“Nothing comes with a guarantee…” THE COENS’ BLOOD SIMPLE

© 2013 by James Clark

 We tend to take for granted that ours is a filmic era uniquely endowed with reckless and unpredictable artists (like David Lynch, Lars von Trier, Quentin Tarantino, Nicolas Refn and the Coens (Joel and Ethan), whereas the practitioners of the past were sworn to a sort of Hippocratic Oath tracing out to cryptic but definitely solemn assurances. The grand vizier of that latter company would have to be the sainted Robert Bresson, whom you wouldn’t be surprised seeing photographed in a lab coat or cassock. But, arguably, Bresson was the consummate gamester—fanning whole eras of film experts coming to (slo-pitch) bat for making contact with piety unseen since the waning of the Roman Empire.

There is in fact a world of hidden reaches paradoxically emanating from those melancholy tales of his, a sensual firestorm locked, temporarily, behind bars. And one of the great moments, to date, of that overt bid for a kick-ass jailbreak is the first film that Joel and Ethan Coen brought forward, in 1984, namely, Blood Simple, a work it would be a huge understatement to describe as irreverent. Bristling with indiscretion, this movie is, nevertheless as subtly designed as a Swiss watch; and hence it couches its kinship with the apparently stuffy but razor-sharp elder within a narrative which includes a second, far more flashy associate, namely, that commission to deadly resolve (well known to and beloved by Bresson), the Robert Aldrich/ A.I. Bezzerides noir, Kiss Me Deadly.

So if we want to make sense of the seemingly improbable Bressonian (which is to say studious as well as sophisticated) inspiration of Blood Simple—a title with a Dashiell Hammett source, to be found in the novel, Red Harvest (1929); but a project with marked disengagement from the Hammett narrative —we have to allow its raunchy and rabid factuality to run its course in such a way that its general bankruptcy begins to suffuse us with strands of solvent energy, impacting cinematically, not discursively. Bresson is salient here, not due to any doctrinal coincidence, but because he’s as wild and crazy as the more obvious outlaws of the present era. The best way to capture this affinity is, I believe, to savor instances of the aural and visual design of this work, because the strange abysses they bring to us are demonstrably akin to those truncated auras stopping us cold in face of Bresson’s death marches.

Positioned, as we are, at the outset, in the back seat of a car where, in the front seat (rain pouring over the windows and the windshield wipers cutting through it like machetes in a canebrake) a man who is driving and a woman who is a passenger converse in muffled tones about her leaving her husband, we are given access to a moment of narrative in which ambience is very much to the fore. Whenever beams from oncoming traffic, presumably highway traffic, as there is no lighted detail of habitation, hit the windshield there is an incandescent pulsating glow recalling the researching tendencies of cloud chambers. In addition to the wash of those storm systems (real or imagined mechanisms), there is a quiet, rather eerie peal of an organ, running across our attention like a satellite sharply hurtling against a black sky. “…Something wrong with him…Maybe he’s sick…mentally,” is one move by the woman trying to bring clarity to a moment of confused impasse. “Find a marriage counsellor… I don’t know what goes on… don’t wanna know,” is his sudden abandonment of clarity. She had dramatized her enmity, beginning with what struck her as the unforgivable dullness of her husband’s recently giving her a pearl-handled 38 revolver for their first anniversary. “Figured I better leave. Might use it on him.” In response to her being struck by the driver’s kindness in driving her away from her untenable home, he maintains, rather equivocally, “But I like you. I’ve always liked you…” The slur and haziness covering his words seemingly enact a panoramic atrophy besetting his maintenance of affection. Suddenly she looks at the road behind them, where a Volkswagen Beetle (scruffy, at that) is clearly following; and whatever passivity her passenger status implies disappears in a flash. She burns away a good percentage of the atmospheric interference with, “Hell! Stop the car, Ray!” After the little menace passes by, she is pensive, back under the sway of a compelling infection. “I don’t know…I just think maybe I’m making a mistake.” Her setback calling for some getting back on track, she activates what’s on hand, by asking, “Did you mean what you said before?” He, once again wanting no part of complication, declares, “Abby, I like you. But it’s no point startin’ anything now.” But the rush of traffic increases; and then it’s the noise and lights of big trucks rushing past the motel bed where they are making like, raking over them like that of a hostile army. She had, while still in the car, listened along with us to the insistent motif of organ pipes, drawing her toward some kind of emotive jailbreak. The subsequent flashing movements, temporarily at least, infuse some punch into their confinement and tentativeness (which also had to contend with the pitter-patter of the credits).

