SALON

Thursday, Jan 10, 2013 9:28 PM UTC

“Gangster Squad” whitewashes the LAPD’s criminal past

A lavish 1940s shoot-'em-up with Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone and tasty outfits sugarcoats L.A.'s darkest history

By

Topics: Movies, Gangster Squad, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Action movies, Crime, Zero Dark Thirty, Los Angeles, entertainment news, Editor's Picks, LAPD, Noir,

If you view Ruben Fleischer’s “Gangster Squad” as a violent period crime thriller in a familiar dress-up vein – as a capable imitation of better movies by Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma and Roman Polanski – it’s reasonably successful entertainment. It’s got overacting from Sean Penn, beneath a ton of makeup, as legendary Los Angeles mob boss Mickey Cohen, along with underacting from Ryan Gosling as the slightly nebbishy romantic lead and down-the-middle acting from Josh Brolin as its upright cop hero. Add in the digitally re-created, noir-flavored locations of postwar L.A. and the dazzling eye candy of Emma Stone in terrific period dresses and heartbreaking auburn hair and, hey – by the standards of midwinter Hollywood releases, not bad at all.

But let’s back up for a second and talk about propaganda and how it really works. I’d like to declare a temporary truce around the issue of “Zero Dark Thirty” and its depiction of torture, at least long enough for us to agree that the question of whether or not the film is propagandistic is now a matter of extensive public discourse. Nearly no one will raise such questions about “Gangster Squad,” because it does not depict recent history and because it’s a conspicuously artificial Hollywood entertainment released in January. One could argue, however, that those things make it more effective as propaganda than an overtly disturbing film like “Zero Dark Thirty” could ever hope to be, since the message delivery is almost invisible.

What message do I discern beneath the snazzy fedoras, Italianate villas and Latin-jazz supper-club numbers? Or the ultraviolent concluding shootout that rips off everything from “The Untouchables” to “Bonnie and Clyde” to “Dirty Harry” to various other things I didn’t bother to identify? A complete whitewashing of one of the most vicious and racist paramilitary organizations in American history: the Los Angeles Police Department.

“Gangster Squad” is a heavily fictionalized account of longtime LAPD chief William H. Parker’s campaign to prevent Mickey Cohen and other mobsters with East Coast roots from gaining power in Los Angeles. While the movie plays fast and loose with the facts about Cohen and Parker in all kinds of ways, it accurately portrays Parker (played by Nick Nolte in the film) as urging his favored cops to go beyond the law into vigilantism when they deemed it necessary. Sgt. John O’Mara (Brolin), Sgt. Jerry Wooters (Gosling) and the other untouchables of the “gangster squad” are of course presented as heroes, who embark on an extralegal campaign of surveillance, brutality and murder to save their city during an unprecedented emergency.

That was, of course, precisely the rationale proposed by Dick Cheney and other leaders of the Bush administration in defending the torture seen in the opening scenes of “Zero Dark Thirty” — the torture that has since been swept under the rug by the Obama administration so that we won’t ask questions about its own human rights record. In both cases, the motivations that lie behind the visible actions are complicated. If Bush and Cheney were trying to establish a near-absolute form of executive power, which Obama has embraced and broadened, William Parker was trying to preserve the predominantly white Protestant power structure of postwar L.A. against Eastern intruders with immigrant Catholic or Jewish roots.

“Gangster Squad” adds a faint patina of 21st-century political correctness to the proceedings by adding one African-American cop (Anthony Mackie) and one Latino cop (Michael Peña) to O’Mara’s secret elite team. Not only is this wildly unlikely in the context of 1940s Los Angeles, which had a near-Jim Crow level of segregation, it flies in the face of Parker and the LAPD’s long and poisonous relationship with the black and Latino communities. Parker is said to have originated the term “the thin blue line,” and was among the first police chiefs to take cops off the streets of his sprawling city and transform them into a military-style rapid-response team in juiced-up patrol cars. Even an elementary grasp of L.A. history, or its great tradition of crime fiction, makes clear which neighborhoods the thin blue line was meant to protect, and which ones – on the eastern and southern fringes of the city – it was meant to contain.

