Released in 1984, Blood Simple was the Coen brothers’ debut feature film. An independently produced neo-noir, financed with money the Coens had raised themselves, it was well-received at film festivals including the Toronto Film Festival, the New York Film Festival and the US Film Festival (later renamed Sundance), where it won the Jury Prize. The story is a tale of deceit, betrayal and bloody revenge, written in the pulp fiction style of James M. Cain. Its plot hinges on a romantic triangle, recounting the illicit doings of a naive young man led astray by an unfaithful wife to become the rival of an older, possessive husband who jealously plots the adulterers’ murder.
The setting is a small town in West Texas, where bartender Ray (John Getz) indulges in an extra-marital affair with Abby (Frances McDormand), the wife of Ray’s saloonowner boss Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya). Abby would like to exit her unhappy marriage to Marty, who has hired sleazy private investigator Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to keep tabs on his wayward wife. Seeking revenge for his wife’s infidelity, Marty hires Visser to murder the adulterous couple. Trusting Visser to honour their contract for murder proves to be a crucial mistake and ultimately Marty’s undoing.
This first effort by unknown independent filmmakers drew an unusual amount of critical attention. Critics from coast to coast praised the film upon its initial theatrical run. Writing for the New York Times, Janet Maslin called Blood Simple ‘a directorial debut of extraordinary promise’, while Los Angeles Times reviewer Kevin Thomas thought the Coens’ debut was ‘a dazzling comedie noire’. Time magazine’s Richard Corliss applauded Blood Simple for its ‘elegant variations on a theme as old as the fall’ and praised the Coens’ dark thriller for its simultaneous subversion and revitalization of the film noir genre. The movie’s signature song – ‘It’s the Same Old Song (But with a Different Meaning)’ – signals the filmmakers’ ironic self-awareness that they are telling an archetypal story, but also revising and updating it for contemporary audiences. For these critics Blood Simple was a movie with vitality and wit, an unexpected surprise and a welcome change-of-pace in American independent cinema.
As the initial reviews show, one reason for the positive reception of Blood Simple was its appeal to a venerable cinematic genre, film noir, which had experienced a recent revival in the decade that preceded the release of Blood Simple. By 1984, so-called ‘neonoir’ was on the verge of becoming the most popular and influential generic style of contemporary American cinema. But Blood Simple is more than a neo-noir thriller that embroiders a well-worn narrative with flashy visual stylisations. Its mixture of sex and violence may exploit the genre of film noir somewhat shamelessly for its appeal to the lower instincts, but at the same time it inventively renovates aging generic conventions to deliver something more than a film-school exercise in genre deconstruction.
The overwhelming majority of these early reviews were laudatory, but there were some who criticised Blood Simple as too derivative. In her review for the New Yorker, Pauline Kael considered Blood Simple so generically predictable that it hardly qualified as a ‘thriller’. Kael questioned the Coens’ motives as ‘independent’ filmmakers, asking, ‘What’s the glory of making films outside the industry, if they’re Hollywood films at heart?’ What seems to be missing in this assessment and others like it is the possibility of making genre films independently, outside the Hollywood mainstream. The assumption is simply that genre and big-budget commercial filmmaking are synonymous, and therefore that ‘genre’ and ‘independent’ are mutually exclusive terms.
For these reasons Blood Simple represents, in Kael’s view, what was wrong with so many young filmmakers at the time, namely, that their films were becoming too selfconsciously referential and lacked substantive, interesting plots, credible characters and meaningful thematic content. In Kael’s view, the new generation of filmmakers had sold out their values and integrity to make self-indulgent genre entertainment. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, Kael had witnessed the flourishing of the so-called ‘Hollywood Renaissance’ as exemplified by the films of auteurs like Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese, films she considered more relevant and original than what post-Renaissance cinema was producing. Ironically, the very auteurs Kael admired and championed constituted the first wave of the neo-noir revival and are also among the filmmakers whom the Coens most revere and to whom they are often compared. Nevertheless, what she considered the shallow and derivative films that emerged in the immediate post-Renaissance years signified to Kael a general decline in American film art. Elliot Stein shared Kael’s view, describing Blood Simple as a pastiche of genre conventions gleaned from ‘Prof. Lawrence Kasdan’s Film Noir 101’, an allusion to Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), a commercially successful neo-noir that had a few years earlier boosted the resurgence of film noir. For these reviewers Blood Simple seemed to exemplify the kind of movie made by a younger generation of auteurs who, born into an era of creative exhaustion, could now only assemble vacuous compilations of movie allusions mounted on flimsy generic frameworks, calculated to satisfy a growing audience appetite for pseudo-highbrow content delivered in lowbrow forms.
But R. Barton Palmer offers a different perspective, arguing that the Coens’ noirinfluenced films in particular, with their pronounced emphasis on existentialist themes, ‘engage deeply’ with serious social problems, thus ‘offering a riposte to those critics who think [the Coens’] films to be much ado about nothing’ (2004: 31). Elsewhere, Palmer concludes that in Blood Simple we can discern the Coens’ attempt to ‘extend through complex gestures of restructuring and updating Cain’s analysis of the sociopsychological malaise affecting Depression-era America’ (2009: 268). By this reading Blood Simple reinscribes Cain’s stories of American greed and self-interest, resituating them in the contemporary wasteland of the Reagan years, but representing its characters as no less tawdry or misguided than their models in Cain’s pulp fiction.
