I have watched this movie a fair number of times, and one of the things I could never figure out was why Lynn Braken let Eckley screw her.
Today it dawned on me that pierce pagent could have called Lynn right after his call to Sid (Danny devitos character). He picks up the phone after Eckley leaves, and they go directly to sid’s home, where he takes off after hanging up with his camera, presumably to get the picture of Eckley with Lynn Braken to piss off bud white (Russell Crowes character).
If you are following this so far, they never show a call to Bracken from Pagent, but it makes sense in the context of trying to get Eckley on film having sex with Bracken.
One thing I don’t understand however… Eckley basically attacks her to have sex with her… She wasn’t making any advances toward him in the scene, and Eckley basically decides he wants to have sex with her. This makes no sense to ne from eckley’s point of view for two reasons, one, he knows Bud White is sleeping with her. Two, she’s a call girl and has sex with a lot of different guys.
Why he forces himself onto her is unclear to me… Perhaps I have the double call by Pagent.wrong, since we only see one call. Perhaps he wanted to have sex with her because she is kind of taunting him with Bud White. It just isnt clear to me. And he basically rapes her, since he didn’t have an appointment, and I don’t remember her giving him the go-ahead either.
Can anyone help me out, and let me know if I have this right, or if I’m missing something else…
Thanks!
Ah, look who stops by… I didn’t even notice your name until it was too late.
OK, so if I’m correct, wouldn’t you agree that Exley raped Bracken? Even though Pagent most likely placed a call to her, letting her know that her cooperation would be appreciate (and required), Exley didn’t know that. He basically attacks her without warning, unless you consider “stop mentioning Bud White” a warning and an indication you are about to have sex.
To the (pardon the pun) naked eye. She’s a professional, high end prostitute. Along with the silk nightgown, she was DEFINITELY seducing Exley, although even he was not even aware of it. She KNEW exactly what she was doing, and got exactly what she wanted.
It was clear she was “tasked” by Pagent to seduce him. She looks over at the door where she knows Sid is, to make sure he gets clear shots of her face.
Indeed, I feel like it would have been a missed opportunity to not answer this one.
No, I wouldn’t consider it rape. She knew from the moment that Exley showed up at her door what was going to happen. You could certainly argue that she didn’t know that Exley was going to be so aggressive about it, but she would have done it herself if he hadn’t taken the initiative. It’s hatefucking, rather than rape.
Speaking of your namesake, sort of, my favorite moment is the closeup of Guy Pearce’s face when Jim Cromwell’s character asks him about “Rollo Tomasi”; his face hardly changes and yet you can see the whirlwind of realizations, thoughts, and emotions racing through his head. How in the hell does he do that, anyway? Is he consciously maneuvering selected tiny facial muscles, or what?
I know, it’s amazing. It’s like you look into his eyes and can somehow hear the whirring of his brain, putting all the pieces together. Micro-acting at its finest.
This movie took a few viewings for me to appreciate it as much as I do. Although I always liked the acting, the dialogue was so detailed that you sometimes needed a scorecard to figure out who was who.
When it finally popped into my head that the two cops that were standing by the Mercury coupe must have planted the shotguns, a lot of the movie fell into place for me. The first couple of times I saw it, I couldn’t figure out why the three black guys were talking about a girl being raped and not the Night Owl killings.
And for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the raped girl had to do with the Night Owl at all. Then, I had an “ah ha” moment, and the puzzle pieces fell into place.
It was a really nice piece of acting, and it worked because we, the audience and Exley, knew what was being asked, but the captain thought he was asking a different kind of question entirely. The captain thought he was asking about a real person, but was instead delivering a message. Not only was it the best piece of acting in a good film (where Spacey, as usual, was blowing all the other actors away), but it was a great piece of writing.
They didn’t want leverage on Exley, they wanted to show the pictures to Bud White and then Bud would kill or hospitalize Exley. Then Bud would get arrested and kicked off the force and there would be no one around to investigate Padgett and Smith.
And immediately before that, when the captain seems do be fiddling with his stove, asking nonchalantly, “what does Exley think about this?” and the moment Spacey says “I haven’t told him yet,” Cromwell whirls around and shoots him in the chest – you could hear the audience gasp.
What I’m unclear about was why Lynn thought screwing Exley was helping Bud. Remember the scene in her doorway where she tearfully tells him she thought she was helping him, right before he hit her? I don’t remember wondering about it at the time and it’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but looking back on it now I’m not making the connection.
Damn good movie. All things considered - acting, directing, set pieces, background, etc., I’d be hard pressed not to say it’s the best movie I’ve seen.
I’ll add that I agree that Lynn was provocatively seducing Exley into screwing her. And speaking of subtle acting, I thought Bassinger did a superb job of appearing to seduce Exley while at the same time making it appear to be a challenge, appearing to leave the option of going through with it up to him and concealing her true motives when in reality she needed pretty badly for him to go through with it.
And she was pretty clearly responding to his kisses and so forth there on the floor prior to the act so clearly no rape was involved. Plus like I mentioned above, she told Bud she screwed Exley because she thought it would help him. This shows it was intentional as well.
I thought Kim Bassinger did an excellent job in that scene, and in the movie overall. Going in I expected her to be the movie’s weak link and I was quite pleasantly surprised.
