I believe that it is generally best, in understanding a patient or a film, to start at the surface, to understand that surface and use it as our guide as we go deeper. L.A. Confidential gives us a very clear and readable surface with the opening credits, a surface that, we shall see, resonates with deeper, more personal meanings.
We see pleasant scenes of Hollywood in the early fifties to the tune of “You’ve got to accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative “. We see people playing at the beach, swimming with their children in backyard pools, sitting at a dinner table—a family of four—saying grace before a meal. The voice-over starts like a chamber of commerce ad for Los Angeles, finishing with “Life is good in Los Angeles. It’s paradise on earth.” Suddenly, we realize we are listening to something else as it goes on, “Heh, heh, heh. That’s what they tell you, anyway, because they’re selling an image.” The voice goes on to tell us there’s trouble in Paradise, the criminal organization run by Mickey Cohen. “Every time his picture’s plastered on the front page, it’s a black eye for the image of Los Angeles. Because how can organized crime exist in the city with the best police force in the world?” We learn that Mickey Cohen has been arrested for tax evasion, leaving a vacuum waiting for “someone with balls of brass” to fill it. Finally, we are told that our narrator is Sid Hutchins, a scandal reporter for the tabloid, Hush Hush Magazine,.
It is immediately clear that this is a film about corruption, deceit and cynicism—false surfaces hiding an ugly core. This is a film that scoffs at idealized images. It is about disillusionment. That is the surface. In its underlying fantasies, the film evokes a sense of a more basic, more personal disillusionment that gives us an uncomfortable, edgy feeling even as we are being entertained.
But if the film were only about cynicism, it would be a crashing bore. What keeps it interesting is the ever present tension between the obvious disillusionment and a more diffidently presented idealism that is fueled by the secret wish we all share to be part of a loving family in a just world. We welcome the disillusionment because it expresses a painful feeling that we have been forced to live with. Without it, the idealism would seem a hollow lie. We welcome the idealism as the gratification of a frustrated wish.
L.A. Confidential confuses us with its enigmatic heroes, mixing up stereotypes so that we are not sure if we know right from wrong. Bud White, the violent, abusive cop, comes to stand for idealism; Ed Exley, the clean, law abiding police officer, comes to stand for pragmatism. Yet, as the film develops, it turns out that they are both motivated by trauma and both in pursuit of the same goal.
The private disillusionment centers around three police detectives, Bud White, Jack Vincennes, and Ed Exley. They are each drawn by personal motives into the solution of a complicated series of interlocking crimes. With a mysterious gang war to take over Mickey Cohen’s territory in the background, eight people are murdered in the Nite Owl coffee shop. Among the murdered is Bud White’s ex-partner and a young woman who looks like Rita Hayworth. The killers are believed to be three young “colored men”. When they are interrogated by Exley, they confess to another crime, the kidnap and rape of a young woman. Hearing this, Bud White, who is fixated on saving abused women, forces the address from them and leads the force to the site, where he saves the girl, killing the one man guarding them and planting a gun on him to make it look like a shootout. Meanwhile, the three suspects have escaped and are killed in a shootout.
The crime seems to have been solved and the city to move on in its corrupt way, but neither White nor Exley is satisfied. Exley enlists the help of the veteran detective, Vincennes. Each of them is driven to pursue the truth on his own and they converge upon it independently. Bud White had seen the Rita Hayworth look-alike before and traces her to a wealthy businessman named Pierce Patchett who has been running a fancy call girl service with women made to look like movie stars. We later learn that Patchett also uses them to blackmail politicians. Jack Vincennes learns about the call girl service from a different source. He turns to honest detective work to solve the Nite Owl murders out of guilt over his role in setting up a young actor for one of Sid Hutchin’s exposes in Hush Hush Magazine. The young man was to be caught in an indecent act with the District Attorney, but when Jack, having a change of heart, tried to warn him, he finds him with his throat slit. The investigation of the “Nite Owl” murders leads to the uncovering of a much larger web of crime, and, ultimately, to the battle for criminal control of the city. We first experience corruption and betrayal at a societal level.
The film’s ever-present images of corruption are balanced by only fleeting images of purity and innocence. We tend to dismiss them as foolishly naive, but our intense, if subliminal, wish to return to that sense of innocence drives us through the film. That momentary glimpse in the opening sequence of a family at home saying grace before their meal is presented as a foil, a false surface to a corrupt world; but it cannot help touching each of us with reverberations to some innocent image of a happy family. Even the abused children of disrupted homes keep such a picture somewhere in their heads as a hope and refuge.
