James M. Cain's 'Blood Simple'

While film noir did not manage to accomplish everything that hard-boiled fiction did, the Coen brothers’ approached the literature differently than past filmmakers. Because the Coen brothers released Blood Simple independently and decades later, their film was not shackled by the limitations of classical Hollywood. In fact, the filmmakers are not against opposing or reinventing the unwritten rules. For instance, the Coens ignore the camera’s default invisibility in one of the bar scenes. The camera begins by executing a tracking shot down the length of the bar, but as the camera grows closer to a man who is resting on the bar, the camera moves above the man and comes back down. Furthermore, the Coens forego the character identification that …show more content…
On one hand, some film noirs were direct adaptations of hard-boiled literature. On the other hand, Blood Simple is not an adaptation of any piece of literature, so the Coen brothers did not have to stay faithful to any text. Instead, the Coen brothers desired to revive the “essence” of James M. Cain’s “style” but in their own context. An example of the marriage of Cain’s work and the Coens’ fictional world is setting. Cain’s novels usually take place in California, and film noir moved its characters to urban places such as New York and Chicago. In contrast, the Coen brothers chose to settle in rural Texas. The physical locations of Cain and the Coens are different, but the purpose of the landscapes is the same-to portray a surreal world that allows for the reflection of morality. Another aspect of Cain’s work that the Coens’ admired is that his stories are about normal people. In Blood Simple, the four main characters are a bar owner, a bartender, a housewife, and a private investigator. There is nothing extraordinary about their lives, but they get thrown into extraordinary situations. This film also deals with crimes of passion-a staple in Cain’s …show more content…
Traditionally, adaptation theory compares an adaptation to the original text, but in this case, there is no single text attributed to Blood Simple. To complicate the situation even further, the film does not draw inspiration solely from Cain’s work. When studying film adaptation, Naremore argued that achieving “untainted fidelity” is hard if not impossible. Living in a world where media seems to be around every corner results in the inevitable influence of a range of sources-such as movies, TV shows, books, music, and so on. Coughlin and Naremore suggest forgetting about fidelity in the case of Blood Simple and instead focusing on how the Coen brothers reinterpret Cain’s work and identifying the other sources outside of Cain as well. For example, the scene where Ray has to get rid of a resilient Marty pays tribute to Alfred Hitchcock and the horror