Counterfeit City Part 2: To Live and Die in L.A.

This article is co-written with John Anderson (aka Son of Griff)

December 20th, 1984, Los Angeles. The Gipper (aka Ronald Reagan) is back in his element, en route to a luxury hotel, where, later that night, he gives a rousing speech to donors about his administration’s American revival. 

Set to the title track by the flavor-of-the-month pop group, Wang Chung, this quasi-cinema-verite opening sequence in To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) fades out as Reagan’s address, conveyed via voice-over, echoes through the hotel. Cut to Jimmy Hart, a dogged Secret Service agent, who enters the hotel kitchen, on the lookout for lurking assassins. His younger partner, Richie Chance, spots one in a hallway, a fanatical suicide bomber, whom he pursues to the rooftop, with Hart a few steps behind. After Chance and Hart survive the full force of the blast when the bomber blows himself up (safely away from the targeted political shindig), Hart utters, perhaps for the first time in the annals of modern-action cinema, “I’m getting too old for this shit.”

We know what these words mean. Hart is going to retire, and, just two days before he does, he will be killed by the object of his obsession, Rick Masters, a counterfeiting artiste who has successfully eluded arrest. Chance is thus bound by honor to hunt down his partner’s killer, doing whatever it takes, even if it harelips the brass and trashes established procedure and protocol — such as, with John Vukovich, his new partner, stealing 30,000 dollars of “real” money in order to infiltrate Masters’s operation. We’re beyond the ethos of The Godfather (1972): this isn’t business; it’s personal. This rather curious definition of honor doesn’t, not even for a moment, get in the way of the pursuit of personal pleasure, for we see that Chance takes liberties with, while getting intel from, a young-woman parolee. 

Reagan’s aural cameo in To Live and Die isn’t happenstance. His cameo reflects and expresses the cynicism that facilitated his rise in the national political scene and the tone of facile consumerism that defined his administration’s culture. In the wake of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers, government institutions appeared to be whitewashing their malfeasance and ineffectiveness. Rising crime rates, coupled with the moral panic over a seemingly unstoppable flow of drugs from the inner cities to the suburbs, symbolized a decline in social containment and security, while taxes rose and inflation raged.  

Number 40’s presidency tried to symbolically reverse the flaccidity of bureaucratic legalism through the Viagra of individual initiative. Surviving an assassination attempt, Reagan maintained his heroic pose, an act consisting of an unflappable wit in the face of considerable opposition to his policies. Hollywood followed suit, rejecting the despair of 1970’s New-Hollywood-auteur cinema (adjacent to the independent scene developed primarily by filmmakers such as John Cassavetes) and embraced a more traditional, and less complicated, representation of masculine vitality and national triumphalism. 

Yet To Live and Die, directed by William Friedkin, doesn’t feel particularly jingoistic (with the notable exception of the terrorist’s going down in flames). There is no re-imagining of the trauma of Vietnam through muscle-magazine campiness ala the Rambo franchise (1982-2019) or Commando (1985). Nor are there menacing Hispanic drug gangs shoveled into an unnecessary subplot ala Three Men and a Baby (1987). 

In fact, To Live and Die often engages in a dialogue with the films noir of an era 40 years before its release. Like T-Men (1947) it examines how the crime-containment narrative contextualizes counterfeit relationships, while updating this narrative to acknowledge the waning power of institutional coherence and adding new layers of psychological obsession into the mix. And like the post-WWII era, Friedkin’s entrance into the counterfeit city (discussed in more detail in Part 1) explores how systems of urban containment and transgression mirror each other, albeit under different historical circumstances. 

While To Live and Die downplays the auteur-oriented cinema of the 1970s, Friedkin is aware that his name provides a context for framing the expectations of the audience. He is fully cognizant of his reputation for directing action sequences. The film’s most famous sequence, a car chase that starts through the L.A. train yards, moves to the L.A. River, and proceeds to the wrong lanes of the I-5 freeway, is not simply a ‘lowbrow” diversion; this sequence stages his argument for how the film must be interpreted through a stylistic, systemic mode/code, one based on his own film-making persona. 

