Still from L.A. Confidential
IU Cinema Director Dr. Alicia Kozma explains the impetus behind the upcoming L.A. Scams Itself film series and its inclusion of Curtis Hanson’s acclaimed neo-noir. Spoilers ahead!
This fall programming season I had the pleasure of curating a series called L.A. Scams Itself, a set of four films that invest themselves in the deeply complicated truths of one of the United States’ most mythologized cities: Los Angeles. While the enduring allure of glitz and glamour has crafted the image of Los Angeles as the land of sun, celebrity, and movie magic, underneath its surface lie histories of suspect urban planning, racial tension, corrupt politics, and infamously untrustworthy municipal institutions. This tense milieu has led to some of cinema’s most scathing indictments of place, space, and society, as exemplified by the four films in this series. Which is why it only makes sense that the series inspiration came from the Summer 2024 Paris Olympics.
Tom Cruise closes out the 2024 Paris Olympics with his signature stunt work
Almost as soon as the Paris Olympics began, talk of the next summer games, to be held in L.A., was concurrent. As the internet churned out memes of runners with the Olympic torch dodging traffic on the freeway and entertainment outlets began speculating on Tom Cruise’s involvement with the Paris closing ceremonies (during which he did, indeed, repel from the top of the Stade de France, take the Olympic flag, and deliver to L.A. while also installing the Olympics rings on the iconic Hollywood sign), a more complicated narrative was emerging. Reports began to circulate about plans for the mass displacement of the city’s unhoused population in preparation for the games, residents in neighborhoods close to proposed stadium and events locations decried massively increased rents, and a formal partnership between the Olympics and Airbnb had Angelenos in an uproar over what many predict will cause increased stress on an already stretched-thin housing market. But the overriding sentiment from the city population was frustration that their city was not looking out for their own. Digesting these debates naturally (well, natural for the mind of a programmer) had me thinking about the long history of Los Angeles in film and the intersection that history has with cinematic narratives of municipal malfeasance and corruption, and this series was born. The series title, L.A. Scams Itself, is a play on the title of the excellent documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, but the “scam” here is a nod both to the crime-based storylines that drive the series’ films and a recognition of the general feeling of the city’s citizens feeling like afterthoughts to their own elected officials. It seemed fitting, then, to kick off the series with Curtis Hanson’s sprawling neo-noir L.A. Confidential.
Bogart as Marlowe in The Big Sleep
While “neo-noir” has often become a type of shorthand to convey atmosphere rather than necessarily as connective tissue to an established noir aesthetic, thematic, and narrative style, Hanson’s film is a closely-linked descendent of the subsection of classic noir films concerned in some way with exposing municipal corruption — films like The Big Heat (1953), Touch of Evil (1958), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and I Wake Up Screaming (1941). Interweaving multiple stories — the mob controlled-drug trade, race-based violence, a vast sex work-as-blackmail network, the seedy underbelly of celebrity, and a vicious multiple-murder — the film finds its noir anti-heroes in a trio of LAPD detective: Det. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce), Det. Bud White (Russell Crowe), and Det. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey). While like the traditional noir anti-heroes in the vein of Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep), the trio has their own code that lends them a complicated, rather than didactic, morality. Exley, arguably the “straight arrow” of the three, refuses to take part in the police department’s culture of bribes and kickbacks but he’s more than willing to sacrifice the careers of fellow officers to advance his own. White has a reputation for violence and an exceedingly high comfort level with beating suspects in and out of police custody, but his fists are also used to wield vigilante justice onto men who beat women. Meanwhile, Vincennes has formed a lucrative relationship with celebrity tabloid publisher Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito) wherein Hudgens finds celebrities breaking bad and then pays the detective to bust them in front of his cameras. Yet Jack is the first detective to aid Exley, newly ostracized by the department for crossing the thin blue line, in his search for the perpetrators of multiple murders at the Nite Owl Café, the inciting incident that breaks open the film’s central conspiracy. Other similarities include both Exley and White falling for a femme fatale (Kim Basinger), a matter-of-fact attitude about the inability of everyday citizens to effect change in their own city institutions, the complicity of the political establishment, and Vincennes redeeming his moral center with an act of self-sacrifice.
The Big Bad and the Heroic Trio: Capt. Smith (Cromwell), Det. Bud White (Crowe), Det. Ed Exley (Pearce), and Det. Jack Vincennes (Spacey)
Yet there are notable differences, too. If Bogart’s Marlowe was the combination of brains, brawn, and cool all in one, L.A. Confidential splits those characteristics across its three leads: Exley is the brains, White is the brawn, and Vincennes is the cool. Basinger, initially coded as a femme fatale, is instead the steadfast romantic partner who offers redemption for both White and Exley. Perhaps the most significant difference, though, is that the film’s heroes are all part of the corruptive systemic force in the film, the Los Angeles Police Department. Whereas in classic noir, institutions were seen as tools of overarching municipal and political corruption, the “big bad” of the film is grounded in one specific character, Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell). While Smith, of course, represents the LAPD, by centering him and his actions as the driving evil, the film positions his takedown as the end of the department’s illegality and malfeasance. In this way, the heroic trio are allowed to be part of the system that is rotting while also being separate from it, allowing a type of faith in the institution of policing itself to be regained once Dudley and his crew of bad apples are excised. Additionally, at the film’s close, Exley remains a police officer despite the repetitive departmental lawlessness he’s witnessed, and the viewer gets the feeling that if White hadn’t been too injured to continue and Vincennes hadn’t met his end, they too would have remained on the force with a sense of justice restored. It’s a distinctly hopeful ending for a film that, for most of its run time, positions hope and moral clarity well beyond the frame. It’s a surprisingly nostalgic ending for what is, primarily, a non-nostalgic film.
These similarities and difference are precisely what makes L.A. Confidential interesting, rather than a simple retreading of its classic noir forefilms, and why — with all its complications — it is the perfect film to open the series.
L.A. Scams Itself starts this Friday, October 18, with L.A. Confidential, followed by The Nice Guys on October 25, The Long Goodbye on November 8, and Inherent Vice on November 15.
Dr. Alicia Kozma is the director of Indiana University Cinema. She researches, writes about, and teaches film. Learn more at www.aliciakozma.com.