L.A. Confidential

Commonly, when we make value judgements about people we speak as if there were a single norm towards which everyone ought to be growing. They're supposed to succeed in becoming perfect specimens. You can tell whether they do by seeing how well they perform according to a checklist of desired features. We also speak as if people have an outside and an inside, and that on the inside, they're really either good or bad.

It's hard to analyze Ellroy's characters in these terms. For Bud White we'd have to say that he was warped by his early trauma. What his father did to him made him a brute, yet he still has enough inner decency to try to prevent women from being abused. Or--Wait a minute!--is it the opposite? Maybe, he's a brute by nature and it's only thanks to the terrible thing that happened to his mother that he has some morality. Neither of these explanations seems to satisfy, because the framework on which they are constructed is inadequate. Bud doesn't seem to fit into a dichotomy of outside versus inside. Also, the things that make him bad seem more or less identical to the things that make him good: his hatred of violence towards women, his blind persistence. Bud White doesn't seem to have had any chance at perfection. So, what can he do then, assuming he wants to make a decent adult out of himself? Maybe Bud has to start out from where he is and we have to interpret his current actions against that background instead of comparing them to an abstract, one-size-fits-all standard.

L.A. Confidential is about three men and a woman who find themselves in medias res. They don't get any single chance to decide forever what they'll be. They're already on the wrong side. They don't seem to be able to separate out their imperfections from their perfections, so their job seems to be to take all of what they've got, including their neuroses and the ghosts from their past, and to use it as raw material to continuously reconstruct themselves. They can't make themselves perfect: the moving finger has already written and moved on. The things that they go through, terrible as they are, do give them a chance to make themselves better. Commonly, when we make value judgements about people we speak as if there were a single norm towards which everyone ought to be growing. They're supposed to succeed in becoming perfect specimens. You can tell whether they