The Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple (1984)

What is it about Joel and Ethan Coen, the Coen brothers, that makes them such an engaging duo of filmmakers. The brothers, who grew up here in St. Louis Park, MN, have directed countless features like Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and most recently No Country for Old Men. They do comedies, thrillers, period pieces, and other strange adventures, in a genre that could only be called ‘A Coen Brothers Film.’ And auteur theory may be the only way to describe them, as there are elements that run through everyone of their movies, beginning with their first here—Blood Simple.

Blood Simple, the first winner of the Sundance Film Festival in 1984, shows the Coens doing what they do best. The film has a simple setup that only results in more and more complications. Julian (Dan Hedeya) knows his wife Abby (Frances McDormand) is cheating on him with Ray (John Getz), so he hires a private detective named Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) to kill them. There’s money, there’s murder, and a lot that can go wrong, does in fact go wrong.

I remember when No Country got its first look by the American critics who were saying that this was radically different from anything the brothers have ever attempted. True—it’s very different from their comedies, but Blood Simple deals with much of the same material. The opening of the film, in which Visser talks about the problem of fate, is directly referenced with Tommy Lee Jones in No Country.

What Blood Simple does best is never let details go. As each step of the plot advances, another complicated issue arises. Double crosses become triple crosses. Innocents become murderers without pulling a trigger. Nothing is simple in the world of the Coens.

Yet it has a dark sense of humor to it, making the strangest of jokes out of the weirdest of situations. A man may be dying, but the Coens are there to point out the absurdity, and even if you don’t laugh, there’s at least a twisted smile on your face. The choice of music always adds another ironic touch, especially as the film ends.

Is this film what we could call a neo-noir? Well that definition has always been hard to say. There is a private cynical detective, but he’s not the protagonist. There’s a woman, but she isn’t a femme fatale. The film is dark, but definitely not shot like the old ‘40s movies. Neo-noir is a genre that I believe we want to exist, but doesn’t. Just as the term ‘noir’ never existed in the minds of Billy Wilder, Raoul Walsh, or Carol Reed, neo-noir probably is a genre that only exists in terms of our desires to see homage to the past. And it is certainly true that the Coens are taking from Double Indemnity, but they owe as much to cheesy B-movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

So maybe, we should just call Blood Simple a Coen Brothers film. It’s sadistically funny, darkly serious, and always engaging, just like any film by the Minnesota duo should be.

Peter Labuza
Film Club President Emeritus

Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000)

Memento, the product of brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s collaboration, follows an anterograde amnesia patient searching for his wife’s murderer. Director Christopher Nolan adapted his brother’s short story and later came up with the unique idea to tell the story backwards. The structure of the film alternates between black and white segments and color segments. The black and white segments fit together in chronological order, depicting a phone call between the protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), and an anonymous man. The color segments are played in reverse order starting with the end of the chronological events and represent the time in between Leonard’s memory lapses. The innovative structure of the film creates a tense and mysterious drama that makes the audience share the protagonist’s experience because, like Leonard, we don’t know what happened before the scene we’re watching.

Memento falls into our Film Noir series, but as a modern film made in 2000, critics would categorize it as “neo-noir.” While Memento may lack a number of the stylistic traits associated with classic film noir, it exactly embodies many of the noirist motifs. One might compare Memento to Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Somewhere in the Night (1946), about an amnesiac ex-marine, in which “memory and identity is an absolute metaphor for the inability of the noir hero to distinguish between benign and malign as he moves through the noir underworld,” critics Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward write. The same is true of Leonard.

The neo-noir tones of Leonard’s identity crisis and memory loss and the cruel subjectivity of the characters of Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) emerge very subtly. The subtlety of Natalie and Teddy make the depressive emotions of the neo-noir genre even more pervasive as their ambiguous motives lurk just beneath the surface of their everyday demeanors, just waiting to take advantage of the confused Leonard. This sense of paranoia is further enhanced by casting Guy Pearce, a relative unknown, to play Leonard. Alec Baldwin and Brad Pitt were originally considered for Leonard’s role and but both were unable to accept, allowing the film to take on a more down to earth feeling without the attending “star power.”