Reinventing Film Noir
When asked why they chose the noir genre for their first film, the Coens responded: ‘We’ve liked that type of story for a long while: James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It’s a genre that really gives us pleasure.’ At the same time they admit that they chose film noir for practical reasons: ‘We knew we weren’t going to have much money. Financing wouldn’t permit other things. We could depend on that type of genre, on that kind of basic force’ (Allen 2006: 33). Generally, the Coens do not make genre movies simply because they are more reliably bankable, and they don’t make genre movies merely because they love old-fashioned films and hope to recreate the forgotten magic of classic Hollywood cinema. In fact, they contend that they did not approach Blood Simple as generic film noir at all. According to Ethan: ‘When people call Blood Simple a film noir, they’re correct to the extent that we like the same kind of stories that the people who made those movies liked.’ But, he hastens to add, ‘We tried to emulate the [literary] source that those movies came from rather than the movies themselves’ (Allen 2006: 14). A more common practice among contemporary filmmakers is to take classic film noirs as source texts, remaking them with varying degrees of fidelity. Prominent examples would be The Postman Always Rings Twice (Bob Rafelson, 1981), a faithful remake of the 1946 Garnett adaptation, Steven Soderbergh’s The Underneath (1995), a remake of Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949), or Kasdan’s Body Heat, an update of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity.
Unlike these filmmakers, the Coens have little interest in remaking prior adaptations of Cain. Instead, their aim was to ‘write a story in Cain’s style’, a hybrid re-adaptation of his two best-known novels, The Postman Always Ring Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936). As defined by Thomas Leitch, re-adaptations ignore previous cinematic adaptations (like Garnett’s and Rafelson’s filmings of The Postman Always Ring Twice) and strive for a fresh adaptation of the literary source (2002: 45). By comparison, Kasdan’s Body Heat, a film to which Blood Simple is often disparagingly likened, is more directly indebted to its cinematic model. In contrast to the Cain homage of Blood Simple, Body Heat is actually an unacknowledged remake of Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Double Indemnity. Although in Body Heat the Cain story is updated to a contemporary setting, Kasdan otherwise appropriates Wilder’s plot wholesale and at times mimics the precursor’s dialogue, both of which depart significantly from the Cain novel. Despite its obvious borrowings, however, Kasdan, who also wrote the screenplay, presents Body Heat as his original story. The film credits read simply: ‘Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan.’ There is no mention of Cain, much less Billy Wilder’s adaptation, the true sources of Kasdan’s film. The publicity slogan used to promote the movie, however, reveals quite clearly Kasdan’s stance toward his sources: ‘Body Heat echoes the powerful impact of 40s film noir melodramas like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice – but with energy, irony, and passion that could only flare out of the 80s.’ Thus, in a transparent act of disavowal, Kasdan performs what Leitch calls a ‘dance of invocation and denial’ vis-á-vis his precursor (2002: 52). His paradoxical stance toward antecedents in classic film noir entails both the explicit naming of sources and the implied promise of re-energising the originals and accommodating them to a contemporary audience by inventing a new and more relevant version of an archetypal story. In Leitch’s view, Body Heat strives to be ‘the definitive version that renders its model obsolete’ (2002: 53). In an attempt to establish its priority Kasdan’s film ‘takes what is presented as a classic, timeless story and updates it – partly by the paradoxical attempt to remove all markers of any historical period whatever’ (2002: 52).
Because it harks back to classic film noir, attempting to reawaken a sense of that historical period (the 1940s), Fredric Jameson considers Body Heat an example of the contemporary trend toward ‘nostalgia films’, which he thinks proliferate in postmodern cinema, ‘invading and colonizing’ even those movies with contemporary settings (1998: 9). Here Jameson is not referring to heritage cinema or period films that faithfully recreate and thereby restore bygone eras. Rather, he has in mind contemporary films that make a sentimental appeal to the history of cinema, reproducing the stories and generic styles of an imaginary past. This is problematic for Jameson because, as he sees it, contemporary filmmakers have become incapable of producing authentic artistic representations of their own historical present. If this is so, writes Jameson, ‘it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself – or at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history’ (1998: 9–10). Thus, Body Heat, in its attempt to recycle Cain via Wilder and repackage it as contemporary noir, becomes a specimen of the ‘blank’ parody Jameson finds characteristic of postmodern art, which he understands as ‘a neutral practice, without parody’s ulterior motive’ (1998: 5). Synonymous with postmodern pastiche, ‘blank parody’ is parody that has lost its sense of humour. But, more important for Jameson, it is also a brand of parody that has lost any sense of its ulterior motive, which Jameson would identify as its socio-critical or ideological function.
Upon its debut, critics attributed a similar logic of parody to Blood Simple, seeing little difference between the Coens’ approach to film noir and Kasdan’s. There are, however, fundamental differences. While Kasdan appropriates both Cain’s novel and Wilder’s adaptation as his own, disavowing any influence from original sources, the Coens pay tribute to Cain, eagerly acknowledging their debt to his fiction. They say they set out to write their story ‘in the style’ of Cain as a tribute to his literary accomplishments, but the result is an inventive re-adaptation which, somewhat paradoxically, they can still claim as their own. Kasdan might also make such a claim for Body Heat, but closer scrutiny reveals direct borrowings from Wilder’s movie, which in Jameson’s view often border on plagiarism. Thus, in a film widely labeled ‘postmodern’, Kasdan’s disavowal of ancestral precursors positions Body Heat, oddly, in the belated tradition described by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), a study of the aesthetic strategies used by authors to defeat the precursor’s influence and thus preserve the originality of their writings. As authentically postmodern filmmakers, the Coens find value in honouring ancestral models whom they admire and whose style they hope to revive, not simply by means of conventional adaptation, but in an act of creative reinvention.
