The Fade Out #2

"The Death of Me"
Number Two
written by Ed Brubaker
art by Sean Phillips

There's a barely sub-textual irony in systematically blacklisting artists for their fascist sympathies.  Whatever else post-war Hollywood was, in Brubaker and Phillips' murder noir, Hollywood is a wasps' nest of bullies:  Gil Mason is blacklisted for his supposedly communist sympathies, turned in (by their mutual agreement) by his former protégé Charlie; Charlie and the other writers are browbeaten by directors regarding their scripts and the creative directions of their movies; directors are man-handled by executives laboring under deadlines and anti-trust legislation chipping away at their monstrous profits; movie stars manipulate and exploit their doubles; and a starlet is murdered, and possibly raped, but it is covered up by a corrupt, self-righteous, money-obsessed industry.  (It's a statement of character reinforced by the issue's concluding reality fable, the unjust, sensationalized fall of silent film comedian Roscoe Arbuckle.)  That's Los Angeles.

Valeria Sommers—née Jenny Summers—is a difficult woman to get a read on.  Dead at the start of the series, we only get short, remembered moments of her, reminiscences offered by other characters.  She might very well be the sweet, naive ingénue that Charlie imagines her to be, an innocent young life, a promising talent, and a beautiful face caught in the Hollywood machine.  Jack Jones certainly remembers her with unassuming fondness, a friendship that apparently extends to childhood.  But her seduction of Charlie, attempting to get her dialogue improved, is practiced and could easily be as calculating as it could be artless:  sitting close to him on his sofa, leaning in and stealing his cigarette, sliding her head down on his leg, complimenting his perhaps unexpected handsomeness.  It's less a criticism of Val Sommers herself, whose sexual appetite and flirtatiousness are her own, than it is an indictment of the men's inability to see women beyond types, beyond the roles they write for them in the movies they sell.

In the wake of her funeral, a gathering of suspects in her murder, Charlie and Gil work themselves into a self-abusing, self-defeating stupor, Gil more than Charlie.  But their mutual cowardice, self-hate, frustration at the impunity with which their studio bosses do whatever they want, it all is also working them into a righteous frenzy for justice.  Once the hangover subsides and the bruises heal.

The Fade Out #1

"The Wild Party"
Number One
written by Ed Brubaker
art by Sean Phillips

Brubaker and Phillips return to what they do best:  classic noir.  This time it's late-40s Hollywood.  Or Hollywoodland.  There's nothing horribly innovative about that.  Money, glamor, celebrity, corruption, and an indefinable mystique makes Los Angeles ready-made for its own dark underbelly and the stories it tells about itself.  After all, there was just "something in the air [that] made it easier to believe lies" (The Fade Out #1: 4).  It makes it just a little easier to dismiss the desperation.

A morning-after haze is timeless.  So is the embarrassingly inebriated friend.  Mirror lipstick is a little more mysterious.  A dead woman considerably less common.  Unless you're writing a Hollywood noir, in which case, she's all but required.

There's very little to recommend Charlie Parish, especially when it comes to women.  He wakes up in a dead woman's home, finds her strangled body, and removes evidence that he was ever there instead of calling the cops.  He barely remembers an anonymous blowjob from a (maybe?) dancer in a coat room.  He can't reconcile his patronizing estimation of publicity guru Dotty with the women who enjoyed Earl Rath's parties, a narrow reduction of women into crude categories men use to demean them when they find it convenient.  Girls you fuck and girls you protect.  Admittedly, he knows this last, though it does little to adjust his mindset.

Charlie's misogyny is nothing next to Chief of Security Phil Brodsky's racism.  A dust-up at Rath's party included a black actor named Flapjack, who apparently had sex with some MGM executive's wife (or two).  Brodsky's response:  "Yeah, lotta white women wanna fuck their hero from the goddamn 'Krazy Kids.'  Even Jew broads go for that little spook" (21).  His tolerance of so deemed "communist sympathizers" is, if possible, even less benign.

This is the cold-hearted world of The Fade Out, a world that can prioritize entertainment, conspire to eliminate scandal from the movies, and cover up a young woman's murder to do so.  That Charlie is made sick by it is actually quite winning.  Bravo!