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.
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 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.
“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
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