Friedkin also uses the “Khuleshov Effect,” where the viewer’s perspective on a character’s feelings is dependent on the superimposition of the object the character is engaging with, in ways that ambiguate, rather than clarify, the character’s motivation. This effect distinguishes Masters and Chance from each other. The androgynous Masters, sensuously realized by a young, reptilian Willem Dafoe, derives an erotic charge from observing himself in a reproduced image, be it on a canvas he paints (and subsequently burns) or in a video of himself having sex with an equally gender-ambiguous lover, whose affair is being watched by the object of her lesbian crush. 

Masters is a fetishist whose pleasure derives from the buzz of art generated for public exhibition (yet situated, as Michael Mann would put it 10 years later, in a “dead tech, postmodernist bullshit house”). From this arrangement, we’d assume that the art he produces to support his lifestyle, the visibility of his art diminished due to its circulation in the larger economy, is a means to an iconoclastic integration of art and personality. But this synthesis is complicated by his art that, informed by a “synthetic” eroticism (cued by the video-reproduced image), circulates beyond the spaces of the gallery and home. 

On the other hand, Chance, played by William Petersen, gazes upon nature for a connectedness beyond the manufactured environment. Like Masters, his first major point-of-view shot is of a human/image consumed by flames, but when the fire, ashes, and viscera dissipate, Chance envisions a panoramic view of L.A. at night, a revelatory vision, including an iconic view of a freeway that is in no way visible from the rooftop of the hotel where the terrorist’s death takes place. 

The first time that we see Chance process his actions is associated with other occurrences where he is in an elevated position, such as a balcony or bridge, looking out at a harbor, a beach, or airline trails. His bungee-jumping from a bridge foreshadows his possibly suicidal ideation and rule-breaking persona. The Khuleshov Effect thus underscores a sense of the sublime that animates the film’s images of masculinity while distinguishing Chance’s connection to the physical world from Masters’s fetishization of the synthetic. 

For Chance, the bureaucracy of crime-fighting poses a challenge to his romantic quest for an authentic self. When he tries to remove Vukovich as his partner, his supervisor gives him paperwork to fill out. Likewise, regulations, that interfere with the duo’s attempt to use Treasury funds to buy Masters’s counterfeit dough, rationalize their attempt to rob whom they believe to be a drug-money courier to get their funds. Whereas Masters must occasionally recognize the distinctions between consumption and fraud, Chance’s self-actualization requires him to look past such distinctions, blurring the line between being a cop and a criminal.

If taking down Masters demands redefining which side of the line he’s on (if that even exists), then Chance must recognize that much of the power vested in him to make that decision rests on the symbolic authority vested in wearing a badge. His recognition is demonstrated in an on-again, off-again affair with the young-woman informant. Whatever physical pleasure that they derive from their intimacy still does not insure a bond of loyalty, a bond that might bridge the professional distance between cop and criminal informant (CI). Following one of their trysts, Chance even tells her that if she stops feeding him information, he’d note a violation of her parole and send her back to prison. Just as Masters, which we will discuss below, walks an ambiguous line between the socially-regulated and -unregulated worlds of art, Chance is invested in a system whose inefficiency and protective ass-covering provides some avenue of coercive power and pleasure.

At first glance, Chance embodies the urban-containment system and Masters, its transgressive counterpart. Like in T-Men, the economic system influences, or interpenetrates, the domains of both systems. To Live and Die’s staging of these systems become self-referential, reflecting modern trends in which the interpretation of a film is filtered through, or leverages, a director’s signatory gestures/themes. Another trend is the interweaving of the directorial point of view with Masters’s performance as a “serious”/counterfeit artist. In an homage to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), Friedkin places his director’s credit over the shot that introduces Masters, abruptly stopping the music of Wang Chung (hired to compose the score), as he unrolls paper across the floor. 

Whether we watch Masters deconstruct his art-making, as an individualist act, through burning his own paintings or printing fake bills, we observe his art, as we do the film, in what systems theory calls a space of social regulation. That is, we can designate the privileged space of, say, a gallery (or a movie theater), because people’s attention is “fixed” in a certain way to observe art (Wolfe, 2010). Friedkin will engage the viewer in both recognizing the constraints of social regulation and the desire for watching the transgression of its codes and language. 

