The Killer Inside Me: Pushing Buttons

First off, I'm reposting the trailer for The Killer Inside Me, since YouTube seems to have taken it down. Secondly, prompted by this blog post, and it's concern about the film's depiction of violence against women,I went back and reread Thompson's book, which I had not looked at in many years. My first observation was that the trailer seems to show a film that shows remarkable fidelity to its source material. The story, as far as I can tell, is the same as the book's, and even has a lot of dialogue lifted verbatim from the book. That makes me optimistic about the film, even though Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson aren't exactly the greatest actors in the world.


Now,I'll make a frank assessment: The violence depicted in the trailer isn't the result of some Hollywood desire to tart up Thompson's book with titillating and shocking detail. It comes straight from the novel. The filmmakers seem to have actually toned down the initial meeting between Lou Ford and Joyce (Jessica Alba's character). In the book, Ford beats Joyce until she's unconscious and then revives her. When she comes to, she comes onto him. It's an uncomfortable scene, but not nearly as uncomfortable as the scene where Lou kills her. The trailer is graphic, but so is the book. Lou describes killing Joyce as, "like pounding a pumpkin. Hard, then everything giving away at once." If that imagery weren't disturbing enough, Joyce, who is clearly almost as screwed up in the head as Lou, asks for a goodbye kiss while she is being beaten.

The murder of Amy Stanton (played by Kate Hudson in the upcoming film) in the book is even worse. Lou hits her in the stomach, and "[his] fist went back against her spine, and the flesh closed around it to the wrist. " After that vicious blow, Amy falls and the floor, and Lou sits there and watches her die. Then he kicks her in the head for good measure. I've got to say, this scene, particularly the description of the punch, stayed with me for years. I remembered it long after I had forgotten most of the book's story.

Now, Lou Ford is a complex character. His violence is not just reserved for women. He kills men. He puts cigars out on vagrants for fun. He corners people and repeats corny cliches just to watch them squirm, but the worst violence of the book is reserved for women because Lou Ford has a complex relationship with the opposite sex. Without giving too much away, let's say that what torments Lou, aside from an inherited tendency toward sadism, is his relationship with women. To say more than that would be telling, but Thompson isn't going for misogynistic thrills. He's doing a character study of a man who has an inner life he hides from the world, and a public face at odds with his true self.

The Killer Inside Me was published in 1952, seven years before Robert Bloch's Psycho (another novel that hinges on a killer's complicated relationship with women). You can probably lay a lot of blame at Thompson's feet for the boring and repetitive serial killer fiction that clogs up the crime fiction section of your local bookstore, but it would be a mistake to accuse him of misogyny. It's not a theme that runs throughout his work. Thompson, like Bloch, wrote a lot of novels, and they're quite different, with different types of characters.

Similarly, it would be a mistake to accuse the filmmakers of misogyny for bringing Thompson's disturbing story to the screen. Artists have no obligation to preach, or try to instruct, or to worry about whether their work depicts something that's "dangerous." If you can't depict "dangerous" behaviors or ideas in fiction, then where exactly can you depcit them? I can see how The Killer Inside Me trailer might make the author of that blog post uncomfortable. It's not based on a Little Golden Book. The book is disturbing. It's meant to be. Dismissing The Killer Inside Me, as "no better than a snuff film," however, based on five minutes of footage, an obvious ignorance about the source material and a misplaced sense of self righteousness seems silly, although such controversy will undoubtedly end up helping at the box office.




Bonus video: MC 900 Foot Jesus raps from the POV of Lou Ford in his 1991 song "The Killer Inside Me."

The Killer Inside Me Trailer

Self explanatory and NSFW.

Blogging The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction: This World, Then Fireworks

Since Victor Gischler deprived you of a review of The Deputy, by jumping ship from Bleak House to Tyrus Books, and pushing publication back to April, I'm bringing back my thoughts on the Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction. This week, "This World, Then Fireworks" by Jim Thompson. I have read much of Thompson's better known work, but I'm no expert. Much of his work is said to be uneven, and this posthumous work is a real head scratcher. I'm not sure if it's some sort of half-assed throwaway, a work of twisted, bilious genius, or a combination of the two. It's definitely going to bear another reading.

TWTF focuses on Marty and Carol, an incestuous brother and sister couple who obviously had, a troubled childhood, although the nature of their trauma isn't clear at the beginning. Marty has left his dying wife and kids to return home, after having been fired from a reporting gig for trying a little blackmail. Carol, who has been taking care of their elderly mother, is a whore. When Marty comes back to town, he gets a job with the local paper, gets promoted in record time, and then resigns, because he's perverse. Then he picks up a lady cop, and, well, the story's kind of a mess, and trying to explain it all would just confuse you. It does, in the end, make a twisted sense, to Thompson's credit, but many elements are too convenient, and feel lazy and rushed. There are still, however, moments of genius, like Marty's musings as he wonders through a cemetary:

"Yes, hell. Yes, oh God, yes, it was a wonderful place. The City of Wonderful People. Everyone in it was everything that everyone should be. Some has a little more on the ball, of course, than others; there was one guy, for instance, who was only humble. But think of that! Think of its possibilities! Think of what you could do with a guy like that on a world tour. Of if war prevented, as it indubitably would, you could put him on television. A nation-wide hookup. You could go to the network and say, look, I've go something different here. Something unique. I've got a guy that's-No, he doesn't do card tricks, he's not a singer or a dancer. Well, he does have a sense of humor, but he doesn't tell-No, I'm afraid he doesn't have big tits and his ass looks just like yours and mine. What he's got is something different. Something there's a hell of a need for. And if you'd just give him a chance. They'd never go for it. You'd have to nail him to a cross first. Only here, in The City of Wonderful People, was the wonderful wonderful."

What else is there to say?

Oxford American Article

Barry Hannah has an article in the latest issue of the Oxford American about crime noir. He tips the hat to Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford, but the essay never really goes anywhere. It starts off with Hannah complaining about real estate development in Oxford, Mississippi, and then goes on to Faulkner, Celine, Bukowski and Camus. (Not in that order.)
I wish he had had some kind of thesis, or expanded on some of the comments he made, particularly about Willeford, whose novels, "carry authentic wit down to psychological strangeness such as [Hannah has] never quite read, even in Kafka."
There's a lot to be said about Willeford, who wrote some damn strange novels, including The Shark Infested Custard, Cockfighter and The Black Mass of Brother Springer. Black Mass, in particular, must be read to be believed. I think it's Willeford's great philosphical novel. It may be the single most cynical book I've ever read. The protagonist, a failed novelist, leaves his wife in Ohio, gets ordained into a dying church by an unbelieving priest, takes over a black chuch in Jacksonville, Florida, organizes and leads a successful bus boycott, stands up to the Klan, beds a parishoners wife, steals all the money sent in to support the boycott, and runs off with the aformentioned wife to New York, where he abandons her. He learns nothing. It makes not crying at your mother's funeral and shooting an Arab on the beach seem completely reasonable.