Current Forum: Session 10: Film Noir and Sexuality	Read 10 times 	
Date: 27-Mar-2001 00:11:36	
Author: MCKAHAN, JASON G. <jgm8530@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: Homophobia Confidential 	
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       L. A. Confidential (Hansen 1997) both reproduces and transforms noir conventions. The cinematography often makes use of low-key lighting and shadows of characters and objects. The set design is accurate as a period piece of the 50s and the use of voice-over (although seldom subjective) is often employed. On the other hand, the characters who move through the mise-en-scene are obviously the relic of post-Reaganite ideology. The film has lost the shocking and cynical nuances of noir and replaced it with a neo-conservatism characteristic of Die Hard as an action genre. The buddy relations Bud White and Ed Exley combine violence with conservatism and thus cast a false light of optimism upon the status quo. The ambiguity of the psyche so prevalent in noir characters is shed and what remains are artificial forces of “good guys” (the overly righteous Exley and hyper-masculine White) and “bad guys” (racist Stensland and snarling Smith), all characters that really embody the same masculinist institutions of homophobia and violence. 
       Femininity has also been transformed from the menacing presence of the femme fatale (although Lynn Bracken is initially not trusted by Exley and White) into a more comforting vision of a recuperated whore as in Trading Places. Lynn’s world is not one of duplicity and threat to the bourgeois home, but rather of mutually exclusive spaces of professional and private. This 
turns up in the set when one contrasts the “work space” with a projector showing This Gun for Hire and the luxurious bedding and couches with her interior room, which no customer enters, 
except for Bud. The move from the sexual workspace to her sincere and personal room parallels Lynn trajectory from exclusive call girl to a retired cop’s wife. Thus, the castration threat is circumvented and Lynn figures as the victim-object that White sees in all women since his mother’s death. L. A. Confidential’s women are exploited, killed, raped and if they are saved, only so by men.
       Masculinity is seldom castrated in the manner we expect of nourish protagonists such as Marlowe in Murder My Sweet (1944) and Neff in Double Indemnity (1944). Indeed, L. A. 
Confidential’s ideological project simply props up the white masculinity of its heroes at the expense of gays and non-whites. Homophobia recurs throughout the text and becomes a part of a sexual hierarchy favoring heterosexualism. In the scene when Exley questions Fontaine, he manipulates him through accusing him of being gay, “Larry, he called you queer. He said at Casitas you took it up the ass.”
       This aura of homophobia defines gender roles through sexual difference and threatens the man who has any gayness in him. To deny homosexuality is to affirm a “normal” manly sexuality and to differentiate manliness from queerness. This scene is particularly oppressive because the rouse of the threat to masculinity works and makes suspects talk. Another scene in which the gay actor, Matt Reynolds, is murdered further underlines the homophobic in the film, as Sid Hudgens remarks, “Jesus. Jack, that's a story. 'Swish Actor Gets The Gay Blade. 'Let me get my camera.” Finally, the trip to the D.A.’s office is the clearest expulsion of gays from political power and proposal of noxious variance. Ellis Loew’s character equivocates gayness and child molestation when he says, “And so what if some homo actor is dead. Boys, girls, ten of them step off the bus to L.A. every day.” Rubin’s domino theory aptly describes how this hyperbolization of the “danger” of sexual difference. However, the conflation villainy and gayness is really one more feature L. A. Confidential reaps from the “gay” noir villain convention as found in the birth of noir with masculine anxieties found in Maltese Falcon (1941).
       Non-white lives become the stepping-stones of Exley’s career. The beating of the Mexicans brings his promotion to detective lieutenant and the death of the black suspects brings his medal 
of honor. In a similar manner, the film exploits the injustices against non-white suspects in order to instill nobility in the “non-racist” white protagonists. The implication of the maltreatment of non-whites is scarcely explored in the film and we sense that they were necessary victims in order to reproduce the status quo.