The same bid for a pop that cleared the closeness of that dark evening can be heard coming from the phone call that wakes them up next morning. “Havin’ a good time?” the caller asks; and this solicitude, by contrast, entirely lacks affection. “Your husband,” Ray reports to Abby. And this rather ominous triangulation has to be, from the get-go, followed (thanks to the difficulties we soak in, from that back seat) not as about a crash, clinch and a clash of personalities, but as about how one rides that clouded trail, as, in fact, belonging to the trail in accordance with the surreal warp and woof we encountered on that first drive. We are in Texas and that arid Lone Star State is in the process of giving us an insider’s taste of its sink-or-swim circulatory system. Thus we have a little prefatory moment, functioning as an epigraph we have to ride hard to lasso. “The world is full of complainers…You could be the Pope in Rome, the President of the United States, something could always go wrong…In Russia they got it all mapped out where everyone pulls for everyone else. But all I know, down here in Texas, you’re on your own. Nothing comes with a guarantee.” (This is another way of saying, “Cry who can. Laugh who will” [the epigraph of Jacques Demy’s first film, Lola].) The speaker is a self-styled “private investigator” enlisted by Abby’s complainer-husband, Marty, to verify her legally precarious errancy. Mike Hammer, the protagonist in Kiss Me Deadly, was an expert in that line of work. The car we soaked up some blues (and then some) in, as the credits were presented (in Mike’s story, they roll in an arresting way; here, they just stand there), could be a radioactive take on tentative Mike and distressed Christina, chatting about a future where nothing is guaranteed. The Volkswagen (a vehicle you’d never see Mike driving) trailing them brings to mind the deadly interruption of Mike and Christina’s drive by G.E. Soberin, a fond supporter of Soviet Russia. The chunk of tire rubber on the highway during the drawly declamation of the epigraph alludes to that moment of being run off the road. Hymn-sober and dupe, Marty, has something in common with Soberin’s destructiveness. (There is, then, a multi-positioning of such characters, a distribution through various personae, in accordance with the volatility of the processes of a cloud chamber, and also a cyclotron.) And this Marty has a German Sheppard who looks like the one accompanying L’Argent’s Yvon on the latter’s rounds of butchering, amidst shadowy corridors. The resentful husband brings his beautiful dog along for the invasion of Ray’s house and its shadowy corridors, and abduction of Abby (which she foils by breaking his finger and kicking him in the balls—a lively [if stifled, a tad] partner to a Ray who’s headed for pulling an Yvon).

