FratFiles

• Save Paper

Commonly, when we make value judgements about people we speak as if there were a single norm towards which everyone ought to be growing. They're supposed to succeed in becoming perfect specimens. You can tell whether they do by seeing how well they perform according to a checklist of desired features. We also speak as if people have an outside and an inside, and that on the inside, they're really either good or bad.

It's hard to analyze Ellroy's characters in these terms. For Bud White we'd have to say that he was warped by his early trauma. What his father did to him made him a brute, yet he still has enough inner decency to try to prevent women from being abused. Or—Wait a minute!—is it the opposite? Maybe, he's a brute by nature and it's only thanks to the terrible thing that happened to his mother that he has some morality. Neither of these explanations seems to satisfy, because the framework on which they are constructed is inadequate. Bud doesn't seem to fit into a......

View the rest of this paper...

Approximate Word Count: 463
Approximate Pages: 2 (250 words per double-spaced page)

Similar Essays

1. L.A. Confidential
   

   L.A. Confidential This didn't have to happen. Ellroy's novel is a ferocious, caterwauling slab of pulp -- a big Buick 6 of a book that serves up 1950s-era L.A. as if the only

2. L.A. Confidential Review
   

   L.A. Confidential review L.A. Confidential By Peter Foy Ah, Los Angelas in the fifties. The glamour, the bright lights, the films, the women, the celebrities...all these things

3. L.A. Confidential
   

   L.A. Confidential L.A. Confidential L.A. Confidential is a movie of cops that are more corrupt than the criminals they arrest. Throughout the movie Bud White is portrayed to have

4. L.A. Confidential
   

   L.a. confidential Commonly, when we make value judgements about people we speak as if there were a single norm towards which everyone ought to be growing. They're supposed to

5. Hypocrisy Lies And Videotape At The L.A. Times
   

   has endorsed, while the Times says they are ethically bound to abide by a promise to a confidential source not to share the video. In an article in the Times dated October 30,