Truth about Biggie and Tupac

Nick Broomfield's "Biggie & Tupac", now available on DVD from Razor & Tie, opens on a famous photo of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur -- together. Each appears to be trying to out-thug-pose the other: B.I.G. stands with his head tilted to the side, his black headrag pulled low over his large eyes, as Tupac Shakur, equally artful, throws his hands up, both offering a "fuck you" to the camera, representing the way he used to do.

As the camera passes over this image -- so frozen in time and now, after all the violence and grief, so sad -- Broomfield's voiceover explains the occasion for his film. Tupac was shot to death in a car in Vegas on 7 September 1996, and Biggie was murdered just 6 months later, outside a party in L.A. He wonders aloud how these two one-time friends came to an apparently fatal enmity. But this introduction to the vagaries of hiphop industry competitions is only a hook. Broomfield's film is less interested in Biggie and Tupac per se than in the simultaneously extraordinary and mundane circumstances surrounding their deaths, in particular, the frustratingly go-nowhere "official" investigations.

"Biggie & Tupac" picks up arguments made elsewhere, by others, including ex-LAPD officer Russell Poole (who claims his investigation was thwarted by superiors) and Randall Sullivan, author of LAbyrinth, that the murders resulted from a combination of gang and cop vengeance plots and have since been covered up by a variety of conspiracies. (It also argues against Chuck Phillips' suggestion, in the Los Angeles Times in 2002, that Biggie paid to have Tupac killed and was in Vegas at the time of the shooting.)

Versions of the corrupt L.A. cops story have been told before, in a 2000 article in the New York Times Magazine (Lou Cannon's "L.A.P.D. Confidential"), as well as 2001 articles in Rolling Stone (Sullivan's "The Murder of the Notorious B.I.G.," 8 June) and The New Yorker (Peter Boyer's "Bad Cops," 21 May), as well as a Frontline documentary about L.A.P.D. corruption that same year. Essentially, Broomfield, with Poole's on-camera help, makes connections among several L.A.P.D. officers (Rafael Perez, David Mack, and the late Kevin Gaines among them), the Rampart scandals, and the Biggie and Tupac murders.

Broomfield comes at this morass of egos and exploits as he comes at all of his filmic subjects, as an outsider looking for "answers." In this role, he's earnest and dogged, outwardly naïve and even stammering on occasion, but always wryly commenting and asking aloud the questions that might occur to anyone without a background (and some with a background) in the particulars and personalities. Much like his previous films -- for instance, Kurt & Courtney (1998), Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (1995), Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) -- this one pushes at the limits of traditional documentary. Broomfield presents himself as a pseudo-valiant, persistent pursuer of "truth," liking especially to look for it in places where others have not, and implicitly acceding that everyone has his or her own truth to tell.

This is Broomfield's great insight, worth repeating in all his films: truth is messy and unstable, truth is self-serving (even if that self might be, on occasion, Broomfield), and truth is produced by the beholder's interests and investments. Broomfield's films don't feature much objectivity. Rather, they give the concept a good going-over, so that, by the end of each, you're likely to be less sure of your own reading abilities than you were at the beginning.

This can be a very good thing. "Biggie & Tupac" is best when it's not making assertions (most of which are not new), and is instead challenging the very idea of making assertions. As Broomfield notes on the commentary track, his "interview method" can seem transparent: He likes to repeat a last word spoken by a subject, as this may help the subject to build on an idea. He "enjoys" his interviews, treats them as "conversations" more than examinations or quests. The film is about process, exposed as equally ludicrous, methodical, accidental, and/or fortuitous. As an investigation of investigations, the film is a little meta, but that only makes it more compelling, more knotted, more galvanizing.