An Analysis of L.A. Confidential as a Post-Noir Film

L.A. Confidential begins with this opening narration spoken by Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito), a tabloid writer for Hush-Hush magazine. The rest of the movie plays on these opening lines-a nightmarish reality under illusions of sunshine. There is a serpent in the City of Angles, and his name isn't Mickey Cohen. The evil that prevails comes in many forms-corrupt cops, pornography kings, lascivious D.A.s, and even tabloid writers like Sid.

Set in 1953 Los Angeles, L.A. Confidential explores typical noir themes common to post-war films of the 40's and 50's. Light is contrasted with dark, good with evil, and friends with enemies. The city itself becomes one of the main characters as its progressive urbanization undermines its mythic image, and its inhabitants become isolated within its steadily closing boundaries. Moving toward a post-noir symbolism, L.A. Confidential diminishes the power of these classic noir themes as it turns to post-modernity in its exploration of nostalgia, isolation, and schizophrenia.

As the title and opening narration suggest, the city of Los Angeles is a central focus of the movie. The city is also a typical focus of noir. As Nicholas Christopher comments in his book, Somewhere in the Night, "however one tries to define or explain noir, the common denominator must always be the city. The two are inseparable" (37). Los Angeles has had more than its fair share of depictions in film noir. Many of the favorite film noir classics are set in Los Angeles-movies like Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly, Chinatown, and The Big Sleep. As the center of a populous devoted to crime and corruption, Los Angeles has become synonymous with film noir. Mike Davis in City of Quartz, cites noir as a response to the L.A. boosters, who promoted the city as a paradise on earth. He sees noir as "a fantastic convergence of American 'tough-guy' realism, Weimar expressionism, and existentialized Marxism-all focused on unmasking a 'bright, guilty place' (Welles) called Los Angeles" (18).

Los Angeles unmasked reveals a city founded on corruption. J.P. Telotte in The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir, characterizes film noir as a group of films that, "generally focus on urban crime and corruption, and on sudden upwellings of violence in a culture whose fabric seems to be unraveling...film noir seems fundamentally about violations: vice, corruption, unrestrained desire, and, most fundamental of all, abrogation of the American dream's most basic promises-of hope, prosperity, and safety from persecution" (2). Meaning literally 'dark film,' film noir exposes a reality previously unseen in classical narrative cinema. When Curtis Hanson, L.A. Confidential's director, comments about his movie, "It's noir in the broadest sense, meaning the darkness under the bright," it is clear that this film is a contemporary extension of film noir (Taubin 8).

In L.A. Confidential, corruption abounds, and it is most noticeable in the L.A.P.D.. Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) encourages his officers to plant corroborative evidence on a suspect they new to be guilty, beat confessions out of suspects they knew to be guilty, and shoot hardened criminals in the back to offset the chance of lawyers setting them free. While obviously above the law, this Captain is also outside of the law. In corroboration with pornography leaders and drug lords, he aspires to lead organized crime in Los Angeles. Exposing the crime and decay of the city's most honorable institution dedicated to law and order, L.A. Confidential truly offers up the dark side of humanity.

While obviously possessing dark themes, film noir also embodies a style distinct to its genre. Telotte examines some of noir's primary discursive formations: the voice over, the flashback, the documentary style, and the subjective camera. Telotte sees the voice-over as the most characteristic of noir strategies (14). There is a voice-over in L.A. Confidential, but it is slightly different than typical noir narration. Unlike Double Indemnity, where a dying man recounts the events leading to his death, or Sunset Boulevard, where a dead man relays the last days of his life, the narration of L.A. Confidential is in the form of a person in the present relaying present happenings, and this person is not the protagonist of the story. Sid Hudgens offers an overview of the characters and events occurring in the story, but as a tabloid writer, he does this through the lens of scandal-oriented journalism. But this type of narration serves the same purposes of classic film noir, as described by Telotte-"it reminds us that seeing and understanding are always someone's, and that every view comes from a single, invariably limited perspective" (16).

The flashback and the voice-over serve the same purposes for Telotte because they are both employed similarly: past events are relayed for the first time to the viewing audience to complete the story through perspectives. In L.A. Confidential, they are used differently. Flashbacks occur for Bud White (Russell Crowe) as he is trying to solve a crime. He remembers scenes and conversations that we, the audience, have already seen. In a sense they are our flashbacks, as well as his. They are used to trigger our memory of past moments in the film.

