1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 64: L.A. Confidential

My “anchor” year is 1996, but now I’m casting a wider net. 1997 is well within what I consider to be a “golden” period of moviemaking – which, like other golden eras, hearkens back to previous ones. The English Patient (1996) hearkens back to David Lean; L.A. Confidential (1997) hearkens back to Chinatown, which itself hearkens to older crime dramas – the greatest of which, for me, is The Big Heat.

The Big Heat, Chinatown, L.A. Confidential. Three dramas about police or ex-police who have a special zeal for protecting women, and who end up hurting those women in one way or another.

That sounds as if the women were passive. They aren’t. Arguably, the most forceful and complex character in each of these movies is a woman. In L.A. Confidential, it’s Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a prostitute who specializes in reminding men of Veronica Lake; meanwhile, she loves those she is able to love.

But these movies are mainly about the men who try to save the women – foolishly, perhaps.

The “protector” in L.A. Confidential is Bud White (Russell Crowe). Rescuing domestic abuse victims and sex workers is his avocation. His temper often gets the better of him. His captain, Dudley Smith (James Cromwell), keeps him around to intimidate and beat confessions out of criminals. This is the 1950s. Los Angeles is growing. Mobsters from out of town try to move in, but the police keep them in check.

It’s the corrupt local bigwigs, cloaked in respectability, accumulating wealth and power in tandem with the city, who run the scene.

Bud seems like a brute, but he’s smart. He follows leads and quietly makes progress on tricky cases. The movie also follows two other smart police officers. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is running a side-hustle, sharing information with the tabloids. They get the scoops; he gets the collars and the publicity. Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce) is a careerist “boy scout” – upright but ruthless, and loyal to none but himself. His colleagues initially doubt that he has the stomach to perform the necessary brutalities. By the end, he’s laid out more bodies than anyone else.

The death toll is high, what with one mass murder, a few gunfights, and many assassinations. There are a lot of beatings, too, and an off-camera rape. People speak nastily enough to make each other cry. All of this taxes and ennervates the viewer. The movie isn’t shy about how morally compromised, even downright awful, these police are; but it revels in the exhibition. It invites the viewer to share in the thrill of pumping a shotgun or getting an interrogee to squirm. More than Chinatown, in which the spectacle descends into tragedy and then sordidness, or The Big Heat, which seethes with irony, L.A. Confidential helps us to understand the visceral attraction of policing that mixes sadism, cynicism, and self-righteousness.

Each protagonist is asked why he became a cop. Jack Vincennes can’t remember. Edmund Exley wants to catch the guys who don’t get caught: in other words, he wants to outsmart people. The hotheaded Bud White, the noblest of the three, simply responds to woundedness, inflicting it upon the wounders and rescuing the wounded. He breaks the most rules – while following orders, as often as not – but he takes the job more seriously than the others do. He also relishes it the least.

The best line is uttered by Lynn Bracken when she says goodbye to Exley, who has just climbed a few more rungs up the ladder: “Some men get the world. Others get ex-hookers and a trip to Arizona.” Ex-hookers and Arizona is the better choice.

I don’t know how closely this movie resembles real policing. I just have other movies to compare it to.

On who can work for the police these days

Today I watched the mystery series Manhunt (2019), featuring Doc Martin’s sour-faced Martin Clunes.

Look at him.

I decided that British TV insidiously promotes the belief – the ideology – that practically anyone could work as a Detective Inspector.

In the halcyon days, detectives in fiction were either private consultants (Sherlock Holmes; Hercule Poirot) or else amateur busybodies (Father Brown; Lord Peter Wimsey; Jane Marple). It was easy enough to accept their quirks. At least those sleuths weren’t representatives of the state. One could keep one’s imagination untainted by bureaucratic matters.

Now, the bureaucracy is almost the main feature. Viewers have come to understand that sleuthing is only feasibly done by the police. Consequently, almost all of today’s detectives are public servants.

In and of itself, this is realistic. The corollary it generates is anything but.

