No matter how gifted, you alone cannot change your shirt

I can’t help but notice that each succeeding Death Note medium, post-manga, is dedicated to blowing increasing amounts of warm, yellow sunshine up L’s ass.

Even the anime falls victim to this, though the anime’s work with L was so note-perfect that it’s a purely positive example.  I’m never sure that the manga writer knew what he had in this character — even though he obviously knew he had something – and the writers of the anime adaptation were the first to make L more than a wide-eyed quirk machine. But the later films and the novel, in turn, take that elaboration much too far. They actually end up exposing massive gaps in the character’s basic design, and they get confused about genre in a really unappealing way.

First of all, both of them make L the de facto protagonist, even given a relative lack of screentime — and this is ridiculous, because it effectively reverses the original writer’s clever decision to focus the story on Light rather than L. Telling the detective story from the killer’s perspective is not original to Death Note, but it’s still a good subversion. So is the subversion of distancing the reader/viewer from the quirky, Holmesian detective through the device of his enemy, rather than his sidekick.

It’s not a disaster to ignore this, provided you’re aware of why it was done. I don’t inherently see why you couldn’t do a great story about L alone. He could easily be dropped into a hundred genres. And I recognize that this is what the later writers were trying to do: the film creators tried to use him in an action flick, and then a melancholy horror movie; the novelist tried to plonk him into a ghoulish L.A. noir. In the process, they both displayed some level of genre-savviness and awareness of the challenges, the basic questions of character that they faced in uprooting such a person from his original storyline.

(In brief: who will be L’s foil, or can poignancy or plot be extracted from his lack of a foil? What does he want, even if the answer is “cake”? Why does he want it, even if the answer is “he’s hungry”? How can we take a classical Great Detective character and make him act like an action hero, or a noir dame, or a directionless youth, without sacrificing the essential traits of that character type — extreme brilliance and a horror of the social — without which he is almost nothing, unless further work is put into developing him?)

But they never really answer these questions, with the result that the film and novel are pornography. There’s nothing here but a popular character being put through all the usual motions and all the expected scenes, with special focus on depicting his greatness and/or kindness. Yes, all of this was gussied up with a couple of big twists, some more openly autism-inspired characterization points, moderately interesting narrative layers involving Mello — but essentially, these stories are about L saving runaway planes and hugging smaller detectives. Which is to say they were about Sherlock Holmes kicking cocaine and undergoing analysis with Sigmund Freud. It can be realized well, but it requires expert hands to humanize the Great Detective. Archetypes are strong, and writers are small.

(Disclaimer to the link: I haven’t read The Seven-Per-Cent Solution since I was a teenager, and do not know if it’s aged particularly well. I do remember it being pretty good, though.)

Like all one-character spinoffs, the film and book have a propagandistic, eulogizing flavor, a tendency to reduce everyone to physical type — much like the ways we represent historical politicians to children.