Film noir habitually uses documentary style footage to add a sense of realism to the stories. In this type of noir, "the main concern seems to be not just telling an interesting tale but fashioning a realistic context for the narrative, so as to suggests its relevance to the specters and to assure them they are indeed gaining a new and revealing perspective on the world they inhabit" (Telotte 24). Whereas movies like Citizen Kane use false news footage ("News on the March") to add realism to its story, L.A. Confidential uses photographic imagery and real life occurrences to create a more realistic atmosphere for its audience. The opening scenes of L.A. Confidential are in the form of home movies taken during the 50's. These consist mostly of images of home life-the nuclear family at play and at rest in suburbia.

The tabloid photographer's camera also serves a realistic function. When the officers of the L.A.P.D. are caught violently abusing their Mexican prisoners, the audience witnesses the flash of the camera and then the image of brutality is frozen in black and white as it becomes the next morning's newspaper front page article. The beating up of the Mexicans is based on an actual event in L.A.P.D. history-further adding to the scene's realism.

Telotte also cites a subjective camera as key to challenging "our normal perspective by forcibly aligning our vantage with another's" (17). Here is where L.A. Confidential strays from Telotte's structural model of film noir. The subjective camera angle that serves to position the audience with a character's point of view is conspicuously absent from L.A. Confidential. Our first encounter with a main character is with Ed Exley (Guy Pearce). As we try to decide if he will be the protagonist of the movie, the camera is no help-always giving us objective vantage points. We next meet Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey), and here again we see objective compositions within the shots. All characters are within our view-we are not seeing things from any one person's perspective. Finally we meet Bud White, arguably the protagonist of the film, but this information is not given to us through the camera, which, again, remains objective. Here is where the film, and its use of multiple perspectives providing multiple realities, pushes noir techniques into the postmodern.

Frederic Jameson in "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" characterizes the essence of the postmodern in a variety of ways-a sense of nostalgia as embodied through pastiche, an inability to focus on our own present, the end of individualism, and the breakdown of the relationship between signifiers, what Jameson terms 'schizophrenia.' L.A. Confidential conveys all of these postmodern characteristics.

Jameson distinguishes between parody and pastiche. Where parody is a satirical mimicry of other styles, pastiche is a "neutral practice of such mimicry" (188). Pastiche is a non-humorous form of parody-its intention is not to ridicule the style it mimics, but instead to convey a straightforward imitation, an imitation for imitation's sake. Jameson's example of pastiche is the nostalgia film-a film about the past. Set in 1953 Los Angeles, L.A. Confidential is very much a film about the past.

The movie's mimicry of other styles can be seen in its use of 40's classic noir films and 50's classic TV as backdrops to its own story. In Images of Postmodern Society, Norman Denzin explains a film's use of pastiche by its use of signifiers from the past, "shots from Casablanca in Woody Allen's 1972 Play it Again Sam, or a shot of Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd talking about his friend Harvey in the 1989 film Field of Dreams, circulate alongside advanced technologies, and modern conveniences" (10). Similarly L.A. Confidential plays an old Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd movie, This Gun for Hire, as Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a woman made to look like Veronica Lake, meets with one of her clients. Curtis Hanson comments on this scene, "We see Lake and Ladd onscreen, lit in that wonderful classic forties noir style. After a camera move, Kim appears, lit in our style, right in front of Veronica Lake's image. You see that this image on the movie screen is what Basinger's character is pretending to be" (Rudolph 48). Hanson's intention is not to mock or critique this classic noir film, but contrast it with his own imitation.

Similarly Badge of Honor functions in the movie as a reminder of the 50's classic TV show, Dragnet. Bordering on parody, as the main character in Badge of Honor monotonously says, "just the facts ma'am," this mimicry serves as a reminder of things past more than as a critique of style. This type of reminiscence in nostalgic films is where remembrance of things past turns into a broader social issue of an inability to focus on the present.

"There is another sense in which the writers and artists of the present day will no longer be able to invent new styles and worlds-they've already been invented" (Jameson 190). Instead of reinvention of noir style, L.A. Confidential presents a bare-bones sketch of its major concepts. The characters flow through the expected experiences of betrayal, alienation, corruption, and greed previously found in noir classics, but in the case of L.A. Confidential, these characters embody an almost empty characterization of these dark motives. It is as if they are meaningless representations searching for meaning through the imitations of things past-things believed to have had meaning.