As an act of creative reinvention, Blood Simple is a text that in Palmer’s view ‘can hardly be understood properly apart from its literary source’, of which it is essentially what he terms a ‘re-composition’ (2009: 268). Developing this concept, Palmer proposes the Coens’ neo-noirs (especially Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn’t There) as examples of what theorist Peter Brooker has called ‘imaginative remaking’, a postmodern artistic practice which, rather than striving for originality, undertakes a ‘re-functioning’ of antecedent texts (2007: 114). Adopting this intertextual strategy, the contemporary writer/filmmaker attempts to renovate the source text, renewing its significance while simultaneously modifying its discursive features to accommodate changing cultural and artistic sensibilities. By freely reinventing pre-existing sources the postmodern film-auteur aims to re-configure anterior texts which, as is the case for Blood Simple, pay tribute to ancestral writers and simultaneously circumvent the conventions of fidelity, imaginatively recomposing the precursor text. Much more than what Jameson dismisses as postmodern pastiche, Blood Simple engages Cain’s fiction in a creative negotiation, reconstituting the writer’s fictional universe so completely that, in Palmer’s view, Blood Simple ultimately constitutes a text that is ‘more Cainian than the fiction upon which [it] draws’ (2009: 268).
In Dialogue with Pulp Fiction
In an interview following Blood Simple’s release the brothers eagerly admitted their fascination with Cain’s fiction: ‘We read all of Cain six or seven years ago when they reissued his books in paperback. Chandler and Hammett too. We’ve also pored through a lot of Cain arcana’ (Allen 2006: 13). Jokingly, Joel said, ‘We’ve always thought that up at Low Library at Columbia University, where the names are chiseled up there above the columns in stone – Aristotle, Herodotus, Virgil – that the fourth one should be Cain’ (ibid.). As a commemoration of Cain’s literary legerdemain, Blood Simple inaugurates a practice repeated in subsequent films such as Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink, where the Coens rediscover undervalued ancestral authors like Dashiell Hammett, Nathanael West and Clifford Odets. Here it is important to recall that in the early 1980s when the Coens penned Blood Simple, Cain was still not held in high esteem. As late as 1989, literary scholar Paul Skenazy characterizes Cain as ‘a creature of the paperback racks of bus stations and airports and the mystery shelves of used bookstores’, still regarded ‘more as a cultural phenomenon than as a writer of substance’ (1989: ix).
Drawing on The Postman Always Rings Twice and to a lesser extent on Double Indemnity, Blood Simple relocates Cain in an early 1980s rural Texas to voice one of the writer’s most prominent thematic concerns: the disintegration of community and the social alienation fostered by capitalist economic competition. In this regard, Blood Simple offers what Palmer describes as a ‘penetrating reading of Cain’, a reinscription which not only recreates the author’s fictional world but also the Cainian themes of crime for profit and the inevitability of betrayal (2009: 269). In its essentials the story of Blood Simple follows the narrative pattern Frank Krutnik has called ‘the Caintext’ (1982: 33), which in his understanding relies heavily on pop-Freudian notions of oedipal desire that attracted Cain as well as many other early twentieth-century American writers. In Krutnik’s psychoanalytic reading, the Cain-text stages a Freudian ‘testing of masculinity in relation to the law’ (1991: 163). Typically, the Cain-text casts a virile younger man as the oedipal son who comes in conflict with an older fatherfigure (typically the cuckolded husband) representing patriarchal power. Father and son compete for possession of an eroticised mother-figure (the unfaithful wife). In Blood Simple this pattern is reproduced by pitting Ray, a younger man, against his older boss, Marty, whose younger and sexually attractive wife, Abby, is unhappy in their marriage and seeks escape. Andrew Spicer calls this Freudian triangulated scenario ‘the paradigmatic master narrative’ of classic film noir (2002: 25), but as Krutnik rightly contends, the true origins of this archetypal narrative are found in Cain’s literary fiction.
In terms of narrative, the ‘song’ remains more or less the same, but the ‘performers’ undergo important changes that modify and reshape their Cainian counterparts. In Blood Simple the principal players (Ray, Abby and Marty) recall the central figures of The Postman Always Rings Twice: A young drifter, Frank Chambers, goes to work for a patriarchal elder, the Greek immigrant Nick Papadakis, whose attractive younger wife, Cora, presents Frank with an irresistible erotic temptation. An adulterous affair develops, as the younger man and the unhappily married wife are inevitably drawn to each other. Eventually, urged by Cora, Frank hatches a murder scheme to eliminate the naïve and unsuspecting husband and acquire his business, a roadside diner. Similarly, in Cain’s Double Indemnity Phyllis Nirdlinger betrays her older, inattentive husband, plots his murder and manipulates her younger lover, insurance agent Walter Huff, to carry out her plan. Cain’s stories are ignited by a chance encounter – an unwary man meets a dangerous woman and there is an immediate and mysterious attraction that quickly becomes a fatal obsession. Chance soon becomes fate, as the seductive power of the femme fatale draws the oedipal suitor ever closer to a destiny of self-destruction.
Compared with Cain’s femme fatales, Abby represents a major departure from the archetype. The fatal woman in Cain’s fiction is typically unfaithful and deadly, indeed, in some cases (like Phyllis Nirdlinger) explicitly psychopathic. In the many adaptations of Cain by noir filmmakers, the fatal woman is endowed with a physical beauty that intensifies her powers of seduction. Accordingly, the film noir femme fatale is portrayed by glamorous film stars like Lauren Bacall, Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck. This Hollywood image of the femme fatale as beautiful but dangerous has become the definitive representation of women in the classic film noir. Here Blood Simple departs from the generic film stereotype, hewing closer to its origins in Cain. Abby simply does not conform to the conventions of film noir. For one thing, as played by Frances McDormand, Abby is not a ‘raving beauty’. In contrast to the film noir femme, Abby is rather plain, her feminine beauty more ordinary, much like Cain’s Cora as described by Frank the first time he sees her: ‘Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her’ (1982: 4). Cain had no interest in creating Hollywood images of feminine beauty. His eye was drawn to the common people whose ordinary, unglamorous crimes are the meat of tabloid journalism. Not surprisingly, Cain modeled his Cora on a real-life woman he had met at a gas station in southern California, whom he described as ‘common, but sexy, the kind you have ideas about’ (Skenazy 1989: 21). Later, when Cain saw in the newspaper that she had schemed to murder her husband, this ordinary woman from everyday life became the inspiration for Cora and her tabloid tale of betrayal and homicide became the impetus for The Postman Always Rings Twice. Thus, Abby’s wholesome girl-next-door appeal corresponds more accurately to Cain’s picture of Cora than to any of the glamorous femme fatales of classic Hollywood noir.
