VARIANT 33 | WINTER 2008 | 17 Public Service Denouncement Tom Jennings Crime fiction has enjoyed something of a the Madeleine McCann case – an association no renaissance since the 1980s – aspiring to the status doubt boosting box-office despite the two child of serious literature as well as pulp populism, and abduction scenarios bearing scant resemblance. embracing ambitions to critical social commentary The salacious jostling of news-team vultures would from pungent perspectives outside of and in be one common denominator – here descending opposition to mainstream complacency. Many on the depressed environs of Dorchester, South younger writers were inspired by neo-noir pioneers Boston, Massachussetts. Their typically hysterical like James Lee Burke, Elmore Leonard and saturation coverage highlights single-mother James Ellroy, who built on the genre’s founding Helene McCready (a magnificent Amy Ryan) characteristics pitting independent ‘working stiffs’ lamenting her disappeared four-year-old Amanda, and ‘little guys’ against the corporate corruption shepherded by steely-eyed police with neighbours of the monstrous modern urban machine. and family rallying supportively even in a However, these authors’ somewhat old-fashioned, prevailing mood of ominous pessimism. First-time backward-looking sensibilities – partly, no doubt, director Ben Affleck (co-scriptwriter with Aaron due to their generational positioning – result in a Stockard) as well as the story’s creator also hail pessimistic, ultimately even conservative, outlook from these mean streets, while thirty-something concerning prospects for change. Beyond, that is, protagonist PIs Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) the temporary victories of cynically lovable rogues and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) have unmasking the amoral excesses of the rich and lived there all their lives. Passionate attachment powerful – but which promise no enduring impact, to the blue-collar ’hood is reflected in the latters’ either on the overarching societal structures preoccupations (e.g. Kenzie: “Things you can’t and conditions which foster and shelter large- choose ... make you who you are”), and in the scale wrongdoing, or on the range of strategies camera’s regular carefully naturalistic pans around employing variations of brutal and cunning self- inner-city blight, alighting on variously battered seeking machismo shared by heroes and villains and beleaguered, resigned and/or residually alike. These dispiriting trends are reinforced energetic real residents – many of whom are also in the most popular latter-day descendants of cast in supporting roles and minor caricatures private eyes in visualisations of urban chaos and complementing consistently fine acting by star- crime at the cinema, where earlier shades of grey turns. in classic film noir had mutated by the 1990s Despite high-minded pronouncements by into lurid stylisation and the glamourisation of Crimes Against Children Unit cop supremo cartoonish violence – such as in films by John Dahl Captain Jack Doyle – who years ago lost his own and Quentin Tarantino – with social and political child to kidnappers – and ace detectives Remy The relentless context or nuance obliterated by technicolour Bressant and Nick Poole being assigned to the nihilism and comic-book characterisation. case (Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris and John message from media But there is another trajectory in recent noir Ashton respectively lending grizzled gravitas to fiction which starts from the empirically obvious proceedings), official inquiries quickly falter. proposition that the suffering associated with Specialist skip-tracers hunting down debtors and and politicians is criminal violence falls disproportionately and errant spouses, the initially reluctant Kenzie routinely on the poor. Lower-class strata may and Gennaro are beseeched by Amanda’s aunt to abandon the be stigmatised and marginalised in terms of Bea (Amy Madigan) and uncle Lionel (Titus media portrayal as well as in achieving American Welliver) to join the investigation. After putting dreams, yet constitute the bulk of the population the word out on the street, local confidence in irredeemable poor, – so that a point of view properly rooted within their discretion immediately yields leads – first, their milieux and lifeworlds may more accurately a recently-paroled child-molester may be in encapsulate the contours of present social ills. the area; then, the potential involvement of demonising any Alongside authors such as Walter Mosley and notorious gangster kingpin Cheese Olamon (Edi Michael Connelly (Los Angeles), Andrew Vachss Gathegi) and missing drugs-money. Helene’s own deviation from and Richard Price (New York), and George substance-abuse, chaotic self-centred behaviour Pelecanos (Washington DC), a prime exponent of and neglectful parenting compound suspicious this new wave is Dennis Lehane, whose Boston- unreliability, and her elusive boyfriend Skinny-Ray passively respectable based stories deal with urban impoverishment, Likanski’s (Sean Malone) sudden violent execution gentrification, racism, organised crime and clinches the link. No longer patronised by the defeatism. political and institutional corruption in such police for naïve amateurism, the investigators a way as to meditate on how ordinary people uncover the cash and Doyle brokers a highly Maher). Not waiting for backup, Kenzie, Bressant collectively understand and negotiate