Los Angeles in Noir
An essay on William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in LA and personal reflections of the city.
“Buddy, you’re in the wrong place, in the wrong time,” says Rick Masters, an artist and counterfeiter, moments before shooting Secret Service agent Jimmy Hart, who was closing in on the warehouse where thousands of counterfeit bills were printed (00:19:40). The citation above not only sets the stage for the events to come in William Friedkin’s 1985 neo-noir thriller, To Live and Die in LA, but also offers a glimpse into the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles – a good person may face very unfortunate circumstances if intertwined in the city’s encompassing web of corruption, violence, and inequality. The gritty façade of Los Angeles is similarly highlighted in two essays, Robert Carringer’s “Hollywood’s Los Angeles: Two Paradigms,” and Mike Davis’ “Sunshine or Noir,” from City of Quartz. In spite of the authors’ differing backgrounds – Carringer is a Professor of English and Film at University of Illinois, while Davis was an urban theorist – both essays provide deeper commentary into Los Angeles’ multifaceted, tumultuous character that Friedkin has memorably portrayed in a classic, neo-noir fashion.
Carringer categorizes Hollywood’s depiction of Los Angeles to two recurring constructs: a commodified Arcadia, “a corrupted version of pastoral in which anything and everything can be had for a price,” and a pathological cityscape, a term to describe the “city’s ordinary, everyday spaces as presumptive sites of violent surprise (247). To some extent, To Live and Die in LA portray both narratives. Commodification, in the literal sense, is essential to the movie, and speaks to the classic trope[1] of the neo-noir genre: a conspiratorial plot, which involves “an antihero unraveling a sinister conspiracy involving powerful criminals and corrupt systems.” In Friedkin’s world, information is a valuable commodity, intertwining his characters into the world of deception and betrayal whose transactions occur in the varied landscapes of Los Angeles. Chance, the antihero driving the narrative, relies on his sexual-extortion relationship with Ruth, a parolee, as his source of information. Their encounters occur throughout the movie in her nondescript, Craftsman bungalow, against the backdrop of oil rigs dotting the coastline of Long Beach (00:47:08). Worried of being ousted as an informant and doubtful of Chance’s willingness to protect her, she later attempts to get Chance arrested by setting him up to rob, unbeknownst to him, an undercover FBI Agent Thomas Ling as the latter arrives in Union Station. A handheld tracking shot of Chance forcefully seizing Ling illustrates the Art Deco-inspired interior with intricate brise soleil patterns and floor tiling reminiscent of the Spanish Mission Revival style (1:16:56). Furthermore, Masters (played brilliantly by Willem Dafoe), the counterfeiter, is the embodiment of commodification. His production of fake bills is used to fund hitmen to extricate him from trouble and to serve clients engaged in illegal activities. Friedkin portrays the counterfeiting process in excruciating detail that the production actually succeeded in counterfeiting money[2] – starting with real bills as stencils, Masters extract their serial numbers, fills the stencil with ink, paints over the bills with a mixture of green, white, and black paints, prints them, slices them with a paper cutter, and puts them in a dryer with clothes to rough them up (00:12:18). At the climax of the movie, the counterfeited money was used in the bogus transaction between Masters and Chance – who posed as a businessman from Palm Springs – against the backdrop of Masters’ modern Southern Californian home, its white walls and large expanse of windows with skinny, modular mullions are reminiscent of Irving Gill’s works (1:40:42). In a way, Friedkin alludes to the fact that to live and die in the arcadia of Los Angeles – wherever one may be in its seedy underbelly – anything can be commodified to secure an advantage.
