Post-Noir Confidential: Style, Politics, and the Case Against James Ellroy

On January 15, 2006, James Ellroy addressed the San Francisco Film Noir Festival, whose website identifies Ellroy as “America’s greatest living writer of noir fiction.” Now, if you’re putting together a film noir festival (or a noir fiction festival, or a book fair, for that matter) and you can book James Ellroy, you probably should: lots of people read his books, even more people went to see L.A. Confidential (1997), the film adaptation of his novel of the same name, and later this year, probably more people than that will go to see Scarlett Johansson in The Black Dahlia, an adaptation of another novel in his famous “LA Quartet.” Many of these people will agree with the San Francisco festival’s assessment of Ellroy; they will buy tickets to hear him speak; your festival will make money. But let’s not get confused here: James Ellroy does “noir” like Bill O’Reilly does “journalism.” If you prefer, calling Ellroy a “writer of noir fiction” is like calling Howard Dean a liberal firebrand. Ellroy apes noir style and convention, and it’s true that he reproduces its characteristic tone and mood. Ellroy’s novels, though, for all their fidelity to the iconography of the kind of noir film and fiction that film noir festivals celebrate, empty noir of its historical acumen and its political content.

Ellroy himself probably wouldn’t argue with this assessment; he imagines himself correcting the mistakes of classical noir—a body of stories and films that runs, generously, from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s and whose characteristics I’ll take up later. In a 1991 interview, he told John Williams that “the private-eye icon/hero . . . that Raymond Chandler created and which has spawned so many imitators is essentially bullshit,” and that his novels seek to provide “an antidote to that.” In the same interview, he says that “[his] Los Angeles” was “very much a white city,” as opposed to the “black and Latino” metropolis of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Talk about bullshit: to claim that El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles de Porciúncula became Latino in James Ellroy’s lifetime is preposterous. The fact that the self-appointed guardian of civic history, interviewed in the months between the beating of Rodney King and the trial of Officers Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind and Theodore Briseno, deracinates the city’s past seems more insidious than any misrepresentation Raymond Chandler may perpetrated. More to the point, when he writes the private eye out of history, Ellroy manufactures a reactionary image of Los Angeles at mid-century.

Noir is famously difficult to define, especially if we open up the category chronologically to include Ellroy’s or Walter Mosley’s novels, or Polanski’s Chinatown. The “private eye icon/hero,” though, is close to a constant, so we can begin there: think of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashell Hammett’s Sam Spade (and their most famous onscreen equivalent, Humphrey Bogart), Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, James Cagney as Cody Jarrett in White Heat (1949), Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff in Double Indemnity (1944), or any of the down-and-out small-time crooks who populate James M. Cain’s and Jim Thompson’s stories. This figure works outside of, whether against or alongside, the law and the police department. His greatest asset is street-level knowledge of the city where he operates, and he uses that to hold together the social landscape and maintain an acceptable level of disorder. This is a democratic take on the crime narrative: it entrusts the private citizen, not the state, and privileges local knowledge and personal encounters over centralized, governmental authority. Noir shows us the triumph of street-level urban intuition and human interaction over impersonal, government surveillance.

In Chandler’s novels, Marlowe provides precise driving directions as he pieces together stories and makes sense of the modern city. For a cinematic example, we can look at White Heat. There, after Cody Jarrett robs a train and eludes law enforcement, the LAPD sets up an elaborate dragnet to follow Ma Jarrett back to Cody’s lair. They follow her in several cars, organized and directed by a central switchboard operator who holds a map of Los Angeles, but her intuitive, irrational driving allows her to avoid them in a manner she cannot have predicted: after she doubles back on a side street, a truck pulls out of a driveway between her car and the one following her. When it disappears, so has she. In this early scene, White Heat affirms the value of expertise to the noir crime narrative: she is able to outperform the better-equipped and better-prepared police department because she knows, and uses, the city streets more practically and effectively. Noir made popular this kind of urban practice.

When he hands over the city to the police department—in particular, to the LAPD in the 1950s—James Ellroy undoes all that. He moves his novels away from noir’s street-level navigation and the democratic politics of urbanity it implies. This observation is both generally skeptical of the repressive state apparatus’s liberatory capacities and grounded in the specific history of the Department in the middle of the century. In the 1950s, the LAPD substituted technology for manpower in an effort to remove the street and the people there from police work—compare Marlowe’s painstaking navigation and interviews to Joe Friday’s “just the facts, ma’am.” The police department into which Ellroy displaces his noir detectives is in fact a model for impersonal, technological surveillance. In the 1980s and 1990s, Ellroy gives over the figure of integrated or experienced community to the space police.

Spatial surveillance at the expense of urban practice is apparent in L.A. Confidential (1992), when Edmund Exley, the most cerebral of the novel’s flock of morally compromised antihero policemen, goes about organizing the facts of the baroque crime plot. Exley has, to this point, been the novel’s one consistent source of narrative fiction (even as the novel itself breaks down periodically into collages of headlines, chronologies and police reports); he is a professional storyteller who invents the department’s and the city government’s official explanations of police misdeeds and he turns this storytelling to his personal and professional gain. Faced with police work, though, Exley turns to visual logic:

One wall of his den was now a graph: Nite Owl related case players connected by horizontal lines, vertical lines linking them to a large sheet of cardboard blocked off into information sections . . . Ed crossed lines. (393)

Where classical noir navigates the city intuitively, in narrative, in order to put together an understandable order of events, Exley brings the mathematical precision of graphing to his detective work. This allows him to make sense of the plot that surrounds him without leaving his den and immersing himself in the city. The novel’s plot fictionalizes the construction of modern-day Los Angeles, from the political scandals surrounding freeway construction to the development of a barely-disguised Disneyland (the cartoonist and entertainment magnate Raymond Dieterling’s “Dream-a-Dreamland” outside the city limits, whose icon is Moochie Mouse) in Orange County. Exley comprehends it from a panoptical perspective, rather than the synoptical one that is traditional in noir, suggesting that stories are best told from the top down, by a police officer. Raymond Chandler would, I think, feel suitably (if incorrectly) chastised by this passage from L.A. Confidential. Removing the act of navigation from the process of understanding or decoding the city changes its definition; urban space is recognizable, in Ellroy, via surveillance and management.

Ellroy appropriates noir iconography and occasionally noir style, then, but he contradicts (sells out, really) its claims about knowledge and urbanity. Something similar happens in The Black Dahlia, when morally compromised antihero policeman Bucky Bleichert announces that “bop was moving into its heyday” (280). That’s a fine thing to say in 1987, or in 2006, but it wouldn’t have made any sense at the time. (One almost expects Bucky to go out and buy a “Best of Dexter Gordon” compilation CD here, so removed is his perspective.) Such historical shorthand transforms a resistant movement in jazz, defined by its difficulty and its shock to listeners, into a reified aesthetic period, limited and mass-marketed, something the cops listen to.

It’s that logic, unfortunately, that leads us to call Ellroy’s novels noir (or Dean’s politics liberal, or O’Reilly’s bullshit journalism): they’ve got the right packaging, however reactionary (very, mostly, and very) they may be. But we’re talking about a body of work that once had actual cultural-political value, that continues to be evocative and powerful in the present day, and that has contemporary practitioners doing interesting, innovative work. To dress up a street scene in old cars, trenchcoats and fedoras and call it noir is to deny all that.