extremes of unorthodox exchange for Amanda at a remote and Poole’s shootout with the Tretts leaves the adversity – preferring vernacular verisimilitude flooded quarry. Unfortunately the botched switch latter three dead, whereupon Kenzie finds the in geographical and temporal specificity to leaves Cheese shot dead, and she’s believed missing boy already murdered and kills Earle in the quirkily baroque, drifting grifting misfits drowned when a favourite doll is found floating cold blood. Soon afterwards, uniformed cop Devin elsewhere. Since this writer attracted widespread in the treacherous waters. Doyle is sacked for (Michael Kenneth Williams) – another mate from attention with Clint Eastwood’s multiple Oscar- culpable incompetence and retires in disgrace to back in the day – provides vital corroboration winning 2003 version of Mystic River (first the sticks; the little girl’s funeral is held; crime- of the suspicions Kenzie has developed about published in 2001), several more of his books are and-punishment pundits seek new shock-horrors; Bressant who, disguised as a stick-up artist, now the source material for big-budget films whose and everyone sees tragic closure achieved. desperately threatens to assassinate Kenzie and producers expect equally impressive worldwide Except for Kenzie, who still smells a rat – but Titus to seal their silence. But a trigger-happy audiences. The next adaptation to reach the a subsequent spiralling descent into the violent bartender gets him first and Titus confesses their screen and fulfil the projection was Gone, Baby, degradations of child abuse and addiction collaboration in Amanda’s disappearance. Putting Gone (directed by Ben Affleck, 2007; originally eventually reveals depths of duplicity at all levels it all together, Kenzie and Gennaro travel upstate published in 1998), providing a convenient even he’d never dreamed (surely also wrongfooting and discover Amanda playing happily with Doyle’s opportunity to evaluate any advances made by this most viewers – so anyone not wanting the suspense wife. However, refusing Gennaro’s ultimatum to revisionist hardboiled realism. ruined should not read on). When another local leave the child where she’ll (assumedly) have a child disappears, Kenzie’s old schoolfriend, now chance of a decent life, Kenzie reports the crime drug dealer, Bubba Rogowski (Boston rapper and Doyle is arrested. When the dust has settled, In Loco Parentis Slaine) confirms that cocaine addicts Leon and Kenzie visits the reunited mother and daughter. Based on the fourth book in Lehane’s acclaimed Roberta Trett (Mark Margolis and Trudi Goodman) He finds Helene apparently cleaned-up, but Kenzie & Gennaro series, Gone, Baby, Gone’s UK are sheltering paedophile Corwin Earle (Matthew preparing for a new date (courtesy of the local theatrical release was delayed in sensitivity to 18 | VARIANT 33 | WINTER 2008

celebrity status afforded her by the media) and plot may not seem outrageous at all, resonating obligingly babysits, considering the situation far beyond its particular setting to the War on The innocent purity thoughtfully as Amanda gazes mutely at the Welfare everywhere. But in a South Boston rapidly television ... decaying beyond reasonable hopes of salvation, Kenzie and Gennaro are cast as representative of to be protected here a grass-roots, working-class sensibility, yet without Rule of Law the luxury of cynical fatalism if they are to nail These plot twists in the last part of the film the truth and do their job. And although the film is the lingering quasi- certainly serve to undermine our assumptions as loses the bulk of Lehane’s meticulous dialogue cultivated so far – and Kenzie and Gennaro’s too, conveying the full convincing texture of conflicting religious illusion that leaving them disagreeing over a final dilemma so attitudes in action, viewers are given several hints fundamental as to terminate their professional among the blood-red herrings that the protection and romantic relationship. Nevertheless, ultimate of childhood innocence is a (perhaps the) primal things might turn judgements and justifications concerning pretext for other, guiltier, agendas. rights, wrongs and likely consequences remain So, encouraged to perceive Helene harshly suspended. Not only are heroic rescue, reassuring through circumstantial implication, explicit out right by trusting redemption, and cautionary tragedy refused, but condemnation, and the harsh glare of unforgiving the conservative grounds upon which viewers attention, we never glimpse direct evidence of her the benevolence might expect such outcomes – from banal actual everyday relationship with her daughter. Hollywood crime-action pulp to the parallel (but We are expected to assume the worst. Kenzie, no less fantasy-ridden) morbid tabloid shock- though, sees genuine grief (as opposed to self- of those in charge horror over current affairs – are comprehensively pity) beneath her white-trash bravado – which undercut. Such disquieting limbo was obviously inclines him to accept the mission – while Gennaro and believing their deliberate, and scriptwriting decisions altering embraces advocacy for Amanda herself, regardless and cutting the source novel wholesale pass the of the concerns of the adults. These combined buck to us even more starkly. But, when the crunch criteria, without which the case would have gone rationalisations. comes, the alternative courses of action are already decisively cold, specifically rebut any stereotypical so