The Cinema of the Coen Brothers

Hard-Boiled Entertainments

Jeffrey Adams

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231850810
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

The films of the Coen brothers have become a contemporary cultural phenomenon. Highly acclaimed and commercially successful, over the years their movies have attracted increasingly larger audiences and spawned a subculture of dedicated fans. Shunning fame and celebrity, Ethan and Joel Coen remain maverick filmmakers, producing and directing independent films outside the Hollywood mainstream in a unique style combining classic genres like film noir with black comedy to tell off-beat stories about America and the American Dream. This study surveys Oscar-winning films, such as Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men (2007), as well as cult favorites, including O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) and The Big Lebowski (1998). Beginning with Blood Simple (1984), it examines major themes and generic constructs and offers diverse approaches to the Coens' enigmatic films. Pointing to the pulp fiction of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler, the study appreciates the postmodern aesthetics of the Coens' intertextual creativity.

CHAPTER ONE

Blood Simple: ‘It’s the same old song’

Released in 1984, Blood Simple was the Coen brothers’ debut feature film. An independently produced neo-noir, financed with money the Coens had raised themselves, it was well-received at film festivals including the Toronto Film Festival, the New York Film Festival and the US Film Festival (later renamed Sundance), where it won the Jury Prize. The story is a tale of deceit, betrayal and bloody revenge, written in the pulp fiction style of James M. Cain. Its plot hinges on a romantic triangle, recounting the illicit doings of a naive young man led astray by an unfaithful wife to become the rival of an older, possessive husband who jealously plots the adulterers’ murder.

The setting is a small town in West Texas, where bartender Ray (John Getz) indulges in an extra-marital affair with Abby (Frances McDormand), the wife of Ray’s saloonowner boss Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya). Abby would like to exit her unhappy marriage to Marty, who has hired sleazy private investigator Loren Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to keep tabs on his wayward wife. Seeking revenge for his wife’s infidelity, Marty hires Visser to murder the adulterous couple. Trusting Visser to honour their contract for murder proves to be a crucial mistake and ultimately Marty’s undoing.

This first effort by unknown independent filmmakers drew an unusual amount of critical attention. Critics from coast to coast praised the film upon its initial theatrical run. Writing for the New York Times, Janet Maslin called Blood Simple ‘a directorial debut of extraordinary promise’, while Los Angeles Times reviewer Kevin Thomas thought the Coens’ debut was ‘a dazzling comedie noire’. Time magazine’s Richard Corliss applauded Blood Simple for its ‘elegant variations on a theme as old as the fall’ and praised the Coens’ dark thriller for its simultaneous subversion and revitalization of the film noir genre. The movie’s signature song – ‘It’s the Same Old Song (But with a Different Meaning)’ – signals the filmmakers’ ironic self-awareness that they are telling an archetypal story, but also revising and updating it for contemporary audiences. For these critics Blood Simple was a movie with vitality and wit, an unexpected surprise and a welcome change-of-pace in American independent cinema.

As the initial reviews show, one reason for the positive reception of Blood Simple was its appeal to a venerable cinematic genre, film noir, which had experienced a recent revival in the decade that preceded the release of Blood Simple. By 1984, so-called ‘neonoir’ was on the verge of becoming the most popular and influential generic style of contemporary American cinema. But Blood Simple is more than a neo-noir thriller that embroiders a well-worn narrative with flashy visual stylisations. Its mixture of sex and violence may exploit the genre of film noir somewhat shamelessly for its appeal to the lower instincts, but at the same time it inventively renovates aging generic conventions to deliver something more than a film-school exercise in genre deconstruction.

The overwhelming majority of these early reviews were laudatory, but there were some who criticised Blood Simple as too derivative. In her review for the New Yorker, Pauline Kael considered Blood Simple so generically predictable that it hardly qualified as a ‘thriller’. Kael questioned the Coens’ motives as ‘independent’ filmmakers, asking, ‘What’s the glory of making films outside the industry, if they’re Hollywood films at heart?’ What seems to be missing in this assessment and others like it is the possibility of making genre films independently, outside the Hollywood mainstream. The assumption is simply that genre and big-budget commercial filmmaking are synonymous, and therefore that ‘genre’ and ‘independent’ are mutually exclusive terms.