Abby also departs significantly from the stereotypical femme fatale in her lack of devious ulterior motives. She does not conspire with Ray in a plot to murder Marty. Apparently she just wants to escape her unhappy marriage. One could argue that her infidelity eventually causes the trouble that leads to the deaths of her husband, her lover and the private investigator, but she can hardly take the blame. She remains, in Joel’s words, ‘relatively innocent’ throughout the movie (Allen 2006: 19). Lacking at least one cardinal virtue, she does commit adultery and that action does trigger the subsequent fatal events of the plot. In the end, though, she emerges as the survivor, and while the men around her all act stupidly, she is the only one to keep her head and not ‘go simple’. Still, there are some unanswered questions. Why, for instance, does Abby make a point of retrieving her handgun? Is she afraid Marty will use it to harm her? Could she be planning to defend herself? Or perhaps she plans to have someone else use the gun on Marty? We never know her thoughts. We are left guessing, making assumptions, just as all the characters in this story are in the dark about others’ intentions, forcing them to draw erroneous and fatal conclusions.
It is possible that the modifications of the femme fatale in Blood Simple are intended as a revisionary cleansing of the misogynistic image of women in film noir and that, in a larger sense, the Cainian archetypes of Blood Simple are reconfigured to accommodate the shift in the moral values of 1980s America. Marty, for instance, is clearly modeled on Nick the Greek, but as Joel puts it, ‘a little less cheerful and fun-loving’ than Nick Papadakis, whom the Coens describe as a ‘greasy, guitar-strumming yahoo’ (Allen 2006: 13). In The Postman Always Rings Twice, Nick the Greek disgusts Cora because she thinks he is ‘greasy’, a racist stereotype of Mediterranean immigrants. Her perception of Nick’s ‘greasiness’, however, reveals itself as a projection of her own self-loathing: Her lover, Frank, works as a garage mechanic, a ‘grease monkey’, while Cora works in Nick’s kitchen preparing greasy diner food. Marty is ‘greasy’ too, but in a different way. In addition to casting Dan Hedaya, whose dark features convey a Mediterranean ethnicity, the Coens intensify Marty’s foreignness by depicting him as an East Coast city slicker, out of place in rural Texas. The most compelling sources of Marty’s ‘sleaziness’, however, lie in his cowardly mendaciousness and lack of moral scruples. Portrayed as a greedy, tyrannical boss and a lecherous hustler, Marty is most despicable as the vindictive coward who buys the murder he cannot commit himself. Unlike Nick the Greek, Marty’s sleaze is a manifestation of his bankrupt morality rather than a signifier of his ethnic identity. In contrast to Nick, a harmless and trusting guitar-strummer, Marty is a brooding, ill-tempered sociopath who trusts no one and is far from harmless. Compared with the likeable Nick, Marty, mean-spirited and seemingly without redeeming qualities, arouses little sympathy. Even Mr. Nirdlinger, the grumpy, controlling husband in Cain’s Double Indemnity, inspires more compassion than Julian Marty.
Cain’s male protagonists consistently share qualities of physical and moral cowardice. They are men with disabling weaknesses, often profoundly impotent, a condition signified in a number of Cain’s stories by wounds to the leg or groin, an allusion to the myth of Oedipus where, according to Freud, the wounded member symbolises a universal male fear of castration. This Freudian defect commonly associated with the younger oedipal suitor in Cain’s fiction is transferred in Blood Simple to Marty, the oedipal patriarch, whose cowardly impotence is exposed and humorously punished by Abby’s castrating kick to the groin – after she has already broken his ‘pussy finger’. Ray, watching the drama from a distance, wields Abby’s (phallic) gun, as Marty, in one final act of humiliation, is forced, vomiting, to retreat. Elsewhere, Marty himself makes allusions to ancient stories of castration, in particular by insulting Visser with a reference to the Greek custom of beheading the messenger who bore bad news. Marty’s fishing trip to Corpus Christi (establishing an alibi for the murders committed by Visser) seems to allude to the Fisher King of the Grail legend who, like Oedipus, suffers from a debilitating ailment in need of a cure, as well as to Christ’s death and resurrection, soon to become Marty’s fate as well. The central motifs of degeneration, death and resurrection in these myths are played for laughs in Blood Simple, in particular by casting Marty as a small-time anti-Christ whose death and return from the dead are staged as grotesque farce. After he is buried alive by Ray, Marty is resurrected in Abby’s dream, where his spectre returns to haunt the cheating wife, this time vomiting blood.
The one-dimensional patriarchs of Cain’s stories function solely to supply the sacrificial third-party in the triangulated oedipal romance. More fully developed and integral to the plot, Marty refuses to play the passive victim. Instead, he actively seeks revenge, but as a coward would, by hiring a hit man to do his killing. Even after he is shot point blank Marty refuses to die, still trying to kill his murderer with his last breath. His malignance is finally transferred to Visser, who unwillingly enacts Marty’s revenge, forced by his own stupidity to honour a contract for murder ordered by a dead man. In The Postman Always Rings Twice, Nick’s murder is also a protracted affair requiring repeated attempts, finally culminating in a staged auto accident. Ironically, at the story’s tragic end Frank accidentally kills Cora in a car wreck and is wrongfully sentenced to death. This ironic duplication of the death sentence (announced in the novel’s title) reverberates in Visser’s ominous warning that ‘something can always go wrong’.
