LA Confidential

KENNETH ANGER—UNDERGROUND artist, queer-film pioneer, outrageous occultist, and dated purveyor of misogynist, racist, and homophobic snark—wrote several versions of this vulgar compendium of Tinseltown tragedy (Anger’s style tends toward gleeful, relentless alliteration) before the definitive version was published in 1975. By the time I discovered it in the 1980s, it was a trash classic, up there with Pink Flamingos, Russ Meyer films, and Valley of the Dolls. But Hollywood Babylon wasn’t merely bad taste; it was bad taste with a death obsession (from the suicide of failed starlet and “man-addict”

print June/July/Aug 2008

Reflections

Madison Smartt Bell

Flannery O’Connor warned us some fifty years ago that any work of fiction burdened with instructional intent was doomed to become a tract. Or as Sam Goldwyn is reported to have said, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

Most American novelists seem to act on these principles (whether or not they’ve actually heard them announced). And there is something quite sound in the idea that flaming political passions make for bad art. The fact that it is extremely difficult to define the boundaries of any event while it’s happening has led American novelists to