However, while other filmmakers got caught up in the heady, cocaine rush of the 1980s, Friedkin was harder to convince. When we dig a little deeper into his Los Angeles, the fruits of Reagan’s reforms are less miraculous. Beneath the gleaming façade of art deco buildings and expensive wardrobes, Friedkin found an American Dream that was decaying, and in his hands, a project that could have become a gung-ho action movie was turned into something much darker.
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In the 1970s, with The French Connection (1971), William Friedkin helped define the cinematic image of New York City. As well as being iconic, that film’s asphalt skies and looming architecture were also emblematic of the decade in which the picture was made – a time of racial violence, political scandal, and opposition to the Vietnam War. By the time Friedkin returned to similar material in To Live and Die in LA (1985), however, he found himself in a new decade, a new city, and a new chapter of American history. This was an era in which the counterculture had been defeated and a revamped, reinvigorated version of capitalism had been unveiled by the Reagan administration. Visually, the national mood would switch from grimy New York to the sunsets and palm trees of Los Angeles.
The opening scene of To Live and Die in LA features Reagan himself (off camera), delivering a speech at an exclusive hotel, watched over by the Secret Service men who will become the film’s protagonists. As his bodyguards go about their business, we hear snippets of the president in the background, railing against high taxes and calling for an economic revolution. In the neoliberal experiment that Reagan describes, America was supposed to cast off the chains of high taxes and social welfare policies and emerge into a bright, ultra-capitalist future. Newly liberated, a fresh generation of entrepreneurs would rekindle their animal instincts and kick-start an economic renaissance.
It was a market-led vision of the future that was tailor-made for the Los Angles landscape, whose neon skies and immaculate coastlines perfectly symbolised the confidence of the new decade. Perhaps Friedkin had sensed that, visually and emotionally, the centre of American society had shifted from the gray cynicism of New York (captured so well in The French Connection) to the optimism of Los Angeles. It was time to abandon the doubts of the sixties and seventies and become fabulously wealthy in the Californian sunshine, leaving older ideas about social and economic justice behind in the more oppressive atmosphere of the East Coast.
However, while other filmmakers got caught up in the heady, cocaine rush of the 1980s, Friedkin was harder to convince. When we dig a little deeper into his Los Angeles, the fruits of Reagan’s reforms are less miraculous. Beneath the gleaming façade of art deco buildings and expensive wardrobes, Friedkin found an American Dream that was decaying, and in his hands, a project that could have become a gung-ho action movie was turned into something much darker.
Immediately after the film’s opening, Friedkin introduces us to the brutal reality that undercut Reagan’s lofty rhetoric. In a ramshackle train yard, we see abandoned cars and a pathetic-looking horse and cart, whose owners appear to be economic migrants that have come to America in search of a promised land that may no longer exist. Later we visit a black neighbourhood of boarded-up stores and gangs of unemployed men, its walls covered in murals of raised fists and spray-painted demands for revolution, as if the entire neighbourhood is moments away from rising up in revolt.
The storyline of To Live and Die in LA is not dissimilar to the cops-chasing-criminals plot of The French Connection, except that here the cops are switched for Secret Service agents and the French drug dealers for Willem Dafoe’s counterfeiter, Rick Masters.
But Friedkin has created much more than simply a cops-and-robbers movie. As the lawmen pursue Masters, we are confronted with what American society had become in the Reagan era. This is not the thriving, space-age society that was promised but a Hobbesian free-for-all where the strong exploit the weak and the lines between good and evil are blurred to the point of meaninglessness. The landscape of To Live and Die in LA is populated by gangsters, counterfeiters, and crooked authorities, all of whom are engaged in the same desperate scramble for cash and power. In Friedkin’s Los Angeles, Reagan’s reforms have not unleashed America’s entrepreneurial spirit but economic and social chaos.
In this collapsing shell of a society, every source of authority is failing. Richard Chance (William Petersen), the film’s Secret Service agent, lies, cheats and steals in his obsessive pursuit of Dafoe’s villain, breaking a handbook full of regulations and staging armed robberies for the cash required for his next bust. Meanwhile he is ruthlessly exploiting the young woman who acts as his informant, sleeping with her, extracting information, and threatening to revoke her parole if she does not comply. “I can do whatever I want,” he claims when challenged over the legality of his actions.
More than anything else, Chance is a thrill-seeker. When we first meet him, he appears to be committing suicide by jumping from a bridge – it is only moments before he is due to hit the water that we learn there is a bungee cord secured to his ankle. For Chance, the pursuit of Dafoe has less to do with law and order than with securing the next adrenaline rush. He is a card player but also a gambler in the wider sense (the clue is in his name), who sees every decision as a roll of the dice that is as likely to end in a violent death as it is personal glory. Perhaps his ultimate intention is to get himself killed, motivated by the same death drive that destroyed his partner in the film’s opening.
