To Live and Die in L.A.

“If you want bread, go f--- a baker”, and, said to a man before fatally bludgeoning him with the statue in question, “18^th century Cameroon, yes? Your taste is in your ass”, are surely contenders for the movie’s most memorable lines in what is for the most part a punchy script, albeit if the plot itself is problematic in places. The title song has the lines “I wonder why in L.A., to live and die in L.A.”. Notwithstanding the title’s euphonic appeal, you may well wonder why in L.A., because there doesn’t appear to be any plot-relevant feature that is quintessentially of that city. In many respects, including the style of the film’s music, (Wang Chung gets a big shout out in the credits for this), there is more here that refers to what it is to live and die in the Eighties than in L.A. Indeed, the city’s most recognisable settings, the Hollywood hills and their bumper crop of modernist des-res’, for example, are shunned in favour of seedy bars and the grubby docklands.

Set as it is during the time of Reagan’s presidency, there are broad similarities between the economic stagnation of today and of the time of the film’s setting. Whereas Reagan's answer was to cut taxes, much recent debate has focussed on various countries’ central banks engaging in so-called quantitative easing, whereby governments use their right of seignorage to inject cash into the system by printing money, essentially. Here, Willem Dafoe plays a master craftsman engaging in his own quantitative easing effort, using his artistic abilities to forge american currency – referred to throughout as “paper” – and fencing it through intermediaries for a fraction of its face value. Dafoe’s opposite number in this game is played by William L. Petersen (more recently of CSI fame). Where Rick Masters (Dafoe) is a kimono-wearing aesthete with some norm-defying proclivities, Richard Chance (Pietersen) is more middle of the road, a Budweiser from the can as opposed to the forger’s Sake Martini. That said, Chance is not your average nice guy secret service agent, and perhaps the writers are playing with our sympathies, making it difficult for us to root for one side or the other. This marries with what might be the central theme of the story, which is whether we can lie down with dogs but avoid getting fleas. It’s explored in a manner reminiscent of any paranoiac conspiracy-laden movie you’ve a mind to recollect, The Conversation, for example, but while such movies terrify by keeping the audience fully informed and the protagonists one step behind, here both are in the dark. Until the end that is, when the double-dealings are finally exposed, to good effect, even if we are not entirely convinced.

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