Furthermore, Friedkin also repeatedly portrays Los Angeles as a pathological cityscape. Similar to Carringer’s description of John Boorman’s understanding of Los Angeles, Friedkin depicts the city as a place “dominated by massive, forbidding concrete forms – a deserted underground parking structure with tires screaming eerily in the background, a barren field of pylons holding up freeway ramps, and the vast and absurdly dry riverbed” (258). In fact, Banham’s beloved Autopia – the utopia of mobility, which includes both the automobile and the infrastructure – is manifested in a sequence of varied shots depicting Chase and his new partner Vulkuvich’s robbery of Ling and the subsequent car chase. Upon intercepting Ling at Union Station, the two agents throw him into the back of their car but are unknowingly pursued by another pair of men. As Chase and Vulkuvich beat him up under the highway of an industrial area of what is now known as Arts District (the famous curvatures of the Sixth Street Bridge can be seen in the background at 01:17:50), the pursuers ambushed them from street-level. Friedkin alternate between shots at eye-level of the agents at below-grade, low-angle shots looking up at the pursuers on the street-level, and high-angle shots looking down at the agents from the point of view of the pursuer, immediately followed by an over-the-shoulder shot depicting the pursuer aiming down with a rifle (1:20:06).
![]()
The varied types of shots emphasize the rich sectional quality of LA’s highways, their low and high grounds – the city’s “ordinary, everyday spaces” – naturally providing a battlefield for players of “violent surprise” (247). And as it is generally known, the high ground is the most advantageous place to be on the battlefield. The pursuers fired multiple shots at the group, accidentally killing Ling while the two agents take off in their car. What follows is a thrilling car chase through the industrial complex. Chase is driving the car, while Vulkovich, ridden with guilt over the death of Ling, is in the backseat. A tracking shot follows their 1985 Chevy, jostling and scraping against the dips of LA roads, zooming behind neglected objects typically found underneath an underpass – cluttered garbage bins and local debris – and slowly panning up to show the pursuers on street-level, trailing right above them (1:21:18). The camera alternates between close-up shots of Chance driving faster and faster – sweat dripping on his forehead, occasionally looking back to check on his partner, “Are you hit?” to which Vulkuvich reluctantly replies, “I don’t know, I don’t think so,” – and wide shots of them swerving through the day-to-day activities of warehouses, as factory workers operate forklift trucks in the narrow alleys of the industrial center (1:21:33). To add the thrill and suspense of the chase, the wide shots are abruptly interrupted by frenetic point of view shots from Chase’s perspective, the car narrowly dodging semi-trucks backing in and out of loading docks (1:22:11). The final leg of the chase leads them to the “absurdly dry” LA river – after Chase races a freight train labelled ‘Santa Fe’ on bold yellow font (258). As Chase is seemingly cornered by the cars of his pursuers, he pulls the steering wheel to the right, ignoring the “Wrong Way” sign and races up the off-ramp to the highway (1:26:35). Chaos ensues as other drivers attempted to avoid Chase driving in the opposite direction, though the pair finally escaped their pursuers as a wide shot portrays them on Henry Ford Bridge passing by Long Beach’s notable oil field, Chase punching the air in celebration (1:28:19). LA’s unforgiving streets and monumental concrete freeways are inherent to the city’s character and urbanism. To Angelinos, they are typically considered mundane and ordinary, perhaps even a source of annoyance – the frequent traffic and rush hour are reoccurring ventures in one’s daily commute. To Friedkin, however, the streets are fundamental sites of LA’s seedy underbelly. They are sites of violence and chaos, of murder and neglect. Friedkin portrays the feeling that one can get away with any unjust deeds as long as they occur behind the veil of LA’s forbidding concrete. Friedkin’s series of curated images compliment Davis’ description of Los Angeles as a “deracinated city,” its Hollywood alter-ego transforms the city as “literalized Mahagonny: the city of seduction and defeat” (18).
