Even beyond the obvious reasons, this must be a tough year for David Ayer. After more than two decades of translating your adolescent experiences into a gritty brand of Los Angeles-based police thrillers, you are forced to spend your 2020 defending your work against what you did and did not do. First, there were the inevitable comparisons between Ayer’s “Suicide Squad” and Cathy Yan’s “Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey” and the lack of a strong female gaze in the former. Then came the accusations of “brownface” surrounding Shia LaBeouf’s performance in your latest slice of L.A. noir, “The Tax Collector” — which, of course, ignores the fact that Ayer’s been uncomfortably appropriating and blending Latinx culture and white police supremacy almost throughout his entire career. 2020 casts a reflectively poor shadow on Ayer’s violent, often vulgar, copraganda-focused oeuvre given the state of our current dark times. David Ayer films are often ugly in their morality and characters —macho toxic males aplenty, what few female characters there are depicted as underwritten appendages or prostitutes and lots of odious Black and brown stereotypes—but the filmmaker always seems to be suggesting the depiction is just the rough and harsh way the streets are, perhaps a convenient framing.
But while these controversies might be manageable for an established filmmaker like Ayer, it is the ongoing discussion around law enforcement in the entertainment industry that might be the most impactful. Ever since establishing himself with the script for Antoine Fuqua’s “Training Day,” Ayer has carved out a niche for himself telling police-centric or law-enforcing stories often riddled with Latinx gang cliches (even seemingly off-piste, more fantasy-laden films like “Suicide Squad” and “Bright” apply these stereotypes). Unfortunately for Ayer, how we perceive these movies in 2020 is vastly different than at any point in his film history.
When it comes to how law enforcement is portrayed onscreen, Ayer has something of a personal stake. A military veteran who grew up in the rough neighborhoods of Los Angeles, Ayer has spoken openly over the years of how his friendships with law enforcement officers have shaped his movies. The Los Angeles Police Department, in particular, is a major talking point for Ayer, who often describes the evolution of the department over the past few decades in relation to his movies. Even in his first outing as writer-director — the 2005 Christian Bale vehicle “Harsh Times”— it is the LAPD that disqualifies the violent and moody Jim Davis on account of his failed psych test. Years later, Ayer would make “End of Watch,” his overt attempt to show “the positive side” of the industry, though it too is filled with attempts to glamorize police and dubious police practices.
Good or bad, Ayer does seem to cast with the marquee in mind. Bale starred in “Harsh Times” the same year that “Batman Begins” hit theaters; these two movies also followed on the heels of 2002 sci-fi actioners “Equilibrium” and “Reign of Fire.” Thanks to movies like “Source Code” and “Jarhead,” Jake Gyllenhaal was still in the process of transitioning from matinee idol to ‘70s-esque leading man. And actors like Keanu Reeves, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Will Smith have been synonymous with onscreen violence since the moment their names started appearing on the top of the posters.
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But the physical prowess of these performers is only half their appeal. In casting someone like Reeves in a film about the dark side of policing, Ayer marries the complex issues of police brutality with a straightforward redemption arc. No audience is going to turn again Jack Traven or Johnny Utah, no matter how much he steps outside the law. And when you have an actor like Schwarzenegger anchoring your film, you can cram in a dramatic character reveal in the last fifteen minutes of “Sabotage” and still end with a crowd-pleasing gunfight that rallies the audiences to his character’s cause. Celebrity has a way of buffing out potential tripping points in how a cop is portrayed onscreen.
This is important because no Ayer movie can exist without a healthy dose of onscreen corruption. “In the universe of my movies, my films, and my scripts,” the director told Collider in 2010, “corruption is a part of life that I take for granted.” No cops are immune from bending the rules; even Zavala, the morally upright character played by Michael Peña in “End of Watch,” is seen using a carotid restraint on one of their suspects (despite the Los Angeles Police Department’s well-established controversies with the maneuver). When seen in rapid succession, there’s always a prevailing sentiment present throughout these movies that suggests some element of unlawfulness is acceptable— even necessary—for those who choose to wear a police badge or enforce some kind of rule (“Suicide Squad” follow this model to a tee, as well; villains used to work outside the law for the government deemed as a necessary evil). Give us the right leading man, and we presumably won’t be forced to struggle over those decisions too much.
