#3 El Camino and Perfidia
Hello. Thanks for sticking around. I’m Jack. This is my newsletter. Increasingly I’m thinking that this may become my primary means of expression on the Internet. Using Facebook has become about as morally reprehensible as eating chicken. If you really spend time and look into it, it’s pretty much impossible to make a moral argument for doing either thing and yet almost all of us do it. While I haven’t quite yet given up on either of them, I’m thinking I probably should.
I like this format better. It’s not reliant on an algorithm in order for you to find it. It’s not smashed between ads for things I’d never want to advertise. At least for the moment it lacks randos trolling for the sake of trolling. And while I’m technically still providing content through another company, Substack doesn’t have the moral problems that Facebook does.
Ideally, what I’d like is for all my Facebook friends to start up their own newsletters, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. I had the thought of simply asking my friends for their email addresses and emailing them every month or so to see what’s up. But doing that and not getting a response would bug me. Instead I’m just going to say that you should probably start a newsletter and that if you do, I want to know about it. In fact, if you do, tell me about it and I’ll tell others about it right here.
We’re entering an election year. Facebook has already decided they’re cool with ads that lie to you. It’s going to be worse than 2016. Not better. Getting off Facebook isn’t going to be easy, but it’s already my New Year’s resolution. Facebook is not your friend. I am. (Or at least I’m more of a friend than they are.)
Okay, let’s get on with this.
What I’m Watching
I was a late comer to Breaking Bad. I watched the first episode when it first aired, but it just didn’t grab me. I didn’t care about the characters and it honestly seemed kind of dumb. It wasn’t until a bunch of writers I admire started talking about how much they loved the fourth season that I decided to give it another chance. I’m glad I did because it’s one of those shows that gets better as it goes on. And they nailed the ending. Breaking Bad from beginning to end is solid long-form storytelling. And it’s so well told that I haven’t gotten into the spinoff prequel Better Call Saul (though I hear that’s good too). I just don’t need it.
So it may be a bit unexpected that less than 24 hours after Netflix released the first Breaking Bad movie, El Camino, I sat down and watched it. It’s been six years since we last saw Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman. The last time we saw him he was in an El Camino driving out of the desert after being a tortured prisoner meth cook for almost a year and screaming his head off at the horror of his reality. And that’s exactly where we find him as El Camino starts.
Over the last couple of decades the line between movies and television episodes has become blurry. Shows like The Night Manager are basically six-hour movies. And in that regard, El Camino is basically a two-hour episode. On one level, it’s incredibly impressive to take a six-year break and pick right up like you never stopped filming. If someone has never seen an episode of Breaking Bad, this ‘movie’ would make about as much sense as if they watched the last two episodes of any serialized television show.
My saying that El Camino is just and extended episode would typically be a slam, but when it’s an extended episode of Breaking Bad, it’s really meant as a compliment. Aaron Paul is a better actor than people give him credit for. And he’s so comfortable playing Jesse Pinkman that the performance he gives here is just natural. My favorite part of El Camino was the return of Robert Forster. Forster has always been one of my favorite actors. He gives a gravitas and seriousness to his performances that utterly grounds whatever scene he’s in. He’s the consummate professional. Sadly this is his final performance as he just died from brain cancer.
El Camino is a two-hour epilogue for a long-celebrated series. It’s the cherry on the bloody sundae that is Breaking Bad. It’s not necessary. It’s not essential viewing. But if you want to spend a couple more hours in the world of Jesse Pinkman, this might be exactly what you want.
What I’m Reading
I first encountered the work of James Ellroy when I saw the movie LA Confidential. It remains one of my all-time favorites. The movie was based on Ellroy’s novel and unlike a lot of adaptations, it managed to maintain the spirit of the novel despite significant plot changes. LA Confidential was part of Ellroy’s ‘LA Quartet’, four novels Ellroy wrote that have overlapping characters and take place in LA from the years 1946-1958. They are The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, and White Jazz.
Ellroy followed up these novels with his Underworld USA trilogy that spans the years 1958-1972. These are American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand, and Blood’s A Rover. The Underworld USA novels have no overlapping characters from the LA Quartet.
In 2014 Ellroy came out with Perfidia, the first of what he’s calling his second LA Quartet. These novels take place between 1941 and 1946. The second of these novels, This Storm, came out in June of this year. This group of novels has characters from both his first LA Quartet and the Underworld USA trilogy, only everyone is much younger than we last saw them.
I spent all of last week reading Perfidia. It’s a 691-page novel. Ellroy likes short sentences. And I’m not a fast reader. Like all of Ellroy’s novels, it’s solid noir mixed with actual history. Fictional and historical characters and events mix. At the end of the book, Ellroy has a cast list that tells readers which characters are based on real historical people and which are invented along with what other Ellroy novels they appear in.
While I consistently enjoy Ellroy novels, they tend to have a bit of a formula to them. Typically the novel is told from three character perspectives. Those characters are almost always white males. And by the end of the novel, one of them is dead. But in Perfidia he changes things up. Instead of three perspectives we get four and only two of them are white males. It’s refreshing to see Ellroy play with his own formula.
Perfidia starts like any good crime novel, with a horrific crime. A Japanese family is murdered the day before Pearl Harbor with a cryptic note written about a ‘coming apocalypse’. The murders echo throughout the rest of the novel with our main characters all being bothered in different ways by it.
There are no good guys Perfidia. One of the central protagonists is the crooked police chief from LA Confidential. He lies. He threatens to kill people all the time and sometimes follows through on those threats. There is no definition of hero that would include him. And yet he’s absolutely compelling.
One aspect of Ellroy in general and Perfidia in particular that may be jarring for modern readers is the casual racism that can be found throughout the novel. This is a novel that takes place in the three weeks after Pearl Harbor so anti-Japanese racism is everywhere. Ellroy offsets that by having one of the four characters we follow be Hideo Ashida, lone Japanese lab tech of the LAPD. Ashida is a gifted professional lab tech and an even more gifted survivor. The lengths he goes to try to protect himself and his family from the looming internment are simultaneously understanding and disturbing.
Perfidia does have its faults. Sometimes things happen a little too coincidentally. The racism is occasionally over the top. There are little winks to his other novels throughout the book that at points get distracting. But all of that is a small price to pay for a novel that so encapsulates a particular place and time with memorable characters and incredible plot twists.
My favorite moment in the novel (If you want to remain spoiler free skip this paragraph) is when a cop who has absolutely idealized this female character decides to visit her in jail. At this point he has fantasized what the next few years together are going to be like. He sees her as this untouchable thing of beauty. What he doesn’t know is that just minutes before his visit she was attacked by a guard and nearly killed the guard in self-defense in a brutal, bloody fight. So when he sees her, her face is covered in the guard’s blood and she’s in a straitjacket. It’s a moment that shatters his illusions. And it works because of all the character work that’s gone on before. So I’m sure my description doesn’t do it justice.
If you enjoyed LA Confidential, I think you’ll enjoy Perfidia. Ellroy remains one of my favorite authors. And I suppose I can’t give any higher praise than the fact that after spending all week reading, when I got done, I was ready to buy the next book and just keep on reading.
Okay. That’s all for this week.
- Jack Cameron