Final Thoughts on L.A. Noire and some Philosophy- Spoilers Abound

by mfpantst

Ok so I have finished the game, watched the whole credits and watched some more. So if you are reading here, and don't want to be spoiled because you haven't finished the game, stop.

No seriously Stop.

Last warning, because I'm not planning on hiding things because my observations require specific (not general) observations, or may, and in the process of doing so I may ruin the end of the game for you. Seriously, find another entry and come back later.

Ok, I'm assuming those of you with me now have finished the game or want to be spoiled. So I finished the game last night. I sat down and let the credits play and watched the additional scene after the game credits roll. And then I came here and read some of what people have been saying about the story and the characters specifically the following elements (ok I lied, I put a spoiler tag here, so click at your own peril):

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

Cole is not a good guy. but you spend 60% of the game thinking he is.
Kelso is still an asshole- but not necessarily a bad guy, but you do spend 60% of the game thinking he is.
The narrator of the story early on is your Arson Partner
The good guys don't win.

So here is my first observation about this community relative to the game: Everyone is fucking shocked that Cole cheats on his wife. Not just 'shocked,' but you actually lose interest in the game story because of this. As if somehow your 'good guy' doing something pretty bad is a poor storytelling device, or as if it removes you from the game. Let me address this- a fractured moral compass is pretty common. In real life, people have seemingly perfect public (and private) personas that are totally ruined by the discovery of a secret affair all the time! So I'm actually a little shocked that people seem to act as if Cole cheating on his wife breaks the game immersion, or breaks their experience. I suggest that in all likelihood this probably happens more often in real life than it does in our fictional world of games.

That's more of a soapbox issue for me, however, so here's what I really think people may be missing from this game:
I always have a hard time characterizing Noir style media, because I never really can decide if the story plays out like real life, or worse than real life. I've come to define the mechanism that drives the story (for myself) in terms of a dark force. Most stories are moved by something positive. Most stories are trying to show people 'overcoming' to reach a better place. Sure, Noir can have a 'good' ending, and arguably there are some positive developments to be found at the end of LA Noire, but for the most part it's a negative story, and the world is not a better place than at the beginning, and most characters seem soured.

Ok, for a roundabout way of getting to my point: Sartre tried to deal with the main problem existentialists had in a rather interesting way. He was trying to solve for what caused that overwhelming experience of absurdity in reality that existentialists are want to understand. In many ways, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche both tried to rise above the absurdity they observed and presented a system (though vastly different) for making sense of the mess. Sartre, I think, never got that far. He tried to quantify this absurdity, and ended up coming up with this notion of a black 'substance' that lies behind reality. Now every once in a while he seemed to put on his little tin foil hat and go get all freaked out over tree roots as the embodiment of this black substance- which if it were true was pretty scary stuff. See, he thought of this blackness as in a sub-reality existence. That is, it drove the absurdity that is to be found in reality, but when you set out looking for the blackness, you'd never find it. It was elusive in a way (though some may say illusitory) Anyways, I've always thought life a little less absurdity driven, and a little more people driven than Sartre, but I've always considered Noir the embodiment of Sartre's view of the world. In Noir stories, seemingly good people tend to do pretty evil things, and even the bad guys are just a little bit worse than they may actually have been. Add in government corruption going hand in hand with Noir stories, and you get a sort of blackness that drives the story to it's conclusion.

This is a reason why noir stories set in more desert locales use the blowing wind (I think it's called the santa anna?) coming in as a preamble to murder or violence. The fundamental tenet to Noir morals (in my mind) is that people are not good. Further, that people who are all good on the surface are almost all bad, and only people who you initially think of as a bad guy are the real good guys. In other words, the true hero of a noir story has a decidedly bad side, and the true antagonist of a Noir story usually appears to be squeaky clean at first. Inbetween that you have the true innocent bystanders (usually redshirts) and the truly evil characters. The truly evil guys rarely are the true bad guys (just like Mickey Cohen is not the end all of evil in LA Noire) because everyone already knows their nature. It's the seemingly good guys that turn out to be the bad ones. As far as the end of the story, Cole had to die. Kelso is your traditional Noir hero, so it makes sense the end of the story is from his perspective, and Cole is on the eventual path of being the true bad guy in the story. If you go through and watch the way he never gets his hands dirty in the war flashbacks, I think that is a little more clear. The true Noir antagonist rarely does anything other than issue orders. He does his best to live both fully in the 'blackness' of reality and fully in regular reality, where things are good.

Maybe that's all a bunch of ramble, and doesn't make sense. My main point is this: I tend to think of Noir as the actualization of Sartre's world view:
The absurdity of reality is driven by a dark substance- which is not just dark in color, but dark in motive, that is, evil.