The Black Dahlia
Page 38
Crazed. Magnificently fatuous. Hurtful, hopeful, enraged. The reason why I wrote this novel. Misogynistic fury codified. The reason why Betty Short was killed and why I tell redemption tales aimed at women.
And why I’m a Hilliker much more than an Ellroy.
“Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.”
Josh Hartnett understood the precept. His filmic Bucky Bleichert packs that torch for someone out there. The physical Harnett is my described Bucky and me. He’s tall, lanky, and dark-haired, with small brown eyes. Hartnett’s performance nails Bucky with no histrionic excess. He excels at projecting cognition. Bucky Bleichert is always measuring and thinking. He’s circumspect, intelligent, watchful. He’s persistent, self-protecting, and reluctantly decent. He retains a tenuous dignity as Dahlia mania consumes him. The novel is phrased as a young man coming of age in a hell of his own making. Bucky Bleichert is solely responsible for his own descent. He made specious moral choices early in life and brought a grievously flawed soul to the Dahlia. Hartnett captures that. He appears in every scene and narrates the film. He carries the film’s moral vision. He embodies a positive strain of the Hilliker code: you’re fearful, but you always go forward.
The film spins off the axis of DePalma and Hartnett. It’s a three-mode constellation: thriller/film noir/historical romance. The design is near-German Expressionist. It’s L.A./it’s not L.A./ it’s L.A. seen by Dahlia fiends in extremis. The cinematographer was Vilmos Zsigmond. The production designer was Dante Ferretti. The costume designer was Jenny Bevan. The film commands you to savor every scene and revel in your visual entrapment. This textual richness symbolizes the Dahlia’s hold on us. We can never look away. She won’t let us.
Scarlett Johannson, Hilary Swank, and Aaron Eckhart backstop Hartnett. They tweak him and crowd him and push him toward his destiny. They meet him in force of performance and somehow retreat—as if they know that he had to take the ultimate fall for Betty and the story is his to tell in the end. Josh Friedman made my story Hartnett’s story and DePalma’s. The essence of my book was forcefully and luminously captured. Friedman knows that obsession is a self-referential madness commonly known as love. It liberates in the short run and finally destroys. Love requires self-sacrifice and deference. Bucky Bleichert learns that and achieves a tenuous peace.
I knew that twenty years ago. I shaped the book around that theme. Knowledge is quite often not power. Dramatic portent does not constitute the will to change. I’m circling back to the lesson of a book I wrote at the tail end of my youth. The lesson is change your life now.
I’ve had splendid teachers. Betty, Jean, those two other women. This essay and the film it celebrates note a conclusion. Betty and Jean continue with me. I want them to remain sans public dialogue. They’ll flourish in silence. It’s a hush they’ve earned.
My mother was nine years older than Betty. Her life span stretched twenty-one years longer. She knew more than Betty. She was a big sister. She had things to teach her. They could have been Saturday night cut-loose girls together, before Saturday nights cut them down.
That makes Betty a Hilliker. That assigns her a plot in the cold Wisconsin graveyard where I’ll rest one day. It’s my bloodline in repose. Love God. Fear God. Seek goodness as dark forces assail you.
The novel ends with Kay Lake Bleichert pregnant. Bucky travels east for an almost certainly troubled reunion. The year was 1949. Their daughter was born in 1950. She’s fifty-six now. She’s a sturdy and dutiful woman with narrative gifts. She’s Jean and Betty and me. She’s a Hilliker assuredly.
I won’t state whether Kay and Bucky are still alive. I created them, so it’s my determination. I know, but I’m not telling. The Black Dahlia case continues to unfold in my silence. In that sense, it’s your call.
I would like to thank the many people who served to make my novel such a fine film. I would like to thank Helen and Joan for their great kindness and generosity.
“Cherchez la femme, Bucky. Remember that.”
I do. It’s God’s great gift to me and my moral bedrock. I will never forsake that pure thought.
James Ellroy
San Francisco
February 27, 2006
THE BLACK DAHLIA
On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a Los Angeles vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia —and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history.
Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard: Warrants Squad cops, friends, and rivals in love with the same woman. But both are obsessed with the Dahlia—driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl’s twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches— into a region of total madness.
“Brutal and at the same time believable.”
—New York Times
“A masterpiece.”—People