Finally, what makes the film so sharp in all of its facets is the intense passion and attention to detail of all of the actors and directors involved. Guy Pearce personally called the director looking for the part and was on set every day of the incredible 25-day shooting schedule. Besides the tremendous work effort necessary to shoot a movie in 25 days, the director’s attention to detail to create Leonard’s condition, anterograde amnesia – the experience of memory loss of events that follow an injury, as opposed to retrograde amnesia where the victim experiences a loss of memory of events prior to injury – as realistic as possible that it garnered praise from Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch saying Memento is "the most accurate portrayal of the different memory systems in the popular media."

Director Nolan emphasizes this realism by avoiding conventional Hollywood touches. In a fight scene where Leonard attacks Jimmy, Guy Pearce insisted on a realistic fight. While on the phone in the black and white scenes Pearce was allowed to improvise his narrative. We hope you enjoy Memento, both as a thought-provoking addition to the noir genre and as a unique film in its own right.

Daniel Preus
Film Club Co-President

John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992)

Neo-noir, modern films (since 1981) that use the techniques of film noir, can be defined very simply, by analogy. Let’s say you’re working on a piece of art. You throw some mud at a fan, splattering brown gobs all over your walls. You rev the fan (it’s industrial sized) to 30,000 rpm and empty a can of blue paint mixed with honey in front of it. Instantly, everything in the room is mottled with the sticky blue substance punctuated by your brown blobs. Now comes the beauty part: you release 100,000 ants into the room, install a video camera and leave, locking the door. Inside, your three-dimensional Jackson Pollack-esque installation seems to move, to creep, to change second by second, as the ants crawl all over, seeking honey. You call your work “Living in a Factory” and ask the government for a grant to do more. Critics come. They dub your style: Bio-Modernism. You are famous.

When you were doing it, though, you didn’t know it was Bio-Modernism. You thought you were just flinging mud and paint and honey at the walls and freeing the denizens of your friends’ ant farms. But now you’re famous and critics are defining you, your work, and other artists whose work is like yours. There’s the guy, for instance, who built a replica of the interior of a store, all the shelves painted the same color red, filled it with white dishes, and let a bull go inside, smashing stuff. He calls it, unoriginally, “Bull in a China Shop.” Bio-Modernism is all the rage.

Time passes. Bio-Modernism and its unveiled comment on the conflict between the human and natural worlds (with the added ironic comment that this contretemps will be viewed on video) cease to interest the art-lover. Something called Primitive Formalism takes its place, only to be replaced later by Ironic Realism, then Chewed Art.

Then, one day, someone rediscovers your work, its use of constructed living spaces, and fundamental art media, and animals. Using your theories, the ones you didn’t know you had until some critics pointed it out for you, they adapt Bio-Modernism to their own narratives. They keep the randomness, the blobs, the animals, but they apply these traits, intentionally, as embellishments to their own commentary on a world they see freeing itself from the laws of gravity and bioethics. One artist suspends three elephants from the top of the dome in the capitol building in St. Paul, Minnesota, while three Tibetan monks circle below them, chanting for peace. The work is called “The Pit and the Pendulum.” The critics, ever the reductionists, are more impressed with the new artists use of the earlier theory than the new ideas it enhances. They dub the new stuff Neo-Bio-Modernism.

Et voilà! Now you understand how we get to Neo-noir film. Essentially, it’s films like John Dahl’s Red Rock West, which features an intinerant oil worker (Nicolas Cage), out of work, sucked into a corrupt little Wyoming town and an even dirtier relationship between a husband (J. T. Walsh) who’s trying to kill his wife (Lara Flynn Boyle) and the wife who’s not all that she appears. So why isn’t this just film noir, like Double Indemnity or Out of the Past or Touch of Evil is film noir?

Because those films weren’t part of a genre; they included a mood, a mood that reflected the dissatisfaction, alienation, psychological disorientation, and moral relativism that pervaded American during and after World War II. That mood seemed to dissipate after 1959 (although in some ways it was replaced by much darker things). You can’t come back in 1981 (Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat), and just make a film noir. Your awareness of it as a style, the different time in which you make your film, the evolved culture that the film reflects, all mean that you can imitate or adapt the style, but you are creating something new: Neo-noir. At minimum you are making an homage to an older film style, sure. But more significantly you’re making a film that both comments on its own time by associating it with the past and comments on the style itself.

Watching Dahl’s Red Rock West, you’ll recognize a lot of elements from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity or John Farrow’s His Kind of Woman. A femme fatale. A man whose moral compass is just a bit bent by difficult circumstances. Light streaming through slats. A lot of action at night. A sense of corruption. An urban-ness despite the rural setting. But this is still a very modern film. There is something new about it, something that separates it clearly from the original film noir movies. You have to figure out what it is.