Like many film noirs of recent vintage, Blood Simple does not eschew vivid spectacles of physical violence. The movie’s final scene depicting Visser’s demise at the hands of Abby is an inventive staging of agonising death that owes more to the horror genre than to the roman noir. Another example is, of course, the wordless fifteen-minute sequence depicting Ray’s agonising disposal of Marty in which elements of horror and comic burlesque mingle to recast the murder victim as a horror-movie monster who, refusing to die, keeps coming back from the dead. Although the Coens cite Cain as Blood Simple’s central precursor, downplaying the importance of cinematic influences, they have admitted that this sequence riffs on Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain (1966), which at one point stages the murder of an East German secret police agent by an American spy (played by Paul Newman) as a series of gruesomely clumsy attacks, ending with a very messy but perversely entertaining death. As the brothers explain, Ray’s repeated inept attempts to finish off Marty were intended not only as a Hitchcock homage but also as an attempt to outdo Hitchcock’s black-comedic scene. In Torn Curtain the scene runs about five minutes; Marty’s burial clocks in at three times that length, creating a mixture of humour and horror that knowingly recreates the signature dark humour identified with Hitchcock, prompting Hal Hinson to conclude that ‘what the Coens have learned from Hitchcock, whose spirit hovers over [Blood Simple], is that murder can be simultaneously tragic and comic’ (Allen 2006: 7). Asked how they were able to strike a generic balance between comedy and thriller, Joel replied, ‘I think this gets back to Chandler and Hammett and Cain. The subject matter was grim but the tone was upbeat. They’re funny … and that keeps the stories from being grim.’ ‘Humourless thrillers,’ he adds, ‘are dull, flat. They take themselves too seriously in a way that undercuts the fun of the movie’ (Allen 2006: 14).
Edmund Wilson famously labeled the kind of crime fiction Cain specialised in ‘tabloid murder’, observing that Cain was ‘particularly ingenious in tracing from their beginnings the tangles that gradually tighten around the necks of the people involved in those bizarre and brutal crimes that figure in the American newspapers’ (Spicer 2002: 7). In the vein of Cain’s tabloid fiction, Blood Simple tells the story of ordinary small-town people caught in a web of strange and violent crimes. But unlike Cain, who elevated the quotidian crimes of the proletariat to the level of operatic tragedy, the Coens find such ordinary crimes, plotted by simple minds, a particularly rich source of dark humour.
As a story of simple-minded crime, Blood Simple owes more to the fiction of Dashiell Hammett than to Cain. Acknowledging Hammett, the film’s title quotes a phrase uttered in his Red Harvest (1927). In its original context, ‘blood simple’ describes the key symptom of an outbreak of criminal violence infecting the corrupt city of ‘Poisonville’, a contagion eventually poisoning the story’s protagonist, the Continental Op (an ‘operative’ of the Continental Detective Agency). At one point the Op remarks: ‘This damn burg’s getting to me. If I don’t get away soon, I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives’ (135). In Blood Simple it is easier to say who does not go ‘blood simple’. The appellation certainly applies to the male characters; Abby remains the only one who does not lose her wits. Vamping on Hammett’s hard-boiled idiom, the Coens coin the phrase ‘money simple’, used by Visser to express how the lure of easy money obtained by criminal activity often poisons sensible thinking and results in acts of outrageous stupidity. The Coens’ subsequent neo-noirs are littered with ‘blood simpletons’ – ordinary people who in the commission of ill-conceived crimes make comically stupid mistakes. In Blood Simple this type is exemplified by Ray, a simple-minded Everyman (appropriately under-acted by John Getz), easily seduced by Abby and willing to risk becoming an accomplice to murder to protect her. Compared to his Cainian forebears, Ray enacts a counter-type, working against the grain of his literary models. In contrast to Frank Chambers, for instance, who is presented as the tough, streetwise commoner, Ray affects a gullible innocence, playing the part of the dupe, or what Frank Chambers calls a ‘sap’. In every instance, he passively follows Abby’s lead, constantly operating on false assumptions about Abby’s guilt while casting himself romantically as her saviour.
The inclusion of private eye Loren Visser also marks a significant deviation from the Cain-text, where the protagonists are typically not private investigators or police detectives. Here Hammett rather than Cain appears to provide the inspiration for Visser’s characterisation, following the model of the anonymous detective of Hammett’s stories, the Continental Op. Often credited as the first private eye to appear in the pages of what came to be called ‘pulp fiction’, the Op has a place of prominence in the history of pulp fiction gumshoes, but as drawn by Hammett, the Op represents a different breed of noir detective. Unlike later pulp fiction heroes such as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, a tough guy who fights crime in the ‘mean streets’ but, in Chandler’s famous words, ‘is himself not mean’, the Continental Op presents a much shadier, morally ambiguous figure operating on a porous boundary between crime and legality. Ruthless in his pursuit of criminals, he is not above certain kinds of misconduct, including illicit sexual affairs with clients, excessive alcohol consumption and, if necessary, occasional blunt, brutal violence, even murder – whatever it takes to crack the case. Visser (whose name is never mentioned in dialogue and so like the Op remains nameless) embodies an even more pathological version of Hammett’s hardboiled operator. Although the Op can and does occasionally transgress legal and moral boundaries, if the situation requires it, his ethics ultimately define a line he will not cross. Visser, on the other hand, shows no hint of conscience. Driven solely by monetary incentives, he will do the job ‘if the money’s right’. Despite his ironically sunny demeanor, he can be malicious, apparently murdering Marty simply to spite him for his disrespectful insults. Without blinking, he murders his unsuspecting employer, after which he pronounces the epitaph: ‘Who looks stupid now?’ His clothing and physicality are also reminiscent of Hammett’s Op. More cowboy than pulp fiction private eye, Visser’s ten-gallon hat and Western boots fit in with the West Texas setting, but are a far cry from the snap-brim hats and tailored suits of stylish noir gumshoes like Philip Marlowe. Like the Op, who describes himself as ‘short, middle-aged, and thick-waisted’, Visser is overweight and slovenly (described in the screenplay as ‘a large, unshaven man in a misshapen yellow leisure suit’). His sweaty corpulence is the outward sign of inner moral corruption, as are his tasteless canary yellow suit and the flies that buzz about and land on his face, suggesting a kinship with vermin (an image reinforced by the VW ‘Bug’ he drives). He also shares the Op’s cynical wit, which manifests itself in Visser’s darkly self-ironic wisecracks. After Marty mentions that the ancient Greeks decapitated messengers bearing bad news, Visser cracks: ‘Well, gimme a call whenever you wanna cut off my head … I can crawl around without it.’
