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.