L.A. Confidential: Object Relations and Psychic Growth

Dreams are essentially … dramatizations or ‘shorts’ (in the cinematographic sense) of situations existing in inner reality … figures appearing in dreams … represent part of the ‘ego’ or internalized objects … therefore, the situations appearing in dreams represent relationships existing between endopsychic structures; and the same applies to situations depicted in waking phantasies.

As has been argued elsewhere (Clarke 1994) one way of bringing an object relations perspective to bear on cinema is to see each film as representing the dynamics of an endopsychic structure. In this case all the characters in the film will be personifications of one or other dynamic structure as in the case of Fairbairn's derivation of the basic endopsychic structure from the content of a patient's dream (Fairbairn 1952). Fairbairn used three different approaches to the dream before looking at it as representing the dynamics of endopsychic structure and, similarly, any attempt to apply this approach to a film must recognize the plethora of other forms of analysis to which it might be subjected. Any film, like other real objects in the world, is capable of sustaining a variety of analytic responses. This is just one among many.

I want to illustrate the way in which this approach might be applied to film by looking at L.A. Confidential (, dir. Curtis Hanson, Warner Bros.) in some detail. My argument will be that there is a process of psychic growth depicted in the film through the doings and experiences of its three main characters - the only ones to be explicitly introduced to us as the film starts - Bud White (Russell Crowe), Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) and Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey). I suggest that each of these can be taken as a model for a possible central self but, as the film opens, each is flawed in some way. As the film develops each begins to grow and is transformed but, in the end, Vincennes is dead, White is immobilized and only Exley thrives. Exley has