The films of Ayer

Rating: Null/10 (25 December 2012)

This is a review of "Street Kings", "Training Day" and "End of Watch", three films by David Ayer.
Ayer's best film since "Harsh Times", "Street Kings" stars Keanu Reeves as Detective Tom Ludlow, a burnt out cop who spends his days dodging bullets, taking down bad guys and dealing with a corrupt law enforcement system rife with scumbags in uniform. Sounds clichéd? Ayer's film moves like magic. He captures the tone and tempo of sleazy pulp fiction, revels in the genre's trashiness, writes in a baroque, pulp-prose style and volleys dialogue back and forth like Howard Hawks on cocaine.
Ayer, who started out as a screenwriter, also has an ear for snappy noir dialogue. His characters don't talk, so much as they play ping-pong with words, prose hurtling along with staccato intensity; like drumbeats. It's trashy, but it knows it's trashy; 1950s B movie sleaze filtered through a modern prism.
The film's all hand held cameras and snappy cuts, pausing now and then only to capture noir infused, sun drenched shots of California. We get convenience store shootouts, foot-chases through LA's Latino quarter, ominous nighttime skylines and the bloody haze of downtown ghettos. In Ayer's films, California's a war zone.
The message here is also less problematic than that of Ayer's other work. Here Keanu plays your typical loose cannon of a cop. He's a modern Dirty Harry, a fascist with a badge, a ruthless authoritarian who breaks the law and shoots up punks, all in the guise of doing the "greater good". To eliminate evil, Keanu believes, you have to employ risqué tactics, perhaps even the mendaciously immoral and outright illegal. The ends justify the means. Deal with it.
Only they don't. Keanu eventually realises he's a messed up dirt-bag who's been used as a violent blunt object by both the good guys and the bad. Ticked off, this little pawn visits his king, a chubby Police Chief who's house, in a nice bit of symbolism, literally has money, drugs and blackmail tapes leaking out of its walls; the up-scale veneer can barely hold back the corruption.
Ayer also wrote the screenplay for "Training Day". Another cop thriller, it stars Denzel Washington as a vicious LAPD narcotics officer who takes an ambitious rookie (Ethan Hawke) under his wing. Washington's a criminal and crooked cop. Ethan, in contrast, is our great white hope, representative of Good, white American values, family and strong morals. Faced with the multi-ethnic criminality of both LA and Washington, Ethan opts firstly to simply walk away. Let the animals kill themselves. But Washington won't allow it. He attempts to corrupt Ethan – first with marijuana and later with harder vices - before provoking him into righteous violence. Even then Ethan refuses to deliver the kill blow; its up to the people of the slums – Latinos, Russians and blacks – to finish off their own kind. Ethan's hands remain clean. Whilst the film's first hour is thrilling, it becomes increasingly racist and stereotypical as it progresses.
Racism and stereotypes are precisely what gush forth from Ayer's "End of Watch". The film finds actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena playing a pair of LAPD cops. They're young, macho cowboys, high on testosterone and hungry for action. Much of the film juxtaposes the goodness of our virtuous heroes, their family lives and desire for peace, family and domesticity, with the wild savagery of LA's underclass, who actively hunt our heroes and violently intrude upon their private lives. It's your typically racist Cowboys vs Indians story. Our cops are a fraternity of hazing, backslapping, well-meaning frat-boys (they shoot and kill only in legitimate self-defence; yeah right), who hold the line against the savage chaos that is the Other. It's a jungle out there, which Ayer fetishizes and salivates over, his cops finding black kids tied up in cupboards and butchered limbs hidden in basements. You can find similar scenes in early films which demonized those pesky Native American Indians; monster's gonna getcha.
As this is a millennial police drama, two generations removed from Rodney King and a bevy of other scandals, Ayer's cops are more thankless grunts than boys in blue. They're soldiers. The film, with its pseudo documentarian shaky cam aesthetic (which, bizarrely, makes the film feel manufactured and fake rather than "authentic), as a whole mirrors "Saving Private Ryan", the poster boy of modern cinematic fascism, which likewise masked bigotry, blood-lust and hatred behind patriotism and seemingly wholesome values. "Black Hawk Down" for cops, the film's a love-letter to the thin blue line, a blood-and-guts glorification of "those who keep the savages at bay", which is to say, it's total propaganda and trades in bogus mythology.
Crime films routinely demonstrate no social understanding, and routinely ignore the systemic causes of the appalling, violent conditions underprivileged minorities find themselves in. Others focus on "corrupt policemen" and "rotten apples", which itself misses the larger point that all law enforcement is systemically corrupt. The police/polis has a repressive function, its goal is to make politics disappear, for as long as there is no politics, a hierarchal distribution of power remains intact. The police, including disciplinary institutions and their various ideological components, are there to uphold the status quo and make sure that equality doesn't interfere with the hierarchal distribution of power; these social institutions are inherently inegalitarian. Today people have no problem accepting that the thin red line, the armed forces, does not act in the interest of You or Other, but it's the same with the thin blue line. Indeed, the dollar value of crime stopped by police infinitely out-weights that caused by the same. Borne of the desire of the wealthy to restructure society, to manage the urban poor and potential workforces, the law doesn't exist to prevent injustice acting upwards (the old notion that police protect the happy middle classes from the crazy, lazy lower classes), but largely to promote injustices acting downwards.
7.9/10