That wish is given form in the relationship of Bud White and Lynn Bracken. She is one of Patchett’s call girls, a dead ringer for Veronica Lake. When Bud comes to question her about the Nite Owl murders, she tells him Patchett will bribe him, but he won’t have it. She is attracted by his directness and incorruptibility. She tells him, “You’re different Officer White. You’re the first man in five years who didn’t tell me I look like Veronica Lake inside of a minute.” “You look better than Veronica Lake,” he answers matter of factly.
In this film of false surfaces, the sophisticated call girl is another false surface. Beneath the tough exterior is a fresh-faced small town girl just trying to put aside enough to get back to her small town home in Arizona. (Hey, it’s a movie!) When Bud comes back to see her, she takes him to her private room where she can just be Lynn Bracken. We see them watching old movies side by side like a couple of kids. She has her hair back in a pony tail. Now we have innocent vulnerable kids playing tough sophisticates playing innocent vulnerable kids. They make love, but we do not see it. What we see is their intimate conversation after lovemaking in which she tells him about her small town roots and goals and he tells her about his childhood trauma. They comfort and support one another in the areas in which they are most vulnerable. He tells her that while other men only have a Veronica Lake look-alike, he is fortunate to have Lynn Bracken. When he tells her he can’t solve the Nite Owl case because “I’m not smart enough. I’m just the guy they bring in to scare the other guy shitless,” she tells him, “You’re wrong. You found Patchett, you found me. You’re smart enough.”
The film is wise enough not to overplay these scenes. We get just enough of a hint of their underlying innocence, but not so much that we begin to question it. Their relationship, while sexual, is wholesome, part of an honest relationship. That innocent relationship, free of violence or fetishism, is the film’s ideal and the core of the wish that underlies the film. That wish is for a “return” to a simpler, innocent time when pleasant surface is reality, when the simple family scenes depicted at the beginning of the credits can be taken as real. It is a wish that the “sophisticated” audience of the nineties must secretly cling to, as evidenced by the popularity of films like Forrest Gump or films from a more “innocent era” like It’s a Wonderful Life. The film presents this wish subtly enough that our critical judgment does not interfere with our enjoyment of it. We see their innocence only briefly so that we feel it more than recognize it.
On the surface, this film deals with police departments, organized crime, and big city politics, but there are hints of a family drama. For me, the three policemen at the center of the story are like three contrasting brothers. The oldest, Jack Vincennes, is sophisticated, charming and corrupt. We first see him in his element at a celebrity Christmas eve party trying to pick up a young actress using his position as the technical advisor, the real cop behind the TV show, “Badge of Honor”, then negotiating a kickback from the Hush Hush Magazine reporter, our narrator, Sid Hutchins. Bud (Wendell) White, the middle child, is direct and violent, a bull of a man. We first see him staring from his detective’s car through a picture window of a suburban house as a man is beating up a woman. He draws the man’s attention by pulling the Christmas lights off the front of the house, gives him a beating finalized by cuffing him to a railing of his house, and gives the woman some money with a polite “Merry Christmas.” With his soft, flat voice and crew cut, it is Bud White who actually reminds us of Sergeant Friday of “Dragnet,” the obvious model for the “Badge of Honor” hero. Edmund Exley is clearly the kid of the trio. We first see him in uniform at the precinct looking very young, very stiff, with a boyish pair of glasses that look like they were lifted from Clark Kent. He is introduced as the son of the “legendary Preston Exley,” a police corps legend. He is a straight arrow, as honest as Vincennes is corrupt, as “by the book” as White is brutal. But he is also very personally ambitious and politically aware. When he offers to testify against fellow police officers who took part in a beating of prisoners, careful to negotiate his own promotion, he is less like a hero whistle blower than an annoying younger brother who will show off for the adults while getting his brothers in trouble.
Each of them will, in the course of the film, find something in himself that he did not know he had, like the famous trio in The Wizard of Oz. Jack Vincennes will play the Tin Man, discovering that beneath his smug charm he does have a heart—and a conscience. He will join Exley in an attempt to solve the crime out of guilt for his role in leading a young man into a trap that led to his death. Bud White is the Scarecrow, believing himself to be a dumb strong arm man, but discovering that he has the wits to get at the truth behind the confusing tangle of crimes that the film presents. Ed Exley, like the Cowardly Lion, begins the film as an ineffectual nerd, but discovers the courage to survive combat-like conditions, taking bold physical action and overcoming his own scruples to achieve justice and victory.