Or, to paraphrase a man named Morbius: I can only show you the door marked “Neo”: you have to walk through it.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1983)

It’s a simple question: What makes us human? At this point, you could have about fifty different answers: our physical structure; our ability to rationalize, to think, to have memories, to feel emotions, to dream, to hope. To love. But in the end, your ability to believe you are human could simply be a conscious dream. There is nothing you can truly do to prove to yourself that you are more than possibly a machine. Blade Runner asks us this question: How can we know we are truly human?

Directed by Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator) and adapted from the famous novel by Phillip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner is possibly the greatest science fiction film ever put to screen. It is visually stunning, creating a bleak, dystopic vision of Los Angeles in 2019. It is a hybrid of genres, taking a science fiction story and forming itself as a film noir. It constantly uses visual cues, brilliant monologues, and a wonderful storyline to ask us to explore our humanity. And it is also the film that defined the importance of the director’s cut. Originally released in 1982 to mundane applause, Ridley Scott made his intended version of the film in 1992, away from Hollywood’s grasp, making Blade Runner into a cult classic.

The film begins with a title card telling us of our bleak future. It is 2019, and for years a giant corporation has been producing replicants, androids that are identical or greater in every single way to humans, including intelligence and physical capabilities. Used mainly for slave labor on off-world planets, replicants finally realized their own capabilities and began a mutiny. They were finally banned on Earth and “retired” by an elite group of police called blade runners. Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford (Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark), used to be one of these blade runners. Deckard’s adventure begins as five replicants come to Los Angeles, hoping to find a way to cure death, as replicants have an expiration date. Deckard, recovering from his divorce, is put back on the force with the task of hunting these men down, while closely being watched by a man named Gaff. The world is dark and grim, but Deckard seems to be unmoved by this, simply hoping to get his job done.

The vision of the future that Scott has set is breathtaking. The world is covered with lights and pollution, not a utopia as other directors have imagined. If Star Wars was the first to show an unclean future, Blade Runner took it to the extreme. Though some areas may be pristine perfect, other areas show Los Angeles as a dilapidated hole, not renovated in years. Scott also comments on the integration of Japanese culture into the United States. In the film, a majority of the population appears to be Japanese and most advertisements feature Japanese. In the 1980s, it was largely believed that Japan would overtake the United States in economic power, a belief still held today by many, and Blade Runner shows that fear and anxiety well.

Blade Runner also plays with the ideas between science fiction and film noir. Many influences of both classics like The Maltese Falcon or neo noir like Chinatown can be seen in this film. It is full of dark and shady visuals. We follow the film from a single protagonist (who in the original cut has a narration) that had a shady moral outlook. There is a femme fatale. The score is a mix of futuristic tones and jazz, as created by the famous Vangelis. And finally there is the question of corruption, seen by almost every person that dominates this screen.

Speaking of film noir and more specifically, femme fatales, the character of Rachael (Sean Young) is one that haunts my mind. While visiting the replicant corporation, the head introduces Rachael to Deckard as his secretary, but she is actually a replicant who doesn’t know her identity as one. Implanted with the memories of the boss’s niece, Rachael has no idea that her life is simply a machine. Which brings me to the major philosophy of this film. If Rachael, a woman who can love, emote, and have memories among other qualities, does not know she is simply a machine, how can we know what we are not? How can we perceive our reality as a human to be actually real?

Eyes play a major role in this film as a symbol for perception. The opening sequence is an eye reflected upon the city. People’s eyes light up. This is important for Scott’s film, because this is the medium in which we perceive our own reality. Our brain is designed to think that if we can see it, it is probably real. But in Blade Runner, we perceive Rachael originally to be real. Our eyes can deceive us, just as any body part of us can. We can only trust in the soul.

But the question that remains incontrovertible to the entire film is the reality of our main protagonist. Unlike most directors’ cuts, Scott only changed three small parts to his film. First he removed the narration the producers demanded he put in. Second, he removed the happy ending footage of Deckard and Rachael driving into the sun (which was actually extra footage from The Shining). And finally, he added a small scene where Deckard dreams about a unicorn. The importance of this dream can be seen at the end, when Gaff leaves a small origami of a unicorn outside his apartment. Gaff throughout the film leaves small origami figures like the unicorn to toy with Deckard’s emotions, but the unicorn proves that Gaff knows about his dream of the unicorn. And if Gaff knows without ever telling him, then his dreams may have all been implanted. Thus, the ultimate question of this film is: Could Deckard by a replicant?

