A Historicist Proposal. Blood Simple, Neo-Noir at the End of the American Century

Resumo

This paper focuses on Joel and Ethan Coen’s debut film Blood Simple (1984), one of the main exponents of the neo-noir. After a surveying overview of the historical discussion on neonoir’s main wellspring (classical film noir), I move on to contextualize the film historically, providing a critical account of the decade of the 1970s. Thus, the aim of the following pages is to analyze neo-noir by paying attention to the cultural, social, and political discourses that permeate into the film. By considering that the conjunction between the immediate past of the film and the narrative and stylistic repertoire of film noir is the main informing force of Blood Simple; its close reading intends to configure an alternative historicist approach to a generic form dominated mostly by discussions that disregard the chronotope of the films.