Crucial to this engagement is Masters’s circulating the idea(l) of individual artistic creation which informs his deconstructive acts. He adds a spiritual element (what could be called a transcendental signifier) to the incorporation of the real into the imaginary provided by the signatory uniqueness of the artist. He is transfixed by his abstract-expressionist self-portraits and the erotic charge he gets at watching videos of himself performing sex. When he burns his paintings, the incendiary rendering of his death wish is captured in an image that we presume he’s ritualized.  

Reproducing the manner in which lithography is produced and marketed, Master’s counterfeit endeavors don’t provide the same charge. But they do represent a certain uniqueness, because the paper and the types of ink used carry his individual essence by way of choice. When one of his mules fails to unload his quota and thus finish payment to the printer, he burns it, as its use has been sullied. Counterfeit money may, for general purposes, be a reproducible note whose value is determined by a larger monetary system, yet, for Masters, this money is purified by the essence of his own creativity.

While in T-Men, fake notes circulate within a complex, international system that shadows the circulation of “real” notes, in To Live and Die the system is more street level, made up of small-time hustlers and entrepreneurs. Trust between them is largely regulated by swift, personalized retribution that is customarily exacted when contracts aren’t kept. This retribution happens so often that the system itself operates more on the basis of punishment than machine-like regularity and precision.

As noted in the first part of this essay, T-Men’s narrative consisted of two oppositional modes of communication that paradoxically affirmed a specific point about the similar natures of law enforcement and criminality. The first mode was that of written and spoken addresses to the audience that conveyed “factual” verisimilitude to lend authenticity to the story. The second was the film-noir chronotope, which used style and setting to narratively contextualize the spectacle of the crime melodrama within some broadly-held view of social reality. Interweaving these two forms of address promoted the necessity of the Treasury Department’s actions in imitating the activities of the underworld in order to fight it, while emphasizing how organized crime and government bureaucracy mirror each other in their organizational sophistication.

To replace the expositional, didactic modes of communication in films noir such as T-Men, Friedkin, in To Live and Die, uses montage sequences (one, for instance, that depicts the circulation of money). Instead of slowing down the narrative flow to convey information, montages deliver contextual cues with a hyper-elliptical focus; they eliminate moments that would be regarded as not sympatico with the 1980s-action-film genre. The intensity of the fast-forward narrative processing is counterpointed by the repetitive, synthesized beats and riffs of Wang Chung’s filmscore. The stylistic combination of montages with music ready-made for cinematic spectacle hence distinguishes the tone of To Live and Die from those of earlier noirs, and propels the storytelling in anarchic directions. 

With the exception of various time stamps indicating ellipses between scenes, To Live and Die eschews direct textual addresses to the audience while presenting a ramped-up version of the gritty, urban-crime films of the 1970s (of which Friedkin’s The French Connection [1971] is a stellar example). Such films integrated the freer camera mobility of the various 1960s documentary movements (subsequently taken up by the narrative features of the French New Wave and the political docudramas of Guillermo Pontecervo, Constantin Costa Gavras, and Haskell Wexler) and location-based settings that extended the spaces in which realism and narrative melodrama were processed. In addition to this representational shift from studio chiaroscuro to muted color, To Live and Die uses the Khuleshov Effect (to depict the complexity of a character’s motivation), Friedkin’s directorial signature flourishes, and montages to subvert and inform the processing of the film’s turn to a realist aesthetic.

From a postmodern perspective, the blueprint for Masters’s money-making (and vice versa) especially challenges a realist mapping through its conflation of economic and stylistic domains (while, technically, not a system, style can have systemic effects). Masters has “mastered” how postmodern value accrues from the circulation of copies. Signifiers of postmodern value in To Live and Die range from the film’s echoing more outre art forms to its more degraded representations of art/ownership – which will include Masters’s quasi-transcendental, Icarus-like fall at the end. 