Now that we’ve had a glimpse of how truly souped-up this supposed merely Dashiell Hammett-inspired saga is, let’s see what that motor can really do! The residue of those other scenarios serves to put in place the remarkable situation that the grotesque goings-on of Blood Simple are a widely observable basic truth about human experience, amenable to tempering but not amenable to eradication. We’ll soon encounter the film’s heavy resort to factors of inertia and gravity, in the service of displaying this bind. But, to reiterate, it is the sensual wash of palpably measurable malaise that constitutes the heart of its manifestations. And the most transparent instance of this non-clinical pathology derives from the most delicate of the Texans, namely, Marty, first glimpsed with his glass of milk and bottle of Alka-Seltzer, his first name, Julian, implying youthfulness, being one of those Coenesque drubbings of their protagonists. Abby tells Ray, along the way, as Marty swings into a murderous side-road of possibility, “He would tell me, pointing to his forehead, ‘In here I’m anal…’ and I’d tell him, ‘Marty, how come you’re anal and you think I gotta go to the psychiatrist?’” Before that, however, we first see him in the impossibly cluttered office of the bar he runs, meeting with the private eye who, sort of drunkenly (sounding a bit like Mike filled up with Soberin’s “truth serum”), declaimed that epigraph, and who had been assigned to find out what unpredictable Abby was up to. The questionable visionary (resembling an upbeat Ralph Meeker [Mike Hammer] having let himself go to seed) had taken some photos through the motel window they hadn’t bothered to cover; and that causes the husband noticeable stress. “Why’d you take them?” he complains, fighting back an attack of dyspepsia, intrinsic despair frozen into his eyes and jaws. This moment also reveals his ever-close-to-the-surface conversance with violence. “In Greece they would cut off the head of the messenger who brought the bad news.” Showing a surprising tendency to prissiness in those man-of-action circumstances, he pays off the information-hound and dismisses him with, “If I need you, I’ll know what rock to turn over.” His effort to look devastating in tossing the money on the floor falls completely flat. Moving on to the next faux pas, he goes out to the bar-room, with its suave (at first glance) bartender, Meurice (the francophonic element of whom recalling Mike’s haunt, the Pigalle [Marty’s place has a parking lot sporting a large plastic model of a veal calf]), feeding the jukebox, not with the satin musical finish of Nat King Cole—whose “Rather Have the Blues” fills that LA bar—but with The Four Tops (enough said). Meurice is charming a young blonde; Marty again tries to toss some weight around, dispatching Meurice to serve the paying customers, and gets nowhere with that chick. Whereas the front-line staff (Ray was one, AWOL; similarly blonde Abby was another such “friend”) could easily hum along with her about volcanoes, the minute the frowning, tall, dark and ill-at-ease boss begins to speak he’s met with, “Look, you wanna hustle me? I don’t wanna be hustled!” Later that night, Ray confronts him to see if some self-controlled relations are possible, finds it’s not to be (“Might as well quit…”)—Marty refusing to pay him the two weeks owing (“She’s an expensive piece of ass”). And, with his stare locked onto the floor, he goes over the now toxic (in his eyes) Abby, and her favorite line, “I ain’t done nothin’ funny.” He, very typically, allows the affront to become volcanic, and he, along with his German Sheppard (the physical poise of which constituting an ongoing, inadvertent affront far more telling than what he’s pumped about), breaks into Ray’s place, stages that gauche attack and embarrassing setback, gets run off the property by a surprisingly, it seems, resolved and combative Abby—the dog looking back fondly, even admiringly, to her as they pull away (into a dead-end road, wouldn’t you know it!)— (in this, she resembling Gaby Rodgers’ Lily, associate of and betrayer of Soberin [ Marty’s big silver 4-door recalling Soberin’s black Packard]—and he resorts to looking under that rock, intent on murder. Approaching the adolescent drinking and doping redoubt on a bluff where the dick (“Loren Visser”—a name implying cheap, deadly but also strangely cool tricks [think of Bogey’s Lauren]) feels right at home and in the process of romancing and providing drugs for an Eighth Grader, Marty’s fearful discomfort brings out the pit bull in the ragtag punks (as per Norbert, Lucien et al piling onto Yvon, in L’Argent). They yell unpleasantries over the Tex/Mex witlessness on a radio, taunts like (apropos of his finger in a cast), “Stuck your finger into the wrong ass?” Clutching for retaliatory relief from his humiliation (he had defended the Greek beheading on the grounds that “it made them feel better”), he rasps out, “I want them killed…” His $10,000 commission moves Visser to note, “In Russia a man can only make 50 cent a day…” (just the contrast Marty needs to hear at this point of depressive delirium). Then, showing some mordant wit (in marked contrast to Marty’s humorlessness), he sends the boss out on a fishing expedition at Corpus Christi, for the sake of a solid alibi. The desperate social climber adds, self-importantly, “I’ll take care of the money. You make sure their bodies aren’t found. There’s a big incinerator [a tiny Hell] behind my bar…”