Now we have a parade of crime shows in which every actor who’s made an impression, irrespective of style, in a soap opera, period drama, or comedy gets a turn as a Detective Chief Inspector or Detective Sergeant. (If the actor really, really looks like a goblin, he or she can only rise as high as Medical Examiner.) Yes, some actors are specialists: Douglas Henshell has played a DI on at least five different crime dramas since 2009. But the prevailing attitude seems to be: “You were a valet or a lady’s maid on Downton Abbey. Go on now, take a turn as a DCI.” I can think of at least four Downton servants, and at least four soap stars from Last Tango in Halifax, who’ve switched to policing.

Brenda Blethyn, who, in the fullness of time, might have played Miss Marple, has long investigated murders on Tyneside. Could one such as her character, Vera Stanhope, become a DCI in real life? Yes. Could all these scene-stealers, cumulatively, be DCIs? That is, could Brenda Blethyn and Martin Clunes and Nicola Walker and Kevin Doyle (Mr. Moleseley of Downton Abbey) all struggle with their demons while ordering the lower ranks to comb through the CCTV footage? The system would fall apart.

One suspects that if John Gielgud were still alive, he’d be playing an embattled, semi-retired Superintendent.

Meanwhile, I await the investigations of DCI Richard Ayoade.

La final del mundo

Today, I went to Stephen’s apartment to watch the last game of the Copa Libertadores – which, this year, is called “La final del mundo” by the Argentinian press, since the participants are the two most popular Argentinian clubs, River Plate and Boca Juniors. Stephen & Edoarda arrived at the apartment exactly when I did, just before the scheduled kickoff time. They’d rushed over from Chicago, into which they’d flown from Austin, where they’d spent Thanksgiving.

Well, they needn’t have hurried. Like the previous game, this one was postponed. Some fans of River Plate had thrown rocks at Boca Juniors’s team bus, breaking a window. Allegedly, the glass had cut one of Boca’s players in the eye, and his injury had been aggravated by teargas that the police had discharged.

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And so we watched for two and half hours while the Argentinian broadcasters speculated whether the game would be played today or postponed until tomorrow.

The fans remained inside the stadium.

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The air was thick with rumor. At first, Boca’s players were said to be eating steak sandwiches in their locker room, which suggested that they didn’t expect to play.

But then the kickoff was rescheduled for a slightly later hour. Fernando Gago and Carlos Tévez – Boca’s two most famous players – came out of the locker room to plead for a longer postponement.

The clubs’ presidents were said to be holding meetings with the presidents of FIFA and CONMEBOL (the South American footballing confederation). If they intended to postpone the game until the next day, why were they waiting so long to do so? Why were they allowing the fans to continue suffering inside the stadium?

Was Boca’s president urging River’s disqualification? Was he holding out for some lesser penalty, at least, such as a ban against River’s spectators?

It was suggested that the Boca player’s injury was less severe than the team was claiming. Yes, he’d been transferred to a clinic; yes, photos had been released of him wearing a gigantic bandage over one eye. Still, it was possible that he was feigning, as other players notoriously had done.

Moreover – and what was considered to be most ominous – CONMEBOL’s officiating doctor had refused to confirm the severity of the injury. (It was noted, however, that this doctor wasn’t an ophthalmologist.)

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Finally, the presidents agreed to hold the game the next afternoon. The fans left the stadium.

The president of CONMEBOL praised the collegiality of the two club presidents. He disavowed knowledge of the injured player’s precise medical state.

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It must be said that the main beneficiary of this scandal is CONMEBOL, which hopes to move the tourney’s final round away from the participants’ home stadiums and into neutral cities that would submit hosting bids.

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Update, Sunday: The game has been postponed again. The presidents are to meet on Tuesday, at CONMEBOL’s headquarters in Paraguay, to negotiate further.

An inheritance

The snowstorm did hit us, and hard. Side streets were made impassable. Businesses, libraries, churches, and schools were closed. Every so often, we’d see people pushing their cars to release them from the snow; on one occasion, I had to push out Karin’s car. It was a pleasantly easy thing to do, due to my fat (I used to struggle mightily to push cars).