Beyond positioning the car chase in present-day Arts District and Long Beach’s “oil bananza” (25), this particular sequence also highlights Friedkin’s fascination with depicting the industrial sector of the city, one that is inherent to its growth to become the metropolis it is known today. The freight train aptly labelled ‘Santa Fe’ hints at the Old Spanish Trail from New Mexico, providing the foundation for the transcontinental railway that opened California to the rest of the United States, eventually giving way for multitudes of immigrants that fueled Los Angeles’ cultural industry and labor force. Friedkin presents the contradiction embedded in the past and present state of LA’s railway tracks – what was once a people-filled, crucial transportation node is now a form of no man’s land, only occasionally inhabited by inanimate freight trains and players of violent surprise. It is no coincidence that Friedkin uses a wide shot of Ling’s dead body against the backdrop of a perfectly timed passing of a freight train – unbothered and unempathetic of the shootout that has just occurred (1:20:41).
Friedkin’s depiction of the city as both a commodified arcadia and pathological cityscape is exemplary of “exploiting Los Angeles settings in new ways,” highlighting the “rot in the heart of the expanding metropolis” (41). As Ruth mentions towards the end of the movie, “the stars are God’s eyes,” – Friedkin, like an omniscient divine entity, grants his audiences – or at least, for an hour and fifty-six minutes – the power of seeing and understanding LA’s seedy underbelly, especially against the backdrop of the city’s eccentric landscapes and foreboding concrete megastructures.
[1] MasterClass. “Neo-Noir Film Genre: 4 Common Traits of the Neo-Noir Genre.” Arts and Entertainment, MasterClass, 15 Sept. 2021, https://www.masterclass.com/articles/neo-noir-guide.
[2] William Friedkin, in his memoir "The Friedkin Connection", says that the fake money they made was so good that, after some of it left the set, he eventually heard from the Secret Service and a US Attorney. After he avoided a confrontation with them, Friedkin states, "When the film came out, there were news stories about people trying to make counterfeit money after seeing the step-by-step process in our film. I took some of the twenties, those printed on both sides of course, put them in my wallet, and spent them in restaurants, shoe-shine parlors, and elsewhere. The money was that good." From IMDB Trivia, https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0090180/trivia/?ref_=tt_ql_trv
“Buddy, you’re in the wrong place, in the wrong time,” says Rick Masters, an artist and counterfeiter, moments before shooting Secret Service agent Jimmy Hart, who was closing in on the warehouse where thousands of counterfeit bills were printed (00:19:40). The citation above not only sets the stage for the events to come in William Friedkin’s 1985 neo-noir thriller, To Live and Die in LA, but also offers a glimpse into the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles – a good person may face very unfortunate circumstances if intertwined in the city’s encompassing web of corruption, violence, and inequality. The gritty façade of Los Angeles is similarly highlighted in two essays, Robert Carringer’s “Hollywood’s Los Angeles: Two Paradigms,” and Mike Davis’ “Sunshine or Noir,” from City of Quartz. In spite of the authors’ differing backgrounds – Carringer is a Professor of English and Film at University of Illinois, while Davis was an urban theorist – both essays provide deeper commentary into Los Angeles’ multifaceted, tumultuous character that Friedkin has memorably portrayed in a classic, neo-noir fashion.