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Of course, corruption can be seen as a symptom, not the underlying illness. The morality of these films often boils down to how the on-the-job decision-making these characters have developed. “It’s the individual police officer on the street who is the arbiter of our rights,” Ayer told IndieLondon during the “Street Kings” press tour. “The individual has to interpret that black and white law and the regulations of his department. And there are mistakes made. That always fascinates me.” This sentiment even finds its way into the opening voiceover of “End of Watch,” the closest Ayer has ever come to making a movie about community policing. “You’ve broken the law,” Gyllenhaal’s character explains. “I did not write the law. I may even disagree with the law, but I will enforce it.”
How we are meant to feel about these split-second decisions is perhaps best displayed in how Ayer positions his Internal Affairs agents. In movie after movie, Ayer’s characters sit before a review board and twist the circumstances and narrative of a shooting to fit their needs. The men on the other side of the table—often old, short, out-of-shape, or nakedly disinterested in the process—offer the appearance of consequence and little more. In the case of Reeves’ Ludlow in “Street Kings,” what little punishment he does receive serves as one of the film’s few overt bits of comic relief. The review board scene is following by a montage of Ludlow responding to public complaints, with Ayer and company playing the juxtaposition of his violent nature and his current responsibilities entirely for laughs. The filmmaker might suggest he’s mostly interested in the judgment of human error, but his films often convey a much darker and more sympathetic opinion of the necessity of police violence, rule-breaking, and corruption.
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So Ludlow, Kurt Russell’s Perry in “Dark Blue,” and even Schwarzenegger’s Wharton are all able to walk away from multiple gunfights without so much as a departmental slap on the wrist. They are often protected from on-high, and—as is so often the case in the James Ellroy-inspired worlds that Ayer characters inhabit— the only real consequences come when interdepartmental loyalties are tested. There is never any moral ambiguity as to whether the men they murdered deserved to be summarily executed; in Ayer’s vision of Los Angeles, there are always more nameless Black or Brown bodies to be carved up in the name of exigent circumstances (WWII tank picture “Fury” might have cleaner villain in Nazis, but it’s still rooted in the idea of soldiers enforcing through any-means-necessary violence, not to mention just fully ripe with sweaty toxic men).
This belief and depiction—that the use of violence is always open to reinterpretation— also speaks to the malleable nature of policy and procedure in these films. Many of these characters understand that doing things by the book means obeying the letter of the law while breaking its spirit. Take one scene in “End of Watch,” where Gyllenhaal’s Taylor and Peña’s Zavala manufacture an arrest out of thin air. These two officers, following up on their hunch that a suspicious pickup truck belongs to a drug trafficker, pinpoint a CD case in the window as justification for a traffic stop. Ultimately, the suspect is revealed to be carrying heroin, proving what most David Ayer characters— and likely the director himself— believe at heart: the ends always justify the means.
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Granted, Ayer should not be held solely responsible for the modern wave of Latinx exploitation cinema that dogs our current decade. One could argue that Ayer is just writing what he knows; that his own experiences in the military and his first-hand experience with violence on the streets of Los Angeles have helped shape the way law enforcement and gang members are positioned in his movies. But his personal experiences can only take him so far. When these experiences are translated to thousands of movie theaters and Netflix accounts across the country, they only serve to reinforce the subtle (or explicit) biases present in the minds of so many Americans, especially at a time when first-and second-generation immigrants are under attack. Two distinct experiences emerge from Ayer’s body of work: for people of color, the world is full of greed, danger, and consequence. For those that use brutal violence to enforce the law, the wrongs are always mitigated by the actions of someone worse. “And for as much as these films may be rooted in specific neighborhoods within Los Angeles, this is a mode of cinema where good cops battle bad cops and the rest of the community either bears witness or gets buried in a shallow grave.
We need the police, the films of David Ayer scream, because even with the bad eggs, who else is willing to draw a line in the sand between good people and bad people? If this is the message he means to leave us with, then perhaps it is the police movies that we need to defund first.
David Ayer’s “The Tax Collector” opens in select theaters, drive-ins, On-Demand, and digital August 7.
