, only so he and his partners could then take over its organized crime enterprise.  Righteousness comes at a price as Bud and Ed are falsely directed to a motel where they have a shootout with Smith and his men. 

True integrity in justice will always be a target to the corrupt.  Rollo Tomassi must always be the metaphorical figure that those with true justice must pursue, even if their very lives are at risk, because the key to life is finally realising that it isn’t all about you.  Protecting the world from fallen corrupt men is a noble legacy to make in this life, even if it’s disagreeable by many.  Holding onto your own code of ethics is what defines society’s desire for hope.  It allows you to maintain your integrity with courage and honor.

Off the record, on the QT and very hush-hush….

 

“I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel – let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing.  I’m concerned that students not become passive acceptors of the official doctrine that’s handed down to them from the White House, the media, textbooks, teachers and preachers.”

– Howard Zinn