Carringer categorizes Hollywood’s depiction of Los Angeles to two recurring constructs: a commodified Arcadia, “a corrupted version of pastoral in which anything and everything can be had for a price,” and a pathological cityscape, a term to describe the “city’s ordinary, everyday spaces as presumptive sites of violent surprise (247). To some extent, To Live and Die in LA portray both narratives. Commodification, in the literal sense, is essential to the movie, and speaks to the classic trope[1] of the neo-noir genre: a conspiratorial plot, which involves “an antihero unraveling a sinister conspiracy involving powerful criminals and corrupt systems.” In Friedkin’s world, information is a valuable commodity, intertwining his characters into the world of deception and betrayal whose transactions occur in the varied landscapes of Los Angeles. Chance, the antihero driving the narrative, relies on his sexual-extortion relationship with Ruth, a parolee, as his source of information. Their encounters occur throughout the movie in her nondescript, Craftsman bungalow, against the backdrop of oil rigs dotting the coastline of Long Beach (00:47:08). Worried of being ousted as an informant and doubtful of Chance’s willingness to protect her, she later attempts to get Chance arrested by setting him up to rob, unbeknownst to him, an undercover FBI Agent Thomas Ling as the latter arrives in Union Station. A handheld tracking shot of Chance forcefully seizing Ling illustrates the Art Deco-inspired interior with intricate brise soleil patterns and floor tiling reminiscent of the Spanish Mission Revival style (1:16:56). Furthermore, Masters (played brilliantly by Willem Dafoe), the counterfeiter, is the embodiment of commodification. His production of fake bills is used to fund hitmen to extricate him from trouble and to serve clients engaged in illegal activities. Friedkin portrays the counterfeiting process in excruciating detail that the production actually succeeded in counterfeiting money[2] – starting with real bills as stencils, Masters extract their serial numbers, fills the stencil with ink, paints over the bills with a mixture of green, white, and black paints, prints them, slices them with a paper cutter, and puts them in a dryer with clothes to rough them up (00:12:18). At the climax of the movie, the counterfeited money was used in the bogus transaction between Masters and Chance – who posed as a businessman from Palm Springs – against the backdrop of Masters’ modern Southern Californian home, its white walls and large expanse of windows with skinny, modular mullions are reminiscent of Irving Gill’s works (1:40:42). In a way, Friedkin alludes to the fact that to live and die in the arcadia of Los Angeles – wherever one may be in its seedy underbelly – anything can be commodified to secure an advantage.
Furthermore, Friedkin also repeatedly portrays Los Angeles as a pathological cityscape. Similar to Carringer’s description of John Boorman’s understanding of Los Angeles, Friedkin depicts the city as a place “dominated by massive, forbidding concrete forms – a deserted underground parking structure with tires screaming eerily in the background, a barren field of pylons holding up freeway ramps, and the vast and absurdly dry riverbed” (258). In fact, Banham’s beloved Autopia – the utopia of mobility, which includes both the automobile and the infrastructure – is manifested in a sequence of varied shots depicting Chase and his new partner Vulkuvich’s robbery of Ling and the subsequent car chase. Upon intercepting Ling at Union Station, the two agents throw him into the back of their car but are unknowingly pursued by another pair of men. As Chase and Vulkuvich beat him up under the highway of an industrial area of what is now known as Arts District (the famous curvatures of the Sixth Street Bridge can be seen in the background at 01:17:50), the pursuers ambushed them from street-level. Friedkin alternate between shots at eye-level of the agents at below-grade, low-angle shots looking up at the pursuers on the street-level, and high-angle shots looking down at the agents from the point of view of the pursuer, immediately followed by an over-the-shoulder shot depicting the pursuer aiming down with a rifle (1:20:06).