thoroughly tainted by association with webs of dismissal of Helene. Contrariwise, Doyle’s parental corruption, collusion, dishonesty and degeneracy fitness is unchallenged, despite his known trauma that imagining integrity in any pat answer is out and willingness to wreck lives to heal it. Who is the of the question. The story’s unusual strength, then, child, to him, beyond a substitute salving private is to insist that apparently straightforward moral pain? Do his influence and affluence – displaced choices, posing isolated individual instances in from urban hell to rustic idyll – guarantee saintly simplistic good-versus-evil binaries, don’t stand credentials in arrogating to himself godlike scrutiny once their complex, ambivalent contexts choice? Then shouldn’t all the suffering children and histories are laid bare. ‘Doing the right’ thing be saved from the agony of the ghetto and the evils thus depends on what inevitably has to be ignored, impoverishment produces? Even if the manner assimilated, or denied. of its accomplishment adds to the oppression and The critical consensus concerning Gone, Baby, injustice nourishing desperation in the first place, Gone, however, has been that the potential force simultaneously precluding youthful renewal? of any such sophisticated philosophy is scuppered While, irrespective of increments of positivity by the denouement’s implausibility. So deeming which might (arguably) transpire, serving the it unbelievable that the entire saga should selfish desires and fantasies of those in positions to constitute a conspiracy choreographed by Doyle in exploit the system to advantage? ... Anything for a connivance with his lieutenants all the way down happy ending? to Helene’s disapproving relatives; with varying No. The relentless message from media and material, malicious and purportedly altruistic politicians is to abandon the irredeemable interests and self-righteousnesses interweaving poor, demonising any deviation from passively in spiriting the lass to ‘safety’ while her mam respectable defeatism. The innocent purity to drank in the bar. The ensuing host of casualties, be protected here, then, is the lingering quasi- whether dead or bereft – unmourned criminals, religious illusion that things might turn out right Bressant and Poole, sundry written-off lower-class by trusting the benevolence of those in charge dupes – are then blithely sacrificed, pawns for and believing their rationalisations. Whereas, the patriarch’s peace of mind on relinquishing surely, if a single soul spared is the best to hope burdensome responsibility. But what really galls, for, this betrays an utmost cynicism – the complete one suspects – for those of conventional bent – is collapse of legitimacy of the status quo to match that out the window also go all pretensions of its guardians’ insincerity. But Kenzie won’t give up institutional credibility. Crucially, the scheme’s on his people (or himself), following simple ethics, success hinged on acceptance at face value of the fulfilling his promise – returning Amanda to her normal scripts, cliches and homilies of governance, mother – when others see Greater Good accepting public service and basic decency among higher- thoroughgoing corruption in a broken society. Even and lower-order model citizens obeying the law he suspects he chose wrong, in the final scene along with those charged with upholding it. mournfully contemplating prospects, Helene again Whereas not only does the arrogance of power out on the razzle. Yet with no individual correct lead the rogue detectives to assume they can get solution to a collective quandary, maintaining away with their scam, but we are invited to tacitly honesty, integrity and compassion and nourishing underwrite their belief that their actions are in the them around you may represent a pragmatic faith best interests of the child – which was supposed to preferable to fairytale wish-fulfilment making be the official remit all along. token exceptions to busted-flush rules. Credit is due to Gone, Baby, Gone’s makers for going Criminal Justice System against the grain to render such thorny issues even conceivable on mainstream screens. Now, this narrative device – of illegal activity by law-enforcement personnel seeing no other way to fulfil their sworn duty – can be interpreted To Protect and Serve not as a rare unfortunate exception, but rather While acknowledging that it was no mean feat to a particularly vicious and vivid expression of adapt over five-hundred pages of original novel business as usual. Such might be the response, for down to a script five-times shorter – yet still example, of those on the habitual sharp end of managing to effectively convey the spirit and prejudicial insult, harassment and stitch-up from overall ambivalence that the author intended police officers and, for that matter, officialdom in – it is worth looking more closely at the heavy general. In which case an overarching metaphor culling involved in the process of visualising comes into focus – the police force standing for the Dennis Lehane’s scrupulously character- and entire institutional paraphernalia of government, dialogue-driven prose. In his writing, responses to, including its purportedly benevolent arms – whose evaluations of, and wider ramifications pertaining main function is to keep the lid on all the cans to even the most harrowing experiences are of worms threatening polite society. From this contrived to flow naturally from the culturally jaundiced perspective, at least, Gone, Baby, Gone’s and emotionally realistic perspectives of his VARIANT 33 | WINTER 2008 | 19

