Manly Thor's Day special

Blood Simple: the manliness lesson
"To really get a movie like this, I think you have turn around and watch the audience watching it. See yourself in the dark watching and figure out why this stuff resonates."


My thesis—which is a highfallutin way of saying the thing I keep coming back to—is that neo noir films have something to say about the challenges of being a man since 1980. And Blood Simple seems to me to be a great movie for that. Not for anything it says on purpose but for the things that just slip in.

After the narrated bit I discussed in the previous post, we get a dialogue between two people in a car. There has been a lot of commentary about the men in this movie and what their behaviour indicates. But pay attention to the woman here. Men often complain that women send mixed messages about sex but, I have often contended, a woman who sends mixed messages about sex is normal. The woman in this scene does something else. Something that is all too common today but rarely gets much criticism. As a man, you want to be able to recognize this behaviour pattern so you can get the hell out when you see it.

As I say, things go deeply wrong in this movie and lots of people have commented about the ways the male characters contribute to that going wrong. But this woman is trouble, real serious trouble. Our sense of charity tends to lead us to thing that she is just troubled but you don't want any part of her life.

Manly Thor's Day special

Neo noir: Blood Simple
(I am on vacation and the first post of the day keeps getting later and later ... )

The title from this one comes from Dashiell Hammett.

"If I don't get away soon I'll be going blood simple like the natives. I've arranged a killing or two in my time, when they were necessary. But this is the first time I've ever got the fever"

Hammett's ultimate objectives were political. He was a communist and he believed that the seeming surface order masked a deeper imbalance in human affairs. So, as much as the observation above may look like a comment on human psychology, it's really a comment about the ideology of capitalism.

Yes, I know: BORING!!!

And that is why nobody reads Hammett much anymore.

But suppose you took the politics out of it. Suppose you just had a bunch of Hammett-like characters floating along aimlessly in a world that made no sense? That is what the Coen brothers do and they tell us so in so many words at the opening of their very first movie. As Blood Simple opens we have big pan shots of Texas and, classic noir image, oil derricks accompanied by a classic noir narration. But read what the voice says:

The world is full of complainers. But the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States, or even Man of the Year—something can always go wrong. And go ahead, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help—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 ... and down here... you're on your own.

We don't know who is saying this and I'm going to leave it that way. Just think of those words. There is a very clear disavowal of Hammett going on here despite his having inspired the title.

Here is another way to think about all this. Suppose liberalism lost its favourite explanation. Although most liberals are not and never were Marxists, they did buy the theory of capitalism and its discontents being at the root of everything. But suppose they lost that and all they had was the art that had been built on that ideology. Then you'd get movies like the ones the Coen brothers make. Beautiful, artfully crafted movies with nothing at their core. Movies that are inspired by a deep love of movies and of movie-making but movies that show very little affection for humanity.

These are movies in which things do, as our narrator hints, go deeply, deeply wrong but without any real explanation as to why. The Coen brothers dodge this by setting movies in places like Texas and Fargo. That is to say, places sophisticated movie-goers can see as far away and foreign. For this is a movie not so much about a world gone wrong but about a world that no longer makes sense to good liberals and it's a good thing to have it all happen over there someplace.

To really get a movie like this, I think you have turn around and watch the audience watching it. See yourself in the dark watching and figure out why this stuff resonates. More to come ...