The trouble with grasping meaning is similarly conveyed through the movie's use of multiple characters. As already mentioned, it is difficult for the viewer to decide who to align him/herself with. Ed Exley has the morals of a typical good guy-he unflinchingly believes in the letter of the law, but his rigidity does not prevent him from killing the wrong guys. Bud White has the allure of tough guy realism-he upholds the true meaning of the law, but his intensity can lead to a punishment that does not fit the crime . Finally, Jack Vincennes has the charisma of a hero, but his misuse of the law for personal gain does not set well with the viewer. Whereas it was obvious that Walter Neff is the hero in Double Indemnity, Mike Hammer is the hero of Kiss Me Deadly, and Philip Marlowe is the hero of The Big Sleep, it is not so obvious who is the hero in L.A. Confidential. In a sense they are all the heroes: by the end of the move, Ed matches his strictness with leniency, Bud similarly tempers his violence with lawful conduct, and Jack reverses his desire for personal gain as he loses his life in an effort to save an innocent. The individualism of the past has been replaced with a multi-perspective identity.

This multi-perspectivity lends itself to Jameson's view on schizophrenic experiences. Using Lacan's examination of the breakdown of the relationship between signifier, Jameson defines the schizophrenic experience as "an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers that fail to line up into a coherent sequence" (195). Jameson uses the example of Photorealism, which appears to convey a realism absent from such art forms as Abstract Expressionism, but is not so realistic after all-because what Photorealism represents is not the outside world but rather an image of that world. The images are false realisms-"they are really art about other art, images of other images" (199). The image is disconnected from the thing it signifies. Similarly, L.A. Confidential's imitation for imitation's sake makes it not a movie about 1953 Los Angeles, but a movie about other movies. This disconnection of the movie from its plot is like the disconnection of the characters from their motives. While the characters interact at various levels with the movie's themes and with other characters, they seems more like isolated entities to the viewer, as if they were attempting to make a connection between themselves and meaning, but instead only conveying a disconnected shell of that meaning. When Curtis Hanson says, "LA is one of the main characters in this movie and, like the other characters, it requires work to get beneath the surface and understand it," he is alluding to the isolation of the place Los Angeles from the representation Los Angeles (Taubin 11). For Los Angeles, like the other characters in the film, understanding, like meaning, is disconnected from its surface representation and it does require work on behalf of the viewer to attempt a reconnection.

For Mike Davis, the postmodern role of Los Angeles may turn out to be an endorsement of the consumerism of capitalism. Davis envisions what Thomas Pynchon calls a "Disneyfication of noir" (45-46). L.A. Confidential's happily ever after ending supports this vision of noir's future. Unlike the slow death of Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, or the apocalyptic nuclear explosion at the end of Kiss Me Deadly, L.A. Confidential ends with Ed Exley outsmarting his superiors, getting heroic recognition along with job advancement, and Bud White resurfacing from his deadly encounter with the corrupt L.A.P.D. Captain (White was the recipient of five direct shots to his person), getting the girl, and escaping to a remote town in Arizona. Supposedly a film about dark motives in a dark place, L.A. Confidential ends on an awfully bright note. More than its happy ending supports L.A. Confidential's embodiment of a Disneyfication of noir-the two-dimensional characters personify a disconnectedness similarly found in Disney's cartoon characters. Lynn Bracken's character can be summed up in Jessica Rabbit's famous mantra, "I'm not bad I'm just drawn that way" in Disney's own attempt at film noir, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Both characters beautifully create the surface image of a femme fatale, but both lack the powerful meaning such symbolism denotes.

What started out in L.A. Confidential as an apparent critique of Los Angeles, and society as a whole, within film noir style, turns into a postmodern pastiche of those same noir techniques. What results from the movie is similar to what Davis claims about the movie's literary source, James Ellroy's Los Angeles Quartet-"In building such an all-encompassing noir mythology ... Ellroy risks extinguishing the genre's tensions, and, inevitably, its power" (45). Like Lynn Bracken's reduction to a Jessica Rabbit, all the characters, including Los Angeles itself, are reduced to Technicolor outlines of mythic symbols belonging to a black and white past.

Bibliography

Christopher, Nicholas. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the AmericanCity. New York: The Free Press, 1997.

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Denzin, Norman K. Images of Postmodern Society: Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema. London: Sage, 1991.

Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society." Movies and Mass Culture. Rutgers: 1991.

L.A. Confidential. Dir. Curtis Hanson. Warner Brothers, 1997.

Rudolph, Eric. "Exposing Hollywood's Sordid Past." American Cinematographer. 78.10 (1997): 46-55.

Taubin, Amy. "L.A. Lurid." Sight and Sound. 7.11 (1997): 7-9.

Telotte, J.P. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Chicago: Illinois UP, 1989.