For these reasons Blood Simple represents, in Kael’s view, what was wrong with so many young filmmakers at the time, namely, that their films were becoming too selfconsciously referential and lacked substantive, interesting plots, credible characters and meaningful thematic content. In Kael’s view, the new generation of filmmakers had sold out their values and integrity to make self-indulgent genre entertainment. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, Kael had witnessed the flourishing of the so-called ‘Hollywood Renaissance’ as exemplified by the films of auteurs like Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese, films she considered more relevant and original than what post-Renaissance cinema was producing. Ironically, the very auteurs Kael admired and championed constituted the first wave of the neo-noir revival and are also among the filmmakers whom the Coens most revere and to whom they are often compared. Nevertheless, what she considered the shallow and derivative films that emerged in the immediate post-Renaissance years signified to Kael a general decline in American film art. Elliot Stein shared Kael’s view, describing Blood Simple as a pastiche of genre conventions gleaned from ‘Prof. Lawrence Kasdan’s Film Noir 101’, an allusion to Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981), a commercially successful neo-noir that had a few years earlier boosted the resurgence of film noir. For these reviewers Blood Simple seemed to exemplify the kind of movie made by a younger generation of auteurs who, born into an era of creative exhaustion, could now only assemble vacuous compilations of movie allusions mounted on flimsy generic frameworks, calculated to satisfy a growing audience appetite for pseudo-highbrow content delivered in lowbrow forms.

But R. Barton Palmer offers a different perspective, arguing that the Coens’ noirinfluenced films in particular, with their pronounced emphasis on existentialist themes, ‘engage deeply’ with serious social problems, thus ‘offering a riposte to those critics who think [the Coens’] films to be much ado about nothing’ (2004: 31). Elsewhere, Palmer concludes that in Blood Simple we can discern the Coens’ attempt to ‘extend through complex gestures of restructuring and updating Cain’s analysis of the sociopsychological malaise affecting Depression-era America’ (2009: 268). By this reading Blood Simple reinscribes Cain’s stories of American greed and self-interest, resituating them in the contemporary wasteland of the Reagan years, but representing its characters as no less tawdry or misguided than their models in Cain’s pulp fiction.

Reinventing Film Noir

When asked why they chose the noir genre for their first film, the Coens responded: ‘We’ve liked that type of story for a long while: James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. It’s a genre that really gives us pleasure.’ At the same time they admit that they chose film noir for practical reasons: ‘We knew we weren’t going to have much money. Financing wouldn’t permit other things. We could depend on that type of genre, on that kind of basic force’ (Allen 2006: 33). Generally, the Coens do not make genre movies simply because they are more reliably bankable, and they don’t make genre movies merely because they love old-fashioned films and hope to recreate the forgotten magic of classic Hollywood cinema. In fact, they contend that they did not approach Blood Simple as generic film noir at all. According to Ethan: ‘When people call Blood Simple a film noir, they’re correct to the extent that we like the same kind of stories that the people who made those movies liked.’ But, he hastens to add, ‘We tried to emulate the [literary] source that those movies came from rather than the movies themselves’ (Allen 2006: 14). A more common practice among contemporary filmmakers is to take classic film noirs as source texts, remaking them with varying degrees of fidelity. Prominent examples would be The Postman Always Rings Twice (Bob Rafelson, 1981), a faithful remake of the 1946 Garnett adaptation, Steven Soderbergh’s The Underneath (1995), a remake of Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross (1949), or Kasdan’s Body Heat, an update of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity.