They also appear to share a common traumatic history, a childhood “disillusionment,” which gives them a common purpose as police officers and drives them to find the true Nite Owl murderers. For White and Exley, that trauma revolves around their fathers. Bud White explains his fascination with saving battered women with the one personal recollection he reveals, of trying to stop his father from beating his mother. His father tied him to a radiator and forced him to watch as he beat his mother to death. The truant officer found him and his mother’s corpse three days later, and “the old man was never found.” Exley’s father, he tells us, was killed while off duty by an unknown purse snatcher to whom the son gave the name “Rollo Tomasi,” to identify him as the man who got away with it. He tells Jack Vincennes, “Rollo Tomasi’s the reason I became a cop. I wanted to catch the guys who thought they could get away with it. It was supposed to be about justice. Then, somewhere along the way I lost sight of that.” Bud White is looking for his murderer father and Exley is looking for his father’s murderer. Exley asks Vincennes why he became a cop. After a pause in which Vincennes seems surprised or scared, he admits, “I don’t remember.” We are left to assume that whatever trauma he had suffered, whatever wrong he wished to make right had become lost in the years of trying to survive. With a renewed sense of purpose of his own, he agrees to help Exley if Exley will help him solve the murder for which he feels guilty. We can easily be seduced by life into being diverted from our true purpose. Each of them joined the force to pursue justice, to revenge a death, and to find “the man who got away with it.”
Brothers must have a father, and for these men the father is the precinct captain, the worldly-wise Dudley Smith. We see him first with the young looking Ed Exley, posing to him a series of questions they had apparently been through before.
“Would you be willing to plant corroborative evidence on a suspect you knew to be guilty in order to insure an indictment?”
“Would you be willing to beat a confession out of a suspect you knew to be guilty?”
“Would you be willing to shoot a hardened criminal in the back to offset the chance that some lawyer–?”
When Exley answers “no” to each of his questions, Dudley says, “Then for the love of God, don’t be a detective. Stick to assignments where you don’t have to make those kind of choices.” Exley answers, “Dudley, I know you mean well, but I don’t have to do it the way you did, or my father.”
Dudley also adopts Bud White, whom he admires and values because Bud, by his actions, answers “yes” to Dudley’s questions. Bud has lost his badge and gun over the incident at the beginning of the film in which he became involved in a beating of prisoners who had attacked police officers. Dudley returns them to Bud and puts him on special assignment, working as his strong arm man beating up out of town gangsters who try to move to L.A. to fill the vacuum left by Mickey Cohen.
Jack Vincennes turns to Dudley for help with the case they are working on, coming to Dudley’s house at midnight while Dudley’s “wife and four fair daughters are at the beach in Santa Barbara.” Dudley, dressed in pajamas and bathrobe, makes him a cup of tea. Vincennes tells Dudley he is working on the case because “I messed something up. I’m trying to make amends.” Dudley, with his friendly Irish brogue, advises him, “Don’t start trying to do the right thing, Boyo. You haven’t had the practice.” Jack innocently tells Dudley that he and Exley are working on this case as a “private investigation” and that he hasn’t yet told anyone what he has learned about a case several years earlier in which Dudley was the supervising officer. His guilt over the young actor’s death has cut through his cynicism and redirected him to a real investigation. Now, having regained his heart, he turns to the fatherly Dudley for help with the case—and Dudley shoots him in the heart.
Part of the personal disillusionment for each of them, and for the viewer, is that it is Dudley—the father—who is the arch criminal behind all the events in the film. Dudley, we discover, has been in business with Pierce Patchett, a smooth looking criminal who runs the actress look-alike call girl service which he uses to blackmail politicians while he also moves in on the heroin trade. Dudley has been keeping gangsters out of L.A. so that he could take Mickey Cohen’s place, uniting organized law and organized crime in himself. But Dudley is a father figure, albeit a cynical one, and the film’s hidden message is that the father, the authority we are supposed to trust, is the criminal. He is the one who wishes to have all the power, the one who tries to get away with it. But Dudley’s crime is still only the surface of our disillusionment.
