| L.A. Confidential is a movie of cops that are more
corrupt than the criminals they arrest. Throughout the movie Bud White is
portrayed to have a personal hatred for women abusers despite becoming enraged
and hitting Lynn Bracken. At the beginning of the movie, Bud and two other
officers are seen sitting in a car, observing a man beating his wife. Officer
White gets out of the car, approaches the house, and then pulls the family’s
Christmas decorations from the roof. When the man comes outside to see what is
making all the noise is about, Bud White immediately begins to beat him.
Afterwards, Bud handcuffs the man to a rail.
In another scene from the movie
Bud White is seen leaving a bar. When Bud exits the bar, he notices a woman,
with bandages on her nose, sitting in a car with two men. Bud approaches the car
to investigate. In the process, the driver jumps out of the car and tells him to
get lost. Then Bud White beats him up. Bud is thinking that someone has abused
the woman, when in actuality the woman had been hit in the face with a tennis
racket. Throughout the movie Bud is seen beating the information out of
suspects. Such as when he is seen at a bar squeezing a man’s testicles until the
man told him the information that he wanted to hear. During an interrogation at
the precinct, Bud White hears a suspect confessing to have raped a girl. The
officer in the room is having trouble getting the criminal to tell him where the
girl is, so Bud storms into the room, and pins the guy against the wall and puts
a gun in his mouth until the guy tells him where the girl can be found. He
became enraged and lost control when he found out Exley and Lynn had slept
together. He went to Lynn’s house and overcome by anger hit her. After hitting
her he realized that he had done something he never wanted to do which was hit a
woman. Bud White’s hate toward women beaters seems to have come from seeing his
mother beat to death by his father.
Although White is portrayed as being
brainless in the beginning of the movie, by the end of the movie he had proven
himself to be intelligent. He is seen as being a tough cop with no brains.
Throughout the movie other cops mention that they thought Bud was dumb. White
mentions he is not smart when he was talking to the Veronica Lake look-alike he
said, “I’m just the guy they bring in to scare the other guy.” At another point
in the movie, Captain Dudley was talking to White and said, “I want you to come
beat the shit our of a couple guys for me.” In the movie the coroner mentions,
“You know, he is not as dumb as I thought.” Bud White knew that the three black
guys were not responsible for the Night Owl murders. He knew whoever killed his
partner had not been brought to justice and continued to work on the case. Bud
White was always on top of things and was able to piece together how Lynn
Bracken and Patchet were related to the case. He was also able to figure out how
Meeks, the heroine, and Suzanne fit together in the case.
In L.A.
Confidential Bud White believed in taking justice into his own hands to punish
those who abuse women. When they found the Mexican girl the suspects had
mentioned, White shot the guy who was in the house with the girl, and made it
look as if it was necessary to shoot the man. While other characters in the
movie change in the movie, such as Exley who in the beginning does everything by
the book, by the end has been corrupted and will do what it takes to get what he
wants, Bud White stays the same. His hatred for women beaters is constant
throughout the movie.
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