The most revealing skein of Marty’s disarray has to do with his being murdered—twice. Smarting from that reckless crack about knowing what rock to turn over, the dick pulls a clever double-cross: photographing Abby and Ray asleep in bed; tricking out the original print to appear that they were covered with bullet wounds (a vision that sends easily shocked, non-loner, Marty, to the “Gents” room to vomit); telling the guy from Corpus Christi that he’s disposed of the bodies; shooting him with Abby’s gun (stolen in the course of snapping that photo); and leaving him for dead, while being $10,000 richer. Ray comes by to, hopefully advantageously, clear the air (Abby having already moved to a rental [“I’ll be outta your hair…”/”That’s what you wanta do, then you oughta do it…”]), sees the bleeding entrepreneur and Abby’s gun; and, assuming she’s shot him, he, to our edification, rescinds his backsliding and takes the body on a bit of a road trip, after pausing a while at the inferno in the parking lot (perhaps the prospect of cremation unnerving him). On the open road, Ray (whose squeamishness coincides interestingly with that of Marty—not to mention Yvon) has a panic attack, rushing from the car and into a ploughed field. On returning he’s more than surprised to see the always-awkward bar owner crawling along the pavement like a badly winged skunk or some other item of road kill. He drags him out to that field of nightmares, digs a grave and buries him alive (a new wrinkle on a baseline of excruciating discomfort); but not before his victim comes up with a pistol—only to discover it lacks bullets (a nice wrap-up of a life of malicious gestures [for the sake of self-importance] that never catch fire. Ray rushes the infill. (Is this a labor of love; or is it settling old and new scores? Or does he know?) As Marty screams in pain and terror and self-despising, Ray beats him, now a little wart on the grave-site, with his spade.

Ray, hitherto a calm-voiced and calm-faced presence (though reflexively standoffish—after that first night never touching Abby), never recovers from that derring-do. Later he will tell Abby, in a suffocated voice, “Truth is, he was alive when I buried him.” He can’t sleep or eat, and he tells her, “Truth is [trying to find the vein that will bring effective calm], I’ve been feelin’ sick last couple days…” She has come upon him in the last stages of his packing (a variant of Yvon setting off for jail, readily shutting the door on bids for affection). “Want come with me?” he asks her, now no more a ladies’ man than Marty; but definitely a step ahead of Yvon. He ends in a state of being frozen within massive incapacity to grasp events in all their promise, and peril. Having stumbled upon the evidence that she did not shoot Marty and that the (first) killer will be after the last of the doctored photos produced, he sees the Volkswagen trailing him, goes to Abby’s place and peers out of her floor-to-ceiling window at the car having made its way there. “Turn it off!” he orders her anxiously, a phrase having a far-ranging topspin, as she enters the room while turning on the lights for her tellingly spacious living room. Both of them hang suspended in face of such menace become incredible to sensibility flinching under a regime of pervasive threat (a concept of dullness, “blood simple,” floated by Dashiell Hammett, in his crime novel, Red Harvest). That we jump to the crosshairs of Visser’s rifle a couple of times conveys the drive to destiny which they have no better response to than a pair of deer in headlights. Ray finally cries out, “They can see in!” He’s shot dead and she, in a kind of accelerated learning mode, quickly slides to the floor and whacks out the light with a toss of one of her shoes.

