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NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground There are certain people of whom it is difficult to say anything which will at once throw them into relief—in other words, describe them graphically in their typical characteristics. These are they who are generally known as “commonplace people,” and this class comprises, of course, the immense majority of mankind. Authors, as a rule, attempt to select and portray types rarely met with in their entirety, but these types are nevertheless more real than real life itself. For instance, when the whole essence of an ordinary person’s nature lies in his perpetual and unchangeable commonplaceness; and when in spite of all his endeavours to do something out of the common, this person ends, eventually, by remaining in his unbroken line of routine—. I think such an individual really does become a type o...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm

Unapologetically attractive

Unapologetically attractive

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Blood Simple (1984)

 



A gloriously repellent performance by M Emmet Walsh is one of many highlights of this thriller – a drum-tight gem that launched a film-making phenomenon


The Coen brothers’ debut from 1984 is this superb, slightly atypical classic (which got a little-known and rather baffling Chinese-language remake from Zhang Yimou in 2009 entitled A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop). The original is now getting a rerelease: a gripping, drum-tight noir masterpiece to compare with Touch of Evil.

Apart from everything else, it has one of the most disturbing nightmare scenes I have ever sat through. Yet for all the mastery with which it is written and planned out, right down to the spectacular final line and the eerie brilliance of the dying man’s point of view, Blood Simple does not hint – or does so only indirectly – at the more prolix wit, the verbal, visual riffing and offbeat wackiness of the Coens’ later gems. Judging from this, I think I would have guessed at a career closer to that of John Dahl, director of Red Rock West and The Last Seduction. How wrong.

Frances McDormand’s Abby is no stereotypical shady lady, but an entirely plausible, flawed woman who is married to a brutal and emotionally inadequate bar owner, Julian, played with magnificent menace by Dan Hedaya. Abby has fallen in love with Ray (John Getz), who serves drinks at Julian’s place. Seething with jealous rage, Julian hires a private investigator of revolting sleaze: Visser, a show-stopping performance from M Emmet Walsh, with his stetson and perennial sheen of sweat. I had forgotten about the extraordinary closeups of flies settling on his glistening, jowly face, to which he is indifferent, like a lizard. He is given a captivatingly strange speech to start the film, concluding bleakly: “What I know about is Texas, and down here you’re on your own…” Julian gets this unspeakable man to take more direct action against his wife and her lover. But with diabolic inspiration, Julian has his own kind of extra revenge, taunting Ray with the allegation that Abby is cheating on him too.


The genius of “Blood Simple” is that everything that happens seems necessary. The movie’s a blood-soaked nightmare in which greed and lust trap the characters in escalating horror. The plot twists in upon itself. Characters are found in situations of diabolical complexity. And yet it doesn’t feel like the film is just piling it on. Step by inexorable step, logically, one damned thing leads to another.




Consider the famous sequence in which a man is in one room and his hand is nailed to the windowsill in another room. How he got into that predicament, and how he tries to get out of it, all makes perfect sense when you see the film.

It is one of the best of the modern films noir, a grimy story of sleazy people trapped in a net of betrayal and double-cross.

“Blood Simple” was made on a limited budget, but like most good films seems to have had all the money it really needed. It is particularly blessed in its central performances. Dan Hedaya plays the unkempt owner of a scummy saloon, who hires a private eye to kill his wife and her lover. The wife (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with one of the bartenders (John Getz). The detective is played by that poet of sleaze, M. Emmet Walsh. He takes the bar owner’s money and then kills the bar owner. Neat. If he killed the wife, he reasons, he’d still have to kill the bar owner to eliminate a witness against him. This way, he gets the same amount of money for one killing, not two.

Oh, but it gets much more complicated than that. At any given moment in the movie there seems to be one more corpse than necessary, one person who is alive and should be dead, and one person who is completely clueless about both the living and the dead. There is no psychology in the film. Every act is inspired more or less directly by the act that went before, and the motive is always the same: self-preservation, based on guilt and paranoia.




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