To Live and Die in L.A.: Friedkin's Nihilist Neon

William Friedkin spent the first half of the 1980s in a professional wilderness. Sorcerer had bankrupted its own reputation, Cruising had scandalised without satisfying, and the man who made The French Connection and The Exorcist was, by 1985, a director Hollywood had quietly filed under “difficult”. Then he made To Live and Die in L.A., a lurid, pulsing, morally bankrupt thriller about counterfeiters and the Secret Service agents who chase them, and reminded everyone that when it came to putting velocity on screen, almost nobody could touch him.

It is a film that looks like a sports drink advert and behaves like a nihilist tract. Wang Chung’s synth pulse throbs under sun-blasted freeway shots and neon-drenched night interiors, and the whole thing is so aggressively of its decade that it risks reading as camp. It is not camp. Under the gloss is one of the coldest crime films Hollywood produced in the eighties, a movie with genuine contempt for the idea that the good guys are good.

The plot, and why the plot barely matters

Richard Chance (William Petersen) is a Secret Service agent whose partner is murdered days from retirement by Rick Masters (Willem Dafoe), an artist who funds his lifestyle by printing flawless counterfeit currency. Chance decides to take Masters down by any means, dragging his reluctant new partner John Vukovich (John Pankow) into an escalating spiral of entrapment, theft and betrayal. The source is a novel by Gerald Petievich, a former Secret Service agent who co-wrote the screenplay, and the counterfeiting sequences carry the authority of someone who watched it done.

The film shows Masters actually making money — the plates, the paper, the drying, the cutting — in a wordless, near-fetishistic sequence that recalls the process-worship vo.rs has tracked from Rififi onward. Friedkin treats forgery as craftsmanship, and Dafoe plays Masters as a genuine artist who happens to have chosen crime as his medium. It is the same fascination with competence-as-character that Michael Mann built a whole career on, and the timing is uncanny: this and Mann’s Manhunter arrived within a year of each other, both starring William Petersen, both convinced that the way a professional works tells you everything about who he is.

Petersen and the empty man

Petersen’s Chance is the film’s most radical idea. He is the ostensible hero — a lawman avenging his partner — and he is a reckless, adrenaline-addicted creep who base-jumps off bridges for fun and treats an informant (Darlanne Fluegel) as a resource to be used and discarded. Petersen, a Chicago stage actor in his first major film role, plays him with a jock’s grin and a total absence of interior life. He is charisma with nothing behind it.

That hollowness is the point. Friedkin and Petievich construct a cop who is morally indistinguishable from the criminal he pursues — both men take what they want, both destroy anyone in the way, both mistake momentum for meaning. The film belongs squarely in the tradition vo.rs has mapped in twelve neo-noirs worth the dark: stories where the badge is a costume and the moral centre has quietly gone missing. Where a classical noir hero was doomed by a woman or a debt, Chance is doomed by his own emptiness. He wants the thrill of the chase, and the film is honest enough to admit that this makes him dangerous to everyone around him.

The chase, and Friedkin’s physics

Then there is the car chase. Friedkin had already directed the greatest car chase in American cinema in The French Connection, and here he sets out to top himself with a pursuit that ends up going the wrong way down a Los Angeles freeway against oncoming traffic. It is a masterpiece of screen geography — you always know where every vehicle is, which direction the danger is coming from, how much room is left — and it was staged with real cars on real roads at real speed, a discipline that has almost entirely vanished from an era of digital vehicles.

What makes the sequence more than a stunt is its placement. Friedkin drops it into the middle of the film rather than the climax, and he attaches it to a plan that is already morally rotten. The exhilaration is real and so is the disgust; you are thrilled by Chance’s driving and appalled by why he is driving. That doubled response is Friedkin’s signature. He made his name forcing audiences to feel a charge they could not entirely approve of, the same trick that powered the faith-and-filth engine of The Exorcist and the cursed fatalism of Sorcerer.

Why it works

The film’s surfaces are the argument. Robby Müller — the great cinematographer of Wim Wenders’s road films — shoots Los Angeles as a place of poisonous beauty, all bleached sky and burning sunset and cold fluorescent night. The Wang Chung score, which could have dated the picture into oblivion, instead functions as a kind of moral anaesthetic: it keeps the film moving so fast and so seductively that you almost fail to notice how ugly the behaviour on screen has become. Style becomes a form of complicity, which is exactly the trap the film is setting.

This is the crucial distinction between To Live and Die in L.A. and the many lesser neon crime films it influenced. vo.rs has argued elsewhere about the neon problem — the way so much post-Drive cinema uses colour and synth as a substitute for having anything to say. Friedkin’s film has the surfaces and the substance. The gloss is not decoration; it is the delivery system for a genuinely bleak view of American ambition. Every gorgeous frame is in the service of telling you that these people are empty and their world is beautiful and neither fact will save them.

Petievich’s law-enforcement background gives the film a texture that pure invention rarely manages. The Secret Service work here is grubby, procedural and compromised — informants leaned on, evidence bent, a robbery committed by agents to fund a sting. Friedkin does not editorialise about any of it; he simply shows the mechanism and lets the audience notice that the machinery of justice and the machinery of crime are running on the same fuel. That refusal to comment is what separates the film from the more sentimental cop dramas of its moment, and it is why the picture has aged into something closer to a document of institutional cynicism than a period thriller.

Where to watch: it streams in rotation on the arthouse platforms and exists in a strong Blu-ray transfer that does Müller’s photography justice. Watch it as a double bill with its batch sibling Manhunter for the full Petersen-in-1985 experience, or against Michael Mann’s debut Thief, which shares its conviction that the way a man works is the truest thing about him.

Spoilers below

Friedkin’s masterstroke is the killing of Richard Chance. In the raid on Masters, roughly twenty minutes before the film ends, Chance is shot in the face and dies. The protagonist — the star, the driver, the reckless centre of the whole picture — is simply gone, two-thirds of the way through what looked like his story. It is one of the most genuinely shocking structural gambits in mainstream 1980s cinema, and Friedkin plays it completely straight: no slow motion, no last words that tie things up, just a sudden wet gunshot and an empty space where the hero used to be.

Reportedly the studio shot an alternate ending in which Chance survives, and Friedkin fought to keep the death. He was right. The whole film has been arguing that Chance is a void wearing a badge, and killing him abruptly is the only honest payoff. Heroism built on nothing but appetite does not earn a heroic exit.

What follows completes the thesis. Vukovich, the decent partner who spent the film horrified by Chance’s methods, finishes the case — and in the final scene he turns up at the informant’s apartment wearing Chance’s leather jacket and speaking in Chance’s clipped, predatory register. The rot is transmissible. The system does not remove men like Chance; it grows new ones, and the mild, principled colleague becomes the next void. Friedkin closes on that transformation and offers no comfort about it. The counterfeiter made fake money; the Secret Service made a fake man, and the film suggests the second forgery is the more dangerous of the two. John Turturro appears in an early role as Masters’s jailed courier, and Dean Stockwell oils the whole ecosystem as the crooked lawyer, so that by the end there is no one on screen whose hands are clean. Friedkin lets the credits roll over a city that has absorbed all of it without a flicker.