In his gambling and kamikaze commitment to self-destruction, Chance is the perfect embodiment of the Reagan era. He is not just Reagan’s bodyguard but also his sometime companion, enjoying the occasional game of cards with the president he and his fellow agents refer to fondly as “the man.” The connections between Reagan and the corrupt lawman do not stop at a shared game of cards. Like Chance, Reagan was a renegade with little time for red tape and a willingness to suspend norms and regulations in pursuit of his singular vision. While Chance defies the rules of his department, Reagan was dismantling the New Deal-era policies of his predecessors. It is easy to imagine the two men during one of their high-stakes poker games, respective cowboy boots resting on a table, complaining about the spineless bureaucrats who stand in their way.
Perhaps Reagan, like his poker buddy Chance, was an inveterate risk taker, placing speculative bets on America’s economic future. If this film’s portrait of Los Angeles is anything to go by, his economic policies were not careful calculations but reckless gambles in which an overplayed hand could send entire cities into freefall. Both Reagan and Chance were at the vanguard of a high-speed, high-risk new society, where macho thrill-seekers departed from established norms and gambled on inherently unstable alternatives. Like Chase’s method of law enforcement, Reagonomics was an adrenaline-fueled misadventure in which the possibility of oblivion mattered less than the initial, euphoric release of a plunge into the unknown.
In the aftermath of Reagan’s cavalier approach to policy, Friedkin’s Los Angeles has become a capitalist wasteland. Its infrastructure is crumbling, government agents are hopelessly corrupt, and social relations have atrophied. Nothing is any longer what it seems. It is no surprise that Dafoe’s villain takes the form of an elite counterfeiter, forging imitation cash identical to the real thing – the perfect crime in a society that can no longer distinguish between right and wrong, or cop from criminal.
The only principle able to survive in this toxic atmosphere is the pursuit of profit. Money is constantly changing hands, and almost every action, whether sex or an assassination, is performed for cash.
The high priest of this transactional dystopia is Dafoe’s antagonist, Masters. For a gangster, Masters looks suspiciously like the archetype of the 1980s yuppie, the shock troops of Reagan’s neoliberal offensive. He slicks back his hair, sculpts his body at an exclusive gym, and has exchanged the wardrobe of a criminal for that of a stockbroker. He is the Reaganite hustler taken to its logical conclusion – a Gordon Gekko with a gun – no longer bothering to disguise his naked ambition beneath the veneer of respectability. He is a gifted artist but sets fire to his finished paintings and stares melancholically into the flames – there is no room for art in his cynical, profit-oriented world, and he would rather put his talents to work as a counterfeiter.
For the lost souls around him, Masters has the seductive charm of a cult leader. Both men and women are irresistibly drawn to him, offering up their bodies as tribute or gazing at the grainy recordings of those sexual encounters. Rather than relying on any higher power, however, his is an anti-religion, a nihilist belief in acquisition and success for the sake of success. In a society where the status quo has failed so disastrously, the charismatic bandit, with no cause or creed, becomes the closest thing to a god. And when all other beliefs have been abandoned, raw power becomes the new faith.
For a film that deals with such uber-masculinity, To Live and Die in LA also contains an unmistakable undercurrent of homoeroticism. At times, the various combatants do not know whether to fight or fuck. They exchange kicks to the groin, strip one another naked, and command each other to suck on the gun barrels that have been forced into their mouths. When the Secret Service men go undercover as buyers and meet Masters at his country club, they undress in front of each other as if embarking on the opening phases of a mating ritual. In the final confrontation, Masters searches for a gun in Chance’s trousers and jokes about finding his “package.”
None of this should be shocking from a filmmaker like Friedkin who, five years earlier, had made the gay cop thriller Cruising (1980), but it also makes sense thematically. For individuals who no longer possess any sense of higher purpose, the only meaningful question left is who gets to fuck who. The human beings in Friedkin’s Los Angeles have been reduced to feral animals, crawling over one another in an endless competition for sexual dominance.
The only character we meet with any hint of moral integrity is Vukovich, Chase’s new partner. Vukovich is horrified by the scale of Chase’s corruption and oscillates between loyalty to his partner and the urge to turn him in to their superiors. Eventually, however, he too will be been dragged to Chase’s level, his principles eroded piece by piece until, in the middle of a car chase, he collapses into an existential crisis, overwhelmed by the barbarity of this world and his own complicity in it. By the film’s epilogue, Vukovich has become a carbon copy of the corrupt Chase (who by now has been brutally murdered), dressing and walking like his dead partner and striking up the same exploitative relationship with the vulnerable female informant.
The message is that you may kill the man, but you cannot kill the social forces that made him. The world of To Live and Die in LA is in a death spiral and will continue to produce individuals like Chase. If there is one tragedy in the film it is this: the collapse of Vukovich’s idealism and the transformation of a good man into what he had set out to oppose.
Most shockingly of all, Friedkin presents no cure to the sickness he has diagnosed, and at no point does any kind of saviour, human or otherwise, emerge. This is not the kind of Hollywood movie in which a thorny dilemma is resolved neatly in the final act. When To Live and Die in LA ends in a flaming, literal hell and even the fresh-faced Vukovich has fallen from grace, we know that the city is beyond redemption and that its sun-drenched streets will continue to be marred by crime, corruption, and violence. Solutions, if they exist at all, are to be found elsewhere. If you made the terrible mistake of coming to this film in search of comfort, this is not the Los Angeles you were looking for.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