To begin our inquiry into how postmodern value is signified, Friedkin’s directing resume lists a number of theatrical productions, as well as a 1968 filmed version of Harold Pinter’s provocative play, The Birthday Party (1957). Likewise, both Petersen and Dafoe have backgrounds in avant-garde theatre. A year before To Live and Die, Petersen had the leading role as a self-destructive outlaw rock star in a production of Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime (1972). Dafoe was known for his being a prominent member of the Wooster Group, an avant-garde theatre collective.

For To Live and Die to do what it does, it must therefore ramp up what cinema has long appropriated from the staging of style in theatrical spaces. Petersen, as Chance, takes his rogue-cop persona from the transgressive aura of rock stars, such as Mick Jagger and David Bowie, that The Tooth of Crime projects; Shepard’s play envisions rock-music theatrics as a death dual, based on style points awarded for performance. The precise choreography of Dafoe, as Masters, built up through his performing in the Wooster Group, translates, in To Live and Die, as a particularly menacing style. When he insults someone, his words insinuate a physical force. 

In a rather graphic example, Masters confronts a shady lawyer whose office doubles as a space for his art collection, a consumptive parallel with the productive space of Masters’s studio. Masters wants the money he’s owed; the lawyer retaliates by clobbering him with a statue. After shooting the lawyer in the genitals, Masters looks at the phallic-shaped statue and says, “18th-century Cameroon? Your taste is in your ass,” before his kill shot in the lawyer’s face. We get it: the lawyer’s taste in art sucks. This stylistic violation is met by Masters’s even more over-the-top transgressive act; the social regulation of this art space, following the film’s logic, is blown away, just like what Masters does to the lawyer. 

Similarly, Chance’s plan to take down Masters comprises multi-systemic transgressions. As Sharon Willis observes, Chance and Vukovich’s heist of the “real” money to obtain counterfeit money will “‘prove’ the authenticity of their poses.” Chance’s planning, moreover, takes place in bar scenes that look like 1980s beer commercials (and their compressed sound, via studio production, is designed to burst into your audioscape – we could, not coincidentally, describe Wang Chung’s music in a similar way). Here Robby Muller’s cinematography, known for its signature, “high-art” compositions in the films of Wim Wenders, produces a “juxtaposition of codes, the commercial with the artistic” (Willis, 1989).

If T-Men tends to go out of its way not to draw attention to the weakly-drawn boundaries between legal and illegal domains, To Live and Die positions Chance’s performance of criminality as a direct challenge to the legal system’s operational code, that is, is legal “really” legal?, yet does so in such a way that it sheds light on the crossing of artistic boundaries. Through the intersection of “high art,” conveyed by the backgrounds of Friedkin, Petersen, Dafoe, and Muller, with ‘low art,” staged by high-speed car chases and the mis-en-scene of beer commercials, the crucial question becomes, not about who is on what side of the law, but on what artistic side the film is on – or, can it be on both? – what Willis calls the “film’s critical edge” that will place stylistic limits on our interpretation of the ending (Willis,1989). 

And at this point, social regulation returns with an unmistakable vengeance. Arguably, Friedkin’s use of Wang Chung’s crassly unimaginative music mocks our expectations (you’d probably rather watch a beer commercial than to listen to such crap, wouldn’t you?). Yet it nonetheless signifies his coming to terms with what will make the film profitable to his Hollywood investors, who, after all, care considerably less about the copying/counterfeiting of stylistic trends. If social regulation, moreover, sets up “redundancies,” which can then absorb the film’s shock to the system of art (Wolfe, 2010), the ending foregrounds these redundancies. Vukovich takes Chance’s place, taking down Masters, who, this time, gets fatally burned (up) by his ritualistic spectacle of destroying counterfeit money. Putting the final touches on Masters’s fall, his girlfriend and her lesbian lover take off with all of his stuff before anyone gets wise. 

To conclude, in To Live and Die we observe that the dominance of style appears constituted through, rather than seeming distinct from, the economic system. From a postmodern perspective, it’s the same old song, but with new(er) production values. But as the hapless young-woman parolee, the supplier of sexual favors, along with intel – now being run by Vukovich, instead of Chance – would perhaps be the first to ask, what’s the difference, anyway?