Thus ensues a battle of two formidable wills—quite a departure from Bresson and Demy, but a possibility given some credence in Kiss Me Deadly. However, whereas the latter film sides with those Europeans in maintaining the dead end (or nearly so) coming to pass for those pushing the envelope—prying open Pandora’s Box—here we have someone who had (like L’Argent’s Elise) put up with a dud long enough and sets about staging a rally on behalf of something better, the “more” of the “more real” infusing the startling events of this surreal production. She had—in a last-ditch of hope—made her wide-eyed way from Ray’s sofa to his bed (after the beginning of the end for their correspondence), thus making it into the fake photographic overlay devised by Visser. Now he was back, and she has to prove she can’t be manipulated twice. After desecrating Ray’s corpse (with a version of the Maltese Falcon, tattered from scraping for gold); coming after a fruitless search of his pockets for the incriminating photo, Visser stalks her to the point of reaching from one window to another nearby. As he reaches into the room with a gloved hand (a manoeuvre perhaps boiling down to reducing the trembling, gasping Abby to blood simple petrifaction), she smashes the window down on his wrist and then drives a knife (taken from Ray’s pocket) into the back of his hand, pinning it to the window ledge, giving him some spookiness to deal with. This is an exuberant and reflectively fertile return to Mike’s crushing in a drawer the hand of the morgue director who had helped himself into Christina’s gut to retrieve a key of great importance to many. But whereas Hammer easily (even amusedly) roughs up a little old guy to make off with a piece of equipment he’d decided to employ in the course of advancing himself, the scene for Abby is drenched in her extreme agitation that nearly makes her sick (in contrast to Marty and Ray) and she has no schemes ahead, beyond staying strong, ruthless and agile. This cat and mouse scene involves several moments when she is nearly capsized by terror—struggling to keep from crying out; breathing in jagged bursts of material and extra-material stress. He calls out, with an arrogant edge to his usually ingratiating voice, “Now, I don’t know what in hell you two thought you were going to pull off…” [when in fact they couldn’t have told him themselves]. But she musters the courage to grab Visser’s hand and thrust it down on the ledge before stabbing him. While he’s thus held in place (all the while showing agony to match her own) he proceeds to shoot holes in the thin wall behind which she stands. We see this action from the vantage point of her darkened room, and we’re immediately struck by the rounded perforations conveying misty columns of light across the gloom. Despite the piercing cries of the fixed and hemorrhaging intruder and Abby’s near-death tension, these several beams impress us with their strange beauty, emanating from such brutal ugliness. They impress us as resembling the actions of a cloud chamber, bringing to one’s attention the ionization of elementary particles as a vision of electrodynamics at the cusp of a mysterious commerce with materiality. After the unlikely author of this delicate and profound beauty proceeds (King-Kong style) to punch through the strategically weakened cheap drywall and thence proceeds to pull the knife out of his hand and the sill (gore and screaming reaching a fever [cyclotronic?] pitch), Abby has the presence of mind to slip into his room, pick up the dick’s pistol (thus returning us to the opening scene where she regarded Marty’s gift of a 38 as a sign of his derangement and as a frightening temptation for her to use it on that alien), return to her porous fortress, and, when he becomes mobile once again and heads toward her door clutching the knife, shoot him through that wall (impasse). There is, we note, no such comprehensive shimmy to this last shot and its light beam. Moreover, it is Visser who’s most noticeably transformed.

She faintly gets out, “I’m not afraid of you, Marty,” though having been told by Ray that he killed him. Also, just before Ray arrives at her cathedral (and also industrial) proportions temporary home that deadly night, she has a reverie of Marty sitting on her bed and telling her, in contradiction of her blurting out (somewhat desperately), “I love you,” “No, you don’t. You’re just afraid of me…” This, then, would seem to be a flashpoint of facing up to the intrinsic isolation of her bid, where the enormity of her departure from flaccid entanglements has thwarted her getaway. (During that first conversation in the car, Ray asks her, “What ya gonna do in Houston?” And she can only mutter something about “…facing that…”) Visser, ever-quick to capitalize upon the frailties of others, but now close to death, fixed upon the big picture, has his little joke with her, both of them beyond conventional happy endings. She’s not afraid, but she’s still skidding, indulging in a bit of bravado on the theme of necessarily reaching out to hopeless cases. So his last words are, “Well, M’am, if I see him I’ll sure give him the message.” (Ray, just after flattening Marty, and cruising along a country two-lane with his brights on, is tripped up in a way comparable to that overtaking Abby. Shaken by having committed murder [along a more pedestrian route of disposing of evidence that Abby had crossed that line], he’s unable to be elated by a flock of starlings swooping overhead and then he’s nonplussed by an approaching vehicle flashing its brights at him. Only at the last minute does he think of turning off the inappropriate illumination, and the shaggle-toothed driver at odds with him and now right up to his windows gives him a goofy grin and a finger-pistol shot sent his way, as if to say, “Wake up!”)

Visser dies looking up at the pipes of the bathroom sink. Aptly wrapping up this final scene’s play of light, play of darkness and play of wit, his eye catches sight of a water droplet (unlike that dull Ray’s indifference to the starlings) gliding along a thread of plumbing. Abby rises above the gruesome fates of her namesake, the spunky but vacuous Gaby/Lily, and her cinematic kin, the spunky and affectionate Velda. She has, to be sure, more on her plate than Elise. But the title, Blood Simple, refers to Hammett’s insistence that omnipresent violence (the Coens, believe it or not, are far more absorbed by omnipresent emotional violence than simple mayhem) can rob one of the hallmarks of humanity. Would that include the tone-deafness of the MC at Marty’s bar, purring about the stripper, “How about let’s show our appreciation for Lorraine up there…” as if she were parading some livestock in a 4-H competition?

