Jason M. Jones

Blood Simple begins with a shot of the Texas landscape and a voiceover. “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, and down here you’re on your own.” Simple is right, if you’re going by plot. A married woman has an affair with a bartender who works at her husband’s bar. The husband discovers the affair via private eye. He hires the private eye to kill his wife and the bartender. And yet, the Coens are tricky. And by placing this voiceover at the front end of their film, a voice we learn later belongs to the private eye, the film becomes something more. It becomes a critique of Texas, and thereby a critique of America. The film was released in 1985 with the Cold War in its final years. Reagan was in the White House. American values presumed that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were superior to Russian values, but the film, in a very subtle way is asking, Are they? Are the advantages of self-reliance in a free-market system really all that advantageous? Is anyone in this film happy? The wife, Abby, is certainly in a state of pursuing it with her lover Ray. But everywhere she turns, her husband attempts to thwart it.

The film begins with the affair. The Coens shoot Ray and Abby from behind in Ray’s car as Abby tells him that her husband might be mentally ill. In hoping to convey the state of their marriage and just how unhappy she is, she confesses that he bought her a gun for their first wedding anniversary, a .38, and as the oft-quoted Checkoff line goes, if you introduce a gun in the first act, it has to go off by the end. Only this gun, free-floating agent that it is, will continue to do damage even after it goes off. It will ultimately serve as the cause of mayhem even though it only takes one life. “I like you,” Ray tells Abby. “I never knew that,” Abby replies. “Well, now you do,” he says. And as they pass a motel, she tells him to go back. They’re being trailed by a rusty VW Bug, and in that Bug is the private detective Abby’s husband Marty has hired.

Which begs the question: is Marty mentally ill and overly paranoid? If this is the first of Abby’s affairs, why is he having her followed? Why these suspicions? The next morning, Ray wakes to a phone call. When Abby asks who it is, he says, “Your husband.” If we’re to believe Abby, and at this point, we have no reason not to, this affair is a one-time thing. She’s done it because she likes Ray and wants to be with him. But when Ray later goes to the bar to confront Marty and ask for back pay, Marty plants a seed of doubt, reveals she’s had others, a string of them. Marty comes off as insidious. We’ve already seen him make advances on a blonde woman at the bar, which shows he’s not above tit for tat, getting back at his wife by having affairs of his own. And his words are likely more a means of controlling the situation, creating division in Ray and Abby’s burgeoning love affair. But Ray looks shaken. He doesn’t want to believe it, but he can’t help questioning. After all, when two men confront each other over a woman like this, what’s at stake is pride, and that pride is mired in ownership. After all, if Abby’s unhappy with Marty, and he’s certainly not happy with her, why does he insist they remain together? Why not divorce and let him go with Ray? Is it because in a capitalist society ownership is tantamount?

Blood Simple is the Coen brothers’ first film, and already they show an interest in the America quest for capital. How many of their movies involve greedy, money-hungry characters chasing a big bag of cash? The next logical step in Marty’s thinking is, If I can’t have her no one can. And what’s the best way to ensure no one else can have the object you wish to own if you can’t own it? Destroy. So Marty calls back the private eye and offers him ten grand to kill both Abby and Ray, but this detective has plans to double cross and murder Marty, take the money, and pin the blame on Ray and Abby.

Here the Coens are at their most slyly subversive. Early on, they establish that Abby has taken the .38 mentioned in the first scene and gone to stay with Ray. In a few shots, they show us the gun sitting in her purse, unsecured. How uniquely American is this? The gun as a free-floating agent of destruction. In how many other countries would a loaded gun be sitting in a purse, just waiting for anyone to take it out and use it? As such it’s not an object of self-protection but destruction. It’s anarchic. And though I somehow missed this on my first viewing almost a decade ago (I’d watched it then as straight neo-noir without sensing any of these undercurrents), on a second viewing this critique was obvious. Maybe it’s because gun violence has become more prevalent in the last decade, mass shootings an almost daily occurrence, the guns in question inevitably misplaced by their owners or left out in spots the criminal or the mentally ill can access them and do their damage. Maybe it’s also because I’ve seen more of their movies. Blood Simple strikes me at its core to be about what can be bought (human life) and how the pursuit of happiness is thwarted by economic interest (themes they’d revisit in Fargo and No Country for Old Men). In this sense I’m assuming that beyond pride, it’s also cheaper for Marty to have his wife killed than to let her go, divorce her. He isn’t necessarily among the one percent, but he owns his own bar and has a safe stocked with ten grand. Sitting there watching this time around, at the Coen Brothers’ beginnings, I saw the germ of their investigation into the old Horatio Alger myth America perpetuates that happiness is accessible to those willing to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. I decided I’m going back film-by-film to see how this works in each movie, since it’s there even in their comedies. Next up is Raising Arizona, and I’m looking forward to that. I don’t think I’ve seen it since it was on HBO when I was ten.