Coen Noir: Blood Simple

I recently saw a list of top ten film noir movies and at number 7 was the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984).  The list included neo-noir, under which Blood Simple falls, and even higher rated was Chinatown (1974).

Despite my intense admiration for everything Coen Brothers, it seemed that it accompanied Chinatown, and more unlikely was iit being mentioned with The Big Sleep (1946), They Live by Night (1948), and Out of the Past (1947).

Blood Simple’s distance in scope, intensity, and even length, alone would keep it from being in the same ranking as these other films.  But there’s something else.

I considered other great neo-noirs – Point Blank (1967), Body Heat (1981), Angel Heart (1987), Memento (2000) – as having a tone and feeling profoundly different from the Coens’ film, so much so that I am inclined not to consider Blood Simple a noir!

Place it beside other Coen noirs – Miller’s Crossing (1990), Fargo (1995), and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) – Blood Simple feels different.  Despite, I should add, the heavily laced noir tropes throughout the film. 

For example, the title comes from Dashiel Hammett’s Red Harvest.  Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon provided the material, according to many critics, for the first noir film.  Blood Simple’s nihilistic universe which its inhabitants live, nearly “out noirs” the classic films like Double Indemnity (1944) and D.O.A. (1950).  More noir qualities are here than the rest of Coen noir combined.

And this is the point.

The elements and structure of Blood Simple create an artificial construct.  Many Coen Brother haters latch onto this quality of this and their other films (calling their work a “pastiche”), but I don’t mean to disparage the film by describing it as such.  The film’s great pleasure subsists in recognizing the artificiality, the essence of which is located in the A) awkwardly unpassionate triangle of Ray (John Getz), Abby (Frances McDormand), and Julian (Dan Hedaya) combined with B) the sleeziest detective, Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh), in noirs since Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) in Kiss Me, Deadly (1956).

It’s one thing to initiate a new generation of noir – in color – with Body Heat (1981).  Only three years passed before the Coen Brothers tenderized the cynicism until it nearly liquefies.  We’re left with characters who are less victims of fate, femme fatales, or character flaws, and are merely acting as harlequins manipulated by the film makers. 

One might call Blood Simple parody-noir except that the Coens are serious about their vision of human nature.  Their people move along with little or no idea how they became engulfed by confusing, deceptive, and treacherous circumstances.  They have no chance to understand who they are and why they do things, let alone changing who they are, because most people, most of the time, are ignorant and oblivious to the large and not-so-large circumstances that have determined their actions.

Blood Simple’s noir mechanisms remind me what Stanley Kubrick did in his first Hollywood feature, The Killing (1956).  This film has also been labeled noir, especially emblematic of late noir films.  I have argued elsewhere that The Killing, upon close examination, uses all the noir tropes, especially in its choice of actors, who all had deep noir pedigrees, that allows the film to transcend genre clarification. This was something Kubrick did (and the Coen Brothers do) in most of his films.

In Bright Lights Film Journal, I have two articles that maintain there’s a close relation between Kubrick’s and the Coens’ cinema, specifically linking Dr Strangelove (1964) and Raising Arizona (1987) as well as The Shining (1980) and Fargo.  You can find a plethora of Kubrick allusions in all of the Coens’ film.

Additionally, Barry Sonnenfeld’s cinematography in Blood Simple creates humor and pleasure through its emphasis on specific gestures and movements (some of them reminding me of shots in Luis Bunuel’s The Discrete Charm of the Bourgoisie 1972).  He also uses quick camera movements for closeups that puts the actors’ faces in our visual laps.

The noir overkill and the cinematography separates, if not isolates, Blood Simple from the body of noir and neo-noir.  This is an amazing accomplishment for a first film, making it one the best first film features we’ve seen by any film maker.

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If you care about things Coen Brothers, I am trying again to offer a film course this Winter/Spring for Haddon Twp. Adult Night School.  I didn't get enough people to sign up in September but I am trying again, believing there are many who would interested.  The flyer from the school should be arriving soon. 

The course will be nine weeks, on Wednesdays, starting at 7:00.  We will start with Blood Simple and see a total of nine Coen Brothers' films, in chronological order.