Unlike these filmmakers, the Coens have little interest in remaking prior adaptations of Cain. Instead, their aim was to ‘write a story in Cain’s style’, a hybrid re-adaptation of his two best-known novels, The Postman Always Ring Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936). As defined by Thomas Leitch, re-adaptations ignore previous cinematic adaptations (like Garnett’s and Rafelson’s filmings of The Postman Always Ring Twice) and strive for a fresh adaptation of the literary source (2002: 45). By comparison, Kasdan’s Body Heat, a film to which Blood Simple is often disparagingly likened, is more directly indebted to its cinematic model. In contrast to the Cain homage of Blood Simple, Body Heat is actually an unacknowledged remake of Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Double Indemnity. Although in Body Heat the Cain story is updated to a contemporary setting, Kasdan otherwise appropriates Wilder’s plot wholesale and at times mimics the precursor’s dialogue, both of which depart significantly from the Cain novel. Despite its obvious borrowings, however, Kasdan, who also wrote the screenplay, presents Body Heat as his original story. The film credits read simply: ‘Written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan.’ There is no mention of Cain, much less Billy Wilder’s adaptation, the true sources of Kasdan’s film. The publicity slogan used to promote the movie, however, reveals quite clearly Kasdan’s stance toward his sources: ‘Body Heat echoes the powerful impact of 40s film noir melodramas like Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice – but with energy, irony, and passion that could only flare out of the 80s.’ Thus, in a transparent act of disavowal, Kasdan performs what Leitch calls a ‘dance of invocation and denial’ vis-á-vis his precursor (2002: 52). His paradoxical stance toward antecedents in classic film noir entails both the explicit naming of sources and the implied promise of re-energising the originals and accommodating them to a contemporary audience by inventing a new and more relevant version of an archetypal story. In Leitch’s view, Body Heat strives to be ‘the definitive version that renders its model obsolete’ (2002: 53). In an attempt to establish its priority Kasdan’s film ‘takes what is presented as a classic, timeless story and updates it – partly by the paradoxical attempt to remove all markers of any historical period whatever’ (2002: 52).

Because it harks back to classic film noir, attempting to reawaken a sense of that historical period (the 1940s), Fredric Jameson considers Body Heat an example of the contemporary trend toward ‘nostalgia films’, which he thinks proliferate in postmodern cinema, ‘invading and colonizing’ even those movies with contemporary settings (1998: 9). Here Jameson is not referring to heritage cinema or period films that faithfully recreate and thereby restore bygone eras. Rather, he has in mind contemporary films that make a sentimental appeal to the history of cinema, reproducing the stories and generic styles of an imaginary past. This is problematic for Jameson because, as he sees it, contemporary filmmakers have become incapable of producing authentic artistic representations of their own historical present. If this is so, writes Jameson, ‘it is a terrible indictment of consumer capitalism itself – or at the very least, an alarming and pathological symptom of a society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history’ (1998: 9–10). Thus, Body Heat, in its attempt to recycle Cain via Wilder and repackage it as contemporary noir, becomes a specimen of the ‘blank’ parody Jameson finds characteristic of postmodern art, which he understands as ‘a neutral practice, without parody’s ulterior motive’ (1998: 5). Synonymous with postmodern pastiche, ‘blank parody’ is parody that has lost its sense of humour. But, more important for Jameson, it is also a brand of parody that has lost any sense of its ulterior motive, which Jameson would identify as its socio-critical or ideological function.

Upon its debut, critics attributed a similar logic of parody to Blood Simple, seeing little difference between the Coens’ approach to film noir and Kasdan’s. There are, however, fundamental differences. While Kasdan appropriates both Cain’s novel and Wilder’s adaptation as his own, disavowing any influence from original sources, the Coens pay tribute to Cain, eagerly acknowledging their debt to his fiction. They say they set out to write their story ‘in the style’ of Cain as a tribute to his literary accomplishments, but the result is an inventive re-adaptation which, somewhat paradoxically, they can still claim as their own. Kasdan might also make such a claim for Body Heat, but closer scrutiny reveals direct borrowings from Wilder’s movie, which in Jameson’s view often border on plagiarism. Thus, in a film widely labeled ‘postmodern’, Kasdan’s disavowal of ancestral precursors positions Body Heat, oddly, in the belated tradition described by Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), a study of the aesthetic strategies used by authors to defeat the precursor’s influence and thus preserve the originality of their writings. As authentically postmodern filmmakers, the Coens find value in honouring ancestral models whom they admire and whose style they hope to revive, not simply by means of conventional adaptation, but in an act of creative reinvention.

As an act of creative reinvention, Blood Simple is a text that in Palmer’s view ‘can hardly be understood properly apart from its literary source’, of which it is essentially what he terms a ‘re-composition’ (2009: 268). Developing this concept, Palmer proposes the Coens’ neo-noirs (especially Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn’t There) as examples of what theorist Peter Brooker has called ‘imaginative remaking’, a postmodern artistic practice which, rather than striving for originality, undertakes a ‘re-functioning’ of antecedent texts (2007: 114). Adopting this intertextual strategy, the contemporary writer/filmmaker attempts to renovate the source text, renewing its significance while simultaneously modifying its discursive features to accommodate changing cultural and artistic sensibilities. By freely reinventing pre-existing sources the postmodern film-auteur aims to re-configure anterior texts which, as is the case for Blood Simple, pay tribute to ancestral writers and simultaneously circumvent the conventions of fidelity, imaginatively recomposing the precursor text. Much more than what Jameson dismisses as postmodern pastiche, Blood Simple engages Cain’s fiction in a creative negotiation, reconstituting the writer’s fictional universe so completely that, in Palmer’s view, Blood Simple ultimately constitutes a text that is ‘more Cainian than the fiction upon which [it] draws’ (2009: 268).