protagonists and their idiosyncrasies – rather than estrangement at the end then reflects the deeply the arbitrary manipulation to serve externally- personal resonances of the situation rather than imposed stock motivations that Hollywood is dogma – and even this is accommodated in the notorious for. Most obviously in this respect, the subsequent instalment, Prayers For Rain (1999), blockbusting set-piece action scenes and the by which time each sees the merits of the other’s extremes of violence portrayed sit awkwardly with position. the unsentimentally direct depictions elsewhere of Moreover Kenzie, Gennaro, Rogowski, and mundane everyday poverty and its smaller-scale, if Cheese, along with other excised characters, were no less corrosive, aggressions and menaces. In fact all childhood friends, schoolmates or neighbours Lehane admits to imagining the kinetic, balletic with shared histories straddling all sides of the characteristics of such sequences according to law. Bubba Rogowski is the couple’s most steadfast cinematic iconography, and the film treatment friend and protector, not just an old acquaintance certainly obliges – although with a consistent – a borderline-psychotic weapons-dealer and concentration on the visceral and psychological feared enforcer with extensive Mob connections suffering incurred, evoking horror rather than rather than a local pusher. Devin (and his partner cartoon titillation. Nonetheless the slick revelation Oscar) are longstanding close friends too, and and negotiation of their ugly depths cannot Homicide detectives (not patrolmen) into the conceal the fact that the pivotal confrontation at bargain. They have been kept in the loop and Affleck’s self-effacing lead performance at least the quarry and storming of the paedophile’s den, in fact make the decision to arrest Doyle, who captures the author’s intention to sidestep the for example, are side issues both in terms of the had not lost his own child at all; while Bressant tortured existential solipsism of the traditional specific narrative logic as well as the more abstract was ex-Vice squad (where the rogue activities private dick (along with his femme fatale’s Oedipal themes being developed. originated) and married to a former prostitute. supplement) as the driver of the narrative arc True, there is a balanced, gradual progression Unable to have biological children or adopt legally, – even if the central role of Kenzie’s extended of heightening danger, more immediate physical they had also stolen a child – with strong hints of elective family is also sadly sidelined in the filmic threat and raised stakes the further and deeper an established pattern involving many parents logic. But in fact plot structures are secondary into the mire Kenzie and Gennaro stumble. But in deemed deserving or unfit. Thus, among countless in most Lehane novels, being tailored to wider the book’s trajectory – although each blow dealt, elements lost from the plot, such details indicate organising metaphors and signifying chains injury sustained, and narrow escape accomplished that, for Lehane, the function of Kenzie and connecting working-class adjustment to changing wreaks indelible damage on bodies and psyches Gennaro’s familiarity with their neighbourhood conditions – especially in A Drink Before The War that is never trivialised – the objective qualities of wasn’t simply getting information from people who (1994) treating racism, gang warfare, political these deadly situations are overshadowed by the don’t trust the authorities. More ambitiously, it corruption and child abuse and Darkness, Take My shared struggle to interpret their significance in was to develop all of the themes of the story from Hand (1996) with serial killers given succour by the light of limited, provisional understanding. So, the bottom-up, within a working-class community family, neighbourhood, criminal and municipal not surprisingly, the very real evils of organised split along all manner of fault-lines, where no one’s complicity, as well as in Gone, Baby, Gone and crime and the undoubted prevalence of child hands are clean or consciences clear – our heroes Mystic River. sexual abuse were considered prime candidates being just as implicated in the degeneracy that However, while Eastwood’s cinema version to account for Amanda’s abduction. As favoured they encounter and sometimes initiate as are the of the latter retains the quasi-Shakespearean moral panics they also feature centrally in residents saturated with it, the police powerless to symmetry of three characters representing prevailing discourses justifying the whole panoply control it, and the traditional villains of the piece disastrous facets of masculinity, the emphasis was of legal powers whereby the state protects society seeking to profit. shifted entirely by downgrading its grounding in via monitoring and intrusion. Whereas here these the mutual deterioration of their socio-economic are manifestly unfit for purpose, dysfunctioning and psychological wellbeing – a comparable only as pretext and smokescreen, so that any Duty of Care truncation to that observed with Gone, Baby Gone. regressive catharctic release after the usual Despite Ben Affleck’s laudable effort to translate So it seems that mainstream US media remain suspects are disposed of dissipates rapidly as no the substance of its original subtlety and force