Blood Simple (1984)

QFS No. 4 - The invitation for May 20, 2020
I have some peculiar blank spots in my film knowledge, many of them shameful for a filmmaker. Here’s one: I admit it, I have never seen Blood Simple, first film of the Coen Brothers (Miller’s Crossing, Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country for Old Men, Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou, A Serious Man, True Grit.)

I listed all those other films in the parenthesis just to prove that yes, I do quite love their filmmaking and movies and yes I’ve seen all of those, you jerk. I just can’t explain it, but by chance I have never seen the film that put them on the map.

BUT – and this should give me some snobby filmmaking cred to help repair my damaged reputation from revealing the above  – I did see  A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (2009) which is the MANDARIN LANGUAGE REMAKE with GERMAN SUBTITLES in a theater at the BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL. Take that, you judgmental fellow film snobs…

Regardless, I’m looking forward to watching what I assume and hope is an English language production. Because I can’t read German or follow Mandarin. And looking forward to finally watching the biggest part of the Coen Brothers’ origin story as filmmakers.

Blood Simple (1984) Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

Reactions and Analyses:
After the opening preamble, the first scene shows Abby (Frances McDormand) driving with Ray (John Getz) in the rain. For maybe two minutes it’s a two-shot from behind the driver and passenger, the rain is pouring down the windshield and so pitch black that you can’t see anything outside the window and barely anything inside the car. When headlights from outside the window flash up, blinding the frame, there’s a moment to readjust your eyes to the scene - which remains the same two-shot.

There’s something about this beginning that is not only ingenious from a filmmaking standpoint but also provides a set up for the story. The two are talking about a having gun that was a gift from her husband, that she’s leaving her husband (who is not the driver), and the man who is driving works for the husband. The setup is classic - gives us an expository framework, explains some of the setup, sets a mood, and suggests something ahead. The two aren’t yet having an affair but they’re about to start one.

Opening sequence from Blood Simple (1984) sets up story, conflict, character, mood - and is done on the cheap.

And while that’s all excellent storytelling, the ingenuity of the Coen Brothers’ opening here is in the filmmaking. The filmmakers didn’t have a lot of money - it’s their first film and this is a bare-bones independent production in which they had to virtually panhandle for to raise funding. This is a very inexpensive way to shoot this scene. The car is almost certainly not moving, water is probably being sprayed on the windshield while someone on the crew shakes it. Someone else is mimicking street lights. Add rain sounds, car noise and haunting music and you can pull this scene off. The remaining elements - a shot of the moving road that precedes this one, a shot of the bumper coming to a stop on the road - and you’ve got a low-budget, high-impact scene and the audience will feel as if they were in the car with these two characters, moving through a rainy Texas night.

Of course, in addition to production cleverness, you also need the artistry. The artistic filmmaking that follows is entirely contained within the first five minutes of the film and continues apace throughout. About halfway through the film, after Ray discovers that the husband Julian (Dan Hedaya) is dead and decides to hide the body - that sequence is entirely without dialogue for 18 minutes. And it is textbook suspense storytelling. Ray makes the discovery, then makes a decision, then has to prevent the other employees at the bar from discovering the body. He has to get it out, dump the bloody clothes in the incinerator, has to dispose of the body. But the body isn’t a body - it’s Julian, and he’s come back to life! He now has to kill a dead man, but a semi truck almost smashes into them! Then he finally gets the body into a hole but there’s enough life in Julian that he raises a gun but there are no bullets and Ray gently takes the gun from him. He makes the harrowing choice to bury Julian alive - a choice that haunts Ray throughout the remainder of the film.

“How could he have survived that long” is a reasonable question. But it leads to a pretty fantastic sequence in Blood Simple.

It’s the meat of the film and it’s just on the border of believability (that Julian could have lasted that long), but that’s the one thing that requires a tiny suspension of disbelief. Everything else seems entirely plausible - the messiness, the panic, the confusion, the opportunity. If movies have taught us anything, it’s very difficult to dispose of a corpse. And especially difficult if that corpse isn’t yet a corpse.

The ambient sounds, the sparse use of music, the darkness and shadows, lit by headlights or neon signs in the bar or the light from the incinerator - all of this is textbook filmmaking. This 18-minute sequence should be required study for all filmmakers. The choice of shots, when to move the camera, when to be on a close-up, the framing relative to the horizon, the staging of the actors and action. The film is a neon-inflected film-noir, with cigarette smoke floating up in soft purples and blues, with a pace that keeps moving without feeling rushed. Blood Simple feels like the assured hand of an expert filmmaker, not first-timers as Joel and Ethan Coen were in 1984.

People, rightly so, talk about the final shot of the film of the dripping faucet as one of the enduring images of the film. I’d argue this opening sequence holds equal significance artistically and narratively.

Final shot from Blood Simple from the dying Private Detective Visser’s point of view.

One of the fun things about watching Blood Simple is knowing that this is the starting point of the Coen Brothers, their origin story. People who get in over their heads and try to navigate criminal behavior without any real ability to do so. Characters like Private Detective Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) who totally lack self-awareness and usually morals. And some John Carpenter-esque camera angles - the super-wide angle lens fast-moving Steadicam shots or objective angles on a bloody finger or feet walking.

Blood Simple does make it difficult for you to root for any one in particular. Everyone is a sweaty, greedy, selfish maniac. Perhaps Abby - but she’s no saint either. She’s This is a hallmark of the Coens as well. They’re not in it for heroism or a clean ending, not in the way Hollywood has conditioned us to expect. They show people - at times overtly quirky folks but usually just ordinary people - in all their messiness, dealing with primal human emotions. Love, pain, hatred, fear, paranoia and, very occasionally, joy.

Ray drives away in the morning mist after burying Julian in Blood Simple. The location feels real, like we’re in small-town Texas complete with sweat and airborne bugs landing on faces.

There’s something oddly pure about Blood Simple - and I don’t mean the plot of course. The craft is expert level but the story is simple despite the twists and complexities of the relationships. From the vantage point of forty years after this Coen Brothers origin story, there’s a parallel with Wes Anderson. Not stylistically, of course, but in how their films evolve. There’s a “Coen Brothers” film that becomes iconic, the way there are “Wes Anderson Films.” The characters behave in a way you expect them to behave in a style you expect - that’s what makes Anderson and the Coens have a similar feeling, career-wise, from how I look at it today.

For the Coeans, it’s goofy or quirky characters in bizarre situations that can range from realistic to overtly stylized. And at the root of it is money. People need money and are thrust into situations where ill-gotten money gets people in trouble and it spirals out of control. The Big Lebowski (1998), Fargo (1996), No Country for Old Men (2007), Raising Arizona (1987, but the money is kids), Burn After Reading (2008), The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) - all have something to do with money and usually people who don’t have any but need some and do something they usually wouldn’t to get it.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing in any way. A generation earlier thoroughly enjoyed an Alfred Hitchcock film in much the same way - suspenseful, twists, ordinary people getting in over their heads. And now, there exists a Coen Brother Movie archetype. There wasn’t one in 1984. So I try to put myself in that time when watching Blood Simple, of seeing a Joel and Ethan Coen film for the first time without any additional knowledge of what are the expected beats and twists one might expect in one of their films. If you look at it that way - Blood Simple is nothing but a dark, thrilling, suspenseful, film - an explosion of film talent splayed across the screen that, hopefully, continues to endure well into the future.