Ellroy Projecting His Oedipal Desire
By FyreHaar | Posted Under Book Reviews | Comments (6)
I have never wanted so fiercely for someone to kill themselves as I wanted for Bucky Bleichert to blow his fucking brains out.
Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard are LAPD officers. Brought together by political maneuvering, they become partners and eventually close friends. Their partnership, friendship and lives are wrecked by the Black Dahlia murder investigation. The novel is written from Bleichert’s point of view. His whole world and seemingly all of LA eventually revolves around the Dahlia. She becomes the only motivating factor in his life. He is not the only detective in the novel who talks to Elizabeth Short (the Dahlia’s real name) and swears they will find who killed her.
Bleichert’s obsession takes on a sexual element. I found this to be seriously creepy, which could be good except that it rang false. Even though the book is set in Los Angeles in 1947 with period slang and dialog, the characters were very relatable. I never felt a disconnect with their motivations. Then Ellroy makes more and more of a point that Bucky is trying to both protect and possess the Dahlia. His obsession becomes overtly sexual in nature. His desire to have sex with Elizabeth Short is so central to his motivation that that other characters admit to his face that they are using it to manipulate him. He is powerless in the face of it. Reading the afterword it becomes obvious that Ellroy was projecting his Oedipal desire onto Bucky and the Dahlia. It was a disservice to the character. Instead of letting him develop in a more organic fashion, Ellroy pushes too much of himself into Bleichert. This was the point in the book when I really, really hated Bucky.
Bucky does eventually solve the Dahlia’s murder. As the facts of the case emerged I stopped hating him as much, probably because he had stopped wallowing in the Dahlia and was moving forward on the mystery and in his life. The case twists a couple of times in the final chapters. Eventually Bucky is the only one who knows the whole truth of Elizabeth Short’s death. As we leave him he is moving on to live out the rest of his life, still thinking of her. He frees himself of the burden of discovering her murderer, but he will seemingly never be free of his obsession with her.
Despite its flaws this was a fascinating and engaging read and I am looking forward to reading more Ellroy.
This review is part of the Cannonball Read series. For more of FyreHaar’s reviews, check out Fire & Sonic.
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Comments
Posted by: Modest John at July 13, 2010 2:04 PM
Being a big fan of Curtis Hanson's film L.A. Confidential, I decided to start reading Ellroy's "quartet" a few months ago. I liked the first book, The Black Dahlia. It's big and sprawling and, as you say, creepy, but it was gritty and gripping, too, and there's a good reveal at the end. I also liked that I could see what I thought were glimmers of what would become Confidential.
I liked the second novel, The Big Nowhere, a little less. It's still big and sprawling and you want to get to the bottom of the "whodunnit," but it is also much creepier. I mean just plain weird: a serial killer who uses animal teeth dentures to dismember his victims.
I stuck with Ellroy for the third in the series, L.A. Confidential, figuring it would flesh out some more details of Ed Exley, Bud White, Jack Vincennes, and what went down at the Nite Owl and why. Because the book is always better than the movie, right? The book is actually very different. Not only am I amazed by the job Hanson and Brian Helgeland did of turning the novel into such a superb film, I can hardly believe they would want to turn this book into a movie in the first place. It seems to take the promise of the first book and ruin it with the worst features of the second book--oh look, it's another demented mutilator--leading up to a literal trainwreck. All right, maybe my love for the movie prevented me from reading the book with fresh eyes.
And then I read the fourth in the series, White Jazz. Or tried to, I should say. I think I made it 100 pages in before I gave up. It's hardly writing. It's more a mad libs of Ellroy's trademark slang jerked forth in a jittery all-night benzie rage.
So, try some more Ellroy. See if you like it. But be prepared for disappointment, too. And then go pick up Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and see where Ellroy cribbed a lot of his stuff from to begin with.