A Film Canon

Like The French Connection, To Live And Die In L.A. condenses a cityscape to a chase sequence. However, whereas the earlier film was modernist, past-oriented and interested in distinguishing infrastructural strata, the latter is postmodern, already set in a science fiction future, and interested in elasticising infrastructural strata - specifically, those above and below the amorphous Los Angeles freeway system. Hence the film's signature tracking shot, in which a movement from the bottom to the top of the screen, or from one level to another, is offset by some movement within the frame that collapses this binary even as it constitutes it. Hence also Richard Chance's (William Petersen) passion for base jumping, which he uses as an analogy for the police procedural that drives the investigation of Rick Masters' (Willem Dafoe) counterfeiting operation. Dafoe's performance of Masters is the centrepiece of the film, gesturing towards some new, alien, simulacral transgression that becomes continuous with Friedkin's hypercinematic aesthetic itself, and leaves a proliferation of quasi-cinematic doubling, replication and homoeroticism in his wake. By embracing counterfeiting as the only viable outlet for artistic perfectionism in a hypersaturated 80s market, Friedkin offers his film as a piece of elastic, simulacral tourism, as sheer infrastructural spectacle; the moment at which a sedimentary cityscape becomes a metamorphic cityscape. As a result, there's a sublime disparity between the narrative and aesthetic ambit of the film, as if every moment of interiority, introspection or character development were looped back into the fact of living in a city where driving is not only a state of mind, it is the state of mind, making it feel as if Friedkin ultimately wants to condense the narrative to a chamber drama concise and intense enough to be played out in a car, but only so he can let his cameras linger over the purple, crystalline world outside.