noir as it gets
The world is full o’ complainers. An’ the fact is, nothin’ comes with a guarantee. Now I don’t care if you’re the pope of Rome, President of the United States or Man of the Year; somethin’ can all go wrong. Now go on ahead, y’know, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help, ‘n watch him fly. Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else … that’s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, an’ down here … you’re on your own. – Visser, PI.
So begins Blood Simple – an arid voice over by a soon to be uncomplaining corpse, spoken over images of road kill on an empty highway, silhouettes of oil fields and solitary, forsaken artefacts of life: a drive-in theatre in flat desert, a house in the middle of nowhere. Reminiscent and derivative, of course, of so many films and writings of the noir genre – for instance, the opening sequence of Sunset Boulevard, Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest, among much more – but with notable tweakings of noir conventions.
Most notably, the femme fatale who figures so prominently in conventional noir is, in Blood Simple, not simply the only character alive at the end of the film, but her role as femme fatale, as the trigger of destruction and the workings of fate, is here displaced onto the (often literally vomitous) flows of masculine paranoia, projection, lethal commerce, control and (an overtly fallacious) chivalry. Or, as one review puts it: “Frances McDormand would be the movie’s femme fatale if the movie had a femme fatale.”
But what makes Blood Simple particularly compelling is its unwavering, almost exclusive, focus on the thoroughgoing individuation that noir - or the pressure of fate - presupposes. Relations between the characters, whether thrown together by hostility, friendship, sex or love, are characterised by the failure of relation which impels the grim narrative forward. In the mythical, dreamlike world of ‘Texas,’ which is to say, perhaps, of laissez-faire capitalism, you’re on your own …
It was all I think, more or less, downhill for the Coen Brothers’ films after Blood Simple, their first feature. The purist attention to film, the lean hunger that pared back script, image, dialogue and character was drowned in the luxury of recreation and abundance.
Postscript: all of this reminds me that I should re-read Hammett’s Red Harvest, from whence the Coens took the phrase ‘blood simple’. Thomas Heise has an interesting essay, ‘”Going Blood-Simple Like the Natives”: Contagious Urban Spaces and Modern Power in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest,’ MFS, 51:3 (2005). Heise argues that Hammett’s novel
And, certainly, read some more Cormac McCarthy - on which there is an excellent blog, Kick him, honey.narratively embodies the explosive aggression that inheres not in crime, but in the operations of law itself, the violent supplement undergirding the scientific study of crime in the period. Hammett details — through the figure of the detective — the methods by which law organizes urban space by suppressing underworld criminality, policing working-class leisure and crushing industrial labor action.
The word is that their next movie is an adaptation McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. Like you, I’m skeptical of their later stuff, but here’s hoping for a return to form . . .
Benjamin [September 25, 2006 @ 10:16 pm]
Interesting - and agreed. (I also thank that it’s not going to be Tarantino doing the adaption, whom I frankly cannot stand.)
s0metim3s [September 25, 2006 @ 11:05 pm]