In Cain’s fiction the illicit lovers’ crimes often go undetected and eventually mistrust and greed drive them to betray and destroy each other. This is not the case with Ray and Abby, who may mistrust each other but are not bent on mutual destruction. Departing from the femme fatale stereotype, Abby does not calculate or contribute directly to Ray’s death; false assumptions pave the path to his destruction. In the absence of a cunning femme fatale the Coens write in a sleazy private investigator as the agent of ill-fate. Visser is cast as the homme fatal (fatal man) ultimately responsible for the deaths of Marty and Ray, and finally his own. A further deviation from the Caintext is the elimination of passionate heterosexual romance, one of Cain’s trademarks. As Hal Hinson describes it, ‘In The Postman Always Rings Twice, Frank and Cora were so hot for each other that sparks seemed to arc between them; their passion was so volatile that it almost had to erupt into violence’ (Allen 2006: 7). Countering Cain’s fiery passion with a bloodless extramarital encounter, Ray and Abby’s affair is tepid at best, lacking the animal lust that so forcefully attracts Cora and Frank to each other. To compensate for the lack of heterosexual heat the Coens insinuate a homoerotic undercurrent in the relationship between ‘Julian’ Marty and ‘Loren’ Visser. Although their feminine-sounding first names are suppressed in the movie (Visser’s first name is known only from the inscription seen on his cigarette lighter, which he forgetfully leaves behind at the scene of Marty’s murder, thus implicating himself in the crime), Visser makes a point of addressing Marty on a first-name basis, arrogantly assuming an uninvited personal intimacy. Here again we sense the influence of Hammett’s pulp fiction, where a whiff of homoeroticism hangs perpetually in the atmosphere. As James Naremore points out, Hammett’s manly Sam Spade ‘moves with ease through an underworld composed almost entirely of women and bohemian homosexuals, so that even his masculinity seems ambiguous’ (1998: 53). In Hammett’s The Glass Key (1931) themes of masculine friendship become increasingly important, resulting in a latently homoerotic narrative of male bonding set in the tough-guy culture of gangsters. Similarly, Julian and Loren’s mutual antagonism belies an underlying homoerotic attraction slyly implied by Visser’s mischievous flirtations.
One scene in particular illustrates this homoerotic undertow. Visser and Marty arrange a clandestine meeting to plan the murder of Ray and Abby at a romantic overlook or lovers’ lane outside of town, where young people typically congregate to engage in illicit activities. As Marty approaches Visser’s car, Visser turns to the teenage girl he’s chatting up, saying ‘sorry sweetheart, my date is here’. Visser then opens the back door of his VW for Marty, implying that the ‘back seat’ is the best place to conduct their business. Marty refuses the invitation and sits in the front seat, whereupon Visser draws Marty’s attention to a small topless doll suspended from the rearview mirror. Visser gives it a tap and, as it swings back and forth, two small red lights, one behind each bare breast, blink on and off. With childish delight, Visser exclaims, ‘Idnat wild?’ Eyeing the splint on Marty’s finger (the result of his humiliating ‘castration’ by Abby), Visser queries with crude geniality: ‘Stick your finger up the wrong person’s ass?’ When Marty refuses to acknowledge this lewdly suggestive query, Visser launches into an anecdote concerning broken fingers and the anal region, concluding with the remark: ‘That’s the test, ain’t it? The test of true love.’ The homoerotic innuendo suffusing the scene threatens to breach the barriers of repression, and at the same time creates an oddly humorous mood. Later, in their final meeting, Marty calls his relationship with Visser an ‘illicit romance’ and says, ‘we’ve got to trust each other to be discreet’. Visser replies: ‘For richer, for poorer’ – a promise usually made in conventional marriage vows.
‘Idnat wild?’
In Dialogue with Classic Film Noir
As storytellers the Coens acknowledge their affiliation with literary antecedents, but in filming their Cain story the brothers were also aware of working in a classic movie genre. When asked about the influence of classic film noir, however, the Coens assume a guarded stance, deflecting questions of derivation. ‘Blood Simple utilizes movie conventions to tell the story,’ Joel comments. ‘In that sense, it’s about other movies – but no more so than any other film that uses the medium in a way that’s aware that there’s a history of movies behind it’ (Allen 2006: 14). Ethan adds, ‘It’s plain, mean, ordinary people doing bad things to each other in the dark, so I guess that qualifies it as film noir’ (Allen 2006: 137). Despite their feigned ignorance, their knowledge of classic film noir appears to be extensive, and regardless of what they might say about their relationship with that tradition, the Coens have expressed great admiration for classic noir auteurs, Billy Wilder and Edgar Ulmer among them (Allen 2006: 189). In his landmark essay ‘Notes on Film Noir’, Paul Schrader observes that ‘film noir was first of all a style’ (1972: 91), by which he means that film noir emerged first – historically (in the 1940s) – as a set of cinematic techniques which would only later, in retrospect, become a recognisable genre. As Schrader points out, classic film noir is more interested in style than theme. In the world of film noir, he contends, ‘style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness’ (1972: 86). ‘Because film noir worked out its conflicts visually rather than thematically,’ Schrader notes, ‘it was able to create artistic solutions to sociological problems’ (1972: 91). Thus, Schrader devotes a large part of his essay to the analysis of film noir’s visual style, which he praises not only for its aesthetic value but equally for its power to reflect the cynical worldview of film while creating ‘a new artistic world which went beyond a simple sociological reflection’ (ibid.). Schrader’s insights do not seem lost on the Coens, who embrace the visual aesthetic of classic film noir but also reinterpret its conventions to create a visual approach suited to Blood Simple’s noir melodrama. In addition to extreme, disorienting high- and low-angle camera angles and the accelerated groundlevel ‘shaky-cam’ shot (a trademark of Sam Raimi), the Coens accentuate the ‘darkness’ of their story with the frequent use of low-key, so-called ‘mystery’ lighting, one of the most recognisable techniques of classic film noir. The Coens say they were decidedly opposed to making what they describe as ‘a Venetian blind movie’, meaning a film that merely apes the clichés of noir mise-en-scène. As Joel describes it, ‘I wanted [Blood Simple] to have a pronounced visual look. Although it’s made in colour, I wanted it to have the feeling of the old black and white movies’ (Mottram 2000: 22).
