By Bob Goodrich
There’s a trend in games to make protagonists one of two things: a blank slate, so that the player can disregard the character entirely and immerse themselves fully into the world, or a self-aware, witty character who the player can easily relate to.
Cole Phelps, the protagonist of L.A. Noire is decidedly neither of these things, and the degree to which he is his own man is uncommon in games. Perhaps for good reason.
You see, Cole is a highly divisive character. He’s an overbearing, pushy, stubborn, sanctimonious know-it-all. This is problematic, since games are unlike books and film and require input from the audience. This means the player is controlling and directing someone they actively dislike, and since an expected part of games is a “win” state, or at least a progression, the player is driving someone they don’t like to succeed.
Is this a bad thing? Is there room in the industry for games in which you play someone who you don’t identify with? Someone who you don’t want to “win?” For that matter, is there room for games in which you don’t win? Games which end in a worse place than when you started?
Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up. The source of all these questions is Cole Phelps.
Cole starts out as not much of a character, showing only a simple ambition to be promoted from his beat as a patrolman to become a detective. He wants to do the job, do it well, be recognized for his deeds, and get a pat on the back. These are qualities established in the first hour or so of the game, and they end up being key to his entire personality.
Through his relationships with his various partners, we learn more of Cole and his personality, and it is through these conversations and the various flashbacks to his time in the war that some players come to dislike him. In the flashbacks, Cole is absolutely convinced he is right at all times. He is convinced he deserves to be taken seriously by everyone around him, while being equally convinced that no one else is fit for his job. He takes his duties personally, and every challenge to his authority as an insult. In the present, he is much the same, though perhaps a bit quieter, a bit more willing to listen and much more personable with his partners. However, flashes of anger and disbelief at the conduct of his colleagues still make somewhat unlikable, both to other characters in-game and to those people who are ostensibly “in control” of this prickly officer.
His first real partner is Stefan Bukowsky, a Polish man who teaches Cole the ropes. His lackadaisical manner and occasionally joking attitude baffle Cole, who treats every case on the job with the utmost seriousness. His next partner is Rusty Galloway, a old hand at homicide and a misogynist, who’s seen so much that he tends to draw conclusions without evidence and is more than willing to bend the rules and go outside the book to get a collar. This frustrates Cole even more.
The last two partners are Roy Earle, and Herschel Biggs. Roy is the epitome of everything Cole despises; he cares little for the work or the victims, even less for the truth, and is more than willing to break rules in the pursuit of his next collar, or just something to grease his pockets. Cole’s compulsion to prove himself the better cop is his ultimate downfall, as he gets too close to something that involves too many powerful men, and Roy sells him out, revealing that Cole has been having an affair with a lounge singer. This gets him busted back down to Arson, where he meets Herschel Biggs, a man so beaten down by the world that he’s all but given up. And it’s about this time when we learn all of Cole’s past.
Cole does indeed have skeletons in his closet, which exacerbated his compulsive need to prove himself. During the battle of Sugar Loaf Hill, his entire unit was killed, while he survived, hiding in a fox hole in shock after his friend was blown to pieces in front of him. He was promoted and awarded the Silver Star, one of the highest honors he could achieve. This was a crushing weight for Cole. He had been honored for courage when he had shown none, given a reward for something he didn’t do. Now he felt he had to earn it by being the best possible soldier he could be. And this only led to disaster, as he ordered his unit to clear out every single cave rather than simply seal the entrances, inadvertantly causing the deaths of women and children in a makeshift hospital. It was only through the intervention of a man named Kelso, another soldier and his near polar opposite, that Phelps himself was not simply killed by his own men that day.
And this is why Phelps acts the way he does, we realize. The world had placed him in dire circumstances and he had been found wanting. His desire for meticulous, dutiful perfection had gained him nothing but misery. Perhaps this is why he joined the police force after the war, to try and make up for all he had done. Or perhaps he simply needed a new career to excel in, a new place to earn a pat on the back. Even in light of this tragic background, Cole Phelps remains inscrutable and ambivalent; is he a tragic hero, trying to atone for his sins, or the same old know-it-all, repeating the same mistakes that led to his downfall?
In the end, it doesn’t matter much. Eventually, Cole swallows all his pride and works with Kelso on the periphery of the law to bring the corruption in Los Angeles to light. What is interesting in this heroic arc, however, is that ultimately he fails. He faces a difficult choice, and in trying to do the right thing, it costs him his victory and his life. In classic noir fashion, bad things happen, corruption reigns, and the only heroes are false ones.
The Cole Phelps who put others before his duty is markedly different from the man players were introduced to at the beginning of the game. Is that enough? For many, it’s not. They’re not willing to play through hours and hours of a game to learn why someone is a jerk, or whether or not they can change. It’s hard to blame them for it. L.A. Noire is not short, and requires more than its fair share hours to complete. Why should someone put themselves through all that to see if the character they are playing as is just as arrogant at the end as he is at the beginning, and his only possibility of redemption is thwarted?
It is one thing to watch an ambivalent character on the screen; we are passive in that role, and can distance ourselves from person we see making these mistakes or doing the things we know are wrong. Certainly, this appears to the selling point of HBO-caliber shows such as The Sopranos or Mad Men . It is quite another to take on the role of that person, to have to become in some way a person we don’t like very much. We know, if we’re watching Hamlet , that the prince has to die – what does it do to our relation to this character if we are given the illusion of control over him and his actions, and still have to see him make the same mistakes, and suffer the same fate?
It’s a difficult question, but L.A. Noire was fearless enough to ask it, and now it hangs in the air. For all its faults and idiosyncracies, it is a game that is to admired for its ambition and attention to detail.
Much like Cole Phelps.