Many superior films about the murkier eras of L.A.’s past, most prominently “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential,” have been profoundly shaped by an awareness of the darkness beneath the California dream. On the surface, “Gangster Squad” is simply a trivial entertainment that doesn’t care (Fleischer’s previous films are the comedies “Zombieland” and “30 Minutes or Less”), but beyond that it paints a fundamentally mendacious portrait. Will Beall’s screenplay (based, to a very limited extent, on a book by Paul Lieberman) posits a lot of ludicrous patriotic conversation, in which cops stand around at backyard barbecues exclaiming that, by God, they fought Hitler for American freedom and they’ll be damned if they let Mickey Cohen take it away again.

In order to justify the endless litany of crimes committed by police officers in this movie, Penn’s rubber-faced Cohen is depicted as a soulless mini-Stalin who has visiting wise guys physically ripped apart by automobiles and his own underlings murdered with power drills. As J. Hoberman observes, the real Cohen was nothing like that. A shrewd political calculator and sharp dresser who reportedly did not smoke or drink and held progressive racial views, Cohen endured as a force in L.A. society long after his fictional demise in this movie. Whether he or William Parker was worse for Los Angeles, in the long arc of history, is very much up for debate; whether “Gangster Squad” is lazy and mendacious soft propaganda is not.

Andrew O

More Andrew O'Hehir.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • This photo. President Barack Obama has a laugh during the unveiling of the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas, Tx., Thursday. Former first lady Barbara Bush, who candidly admitted this week we've had enough Bushes in the White House, is unamused.
    Reuters/Jason Reed

  • Rescue workers converge Wednesday in Savar, Bangladesh, where the collapse of a garment building killed more than 300. Factory owners had ignored police orders to vacate the work site the day before.
    AP/A.M. Ahad

  • Police gather Wednesday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to honor campus officer Sean Collier, who was allegedly killed in a shootout with the Boston Marathon bombing suspects last week.
    AP/Elise Amendola

  • Police tape closes the site of a car bomb that targeted the French embassy in Libya Tuesday. The explosion wounded two French guards and caused extensive damage to Tripoli's upscale al-Andalus neighborhood.
    AP/Abdul Majeed Forjani

  • Protestors rage outside the residence of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Sunday following the rape of a 5-year-old girl in New Delhi. The girl was allegedly kidnapped and tortured before being abandoned in a locked room for two days.
    AP/Manish Swarup

  • Clarksville, Mo., residents sit in a life boat Monday after a Mississippi River flooding, the 13th worst on record.
    AP/Jeff Roberson

  • Workers pause Wednesday for a memorial service at the site of the West, Tx., fertilizer plant explosion, which killed 14 people and left a crater more than 90 feet wide.
    AP/The San Antonio Express-News, Tom Reel

  • Aerial footage of the devastation following a 7.0 magnitude earthquake in China's Sichuan province last Saturday. At least 180 people were killed and as many as 11,000 injured in the quake.
    AP/Liu Yinghua

  • On Wednesday, Hazmat-suited federal authorities search a martial arts studio in Tupelo, Miss., once operated by Everett Dutschke, the newest lead in the increasingly twisty ricin case. Last week, President Barack Obama, Sen. Roger Wicker, R.-Miss., and a Mississippi judge were each sent letters laced with the deadly poison.
    AP/Rogelio V. Solis

  • The lighting of Freedom Hall at the George W. Bush Presidential Center Thursday is celebrated with (what else but) red, white and blue fireworks.
    AP/David J. Phillip

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 27 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Facebook has been used to find ex-lovers, childhood BFFs or the one who got away. He used it to find the guy who, without his consent, made him his drug mule.
249 points250 points | 23 comments
vote
“This could be a career ender for Michele Bachmann”
168 points169 points | 75 comments
vote
Poll: 3 in 10 voters say “armed revolution might be necessary” - 29% say they believe they'll have to act "in order to protect our liberties" in the next few years
43 points44 points | 18 comments
vote
"New evidence reveals big banks still illegally foreclosing on thousands of homes – and weak settlement allows it."
29 points30 points | comment
vote
Are millennials delusional? New research suggests that members of "Generation Me" are warped by a profound sense of entitlement
27 points28 points | 18 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: "The Shelter Cycle": Raised in a cult

Recommendations