To Live and Die in L.A. · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch Eric Masters finish a painting and then set it on fire. He made it; he unmakes it, calmly, the way you'd close a book. A few scenes later he's standing at an offset press while the film slows to something near instruction, and fresh twenties peel off the roller still tacky, indistinguishable from the money in your pocket. Same hands. Same patience. Friedkin keeps insisting on Masters as an artist so that we feel the rhyme he's built the whole film on: forgery and creation are one gesture. That burning canvas is the door into To Live and Die in L.A., and there's a name for what walks through it.

Deleuze, borrowing from Nietzsche, argued that cinema's deepest power was never to show us the truth. It was to make truth and falsity undecidable, and to do that as a creative act rather than a deception. He called this the powers of the false. The counterfeit bill is its cleanest possible emblem — a thing that is false and yet works, that spends, that passes. Classical cinema had always rested on a quiet contract: the image testifies, the camera is a witness, what you see happened. Friedkin takes that contract and runs it through Masters' press. The film about a man who makes flawless fakes is itself a flawless fake — Robby Müller shoots Los Angeles as a city of pure signage, oranges and acid teals pooled on concrete, a surface with nothing behind it. The image of a counterfeit, made by the counterfeit of an image.

Masters is what Deleuze would call the forger, le faussaire — not a liar but a maker of truth, the figure who creates by falsifying and shifts identity as easily as he shifts ink. He's the film's real artist, and the film knows it. Chance, the agent chasing him, is the one running on borrowed conviction.

Müller's city does something Deleuze tracked with precision. The rail yards, the drainage channels, the bleached anonymous freeways, the sterile offices — these aren't backdrops that a story moves across. They're what he named the any-space-whatever, espace quelconque: emptied, fragmented places that have stopped serving as settings for action and started radiating pure mood instead. You don't orient yourself in this L.A. You float in it. The human figures sit isolated inside hard reflective surfaces, dwarfed, and the synth pulse of Wang Chung — cold where it should be warm — seals the vacancy in. The action goes somewhere; the spaces go nowhere.

And here is the film's strangest move, the one that makes it more than a stylish genre exercise. On paper this is an action-image machine at full throttle: a man perceives a situation (his partner murdered) and acts to change it (revenge). Friedkin even stages the wrong-way freeway chase as a direct answer to his own French Connection, all real speed and long-lens terror, the sensory-motor circuit pushed past redline. But Deleuze noticed that after a certain point in cinema, characters could no longer react adequately to what they saw — the situations got too big, too rotten, and action stopped resolving them. He called this the crisis of the action-image. To Live and Die in L.A. is the crisis dressed as its opposite. All that kinetic conviction, and it pays out nothing. Chance is shot in the face, abruptly, ingloriously, well before the hero is supposed to win — the structural shock Friedkin lifts straight from Psycho, where Hitchcock destroyed the audience's anchor mid-film. The revenge plot keeps running with its hero dead. Vukovich inherits not justice but Chance's ruthlessness, coldly claiming the dead man's informant in the last movement.

That closing circuit is a line of slope — Deleuze's irreversible downward slide, the entropy of men consumed by the methods they use to fight the world. The contagion that ran through Cruising, where Friedkin's undercover man dissolved into what he infiltrated, returns here as a law: cross into the counterfeiter's economy and you start trading in fakes yourself, including a fake self.

The lineage is legible in the craft. The documentary-grade chase and procedural texture are debts to The French Connection and Bullitt; the cool, fatalistic amorality comes through Point Blank; the conviction that the schemer is doomed is Kubrick's, out of The Killing. What Friedkin seeded is just as clear — Michael Mann's whole cop-and-criminal-as-mirror cinema, and the entire "neon noir" palette that Müller more or less invented in these frames.

What did it do to film as an art? It counterfeited the action thriller. It hands you every pleasure of the form — the chase, the sting, the hard men — and quietly voids the moral currency they're supposed to buy. The glossy Reagan-era surface isn't decoration; it's the argument. A culture of perfect fakes, filmed by a man who'd lost his own standing and made his comeback by forging a hit out of unknowns.

So rewatch it for the money. Watch how often Friedkin frames a surface — a bill, a canvas, a mirrored wall, the neon skin of the city — and ask which of them is real. The film's answer is the one Deleuze would give: stop asking. The power was never in the truth. It was in the pass.