Before shooting Blood Simple, the Coens took cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld to see two films they thought exemplified the visual style they hoped to realise: Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1971) and Carol Reed’s classic film noir The Third Man (1949). Both of these exemplary black and white films are famous for their masterful use of chiaroscuro lighting, creating striking imagery by juxtaposing starkly contrasting visual fields of light and dark. The Coens were reticent to film entirely in black and white, fearing it would mark their movie as too ‘independent’ or as an art-house film. Thus, to achieve a chiaroscuro effect in colour they chose to incorporate neon into the set design wherever possible, exploiting the potential of neon lighting to intensify and draw attention to colours, creating added visual interest and offering a range of symbolic meanings not available to black and white. When set against a dark background, coloured neon tends to heighten the visual contrast and create what amounts to, in comparison to black and white films, a new kind of chiaroscuro. A striking example of such neon-chiaroscuro is found in Marty’s roadhouse, appropriately named ‘Neon Boots’. The barroom (itself a stock setting in classic film noir) is, as its name announces, a country and western joint bathed in neon light inside and out. The multi-coloured jukebox, the Budweiser signs, the magenta neon trim that frames the window separating Marty’s office from the barroom – such imagery pays homage to classic noir but at the same time inflects noir style with neo-expressionist touches of neon. One particularly notable instance of the neon effect occurs when Ray returns to ‘Neon Boots’ to collect his back pay. As Ray finds Marty sitting on the back steps, contemplating two workers throwing trash into the orange flames of an incinerator, the monochromatic foreground of the shot is bathed in shades of blue light emanating from a neon electric bug-zapper which snaps and crackles during their brief conversation (an audio effect that underscores the anger seething just below the surface of Marty’s stiffly repressed demeanor). Behind Marty, the bar’s interior provides a dark background, dotted with contrasting accents of yellow and orange neon heightening the overall chiaroscuro effect and visually communicating the atmosphere of menace caused by their mutual antagonism.
The neon noir mise-en-scène is supplemented with resonances of old-style noir, particularly in the choice of iconography, illustrated in the movie’s opening scene with the image of Ray and Abby speeding down a dark highway, oncoming headlights intermittently illuminating the rain-swept road before them. The calculated choice of imagery here evokes the venerable noir theme of illicit lovers on the run, exemplified by Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1949). The precise visual referent, however, seems to be Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945), a low-budget classic noir featuring an illfated road trip through the desert southwest during a stormy night, exploited to full effect as the backdrop for a dazzling display of black and white chiaroscuro imagery. The influence of Detour on Blood Simple is most apparent in the dark desert highway as the setting for the lovers’ getaway, evoking Detour’s most basic iconography as well as its existentialist symbolism, not only the image of lovers-on-the-run, but also the ‘lost highway’ motif, suggesting an escape route with ‘no exit’. Accordingly, Abby’s attempt to flee her oppressive marriage to Marty fails, and she ends up back in small-town Texas, entangled in a new relationship with Ray, which as the story progresses turns out to be just another emotional dead end. The opening shot of Ray and Abby driving through dark expanses of desert, trapped in a cramped car interior, conveys a sense of separation from their surroundings that prefigures their eventual alienation from each other. As the narrative unfolds, these lovers, like all the characters in Blood Simple, become painfully aware of a profound personal isolation, caused by persistent failures of communication and the resulting lack of trust. To reinforce the theme of existential isolation, the Coens frame many shots as restrictive close-ups and show a preference for shot/reverse-shot editing (avoiding medium two-shots) as a way of isolating the characters from each other visually. While the viewers are given knowledge of each character’s actions and motives, the characters themselves remain isolated, each with their own perspective on the events that occur. In the diegetic world of Blood Simple they are, as Visser puts it, ‘on their own’. By the 1990s the detour motif had become a favored trope of neo-noir, featured in a series of movies including Dennis Hopper’s The Hot Spot (1990), John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1993) and Oliver Stone’s U-Turn (1997). Such films, which relocate the Cain-text in the desert southwest, are now numerous enough to be considered a sub-genre of neo-noir and, in R. Barton Palmer’s estimation, should be considered ‘remakes’ of Blood Simple, which he considers the original ‘desert-noir’ (2004: 23).
