An Observation About Changeling

by tristero

I hope Dennis won’t mind my straying yet again onto his beat. I just saw Changeling, the new Clint Eastwood film starring Angelina Jolie and I think it’s one of his best films – not on the level of Unforgiven, to be sure, but still an excellent movie. I’d be curious to get his take on it (Dennis, have you reviewed it? I couldn’t find anything).

I was curious about the story behind the movie so I tried a google. The ways in which it differs from the actual true story confirmed some thoughts i had about some of the subtexts Eastwood works with.

The rest of this post is now under a Severe Spoiler Alert. Please see the movie first.

The story probably came to the attention of Eastwood and/or his collaborators from this article in the LA times from February 7, 1999. Eastwood and Co. then filled in more details regarding the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. Here’s one link to that piece of the story and here’s Wikipedia.

To simplify, Eastwood went far further than he had to in order to sanitize the story. Partly, that’s because what really happened was so ghastly it comes close to Ed Gein territory and that, for Eastwood’s audience today, wouldn’t work commercially. Gone, of course, are unnecessary complications, like Collins’ jailbird of a husband (complete with a perfectly serviceable red herring that her son was kidnapped by an ex-con seeking revenge on her husband). But Eastwood also dramatically cleaned up the sordid tale of the Northcott mudererers, eliminating, for example, Gordon Stewart’s mother, who, unlike her son, actually was convicted of the murder of Walter Collins. (Stewart was convicted of other murders). Also missing from the film is the sexual abuse and the tortures of the poor children. And to top it off, Eastwood further cut a stomach-churning tale of incest as well as other family perversions including a truly insane level of pathological lying.

By eliminating most of the uniquely bizarre details of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders, Eastwood went further than needed, I think. After all, this is Dirty Harry and the producer of the lurid Tightrope. In Changeling, however, he stripped the murders of nearly all of their fascination for us morbid voyeurs. True, they don’t become exactly generic slasher murders, but they don’t stick in the craw the way, say, the murders in Zodiac do. Tamping down our interest in seeing/hearing about unique ways to perpetrate atrocities enables him to place the main focus of the film on Christine’s story, as she desperately calls the cops and becomes victimized by what passed for law enforcement in Los Angeles at the end of the 20’s.

And that’s when things get interesting, because in a very real sense, Changeling becomes a film about a corrupt, violent, law-ignoring government, contemptuous of those it rules, manufacturing fake feelgood stories to deflect criticism and investigation of its abuses. It is also the story of a compliant, lazy press far too eager to print those stories: they easily fit standard sentimental journalistic narratives of how a “tough love” law-and-order government should behave. Should you dare to question the government and/or the press accounts of their behavior, you risk being publicly declared insane and disappeared. Finally, it is only through the incessant, nearly obsessional rants disseminated by a new, relatively inexpensive, but very powerful alternative mass media that the torture, corruption, and incompetence of the rogue government is exposed and denounced.

Sound familiar?

Now, Eastwood is far too sophisticated a filmmaker for anyone to claim that the Bush administration is all that Changeling is about. The serial killer angle is more than just a huge Maguffin (btw, Eastwood quotes at least once from a Hitchcock film, Foreign Correspondent: check out the umbrellas on the steps). The film fits in easily to the genre of LA noir – Chinatown, L.A. Confidential, to name two examples – and that is certainly the main focus of the film, its principle narrative and plot.

However, what I’m suggesting is that Eastwood is much too subtle an artist in his late period to make a film “just” about LA lowlife anymore than Kurosawa was making movies only about samurai (and yes, of course, Kurosawa’s the greater filmmaker). The barely hidden subtext in Changeling is our present time and its hero a strong, even shrill, voice who fights the powers that be with everything she’s got. Why? Because they are complicit in failing to recover her “angel,” a deliberate verbal link by Eastwood to the illusion of a benign “City of Angels,” and a (police) force for good.

Like another great recent movie by a serious director – Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution – there is no mistaking the conscious effort in a period film to confront the opening of the gates of Hell over the past eight years. Eastwood’s film is more conventional than Lee’s, but that isn’t necessarily a criticism (although I have to be honest and admit I think Lust, Caution is the better film). Eastwood is making Hollywood movies with all the constraints on content that large budgets and a star like Jolie demand (by the way, I thought she did a wonderful job), the tradeoff being that he reaches a far wider audience than Lee ever will (at least in the US). Pace Adorno, all art is about constraints as much as it is about freedom and expression. In this discussion, popularity is, to a great extent, just one more factor an artist weighs when creating a work. (And yes, while one’s payday is another factor; for a variety of reasons, I think Eastwood would have made a vastly different film if raking in big bucks was all he had in mind.)

I gather Eastwood endorses McCain. Odd. If so, you’d never know that from seeing Changeling. I truly think the anti-rightwing themes here are deliberately played up to bring up parallels with movement conservatism of the kind the modern Republican party, including McCain of course, practice. (It goes without saying that nothing goes into his films that Eastwood isn’t aware of: I’m certain lefty writers didn’t sneak this stuff past him.)

Again, this is a film to be seen.