L.A. Confidential: Film vs.Novel - Essay Example

L.A. Confidential: Film vs. Novel L.A. Confidential, written in 1990, is a strange mix of criticism and praise for the police force. The publics fascination with police finds its beginning way back in time -- the exploration and rebellion against authority. The book and film version of L.A. Confidential balance the retelling of the unjust and cruel acts of police officers with maintaining the interest of both readers and viewers. The novel, L.A. Confidential was written by James Ellroy is a rapid, action packed, aggressively told story about the life and times of the Los Angeles Police Force in the early 1950s. It intricately tracks the cases and efforts of the police over a half decade. The case load revolves around a particularly bloody murder at a corner diner. The central characters are all police. These characters are named Jack Vincenenes, Ed Exley, and Bud White. These characters have a number of conflicts but are forced to find common ground and work to solve the horrific mass killing. Ellroy spins a tale of blood, guts, narcotics, and even organized crime. No one is immune from the illegal temptations including the police, celebrities, and public officials. Ellroy is no stranger to publishing success. He believes that he is the “greatest crime fiction author that every lived”. He uses a number of literary techniques which do not always translate well to the silver screen. These literary devices include intense dialogue, brevity in speech, extremely interwoven plots, and violence. He makes it a point, in this novel, not to be politically correct. The term politically correct did not even exist in the 1950s. Almost all his novels, L.A. Confidential included, has racial slurs, and vulgar ethnics insults. It is unclear if, through his writing, he is encouraging this negative behavior or making a statement against it. Ellroys life, in some ways, has paralleled the plot of one of his crime novels. His mother was brutally killed in the late 1950s when he was just a child. Many critics believe that this has inspired his writing style and viewpoint. He was a rampant users of narcotics and alcohol. He turned to a life a crime and the tracking of his mother, which he accounts in My Dark Places, which is said to be biographical. Ellroy has described himself as “ 49-year-old white man, basically conservative in temperament. I am Protestant to the core. And I would rather err on the side of authority. I respect cops much more than I dislike them.... And I understand the passion of men who need to impose authority on other people because their inner lives are chaotic." He added, "My guys are the toadies of the fascist system. To me, thats crime fiction in the twentieth century." Ellroy has a very aggressive and brief writing style which breathes life into his novels. This stylish writing is lost in the processes of making a movie. Certainly, in the making of the movie, L.A. Confidential, Ellroys style is non-existent. An representative excerpt from the L.A. Confidential follows: "Cops shoved cell to cell. Elmer Lentz, splattered, grinning. Jack Vincennes by the watch commanders office--Lieutenant Frieling snoring at his desk. Bud [White] stormed into it. He caught elbows going in; the men saw who it was and cleared a path. Stens slipped into 3; Bud pushed in. Dick was working a skinny pachuco--head saps--the kid on his knees, catching teeth. Bud grabbed Stensland; the Mex spat blood. Heey, Mister White. I knowww you, puto. You beat up my frien Caldo cause he whipped his puto wife. She was a fuckin hooer, pendejo. Ain you got no fuckin brains? Bud let Stens go; the Mex gave him the finger. Bud kicked him prone, picked him up by the neck. Cheers, attaboys, holy fucks. Bud banged the punks head on the ceiling..." Ellroy, on the other hand, loves nothing so much as a sadistic police beating. Hausladen, in “L.A. Noir." Journal of Cultural Geography, explains “While he devotes countless pages of his books to the methods, thinking and somewhat impoverished inner lives of cops, everyone else, as the above passage indicates, receives pretty short shrift” (87). There is, in sum, a strong and unappealing attraction to authoritarianism that recurs throughout Ellroys prose. Fashionably hard-boiled author James Ellroy came out snarling and smoking in the very prologue of his 1990 crime novel "L.A. Confidential." A faithfully wretched excess, Curtis Hansons movie version of the Ellroy best seller treats itself to a near-epic running time while exulting in mock-cynical sensationalism. Arguably, the present generation is less hypocritical about acknowledging