Blood Simple — Trust Is a Sucker’s Bet

Four people, one crime, not a single shared fact among them: the Coens’ whole cosmology, complete on the first try.

There is a stretch in the middle of the Coens’ first picture that runs close to fifteen minutes with barely a spoken line, and I want to start there, because it is the whole movie in miniature. A bartender named Ray stands in a plowed field outside Austin at four in the morning, leaning on a shovel, waiting for the man in his headlights to finish dying. He has spent the night cleaning up a murder he believes his girlfriend committed. He has hauled the body across dark farmland with rain hammering the windshield, and somewhere on that drive the body woke up. Now Julian Marty, gutshot and half-ruined, is dragging himself up the furrows one fistful of dirt at a time, lit like an accusation by Ray’s own car. Ray came out here to be loyal. What he learns, standing in that field, is what loyalty will agree to at four in the morning. He digs the hole anyway. It is still the purest nightmare the Coens ever staged, and the horror of it is that nothing in it is evil. It is one decent, terrified man performing each small task correctly, in order, all the way down.

On paper the movie is a pocket noir, and the paper version takes one breath to tell. Marty, a bar owner built out of sweat and grievance, suspects his wife Abby of sleeping with Ray, one of his bartenders. He is right. He hires a private detective named Visser to take pictures, then makes the classic Texas mistake of upgrading the order to murder. Visser sees a better angle. He doctors the photographs, shoots his own client with the wife’s pistol, and walks out, leaving the frame to hang itself. And from that night forward, the four people in this film are each starring in a different movie. Ray believes Abby killed her husband. Abby believes Marty is alive and circling. Visser believes one loose photograph can undo him. Marty believed, right up to the last second, that his money had bought him the truth. Not one of them ever holds a fact in common with another human being, and the plot is simply the sound of those private movies colliding in the dark.

The title comes from Dashiell Hammett, whose hoods used “blood simple” for what happens to a mind after violence: scrambled, rattled, dead certain of exactly the wrong things. That is the film’s true subject, and it gets announced before the story even starts. Visser opens the picture with a drawl laid over empty highways and pumpjacks, musing that in Russia everybody pulls for everybody else, but down here you’re on your own. It sounds like cowboy swagger. It is a job description. Being on your own, in this movie, means being alone with your information: every character makes life-and-death choices from half the evidence and total confidence, and the violence grows out of that gap like a weed. Nobody in Blood Simple is wicked enough to plan the tragedy that actually happens. They are only certain enough.

The look of the thing was built by people who could not afford glamour and turned the poverty into a method, and you can feel the pleasure of that invention in every frame. Barry Sonnenfeld lights rooms so the shadows work like bars on a cell; the bar’s back office, the motel room, Ray’s house at night are all cages you watch people pace. The sound is mixed close and mean. Drips, creaks, a slow ceiling fan doing the work an orchestra usually does, so that when the violence arrives it feels intimate, almost domestic, a chore performed at arm’s length. When Ray mops the blood off the barroom floor, the camera watches the swirl go down the drain with a patience Hitchcock would have recognized, except the inheritance has been stripped of its elegance on purpose. No killing in this movie is clean and none of them is quick. People die here the way amateurs would actually make them die: slowly, clumsily, the killer apologizing to no one and sweating through his shirt.

M. Emmet Walsh’s Visser is the film’s black heart and its only realist. He grins like a coyote that has spotted a lame rabbit, sweats through a yellow leisure suit, philosophizes at gunpoint, and Walsh plays him as the one man in Texas who understands the game being played, undone in the end by the single detail he cannot see. Dan Hedaya gives Marty the strange gift of making jealousy look like an illness, a man so curdled he is decomposing ahead of schedule. And Frances McDormand, in her debut, keeps the film honest. Her Abby has a wide-eyed grit that never tips into either victim or femme fatale: tougher than anyone gives her credit for, exactly as lost as everyone else, and the only character whose wrong guesses come from innocence instead of appetite.

I have to say where the debut stops short of the masterpieces it seeded, and the answer is temperature. These people are premises. The film hands Abby and Ray a motel night, a few half-finished sentences, and no interior life at all; their love is asserted so the plot can misfire around it, and so the finale resolves the way a proof resolves, elegant and airless. You admire the geometry. You do not grieve anybody. Twelve years later, Fargo would run this same spiral of botched crime and confident error and put a whole human being at the center of it; here the center is a diagram, brilliantly drawn. The movie watches its fools unravel without ever preaching at them, which is its integrity. It also never quite mourns them, which is its ceiling.

Then the ending, which is still perfect. Abby, hunted through a dark apartment by a man she has never once laid eyes on, fires through a closed door and announces she is not afraid of Marty. On the other side of that door, under the sink, Visser bleeds among the pipes, takes in the magnificent wrongness of the sentence he just heard, and starts to laugh. If he sees Marty, he says, he’ll give him the message. Daylight comes through the bullet holes in little slanted beams. She has killed a stranger and thinks she is free. He dies knowing the truth and finding it hilarious. The one fact they finally share is a joke neither of them can explain to the other. Nobody wins, the story ties itself tight, and a pair of first-timers walk away having made gold out of grit. Everything the Coens would spend four decades perfecting is already in that room — the fatal confidence, the procedural panic, the comedy waiting inside the horror. In Texas you’re on your own. The first film proves it by letting four people be wrong together, in the same small building, each of them absolutely alone.