unwilling or unable to countenance stories which payoff accrues. With the child still missing, only into screen entertainment, then, Gone, Baby, properly respect the real misery neoliberal obstinate dissatisfaction with received wisdom, Gone’s passage from the written word loses, to a barbarism produces at home among its surplus relentlessly seeking sense, eventually makes the significant extent, its characters’ embedding in a populations, but also hint at the potential for difference. And this perverse persistence feeds collective search for meaning in relation to self, “genuine solidarity and the pursuit of shared on a constant interplay of repartee, interplay and family and class in a concrete historical setting. purpose in circumstances in which business synergy between Kenzie and Gennaro mulling Here, the worldviews of those who grew up poor in as usual is decisively threatened”.1 Whereas over matters arising within their network of close the 1970s and 1980s, when the economic, political the opportunity to follow such lines of flight is friends, colleagues and acquaintances among and geographical profile of urban America increasingly exploited in new-school American criminals, cops and ordinary folk – an immersion twisted so drastically, inevitably involve particular crime writing, on screen the balance consistently which is precisely what the film’s condensation inflections of disillusionment with grand narratives tilts towards old-school staples of vicious impasse abandons. of democracy and freedom and broken promises and hopeless tragedy – from, for example, Spike A world in flux to be deciphered by the hard of upward mobility and social inclusion. The moral Lee’s 1995 adaptation of Richard Price’s Clockers graft of socially-situated knowledge instead hard- landscapes, intellectual priorities, and practical (1992) through to HBO’s much-heralded television boils down to showcase showdowns in a static choices of those of the younger generations who soap opera The Wire, chronicling the small- fantasy universe of heroic fallen angels and still pursue a better life without succumbing to the time drug trade and its policing in Baltimore, archetypal demons puppet-mastered by unseen seductions of materialistic misanthropy can hardly Ohio (featuring scripts by Price, Pelecanos fiendish hands. It resembles all those tiresomely be expected to show patience with the middle-class and Lehane, among others). Conversely, one mechanical detective thriller formats, onscreen liberal pieties that have failed them so miserably. cinematic exception to this recalcitrant rule is and in the genre literature, which pander to Instead they fall back on their own resources Ray Lawrence’s remarkable Jindabyne (Australia, disgusted fascination at the depths of human – such as they are – and manage in this story to 2006). Here an attack on a child again radiates depravity while working overdrive to reassure penetrate opaque veils of deception and delusion, heart-wrenchingly throughout a community, with us of our distance from it. But Lehane’s version misdirection and malice. In the process the the murder whodunnit also irrelevant, yet the flirts with these conventions only to flout and fascistic overtones are exposed of a contemporary film closes optimistically as ordinary townsfolk transcend them, and Kenzie is no lone crusader cultural eugenics foisted on the weak by the strong mobilise their sorrowful social fabric towards for justice – despite the screenplay’s best efforts. in the name of a humanistic duty of care which fellow-feeling and a fresh start.2 In other words, Most importantly, Gennaro’s role is attenuated no alternative means can be found to fulfil. Yet it can be done – in the imagination as in real life to the extent that she appears no more than the critics deem this preposterous to the point of – however much we are encouraged to disbelieve it. a feminine accessory representing empathy, mendacity – so that one wonders which world they concern and support counterpointing Kenzie’s inhabit. masculine detachment and objectivity. Whereas Without in any way minimising the dreadful www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk practically the opposite is the case in the book, anguish precipitated by a lost child, Lehane where he is intuitive and she more practical and cultivates those associations of this iconic Notes organised, a better planner and indeed a better image which loom largest in today’s deprived 1. See my ‘Rose Coloured Spectacles’, in Variant, No. 27 shot – she actually shoots Bressant, and saves neighbourhoods – not least the shattered 2. See my review for Freedom magazine, available at http:// Kenzie’s bacon much more often than vice versa aspirations of parents for their offspring and the libcom.org throughout the series. As a partnership of rough vain hopes of a bright future among the youth equals, their conflictual relationship is central to themselves. The careful accretion of biographical the investigation’s progress, and their contrasting detail and the backstories of the protagonists perspectives on relationships and family arising situate these problematics squarely within their from their own wretched childhoods have left lived experience, modulating their ethics and them both deeply flawed and of questionable conduct, so that they are fully part of a local scene moral stature in various different respects. Their which, on the other hand, the filmmakers can only objectify in sweeping anthropological survey. Here,