The varied types of shots emphasize the rich sectional quality of LA’s highways, their low and high grounds – the city’s “ordinary, everyday spaces” – naturally providing a battlefield for players of “violent surprise” (247). And as it is generally known, the high ground is the most advantageous place to be on the battlefield. The pursuers fired multiple shots at the group, accidentally killing Ling while the two agents take off in their car. What follows is a thrilling car chase through the industrial complex. Chase is driving the car, while Vulkovich, ridden with guilt over the death of Ling, is in the backseat. A tracking shot follows their 1985 Chevy, jostling and scraping against the dips of LA roads, zooming behind neglected objects typically found underneath an underpass – cluttered garbage bins and local debris – and slowly panning up to show the pursuers on street-level, trailing right above them (1:21:18). The camera alternates between close-up shots of Chance driving faster and faster – sweat dripping on his forehead, occasionally looking back to check on his partner, “Are you hit?” to which Vulkuvich reluctantly replies, “I don’t know, I don’t think so,” – and wide shots of them swerving through the day-to-day activities of warehouses, as factory workers operate forklift trucks in the narrow alleys of the industrial center (1:21:33). To add the thrill and suspense of the chase, the wide shots are abruptly interrupted by frenetic point of view shots from Chase’s perspective, the car narrowly dodging semi-trucks backing in and out of loading docks (1:22:11). The final leg of the chase leads them to the “absurdly dry” LA river – after Chase races a freight train labelled ‘Santa Fe’ on bold yellow font (258). As Chase is seemingly cornered by the cars of his pursuers, he pulls the steering wheel to the right, ignoring the “Wrong Way” sign and races up the off-ramp to the highway (1:26:35). Chaos ensues as other drivers attempted to avoid Chase driving in the opposite direction, though the pair finally escaped their pursuers as a wide shot portrays them on Henry Ford Bridge passing by Long Beach’s notable oil field, Chase punching the air in celebration (1:28:19). LA’s unforgiving streets and monumental concrete freeways are inherent to the city’s character and urbanism. To Angelinos, they are typically considered mundane and ordinary, perhaps even a source of annoyance – the frequent traffic and rush hour are reoccurring ventures in one’s daily commute. To Friedkin, however, the streets are fundamental sites of LA’s seedy underbelly. They are sites of violence and chaos, of murder and neglect. Friedkin portrays the feeling that one can get away with any unjust deeds as long as they occur behind the veil of LA’s forbidding concrete. Friedkin’s series of curated images compliment Davis’ description of Los Angeles as a “deracinated city,” its Hollywood alter-ego transforms the city as “literalized Mahagonny: the city of seduction and defeat” (18).
Beyond positioning the car chase in present-day Arts District and Long Beach’s “oil bananza” (25), this particular sequence also highlights Friedkin’s fascination with depicting the industrial sector of the city, one that is inherent to its growth to become the metropolis it is known today. The freight train aptly labelled ‘Santa Fe’ hints at the Old Spanish Trail from New Mexico, providing the foundation for the transcontinental railway that opened California to the rest of the United States, eventually giving way for multitudes of immigrants that fueled Los Angeles’ cultural industry and labor force. Friedkin presents the contradiction embedded in the past and present state of LA’s railway tracks – what was once a people-filled, crucial transportation node is now a form of no man’s land, only occasionally inhabited by inanimate freight trains and players of violent surprise. It is no coincidence that Friedkin uses a wide shot of Ling’s dead body against the backdrop of a perfectly timed passing of a freight train – unbothered and unempathetic of the shootout that has just occurred (1:20:41).
Friedkin’s depiction of the city as both a commodified arcadia and pathological cityscape is exemplary of “exploiting Los Angeles settings in new ways,” highlighting the “rot in the heart of the expanding metropolis” (41). As Ruth mentions towards the end of the movie, “the stars are God’s eyes,” – Friedkin, like an omniscient divine entity, grants his audiences – or at least, for an hour and fifty-six minutes – the power of seeing and understanding LA’s seedy underbelly, especially against the backdrop of the city’s eccentric landscapes and foreboding concrete megastructures.
[1] MasterClass. “Neo-Noir Film Genre: 4 Common Traits of the Neo-Noir Genre.” Arts and Entertainment, MasterClass, 15 Sept. 2021, https://www.masterclass.com/articles/neo-noir-guide.
[2] William Friedkin, in his memoir "The Friedkin Connection", says that the fake money they made was so good that, after some of it left the set, he eventually heard from the Secret Service and a US Attorney. After he avoided a confrontation with them, Friedkin states, "When the film came out, there were news stories about people trying to make counterfeit money after seeing the step-by-step process in our film. I took some of the twenties, those printed on both sides of course, put them in my wallet, and spent them in restaurants, shoe-shine parlors, and elsewhere. The money was that good." From IMDB Trivia, https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0090180/trivia/?ref_=tt_ql_trv