Never On Sunday

Had a laugh-out-loud moment last night, watching Eileene play L.A. Noire-with-an-“e.” Its protagonist, Detective Phelps, shares with Sgt. Friday a straight-as-an-arrow personality that’s stiffly awkward most of the time and occasionally rises to neurotic. Okay, I get the idea that he’s a straight cop in a dirty city, that he actually pursues evidence instead of beating his confessions out of suspects, that he disapproves of all the other cops drinking on the job, that he’s got a college education in an era where that’s still a mark of status. Fine. You can take it too far, though, and sometimes developer Rockstar does.

So last night, we witnessed a flashback to Phelps’s service, beginning with an argument under fire that his men are to call him “sir” and salute, despite a soldier’s reminder of standing doctrine not to do so—it identifies the officers, who the Japanese soldiers, like soldiers in every other army in the world, are bright enough to target preferentially. Despite Phelps’s boneheaded insistence on protocol, he survives and his squad wins the fight, miraculously capturing two of the enemy for interrogation in the process. As he will later be in L.A., Phelps is surrounded by crude, insensitive types who just want to murder the dirty Japs what is just killed their buddies, but Phelps disagrees.

He begins interrogating the prisoners in fluent Japanese. Not only has Phelps’s iron discipline enabled him to master an obscure foreign language (in an era when classical Greek was considered more important than French, and any European language more important than all non-European languages put together), but he has mastered the subtle social cues of that most alien of nations, knowing to slap a prisoner around for taking a hostile tone towards an officer. Even in violence, Phelps is kind: the cuffing is not an expression of rage but rather a face-saving measure for the prisoner, helping a shamed man realize that he’s surrendered to a superior, not a sub-human gaijin. Then Phelps launches into a lecture about how poor little Japan didn’t attack Pearl Harbor because they were in the grips of a violent, conquest-obsessed regime (they were), nor because they held Americans in contempt (they did), but because the mean ol’ US of A cut off their oil. “How would you feel, corporal, if some country tried to take away American resources?” Only we hadn’t. We had just stopped selling oil directly to Japan; we hadn’t blockaded their purchase of oil from other parts of the globe, though there was talk of doing so. Also missing from the history lesson was any mention of what Japan had been doing to raise such ire—bloodily subjugating Korea and Manchuria, with no evidence that it would end there.

The whole “cultural awareness” thing is pretty silly to start with. Even granting that Phelps is about two generations ahead of his time in respecting all nations as co-equal, and graced with the superhuman resolve to maintain it towards a nation that launched an unprovoked war against his country and busily shooting at him, personally, you’d think Phelps would have studied his current events with as much discipline a he pursued his Asian languages, and that he’d hold Korean, Chinese, Filipino, and other victims of Japanese aggression in enough regard to learn the entire sequence of events leading to Pearl Harbor.

The exchange is out of character, anachronistic, preachy, and just plain wrong. It absolutely ruins immersion, as if Jack Nicholson had paused amid the action of Chinatown to recite, loudly and stiffly, “Of course, the fact that many of these events take place in San Francisco Chinatown should not be taken as a slur against the fine residents thereof, who are just as virtuous and just as American as you or I,” and Walsh had replied, equally robotically, “Indeed. Our nation has been dramatically enriched by many immigrant cultures, and I, for one, hold the Chinese in warmest regard.”