To find the root, we must focus on the film’s repetitive image. It begins with the opening scene, after the credits. Bud White is sitting in his car staring at something. We learn quickly that he is looking through a picture window at a man beating up a woman. The next time we see Bud White, we again see him staring through a window. This time it is a car window. He is looking into the back seat of a car where his wary eye catches a woman with a bandage over her nose. This is the Rita Hayworth look-alike, whom we later learned was not beaten as Bud thinks, but is post operative after cosmetic nasal surgery (to make her look more like Rita Hayworth.)
Immediately afterward, we look through a window along with a group of Hush Hush cameramen at a young couple caressing. They are about to be busted for marijuana possession by Jack Vincennes, who is working with the Hush Hush scandal columnist, Sid Hutchins. In the next scene, an ineffectual Ed Exley is locked out of the cell block where a gang of police officers beat up a group of suspects believed to have beaten two officers that day. We see Exley looking helplessly from behind a window. Exley is behind a window again in the next scene, looking through a one way mirror while the committee investigating the incident, made up of the police commissioner, the D.A., and Dudley Smith, interrogate Jack Vincennes.
Next we see two gangland murders. In the first, two gangsters are shot through their car windshield. In the second, another gang leader sees two gunmen outside his picture window moments before shots come through that window.
The image continues. Bud White is at the morgue to see the body of his dead partner. He stands behind a window looking at one of the victims of the Nite Owl murders with Exley and others as the victim’s mother identifies her daughter’s body. White recognizes the dead woman as the Rita Hayworth double he saw in the car. The next windows are the one way mirrors of the interrogation rooms at the precinct as the suspects in the murder are being “softened up.” With a roomful of detectives watching through those windows, Exley interrogates the prisoners one by one. They begin to confess to another crime, the abuse of a girl, catching Bud White’s interest. He becomes so excited that he breaks the back of the chair he is holding, barges into the interrogation room and puts a gun into the prisoner’s mouth to get him to give up the address where the girl is being held.
Bud White’s frustration and mounting excitement give us a clue to the meaning of the windows. A window is a barrier that keeps someone out, but allows them to see. Used in this way, it evokes the frustration of the “primal scene,” the term that Freud used to describe the experience of a small child witnessing parental lovemaking.
Up to this point, most of what has been seen through the windows is violence, but now it takes a turn. It is night, and we see Lynn Bracken greeting one of her customers outside her door. There is presumably no actual window, but the effect is the same. She is in a bright light, seen through a window space as the man gives her a kiss. As he walks inside, she looks back into the street where we see Bud White sitting alone in his car watching her, an image reminiscent of the opening scene. A few moments later, we see her again, kissing a customer who is leaving. Once again, Bud is watching her. This time he knocks on her door and is let into her private world.
The image of the window has now taken on a sexual meaning. Bud White is outside watching Lynn with other men. We can only guess at his jealousy. Finally, he enters and takes his special place in her world. The image of spying on sex is reinforced in the next scene in which Sid Hutchins enlists Jack Vincennes’ help in setting up a young actor with the District Attorney. The plan is to catch them together in a scandal,with front page photographs for Hush Hush Magazine.
The next time we look through a window, the scene is clearly sexual. Jack Vincennes and Ed Exley have been following Bud White to see what he’s found out about the Nite Owl murders. They stand outside Lynn Bracken’s house, hiding behind the bushes, watching Lynn with Bud White. Exley’s jaw twitches as he watches intently while Bud runs his hand up Lynn’s leg. She embraces him and they kiss, with Ed staring in. Ed, the youngest brother trying to force his way into the world of men, is shut out.
Like Bud who became so excited that he had to run into the interrogation room, Ed runs back to Lynn’s place later that night. She teases him, stirring up his jealousy further. Moving close to him, she tells him, “I see Bud because I want to. I see Bud because he can’t hide the good inside of him. I see Bud because he makes me feel like Lynn Bracken and not some Veronica Lake look-alike. I see Bud because he doesn’t know how to disguise who he is. I see Bud for all the ways he’s different from you.” Nervously, he tells her, “Don’t underestimate me, Miss Bracken.” “The way you’ve underestimated Bud White?” He kisses her. She pulls away and says, “Fucking me and fucking Bud White aren’t the same thing, you know.” Out of control, he says, “Stop talking about Bud White,” and kisses her again, pulling her down to make love. She looks through another window, a glass door, where in the dark, Sid Hutchins is taking pictures.