Accompanying the flux of sensuality so salient in the physical fabric of this film, is a truckload of enticements in the form of materiale noticeably falling short of compelling sensuality (Lorraine and her associate, for instance). In trying to grasp exactly where Abby is as we leave her, it may be useful to touch upon that surround constantly discountenancing our protagonist, to the point that (anal, i.e., deracinated) Marty was pressing her to see a psychiatrist. In sharp contrast to Velda and Mike’s Pigalle, where adult discretion and Kitty White singing “Rather Have the Blues” were there for those who can handle it, we have Meurice in his white sneakers jamming the jukebox (a machine-age site of decision) with a Motown mechanism, “The Same Old Song,” so tediously infantile that the musical choice of the adolescent alcoholics dumping on Marty makes them look like budding musicologists by contrast. After the rich and complex struggles of Abby and Visser, the closing credits jump up at us, and Meurice’s damn jingle ominously takes over.) Pairing the latter with Carter Burwell’s “Blood Simple” maps out the gulf between daring venture and “the same old” that runs roughshod. (That rainy night, Ray’s inane repetition of “I ain’t a marriage counsellor” and “Don’t want to know” also fails to make her feel good about her environment. One of my favorite moments is the late-night preacher on Ray’s radio as he drives out of town with Marty’s [supposed] corpse. The oxygen deficiency of that geezer voice, “…two years we’ll be colliding with the sun…” truly reeks of a dead planet, but it is also hilarious, a spurt of local color. Ray, characteristically, finds the program simply terrifying and, stopping the car, he dashes across the dark field. That could be a little foretaste of Abby’s drive to come.)

Sidling up to this incisive aural bout of heavy weather, there is a visual range of physical oppression the demeanment of which functions cumulatively. At the beginning, it’s pouring cats and dogs. The windshield wipers are motion without poetry (as are the pumpjack [“nodding donkey”] oil rigs at the epigraph). Visser’s Volkswagen (deployed by him for its “unobtrusiveness”) is a piece of garbage and the way they make it to bed demonstrates affection in thrall to boredom. Marty’s bar, with its conspicuous “Lite Beer” sign and a patron who seems to have expired from the liteness, not to mention the slag heap quality of his office and another sign unpromisingly hoping for kinetic magic, as to “Neon Boots,” is totally devoid of refreshment. And, last, though far from least, there is the German Sheppard, casting a long shadow and chilling Abbey’s blood, as did the gift of a 38 mechanism. It is that ponderous simplification which elicits covering this saga with the concept of blood simple, which is to say, being swept out of the running (as to fruitful lucidity) by sheer physiological pressures (mainly the violent impingement inherent in adamantly self-congratulatory compatriots who’d sooner be dead than switch from lite).

That snoresville is, notwithstanding the “messenger’s” unseemliness, brightened a bit (and with this crowd a bit is a lot) by Visser’s darkly comedic take on proceedings. Showing Marty the photos of his wife in bed with another man, he quips, “I know where you can get that framed.” His lighter is a little laugh-track unto its own (a machine soaked with the vastly unpredictable), inscribed as it is, “Elks’ Man of the Year.” He also has the range of disinterestedness to put to lovelorn Marty, “It [the split] ain’t so bad… You’re always assuming the worst! You thought she was in a tower…” Recovering quickly from the insult by the irate family-man, he laughs, tells him, “That’s good!” and leaves with the parting shot, “Give me a call when you want to cut off my head… I can always crawl around without it” [a bit of detachment from classical rationality]. He also deftly and amusingly covers his sideline occupation with the kids, as intruded upon by Marty, by rattling off [first to the girl], “Well, sorry, Sweetheart. My date’s here… [then to Marty] She saw me rolling a cigarette. Thought it was marijuana… I was a swinger again!”

Abby’s just killed the only person in town—and possibly the whole Lone Star State—who could do something for her. It’s impossible to say where she could go from there. And, you know, as Visser (who was, when all is said and done, something of a lamplighter) would say, “Ain’t so bad.” That would be tantamount to where Julian (not Marty, though he’s around), the protagonist of Nicolas Refn’s Only God Forgives (2013), ends up –evoking frisson with his outstretched hands as he’s about to be executed by a brilliantly efficient lawman whose law needs some work.