the glamour of hometown vice and corruption. Its also kind of self-flattering to pretend that one can see through the respectable facades of an earlier generation. Making the facades as transparent as they are in "L.A. Confidential" certainly aids in naked exposure (Hausladen 43). Hollywood in the late 1990s also is inclined to overrate source material that smacks of pulp fiction, reflecting the influence of Quentin Tarantino, who has contrived to synthesize numerous influences of his own, from Hemingway to Ellroy and Hammett to Mamet (Hausladen 43). A few admiring critics have been dropping the name "Chinatown" as a source, but as far as I can see, that brooding classic, set in 1937, affects only a minor character with a bandaged nose. Murphet, in "Film Noir and the Racial Unconscious", “The ominous undertow and sophistication of "Chinatown" were more evident in Carl Franklins admirable "Devil in a Blue Dress." Mr. Hanson doesnt have much reason to be subtle with a book that prides itself on explosive, aggressive nuances” (22). He more or less comes out blazing, too, and its doubtful if thrill seekers will demand anything else. Nearly everyone is dirty in his books, and violent, and more or less corrupt. A vicious gossip columnist plays a significant role in L.A. Confidential. Another of his books, dealing with the Kennedy years, is entitled American Tabloid. Ellroys work represents something of a marriage between serious prose and tabloid journalism. The intensity and obsessiveness of his writing holds ones interest for a time. Here, one feels, is a lifetime of anger, bitterness and resentment poured onto the page. But the interest fades in the face of endless and unlikely subplots, undeveloped characters, an unrelenting series of hard-boiled scenes (Murphet 22-35). Ellroy drives his prose at a breakneck pace. There is perhaps a method in his madness. The novelist is massively unclear and ambivalent about the society he is attempting to capture on (to use his own expression) "a huge canvas." Scaggs, in Crime Fiction, explains “Deliberation might very well prove his undoing, in that it would reveal both to the writer and his audience the serious gaps and incongruities of his stories. One suspects, as well, that Ellroy, like many another cynic before him, is obliged to maintain the stream of beatings, killings and double-dealings to protect himself and the reader from his own essential sentimentality and naiveté, which make themselves felt whenever the action slows down even for an instant (66). For the record, two superior adventure thrillers are waiting in the wings and open next weekend - "The Edge" and "The Peacemaker." The incarceration of mobster Mickey Cohen - on a tax evasion rap - provides a hazy factual backdrop for the crime wave that keeps wanting to overflow in "L.A. Confidential." Cohens absence has emboldened potential successors lurking within the mob and the Los Angeles Police Department. The shadow of police corruption threatens and ultimately ennobles a trio of tarnished and blundering detectives obliged to become reluctant confederates, once they smell a rat and begin tracing this aroma to its source (Scaggs 67). Russell Crowe plays brawny, impulsive Bud White, a raging bull with a traumatic past. Guy Pearce, affecting an amusing resemblance to Guy Madison, impersonates the priggish, ambitious Ed Exley, haunted by a paternal thing that rivals Whites maternal thing. Kevin Spacey strolls through the role of crooked, publicity-seeking Jack Vincennes, shamefully susceptible to the bribes of Danny DeVito as a scandalmonger called Sid Hudgens. Schwartz, in Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction, observes “His scandal sheet, "Hush Hush," bears a trifling resemblance to the publication that actually kept Hollywood agitated during the mid-1950s, Robert Harrisons Confidential (304). Always preposterous and overblown, the movie seems to confirm screenwriter Brian Helgeland, recently introduced in "Conspiracy Theory," as the new specialist in top-heavy, convoluted mystery plots (Schwartz 451) . In any event, Curtis Hanson (Bad Influence, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and The River Wild), an Ellroy admirer, chose to make a film out of L.A. Confidential. His script, it must be said, represents by and large an improvement on Ellroys novel. Or, rather, what the screenplay loses in obsession it makes up for in conciseness and coherency. And any film always has this over any novel of the same quality: images of the human face and its expressiveness. Unfortunately, the final product still doesnt add up to that much. `Hansons film retains the central core of Ellroys story (Murphet 25). Bud White (Russell Crowe) is a thug, employed by his superiors to beat up and intimidate suspects. He hates wife beaters because, as a child, he saw his mother beaten to death. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) is an uptight, play-it-by-the-rules cop, determined to prove something to his father. The evolution of the two characters is entirely determined by these traits. It is equally certain that, in spite of their hatred for one another, they will team up. They both sleep with the same woman, Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a call girl made up to look like Veronica Lake (Schwartz 301). Hanson is capable of getting fine acting from his performers: Australians Crowe and Pearce, Kevin Spacey as Jack Vincennes, James Cromwell as a villainous police captain. The weakest performance is Basingers, who naturally won an academy award for it. L.A. Confidential has been carefully conceived and filmed. A great deal of attention has gone into creating the look and feel of a bygone era. The film has clever moments, and engaging ones. One feels certain skills at work (Terr 5). But the directors conceptions are not that interesting. He says a significant theme in his film is "the difference between how things appear and how they are. Terr, in Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found, states “Image versus reality, etc." Terr explains that Los Angeles is a place that he has "always wanted to deal with as a city that has a manufactured image in the first place, an image that was sent out over the airwaves to get everybody to come there.... The truth of that image was literally being destroyed to make way for all the people that were coming there looking for it. It was being bulldozed into oblivion." Indeed the film does not paint a pretty picture of the city, the film industry, tabloid journalism and so forth. But none of this unpleasantness is going to astonish anyone. There is hardly a hint in Hansons film of a genuine protest against corruption, racism, stupidity or greed (Scaggs 66). The film, in fact, lives parasitically off these elements, as their enthusiastic chronicler. One might even say that the film contributes, in its relatively vulgar fashion, to the generally debased quality of contemporary life. It seems that the filmmaker, who has undeniable talent, does not possess enough of an independent view of things to permit him to offer a serious perspective on the corrupt material he presents. So it always remains a question, as it does with Ellroy, whether he is opposing the way the world is or simply going with the (profitable) flow (Hausladen 43). One can already hear the voices. "But isnt L.A. Confidential of value because at least it shows the corruption and violence of the L.A.P.D.?" It is time to categorically answer "No" to this type of question. Surely a thinking and feeling person goes to see a film or reads a novel for some other reason besides the desire to have confirmed the views he already held before he entered the movie theater or picked up the book. A work that delves deeply into human relationships, difficulties and pleasures, that reveals life in a new light, is of more value, in my opinion, than all the heavy-handed exposés that have been created and that ever will be created. Frequent shootouts and blood baths encourage a tactical amnesia about whos betraying whom and pulling those strings that place half the characters in mortal jeopardy. Indeed, about half the police force seems to get blown away before White and Exley can patch up their differences - which include a mutual yen for Kim Basinger, lounging around as a luxury-class trollop named Lynn Bracken - and survive the final showdown. "L.A. Confidential" may be best savored if seen in tandem with "Hoodlum," which got into the marketplace a bit earlier with a lavishly trashy crime spectacle. The distinguishing features are even neatly reciprocal: an early 1950s setting with mostly white cops and crooks bashing each other; a mid-1930s setting that sets aside a major role for legendary, neglected black mobsters, menaced by a really vicious white mobster. Works Cited Hausladen, Gary J., and Paul F. Starrs. "L.A. Noir." Journal of Cultural Geography 23.1 (2005): 43+. Murphet, Julian. "Film Noir and the Racial Unconscious." Screen 39.1 (1998): 22-35. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Schwartz, Richard B. Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Terr, Lenore. Unchained Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories, Lost and Found. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Read More