Karin has long desired for me to view Frozen with her. I had a different hope for this evening, but, what with this weather, I shall have to “let it go.”

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My mother slept two nights on our cot. Then she moved to the house of Edoarda & Stephen (she’ll go to Martin’s & Mary’s next). All during her visit to South Bend, she’s been at the police station or on the phone, trying to recover her missing documents. She’s scheduled to fly back to Ecuador on Wednesday. If she can’t obtain a new passport by then, she’ll have to stay in South Bend at least another week.

She brought many of her dead father’s belongings to distribute among her children. Before she arrived, I had almost no fitting dress shirts; now, I have about ten. I also inherited a large photo of the Atshuara chief, Tsantiacu, which was propped up near my grandpa’s casket at his funeral. I remember having been affected to see that portrait. I think that my grandpa will be glad to be reunited with his friend, who gave up blood feuding for Jesus’s sake.

The woes of Énner

By now, you must know that Ecuador “mopped the floor” with the Chileans, 3 to 0. The first two goals were tallied before the 25th minute. The third goal was scored in the initial moments of the second half. Commentators agree that many more goals could have been attained.

Énner Valencia, in particular, put himself into scoring position again and again, only to waste chance after chance.

Shortly before the game was concluded, Énner was substituted out with an “injury.” He was taken in an ambulance to a clinic. The police jogged several yards behind Énner, putting on a show of chasing him. He was not arrested inside of the stadium.

Since then, Énner’s legal troubles have been resolved: at least, he’s been allowed to board the plane to El Alto (tomorrow, Ecuador will play against the Bolivians, in La Paz). Meanwhile, Énner is using Twitter to defend himself to the public. He maintains that he already has paid lots of support to his child’s mother (who is an inadequate parent, he alleges). He’s trying to obtain custody of the little girl so that she can go to school in England, where he resides.

All of this may yet lead to a happy ending. Please pray for Énner and his family, and pray for Ecuador to defeat Bolivia.

Here are replays from the game against the Chileans. One silver lining of Walter Ayoví’s absence is that Christian Ramírez, his twenty-two-year-old understudy, performed superbly. (I’d been worrying about Ecuador’s vulnerability at Walter’s position, left-fullback.) Ramírez even scored the second goal, flying into the box from well outside of it, expressing a shrewd sense of what was required at that time.

November fragments

So many November birthdays:

Five days ago, Scarlett Johansson turned thirty, and so did my brother, David. …

Yesterday at 6:00am Edoarda called Stephen to wish him a happy birthday. …

A few minutes later, Edoarda’s parents called from Nicaragua. “Muchas gracias, muchas gracias,” Stephen kept on saying.

Oh yeah, Happy Thanksgiving.

Our house is vermin-free. For longer than a week, the traps have remained unoccupied.

People have been asking about my new job at the high school.

How long have you been doing it?

About a month and a half, but it seems like forever.

What’s the craaaazzzziest thing you’ve seen?

Nothing too crazy. I saw a kid get arrested. The school’s cop pulled him into a room and yelled at him for a long time. Then they went into the principal’s office. When they came out, the cop said something else to the kid, and the kid tried to run, and the cop pancaked him and put cuffs on him. The cop was built like an NFL lineman. The kid was scrawny.

A couple of nights ago, I saw the cop on TV, telling how he cultivates relationships with the kids.

How well do YOU get along with the kids?

A few times each week, I buy donuts from them, which they’re grateful for. Otherwise, I barely talk to them. I hardly even notice when they make out with one another in the halls. I work more closely with the teachers, ordering supplies and making photocopies. I could tell you a lot about the copy machines. Whenever there’s a paper jam, a teacher emails me and I scurry off to see if the copier is broken enough for me to fill out a repair request form. Our building is big; some of the copiers are, like, two blocks away from one another. There are teachers who’ve been around for forty years who don’t know where the backup copiers are.

I could go on and on about the copiers.

Do you enjoy this job?

Very much. The teachers have vivid personalities: every day is like watching a sitcom. Also, I get free coffee, courtesy of the Social Studies dept chair.