Recently, the Rewatchables podcast covered L.A. Confidential, one of my favorites

In that episode they discussed the two failed attempts to build a network TV show out from the movie (which seems like a fool’s errand). The second of those, which only made it so far as a pilot, starred (among others) Walton Goggins as Sgt. Jack Vincennes, the role played by Kevin Spacey (I know) in the movie. I told my wife about this, as she’s a big Goggins fan, and she looked at me puzzled and said that she’d never seen L.A. Confidential.

Naturally, I had to remedy this! A good excuse to revisit a great movie and see if there was anything new to take away from it. Turns out, there was.

Very briefly, L.A. Confidential is the story of three cops in 1950s Los Angeles trying to solve a grizzly mass murder that arises in the wake of a power vacuum in the city’s organized crime ranks. There’s Bud White (Russell Crowe), who’s spun up by abusers of women and used as dumb muscle by superiors. There’s Edmund Exley (Guy Pearce), the political animal “college boy” who has ideals of what the “new” LAPD could be. Then there’s Vincennes, kind of a celebrity cop who works as a consultant on a “Dragnet”-style TV show and has a profitable relationship with the purveyor of one of the local tabloids. They’re all drawn together by a massacre that’s initially written off as the work of young (black) hoods, but winds up going straight to the rot of the city.

What particularly stood out to me this time were the scenes where the three cops talk about why they wanted to become cops.

White’s is a post-coital conversation with Lynn (Oscar-winner Kim Basinger), a high-class call girl who’s boss is definitely involved the city’s corruption, when she asks about a scar on his shoulder. White explains that he got it from his father, when White tried to intervene and stop him from beating on his mother. White’s father tied him to a radiator and beat his mother to death in front of him and then escaped. When Lynn asks if he became a cop to “get even,” White says “maybe” and then that he “used to” like it.

For Exley, it comes during a conversation with Vincennes. He tells the story of how his father (also a cop) was shot and the perpetrator never caught. Exley dubbed the guy “Rollo Tomasi,” just to give a name to the people who get away with it. He wanted to be a cop to go after the people who think they can get away with it (notably, this comes after telling a reporter earlier that it was to “help people”). Exley then asks Vincennes why he wanted to be a cop.

Vincennes – aka “Hollywood Jack” – says he can’t remember anymore.

As a public defender I’m awfully cynical about cops. I see too much bad behavior that goes not just unpunished but rewarded. But it’s worth remembering that all but the worst power trippers in uniform probably got there for noble motives – wanting to help people, protect the vulnerable, and do justice. But even the best intentions don’t mesh well with a system that’s all about the accretion and deployment of power and authority over others.

Not for nothing do none of the three main cops come out of L.A. Confidential in great shape. Vincennes is killed, straight up, by the crooked police captain. White is reduced to a mute, broken man with no future in policing. Even Exley, while he comes out of the whole thing with another promotion where he might actually do some good in the department had to extrajudicially kill the crooked captain to get there (the same one who earlier had chided Exley for not being capable of doing “the right thing” when it came to it).

My wife asked, after the movie was over, how I could like a movie so much that was, after all, about crooked cops. I think the answer is that the movie doesn’t valorize them and it shows the destructive power of a corrupt system that people enter into even with the best of intentions. The moral shouldn’t be that, in the end, Exley did what he had to regardless of the rules. It should be about the toll it took on his soul, his humanity, and his values in the process.

That’s the thing about great movies – you find interesting new ways to think about them with every viewing. Plus, this makes me laugh every time: