"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."
So says M. Emmet Walsh as private dick Loren Visser during a monologue that opens the Coen Brothers' 1984 debut feature, Blood Simple. With those words, the professional careers of the two of the greatest writer/directors of our time began. And with those words, the Coens declared what would become the thesis for their lives' work. In the Coen Brothers' universe, it doesn't matter who a character is. It doesn't matter if they're the most sincere, charitable, humane person on the planet. It doesn't matter if they're one of the most powerful, respected or revered people in the world. What matters is that they screwed up. Somewhere along the line they did something that they shouldn't have done and after that first wrong step is taken, their fate is sealed. Sure, they can try to fight it. But they're only fighting a losing battle and we as the audience can only sit back and watch as the extreme, unforgiving consequences of their actions rain down upon them.
In Blood Simple, that first wrong step taken can be summed up rather easily: Julian Marty's wife Abby cheats on him with Ray, one of his employees. That's it. From the simple act of Abby and Ray (Frances McDormand and John Getz) choosing to cuckold Julian (Dan Hedaya), things spiral wildly out of control. Julian decides to avenge himself by hiring Visser to spy on and eventually kill the two lovers for $10,000; only to have Visser double cross him. Ray is then left to discover the fallout of Visser's betrayal and, after fatally misinterpreting it, makes the worst possible decision that the situation allows. Every single decision made along the way leads the characters to a worse place with a higher body count. In the end, three of the four are dead and the last is left to mourn alone, traumatized and shattered by their prolonged and devastating immersion in these sudden acts of violence - the meaning of the titular "blood simple."
What I love about the film is how pared down it is. It strips away all the usual noir tropes - from the conniving femme-fatale to the resistance of the wrongly accused protagonist - and just cuts to the chase. It's direct cause-and-effect. The betrayers get betrayed and the killers get killed. The film doesn't care about what led the characters here. It doesn't explore Abby or Ray beforehand as to explain why they made their choice against Julian and it doesn't dwell on their relationships or even their personalities after we do meet them. The whys of what happen don't matter. What matters, despite whether or not Abby and Ray are good people, are their actions and how those actions lead quickly and inevitably to their ruin. It's that feeling of inevitability that makes the film great.
Everything that happens in Blood Simple seems necessary. The Coens have time and again been bashed (or critiqued if you want to be civil) for "piling it on" their characters. However, in Blood Simple every unavoidable action feels logical. Every damned step the characters take leads to the next. Even when you pull back and see the full picture - as in one famous scene where a character's hand, snaked through a window, is nailed into the the sill by large pocket knife while the character fires pistol shots in pain and anger - though it looks bewilderingly preposterous, all the individual elements that lead the character(s) being there make perfect sense. It's like an insane asylum constructed out of only the sturdiest, most symmetrical bricks.
Blood Simple strikes the perfect balance of satirizing the noir genre while becoming an exemplary entry into it. It's clear that they want to go over the top. Whether they're taking "the corpse that will not die" trope and pushing it to its outermost limit or casting the sleaze king himself, M. Emmet Walsh as Visser, cackling in his too-tight, flopsweat drenched yellow suit - flies swarm around him, land on his face, "Gimme a call whenever you wanna cut my head off," he tells Julian, "I can always crawl around without it" - you can tell that the Coens are having a blast in their own dark, uniquely comical way. It's relatively easy to do a parody of a noir film. It's not so easy to do a straight, well-done noir. And it's almost impossible to do a noir film where the suspense and parody are perfectly balanced. But with Blood Simple, the Coens were able to beautifully blend the two into a stylish and intoxicating, fiendishly ironic work of art and resoundingly state that, "This is who we are. And this is what we're about."
While Visser may state in that opening monologue that "nothin' comes with a guarantee," with the Coen Brothers you're always guaranteed one thing: actions will have consequences.
