To Live and Die in Las Vegas: William Friedkin and "CSI" (Season 8, Episode 9: "Cockroaches")

It all starts with a slam-bang, high-octane pursuit, kinetically captured by Friedkin’s impulsive ferocity in a manner that doesn’t allow viewers to catch their collective breaths. I’m not a fan of “CSI”, so I couldn’t tell you if car chases are a staple of the series, but I’ll make the claim anyway that they seldom could have achieved the forward-probing intensity of the one present here. It never ceases to amaze me what they can now show on network television, as the close of the chase (before the opening credits) are that of a CGI-rendered body being bloodily splayed open on the scorching, hard asphalt. (It should be noted that this chase is entirely independent of the proper narrative, serving only to produce a corpse for the investigation.) So, in totality, it’s probably the most blatantly Friedkin touch in the entire episode, but this doesn’t denigrate it: it could easily stand alongside the celebrated ones in THE FRENCH CONNECTION (1971) and TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. (1985), and to a lesser extent, the automobile pursuits in JADE (1995) and his tele-film JAILBREAKERS (1994). At this point, they are the director’s specialty (especially when he tackles action) and the audience expects to be treated to a new interpretation whenever he’s behind the camera.

Surprisingly, as this is a reunion of sorts for the star and director of TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., William Petersen (as Grissom) is virtually given nothing to do but to gravely issue stern glances at Warrick Brown (Gary Dourdan), the episode’s real focus. As in TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A., Petersen is the older mentor, a character we feel we can never pin down or thoroughly judge. Don’t get me wrong, he’s not a cheat or warped in the same ways the character Richard Chance was, but there’s a degree to which Grissom takes on the status of a big brother with shoes too large to fill. John Pankow occupied that little-brother position in L.A., just as Dourdan represents that here.

A glitzy Las Vegas strip club, run by old-school mob lord Lou Gedda (a latter-day Charles Laughton-esque John Capodice), orchestrates a swindle of overcharging certain high profile patrons the wrong price for champagne after their nights of drunken debauchery with the club’s strippers. When they refuse to pay, it results in a pile-up of broken bones, sliced-up genitalia, and dead bodies. The only witness is a questionable rundown bum (played by an appropriately tattered Dennis Christopher, of BREAKING AWAY [Peter Yates, 1979] and FADE TO BLACK [Vernon Zimmerman, 1980]); I don’t want to stress his importance, but one of the key characteristics of programs like these is the familiar faces of yesteryear’s cinema that turn up from time to time; Christopher’s little more than a red herring, someone who pretends to know more than he does, but his presence is welcome anyway.

Crime Scene Investigator Brown -- who seemingly has had a problem with either drinking or drugs in the show’s history judging by a scene where he hesitates entering the seedy place -- prowls the club as just such a customer, hoping that the crooked powers-that-be may attempt some rough stuff on him. Of course, as Petersen’s Grissom describes, they’re much smarter than that, and they instead eventually take vengeance on Brown in a much more disturbing, earth-shattering way.

Drinking heavily and reveling with one of the attractive dancers (played by Rebecca Budig), Brown finds himself playing into their hand, enabling the underbelly of the unseen forces just enough rope to hang him with. When Brown questions why she works for such an organization, the dancer sticks up for her employees, stating that it’s mobsters like Gedda that built Vegas to be what it was in the first place. Self-deluded as she may be, she’s right, but it’s tough to ascertain if she’s completely aware of her pawn-like status in this private game between Brown and the mob when it’s exposed in a rigidly fatalistic reveal in the final seconds. Friedkin encapsulates this connection between Brown and the dancer by housing their evening spent together in an immaculately white “dream-room” of sorts, where words are reverberated back and a stack of condoms may temporarily take on the visage of a dagger. Friedkin also experiments with flash-frames once again, but instead of CRUISING’s hardcore gay porn inserts, they are inserts inside a sedate scene of a murder-to-be, or a murder-that-has-been.

As in much of Friedkin’s work, there are more questions asked in the end then there are answers, and he certainly knows how to stick the inquisitive dagger deep into the viewer, twisting his almost-consistently constant pessimistic worldview into a series of malleable thoughts and impressions. Tenuous connections that didn’t seem plausible or possible take on considerable meaning once all is said and done, and sinister implications or associations crop up. There’s a rousing finish here that prides itself in feeling fragmentary, and even though there’s supposedly a typical follow-up denouement to the case at the start of the next “CSI”, I doubt I’ll ever watch it. Friedkin challenges the program, and adapts it to suit his own sensibilities, and not the other way around, forcing the other creators, writers, and directors of the subsequent season to play catch-up.

William Friedkin's Forays into Music Video Territory

Everybody knows it’s common in today’s Hollywood for music video directors to get their shot helming big-budget features, but I’ve always been much more fascinated going back to see what an already established feature film director does with this short film form during its initial ascendancy in the 1980s.

Usually, if the director is already somewhat well known, their choice of artists is limited to friends (Scorsese and Robbie Robertson’s “Somewhere Down the Crazy River” [1988]), the music they like (Brian De Palma and Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark” [1986], which in itself could be considered a compacted version of his proposed project FIRE, tentatively to have starred John Travolta as a Jim Morrison-esque rock singer), or music from a soundtrack from one of their own films (this category is almost always less interesting conceptually, relying on clips from the film interspersed with brief footage of the band; the first youtube clip I have on hand is a good example of this).

I’ve also noticed that the directors who you’d think would work efficiently under the commonly used, fast edit aesthetic that's so prominent and prevalent in the form usually cool it with their videos (the aforementioned De Palma, or Jonathan Demme’s clip for New Order’s “The Perfect Kiss”, capturing the band in the studio almost in a detached, yet somehow still palpably enthusiastic, manner).

Which brings me to the following two directed by William Friedkin (according to imdb, he also did one for Barbara Streisand’s “Somewhere”, but that’s not turning up on youtube), as they don't fall into this category of staid compositions, but speak to different levels of his own involvement and interest.

However ridiculous the actual music is, not to mention the oft-used 80s concept of purporting to be from a scoring session -- never mind that the song would actually have to exist first in order to necessitate the need for a video in the first place! -- Wang Chung’s “To Live and Die in L.A.”, from Friedkin’s film of the same name, is notable for Friedkin’s own cameo appearance near the finale in the studio booth (reminding me of the stories of his supposed exhilarated behavior -- pumping his fists, jumping up and down -- during The Germs' studio sessions for CRUISING, albeit this time with much more laid back music). But all in all, the creativity shown is limited.

Laura Branigan’s “Self Control” is another beast altogether with considerable much more input. The concept of a woman (Branigan) becoming entranced by a cloaked figure wearing a white mask during her slumber seems to foreshadow portions of Kubrick’s EYES WIDE SHUT, particularly the usage of the smoothed-over porcelain mask and the moment where she turns the man over for the reveal. There also seems to be the influence of Greek tragedy, ballet, and even opera (causing one to recall that Friedkin revealed in a recent “Cinemascope” interview that he’s been directing a lot of it in Italy).

According to wikipedia:

"In 1984 MTV initially refused to air the music video for Branigan's "Self Control", which was directed by William Friedkin, director of The Exorcist, and was one of the first music videos to have been directed by a major motion picture's director. After the record label provided an edited version, the network added this revised video to its rotation."

Again, the music isn’t my cup of tea, but in the interest of being a completist (supplementing my very own Friedkin retrospective here at home), I thought I’d share:

Wang Chung - "To Live and Die in L.A." (1985, William Friedkin):



Laura Branigan - "Self Control" (1984, William Friedkin):