In Dialogue with Pulp Fiction

In an interview following Blood Simple’s release the brothers eagerly admitted their fascination with Cain’s fiction: ‘We read all of Cain six or seven years ago when they reissued his books in paperback. Chandler and Hammett too. We’ve also pored through a lot of Cain arcana’ (Allen 2006: 13). Jokingly, Joel said, ‘We’ve always thought that up at Low Library at Columbia University, where the names are chiseled up there above the columns in stone – Aristotle, Herodotus, Virgil – that the fourth one should be Cain’ (ibid.). As a commemoration of Cain’s literary legerdemain, Blood Simple inaugurates a practice repeated in subsequent films such as Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink, where the Coens rediscover undervalued ancestral authors like Dashiell Hammett, Nathanael West and Clifford Odets. Here it is important to recall that in the early 1980s when the Coens penned Blood Simple, Cain was still not held in high esteem. As late as 1989, literary scholar Paul Skenazy characterizes Cain as ‘a creature of the paperback racks of bus stations and airports and the mystery shelves of used bookstores’, still regarded ‘more as a cultural phenomenon than as a writer of substance’ (1989: ix).

Drawing on The Postman Always Rings Twice and to a lesser extent on Double Indemnity, Blood Simple relocates Cain in an early 1980s rural Texas to voice one of the writer’s most prominent thematic concerns: the disintegration of community and the social alienation fostered by capitalist economic competition. In this regard, Blood Simple offers what Palmer describes as a ‘penetrating reading of Cain’, a reinscription which not only recreates the author’s fictional world but also the Cainian themes of crime for profit and the inevitability of betrayal (2009: 269). In its essentials the story of Blood Simple follows the narrative pattern Frank Krutnik has called ‘the Caintext’ (1982: 33), which in his understanding relies heavily on pop-Freudian notions of oedipal desire that attracted Cain as well as many other early twentieth-century American writers. In Krutnik’s psychoanalytic reading, the Cain-text stages a Freudian ‘testing of masculinity in relation to the law’ (1991: 163). Typically, the Cain-text casts a virile younger man as the oedipal son who comes in conflict with an older fatherfigure (typically the cuckolded husband) representing patriarchal power. Father and son compete for possession of an eroticised mother-figure (the unfaithful wife). In Blood Simple this pattern is reproduced by pitting Ray, a younger man, against his older boss, Marty, whose younger and sexually attractive wife, Abby, is unhappy in their marriage and seeks escape. Andrew Spicer calls this Freudian triangulated scenario ‘the paradigmatic master narrative’ of classic film noir (2002: 25), but as Krutnik rightly contends, the true origins of this archetypal narrative are found in Cain’s literary fiction.

In terms of narrative, the ‘song’ remains more or less the same, but the ‘performers’ undergo important changes that modify and reshape their Cainian counterparts. In Blood Simple the principal players (Ray, Abby and Marty) recall the central figures of The Postman Always Rings Twice: A young drifter, Frank Chambers, goes to work for a patriarchal elder, the Greek immigrant Nick Papadakis, whose attractive younger wife, Cora, presents Frank with an irresistible erotic temptation. An adulterous affair develops, as the younger man and the unhappily married wife are inevitably drawn to each other. Eventually, urged by Cora, Frank hatches a murder scheme to eliminate the naïve and unsuspecting husband and acquire his business, a roadside diner. Similarly, in Cain’s Double Indemnity Phyllis Nirdlinger betrays her older, inattentive husband, plots his murder and manipulates her younger lover, insurance agent Walter Huff, to carry out her plan. Cain’s stories are ignited by a chance encounter – an unwary man meets a dangerous woman and there is an immediate and mysterious attraction that quickly becomes a fatal obsession. Chance soon becomes fate, as the seductive power of the femme fatale draws the oedipal suitor ever closer to a destiny of self-destruction.

Compared with Cain’s femme fatales, Abby represents a major departure f...