Saturday, May 17, 2008
Film critic-turned-crime writer Helen Knode on her first novel, the soul-crushing deadness of Hollywood, the greatness of "Titanic" and her relationship with husband James Ellroy.
Apr 2, 2003 | I met Helen Knode in 1989 at the L.A. Weekly, when she was in the middle of her six-year run as the paper's leading contrarian film critic. I had just come to town from New York and an editing job at the Village Voice, and was pretty much on my own. Helen and I became fast friends. We shared a love of feminist discourse and enjoyed healthy disagreements over Indian food: While Helen, a Calgary cowgirl, studied early matriarchies, I barely tolerated the notion of "goddess" unless applied to Madonna. She didn't tolerate Madonna. Nevertheless, when my Los Angeles stay was cut short and I returned to New York, we resolved to stay in touch. In 1991, Helen married crime writer James Ellroy and quit the Weekly. Relocated to Connecticut, she was back in my sphere. But after four years, the couple made for Kansas, where Helen had graduated from college years before; it was there that she set herself up to write her first novel.
Eight years later, Knode, now 45, talks about that novel, "The Ticket Out," and the "media-addled, frustrated career woman" who drives her unique crime story. After disillusioned film critic Ann Whitehead finds a dead woman in her bathtub, she embarks on a journey to discover more about the woman and hooks up with the main detective whose job it is to solve the crime. Along the way, she unearths and becomes embroiled in a larger scheme that unites old Hollywood decadence with the corruption of contemporary L.A. Written with wiseacre wit and stylish yet clean storytelling, "The Ticket Out" is an engaging romp with plenty of ideas jostling for place among the many characters and plot points. From a temporary house on the Monterey Peninsula of Northern California, minutes from the new house being readied for her and Ellroy, Knode reports that the book was "a crushing intellectual and completely wrenching emotional labor."
Give me the basic plotline of "The Ticket Out."
It's a police procedural, a homicide investigation. Ann, my heroine, an amateur, finds a dead body in her bathtub. She's fascinated not with the crime so much but the life: Who is this woman? And she runs up against the LAPD detective who is investigating the crime, and gets involved in his investigation too.
Greta is the dead woman and Doug is the detective. So describe the subsidiary plotlines.
There is the Oedipal plotline, which involves Ann Whitehead's father and sister, and their presence in L.A. There is the fact that the dead woman has written a script that is missing, and the script is the story of a real unsolved murder -- real as in an actually historically true, unsolved murder of a woman named Georgette Bauerdorf who was murdered in October 1944 in West Hollywood. The crime has never been solved.
What are the central themes of the book?
Hollywood, and the women in Hollywood. There's a running argument about the state of movies and of film criticism and of Hollywood. Everybody Ann talks to has some role in Hollywood, whether it's fringe or central. And there's also the running theme of Hollywood's past. I use Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the greatest studio ever from the classic era of Hollywood, as a symbol of Hollywood's greatness. There's lots of stuff about Louis Mayer and Irving Thalberg and the MGM lot, which is now owned by Sony.
And there's a lot of stuff about women. Women in various roles in the movie industry, in front of the camera, behind the camera -- the women who never made it, the women who slept their way to the bottom.
And you might also say that there is a subplot and a theme about police and authority.
Yes. Absolutely. Thank you for noticing that.
And concurrently about violence.
Violence against women. Violence in general. The breakdown of authority. Specifically male authority. I'm always looking to shock, and I thought the most shocking thing I could do was try to put myself in the place of the LAPD. Because I really do believe that we live in a time of an authority crisis. And the police are blamed for things that aren't their fault, exactly. They're subject to the same crisis of authority as everybody else, even though they're supposed to be authority. And so I have a lot of male "authority figures" who are weak or stupid. The father, of course, being the ultimate authority figure. All these different kinds of authority and power centers, and they've all just collapsed.
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