Changeling

I watched the movie Changeling last night on DVD. A few thoughs:

• First, this was an excellent movie. Director Clint Eastwood went to great lengths to recreate the world of 1920s Los Angeles. He took the artistically risky step of hewing closely to the timeline of the real events on which the movie is based; thus the movie runs over two hours and covers a period of seven years, with little in the way of a climax. Happily, although many elements in the film can be construed as raising "women's rights" issues, my impression is that Eastwood deploys these for the purpose of period setting rather than liberal preachiness. His most glaring historical departure was making the police captain J. J. Jones into more of a "bad guy" than he really was, although even this was more restrained than we have any reason to expect from Hollywood.

• The film credibly raises the issue of the way large bureaucracies ultimately grow to serve themselves rather than accomplish their stated mission. In this case, we see the LAPD mainly interested in "solving" the Walter Collins case (i.e. putting it in the department's win column) rather than finding the real Walter Collins. It also shows the abuse of Psychiatry in the 1920s, particularly the way the state mental hospitals had been subverted in the service of police corruption. The movie also shows the double-edged nature of public scrutiny: it was especially in its efforts to avoid criticism that the department rushed the case to a premature conclusion and then tried to cover up its mistake.

• Again, Eastwood went to draw the audience into the film's time and place. One of the features the movie's verisimilitude was the racial composition of 1920s Los Angeles. LA didn't have much of a black (or, evidently, Hispanic) population until World War II; hence, the film contains no black characters, and I only caught one fleeting glimpse of a black face at all. In the "making-of" bonus feature, Angelina Jolie speaks tellingly of how beautiful Los Angeles was back then, and the set director speaks of the challenge of finding a neighborhood in LA that didn't have fences. "LA in the 1920s didn't have fences," he said. "We've become such a fenced-in society since then."

  Gee, I wonder why that is.

  The society as portrayed in the movie has a "high trust" vibe to it. People expected to enjoy the community of their neighbors, and the architecture reflects that expectation. The houses of that era, like my house, were built outward, creating a shared space. More modern suburbs are built inward, replacing porches with decks, and never placing windows on the sides of the house where you might be reminded that you have next-door neighbors at all.

  The movie also shows Christine Collins having only momentary misgivings about leaving her nine-year-old son alone all day when she is called into work at the last minute. Few parents would do that today, partly because of our intensive parenting styles, but also because we worry about all the bad guys in the world.

  The events of the movie, of course, show how easy it is for a bad guy to abuse a high-trust society, freeloading, so to speak, on that trust for the purposes of kidnapping and murder.

• I'm not an expert on the socio-economics of the 1920s, but the Collins neighborhood appeared to my eyes implausibly upscale for a single mom working as a telephone switchboard manager. (The Collins' actual neighborhood has since been paved over by a freeway.) I would estimate the present value of the house used in the movie to be in excess of $1M, well outside the reach of all but the rich, especially considering the home financing options available in the 1920s.