Although the symbolic setting and iconography of Detour make a strong impression on the visual style, prompting film critic J. Hoberman to call Blood Simple ‘a Detour for the 1980s’, these elements constitute only part of Ulmer’s influence. The storylines and principal characters of both films also exhibit remarkable parallels. Martin Goldsmith’s screenplay (adapted from his 1939 novel) follows the narrative pattern the Cain-text as it recounts the story of a passive, emotionally pliable Everyman who falls into the clutches of a dangerous woman who blackmailed him for the accidental death of a stranger whose identity he has stolen. The protagonist, Al Roberts, is not actually guilty of the murder, but must nevertheless, like Blood Simple’s Ray, deal with its consequences. In Detour as in Blood Simple, the deceased returns to haunt his accidental killer, not literally as Marty does when he refuses to die, but as a figment of Al’s guilt-fueled imagination. Additionally, both films share a fascination with what James Mottram calls ‘the mechanics of death’ (2000: 27). In Blood Simple this fascination manifests itself in the horrific ordeal of Marty’s burial, but also in the bizarre logistics of Visser’s demise. In the final showdown with Visser, Abby first stabs then shoots her unknown assailant through a wall without ever knowing his true identity. A similar scene concludes the story of Detour where Al refuses to cooperate in a scheme of identity fraud. Threatening to turn him in for the unintentional death of a stranger, his nemesis, Vera, locks herself in an adjoining room and tries to call the police. In a desperate attempt to block the call, Al pulls vigorously on the telephone cord, now entangled around the neck of a drunken Vera, unwittingly strangling her to death and thus repeating the accidental murder that had already forced him into this predicament. Ironically, the difference between Al and Abby is that Al knows his unseen victim’s identity all too well, while Abby is left completely in the dark.
Further affinities with Detour are evident in Blood Simple’s dialogue, which in places seems almost to quote Goldsmith’s script. In wording and tonality, certain passages of Al’s world-weary and cynical voiceover seem to reverberate in Visser’s sardonic prologue. When, for instance, at the outset of Detour, Al protests that ‘the world is full of sceptics. I know. I am one’, the resemblance to Visser’s opening line is unmistakable: ‘The world is full of complainers. But the fact, is nothing comes with a guarantee.’ The fundamental difference in their worldviews is that Al Roberts is not merely a sceptic, but a hardened pessimist. Weak, insecure and whiney, he blames his misfortunes on the absurd machinations of a higher power he cannot comprehend, summed up in his self-pitying nihilistic prophesy: ‘Someday fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no reason at all.’ As self-defeating anti-hero, Al Roberts epitomises a common archetype of classic film noir: the perpetual loser who seeks but never achieves personal freedom because he imagines his fate is controlled by some mysterious force beyond his comprehension rendering all human endeavors inconsequential and pointless. Visser, however, offers an alternative to Ulmer’s depressing vision of the human condition. Visser is not bemoaning the fate of mankind; rather, he is complaining about the complainers like Al Roberts, whose naïve expectation that life should be fair and humans should act with compassion toward their fellows annoys him:
The world is full of complainers. But the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. And I don’t care if you’re the Pope of Rome, President of the United States or Man of the Year, something can always go wrong. Go ahead, complain. Tell your problems to your neighbor. Ask for help and watch him fly. In Russia they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That’s the theory, anyway. What I know is Texas, and down here, you’re on your own.
Like Al Roberts, Visser espouses an essentially pessimistic view of humanity’s lot. It doesn’t matter who you are, ‘something can always go wrong’, even if you are ‘Man of the Year’ (an honour bestowed on Visser himself). Ironically, his opening prologue prophesises his own fate, for something does go terribly wrong. But unlike Detour’s pathetic Al, Visser has transcended the pathos of pessimism to embrace life’s absurdity without personal resentment. His Zen-like acceptance of life’s unpredictable vicissitudes is on full display at the moment of his imminent death. As he bleeds to death beneath a sink, fatally wounded by Abby, she shouts (thinking he is Marty), ‘I’m not afraid of you, Marty!’ With mock cordiality Visser’s replies, ‘If I see him, I’ll sure give him the message.’ Then, as the camera shifts to Visser’s point of view, we see a droplet of water forming on the underside of the sink, which Visser observes with mild interest as it is about to fall into his eye. Suddenly, in the face of death, he lets out a jovial laugh, his final utterance signaling a sense of self-irony completely absent in Al Roberts. He recognises the absurdity of his predicament and can, in his last moment, appreciate without self-pity the irony of his reversal of fortune.
‘If I see him, I’ll sure give him the message.’
Unmistakably, this is a philosophical moment in the story, perhaps as close as the Coens come in Blood Simple to making a meaningful statement. As a philosophical stance, Visser’s self-mockery might be understood as an expression of ‘joyful wisdom’ in the sense that German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche gave it in his book Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882; translated as Joyful Wisdom). There Nietzsche extols a self-transcendent affirmation of human existence, however painful and tragic it might be, calling this affirmation ‘amor fati’ – love of fate – which he understood as the ‘pessimism of strength’, in contradistinction to fellow German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘pessimism of weakness’, In a discussion of Nietzsche, nihilism and neo-noir, philosopher Thomas S. Hibbs renames the weak pessimists ‘passive nihilists’. Against the weak or passive nihilists, who represent a decadent decline in the human spirit, Nietzsche pits his ‘pessimists of strength’, whom Hibbs renames ‘active nihilists’ – those who view the decline of traditional values and beliefs as an occasion for the destruction of antiquated and corrupt social institutions and the creation of a new order of values. ‘Beyond good and evil’, active nihilists appear as amoral, often demonic figures in contemporary film noir, villains who escape the snares of noir fatalism by engaging in acts of ‘exuberant amoral energy’ (2007: 140). Thus, while both Detour and Blood Simple share the noir theme of fatalism, the defining difference lies in the contrast between Ulmer’s passive vision of ‘weak pessimism’ and the Coens’ revisionary activism. The figure of Loren Visser voices rejection of passive pessimists, ‘the complainers’, who capitulate to capricious powers beyond human comprehension. Shifting the spotlight to the comedy of human errors, Blood Simple negates the noir pessimist with the joyful wisdom of its actively nihilistic narrator.