The Coen Project: Blood Simple

"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." -Loren Visser

Blood Simple, the Coen brothers' first film, begins the same way their Oscar winning masterpiece No Country for Old Men does, with shots of desolate Texas prairie overlaid with the voiceover of a grizzled old country boy.  In this case, it's private investigator Loren Visser, an amoral sleazeball played with greasy relish by M. Emmet Walsh and the first in a long line of Coen embodiments of inplacable evil.  His is the first voice we hear in the Coen brothers' canon, and it vividly articulates a theme that will run through all of their work: people cannot be trusted to overcome their own selfishness and stupidity. As Visser says, "tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help, 'n watch him fly." Blood Simple isn't interested in diagnosing the problem, of explaining just why it is that people are such treacherous dogs, just in describing the condition with dry wit and a southern-fried noir sensibility.  When cuckolded bar owner Marty (Dan Hedaya at his slimiest) fails in a ham-fisted attempt to pick up a girl at a bar, he points out "we don't seem to be...communicating."  That goes for everyone in the movie.  The plot is entirely powered by people who distrust one another, and, as a result, are incapable of meaingful communication. That goes for  Marty and his hired operative Visser, but also for Marty's wife Abbey (Francise McDormand) and her lover Ray (John Getz).  When Ray finds Mardy dead, he assumes that Abbey killes him and buries the body.  When Abbey claims ignorance, he assumes that she's setting him up for the fall.  And when Abbey finds out that Marty's dead, she assumes Ray killed him.  All the while, the real killer, Visser, is hovering in the background, trying to cover up his incompetence with more murders.  The Coens have their usual slightly contemptuous distance from all the idiocy and distrust,  but the question of just why the hell everybody just can't talk to one another without fear of being sold out lingers. In their first film, the Coens establish their love of genre, their amused detachment from the human predicament, and their interest in exploring the faultines of modern life.  They would go further towards explaining just why it is we're "on our own" in their next movie, Raising Arizona.