Dudley uses those pictures to turn the tables. He sets Bud up to see the pictures of Lynn making love to Exley, knowing he would go after Exley in a fit of rage. He brings Bud in to help with an interrogation of Sid Hutchins after Jack Vincennes’ death. Talking about Pierce Patchett, Hutchins starts talking about how Patchett uses him for blackmail operations, “in my car in the trunk, under the rug. Patchett got me to photograph this cop screwing this gorgeous slut named Lynn, looks just like Veronica Lake.” Hearing this, Bud loses control, pulls the chair holding Hutchins up, taking pieces of floor where it was nailed down, and runs out to the car to see the pictures of Lynn and Ed. First the younger brother is forced to be the jealous witness, and now the older one.
Bud goes to Lynn’s house, where she stands outside the door, her hair done up in a pony tail—she is the fresh faced Lynn. He cannot control his rage which drives him to commit what is for him the most heinous crime. He punches her in the face. This is the peak of disillusionment, the disillusionment of intense rivalry and jealousy—and above all hurt. The primal scene rage which has been directed at fathers and brothers explodes at the woman. After all, the true betrayal of the primal scene is mother’s betrayal.
The primal disillusionment for this film is the disillusionment of the primal scene, the powerlessness of having to watch someone you love make love to someone else. For each of us the buried prototype for this is the experience of watching our own parents making love. It is reinforced when we watch jealously as our mother turns her love to a brother or sister. It is this “betrayal” of the child’s bond with its parents that destroys the innocence of the family, turning love into jealousy and rage.
In the end, the brothers band together to uncover the truth and ultimately to shoot it out with Dudley at the appropriately named Victory Motel. Before the shooting starts, Ed says, “All I ever wanted was to match up to my father.” Bud tells him, “Now’s your chance. He died in the line of duty, didn’t he?” But Ed will choose to be victorious by modeling himself on the ruthless and pragmatic Dudley. When the dust has cleared, Dudley has shot Bud, who is lying on the floor, and is standing over Ed. Ed looks up at him and says, “Rollo Tomasi.” Dudley asks, “Who is he?” “You are. The one that gets away with it.” Dudley is about to shoot Ed, but Bud stabs him in the leg. Dudley shoots Bud in the face at close range, but Ed is able to get to a shotgun. Dudley asks, “Are you gonna shoot me, or arrest me. You’re a good lad, always the politician. Let me do the talkin’. After I’ve done, they’ll make you chief of detectives.” He walks out of the motel room, advising Ed to hold up his badge, “so they’ll know you’re a police officer.” Ed has learned his lessons. He shoots Dudley in the back and holds up his badge as the police cars approach. Then, sitting behind the window of the interrogation room as the D.A. and police officials look on, he parleys his tale of blistering scandal for a deal that makes him a hero along with the memorialized Dudley.
In the final scene, he is accepting his honor. Lynn comes in, saying to him, “You just couldn’t resist.” He answers, “They’re using me, so for a little while I’m using them.” She says, “Come on,” and they walk out together. This is the pivotal moment in the film. Dudley and his co-conspirators are dead, but we are left with a sinking feeling as we anticipate the film’s cynical ending, with Lynn giving up her innocent dreams to be the wife of a successful, but compromised Exley. Our own faint hope of a fully happy ending, with the loving intact family, appears dead with Bud White.
If the film makers had left it that way, with Bud dead and Ed in possession of Lynn, L.A. Confidential would have been true to its claim to be a film noir. We would have left the theater disillusioned, knowing that good had compromised with evil in order to be victorious. Instead, she takes him back to her car where Bud White is in the back seat, bandages and tubes on his cheek. As Lynn tells Ed, “Some men get the world, others get ex-hookers and trips to Arizona.” Apparently, we cannot have both.
What we have instead is a feeling that our disillusionment is indelible, that corruption pervades our world, starting with the realization that we are each an intruder in our parents’ love affair. Perhaps Genesis is wrong. Perhaps the fall from Paradise occurs not because of awareness of our own sexuality, but because of awareness of our parents’ sexuality. But the film also leaves us with hope that we can overcome that disillusionment even though we can’t wipe it clean. I suspect that most of us leave the theater with a confused, ambivalent feeling of hopefulness and resignation.
Prior publications in the PANY Bulletin” and Double Feature: Discovering our Hidden Fantasies in Film” by Herbert H. Stein.