Abby (Frances McDormand) has an affair with Ray (John Getz) to distract herself from her life with Marty (Dan Hedaya), who is also Ray’s boss. Marty has hired a detective (M. Emmet Walsh) to watch his wife. With the best of these four people a cheat and liar, and the worst an amoral murderer and thief, and no one willing to speak clearly and honestly, calamity and death are inevitable.
The rule, taught in every freshman lit class, is that tragedies display the best in humanity and comedies display the worst. Tragedy is filled with flawed heroes. Comedy is packed with fools. So, it should be clear that all Noirs, in their hearts, are jokes: long, twisted and twisting, excruciating jokes. Some, like Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd. don’t try to hide it. Others, like The Maltese Falcon are more subtle, but in the end, when you realize that these absurd characters have been chasing all over the world for a worthless chunk of metal, it becomes clear that the joke is on them, and on us.
Joel and Ethan Coen saw this, and created an impossible shaggy dog story of deceit, treachery, and murder. Over and over, the characters in Blood Simple could escape their fate by doing insignificant things, such as speaking to each other. But you know by the time the introduction is over that isn’t how the story is going to play out. That would require these people to be, in some small way, heroic, and there are nothing but fools in sight. Yup, this is no tragedy. Step by step they doom themselves, and watching, we know what is going to happen right before it does, and it is always painful and always funny.
The story is told precisely, and while there are unanswered questions and multiple situations left open, nothing more (or less) needs to be said. Every shot is both necessary and sufficient. The camera work brings the viewer into the bar, the bedroom, and the field (where a grave is dug in the middle of the night). You are the fifth character in this trial of human misery, and somehow it’s a fun place to be.
Blood Simple can lay claim to be a starting point three times. It was the first in a long line of off-kilter (sometimes brilliant, like The Hudsucker Proxy, sometimes complete disasters, like The Ladykillers) productions from the Coen brothers. It is also the start of yet another revitalization of Noir. Three years earlier, Body Heat had finally resurrected the genre, but what followed tended to be sexual thrillers. Blood Simple recreated the existential Noir, where each person is alone in the world, and each action leads to their damnation. And for the hat trick, it was the beginning of the indefinable “Indie Film” movement that would culminate in the not-very-indie, big budget productions of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.
Originally released with an onscreen definition of the term “blood simple” (it’s a phrase invented by author Dashiell Hammett to sum up the muddled mindset of anyone attempting a murder), the brothers removed it when they edited approximately five minutes out of the film for a late ’90s re-release (they were just “tightening” the movie, and I can’t imagine how it could get any tighter). Still, they state the movie’s theme without subtlety. The detective explains in a voice over:
The fact is, nothin’ comes with a guarantee. Now I don’t care if you’re the pope of Rome, President of the United States or Man of the Year; somethin’ can all go wrong. Now go on ahead, y’know, complain. Tell your problems to your neighbor; ask for help, ‘n watch him fly. Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else… that’s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, an’ down here… you’re on your own.
And they make you believe it in ninety minutes.
When they recut the movie, they also added an introduction by a fake film restorer, who explains how they used modern technology to save Blood Simple, which was decaying rapidly. For the recent DVD, they also included a full commentary with another non-existent employee of Forever Young Film Preservation Inc. Together, these turn the film into a pure comedy. You can’t ask for a better deal for you money than two entirely different ways of enjoying a single film.
