Todd Reynolds

Conspiracy as Subjectivity’s Negative in The Confidence-Man
and L.A. Confidential

	“No Trust”: The sentiment represented on the sign the barber
aboard the steamer Fidele in the first chapter of Melville’s 1857 
novel stands as stark contrast to the method in which the confidence-man
manipulates others for is own monetary gain. Whether it be for a
convoluted charity, “The Seminole Widow and Orphan Asylum,” or over
speculation that a certain business is about to increase in value, the
confidence-man succeeds in duping others monetarily by playing well this 
game of credit and “trusts.” But perhaps most interesting in this 
manipulation of the monetary system that the confidence-man plays within 
the novel is that he transgresses the boundaries of material fixity, 
specifically via assuming a different bodily form (more than mere guise) 
in each graft—an activity which demonstrates the influence of 
materiality on an idea of subjectivity, for the constitution of a 
subject has centered itself as a specific point of view within the 
material discourse, embodying subjectivity into a specific containment.
	In the 1997 film L.A. Confidential, the idea of conspiracy has 
matured into one in which larger networks manipulate and oppress 
uniformed individuals. But in both Melville’s text and this contemporary 
representation, an allegory for subjectivity on a national level takes 
place (Hollywood’s golden era—a capital for the nation’s largest export 
as well as a location both urban and within the frontier—substitutes for 
Melville’s Civil War-era Mississippi River). In the film, the conspiracy 
itself confounds fixity and plays upon a system of “trusts”: police 
officers out of uniform—disembodied as figures of official order, if you 
will—manipulate the public confidence granted them through 
“officiality.” In both texts, it is not quite an absence of sentience 
embodied which is at the heart of conspiracy, but that the monetary 
system itself seems conducive to the projection of subjectivity’s 
negative: that the economic condition in existence that stipulate a 
“point of view” located in a specific material site creates “conspiracy” 
wherein forces have not yet been explained and contained (disciplined) 
by the technology of the society.