Quid Pro Quo

J. Evert Jones

By J. Evert Jones

 

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” didn’t scare me one bit.

Neither did “Nightmare on Elm Street”

Didn’t see “Saw”. Slept through it.

In order for a movie to truly scare me, it needs to get into my head. Anyone can throw blood and guts in front of the camera, and it’ll scare the kiddies, but it doesn’t do a thing for me. True horror doesn’t always show the blood—it doesn’t have to. But if it gets your imagination working and makes you feel vulnerable and uneasy, if the movie can scare you silly instead of shocking you for split-seconds at a time, that’s horror.

There is a distinct absence of gore in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 movie “Rear Window” starring Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly. But the slowly unfolding implication of one’s neighbor being a killer kept the audience riveted, and made “Rear Window” one of the greatest classic films of all time.

As a matter of fact, the only true horror movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture was “The Silence of the Lambs” in 1991. In it, Jodie Foster portrays a newly-minted FBI agent, Clarice Starling, assigned to capture a serial killer. To gain insight in the way the killer thinks, she seeks help from another serial killer: a former psychologist named Hannibal Lecter (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins).

Clarice begins by attempting to cajole Dr. Lecter into helping her, to no avail. Lecter offers to help only if she reveals pieces of her personal history to him, teasing each jewel of vital information in front of her with the haunting phrase: “Quid pro quo, Clarice”.

Quid pro quo.

It’s a Latin phrase meaning “this for that” or “a favor for a favor”. In other words, it’s a simple bartering tool. In the movie though, Hannibal Lecter made this common phrase sound more like a deal with the Devil. As you watch the movie, a part of you doesn’t want Clarice to tell Lecter anything—even her boss tells her, “Don’t let him get into your head”. But she does it anyway. You see Clarice making herself more and more vulnerable to a psychopathic killer. Willingly.

That still scares the beejeezus outta me.

That old bartering phrase has been popping up in my mind quite a bit lately. It pops up when I read the newspaper, or watch a news item on TV. It happens whenever I see a story about the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. It happened last Wednesday.

You see, in Wednesday's Los Angeles Times, there was a story that DWP employees received raises of 15% over the last five years, outpacing the payrolls of even this city’s first responders, our police and firemen. This amount equates to about three times the rate of inflation in the greater Los Angeles area.

Elsewhere in the very same article, mention is made of the amount the DWP is spending in support of City Controller Wendy Greuel’s candidacy in the May 21 mayoral runoff election. 1.45 million dollars.

The DWP’s name also pops up in mayoral debates.

When her opponent, 13th District Councilmember Eric Garcetti makes mention of the DWP attempting to buy the race, Ms. Greuel scoffs at the notion as a case of “sour grapes” since Mr. Garcetti, like Ms. Greuel, sought the DWP’s endorsement.

Ms. Greuel stated that she could remain independent of the DWP’s influence should she become elected, and make the “hard choices” that would need to be made to bring Los Angeles’ budget back from the brink of insolvency.

Ms. Greuel’s main platform in this election is her claim to have found over $160 million of what she terms as “fraud, waste and abuse” in the City’s budget. An amount that included $80 million of such waste in a line item called “Street Furniture”, but in the seven items related to the DWP, she found a grand total of $0.00.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has spent $1.45 million dollars supporting Wendy Greuel in this election.

One-point-four-five-million-dollars.

Quid pro quo.

A favor for a favor.

…scared yet?