It is a shocking revelation to think about it, but it makes complete sense if Deckard was simply created as a replicant to hunt other replicants. If film noirs are all about untrustworthy narrators, what is more perfect than a narrator who doesn’t know he isn’t human? But what does this mean for us as an audience? It’s a shock to think about Rachael’s existence but if our main character, a man we have come to trust for the last two hours, was nothing but another corporate machine sent to do a human’s job, how can we trust our own reality? What makes us human? What separates man from machine?

The other major intellectual fight is the one for immortality. Our antagonist for the picture is Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), the leader and wisest of the replicants. Roy wants nothing more than to stop the expiration date he is designed with. It is this fight for survival, for human existence, for preserving one’s memories that remain the emotional heart of this film. The final monologue by Roy is one that amazes me every time: “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” I find Batty to be the most complex character, and maybe the most well developed antagonist in any film I have ever seen.

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is an epic and philosophical science fiction masterpiece that will probably never be equaled. This is a film that I find perplexing every single time, and makes me wish I could somehow assert my humanity to the world. But as Scott suggests, it is impossible to assert our own humanity. There is no way we can ever know we are truly human. But this is not just a philosophical film, Scott has used visuals, motifs, and a film noir story to adapted to his theories on life, death, and meaning. Blade Runner is one of those few films that will be etched into your mind for years to come, a masterpiece of the highest magnitude, responding to the mind through entertainment, visual appeal, and philosophical terms.

Peter Labuza
Film Club Co-President

Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974)

Forget It Jake: The Key Ways in Which Chinatown Reflects the Classic Film Noir Period

According to Todd Erickson's "Kill Me Again: Movement Becomes Genre," Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown "is the only 'period noir' which manages to maintain an air of timelessness in its presentation." (Erickson 312). Chinatown is exceptional filmmaking with such essential noir elements as the non-heroic private eye, the complicated labyrinth-like plot structure, and a despairing, fatalistic worldview.

Above all, Chinatown is properly "voiced" in the classic noir style, although there is no actual voiceover used. The film stays with a single, subjective point-of-view, that of the main character, private investigator J.J. "Jake" Gittes. Polanski's camera tails Gittes as he is duped by the duplicitous woman (Evelyn Mulwray), who strings him along with lies and evasive half-truths even before Jake encounters an immoral businessman (Noah Cross) who happens to be Evelyn's father.

A detective in the vein of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, Gittes is a much coarser fellow with fancier pretenses. For example, he attempts to cover up his rough language in front of the ladies while making certain his pocket-handkerchief is arranged correctly in the breast pocket of his tailored suit.

This duality of character further enhances the theme of the film. Gittes searches for the truth about the Mulwrays and the Department of Water and Power never even pretending to limit his search to within the boundaries of the law. At one point, he impersonates a W&P company official in order to gain access to a restricted area; in another, he willfully destroys documents in the Hall of Records for his own immediate gain.

Much like Spade, Gittes has hard-boiled sensibilities, but Jake's code has a wider scope and latitude. The bottom line for Gittes is image, how others perceive him. Indeed, his primary reason for remaining on the Mulwray case initially is that he has been duped and exposed as such in the press. Gittes has to discover the truth in order to save face, subtly enhancing the central metaphor of Chinatown: a major code of the "inscrutable" East is the tradition of allowing combatants to "save face."

In addition, Chinatown has the requisite complicated plot. Despite the twists and turns, it is plausible, and it enhances the suspension of disbelief (323). …

Finally, Chinatown's worldview is one of despair, alienation and fatalism, all celebrated traits of classic noir. … In the world of Chinatown, there are no givens, no best bets, no sure things. The entire worldview is symbolized by the place, "Chinatown." This is a place where nothing is known, a mysterious place closed to outsiders, where nothing is as it seems. In a structure similar to films of the "classic" noir period, the viewer follows Gittes, sees what he sees, knows only what he knows, gets duped right along with him, and realizes finally that one can never really know anything for certain. Most assuredly, Chinatown delivers a "vicarious experience of the nightmarish world of noir" (323).

Tracy Taylor
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