I’ve got a serious thing for Jim Thompson. As crime writers go, I think he hung the moon. I never, however, expected to be a fan of Jessica Alba.
So it goes.
Long before any civilians had actually seen it, Michael Winterbottom’s film “The Killer Inside Me” — adapted from Jim Thompson’s legendary 1952 crime novel — became a blogosphere target as a purported example of Hollywood’s pornographic glorification of violence against women. After the movie’s Sundance premiere in January, a female audience member assailed Winterbottom and the festival during the post-screening Q&A: “I don’t understand how Sundance could book this movie. How dare you? How dare Sundance?”
There were reports at the time that co-star Jessica Alba, who plays a prostitute who is literally beaten to a pulp by Casey Affleck’s deputy-sheriff protagonist, had walked out of that Sundance screening in disgust. Alba later denied this, and on Tuesday night at the film’s New York premiere in the Tribeca Film Festival, she and other cast members (including Kate Hudson, whose character suffers a similar fate) mounted an articulate defense of Winterbottom and his movie.
“Believe it or not, when I read the script it was a little bit watered down from the novel,” Alba said during an onstage chat with blogger and critic Glenn Kenny. “I read the novel and found it incredibly powerful. I took it to Michael and said, ‘I want to shoot this.’”
What “this” means is a story about one of the most chilling antiheroes in fictional history. On some level, complaining that “The Killer Inside Me” is full of misogynistic violence is akin to reading “Moby-Dick” and objecting to all the stuff about whaling. Lou Ford (played brilliantly by Affleck) presents at first as a baby-faced, all-American small-town cop, who doesn’t even carry a gun because crime in Central City, Texas, is nearly nonexistent. But beneath his ultra-normal veneer Lou has the tastes and background of a depraved European aristocrat (indeed, I suspect Lou inspired Thomas Harris’ creation of Hannibal Lecter). He’s probably the only person in Central City who reads Freud and listens to Schubert — or whose sexual appetite goes quite so far into sadomasochism, and beyond.
All the shit that’s getting people riled up, that’s what crime fiction is to me. It’s supposed to be scary, and very few things scare the hell out of me like The Killer Inside Me. The only other crime novel I can think of in the same league — even though it’s not generally considered such — is Harry Crews’ A Feast of Snakes. These aren’t supposed to be the police procedurals and wisecracking detective serials that dominate the crime shelves. I like those too, but this is something different. This is nightmare, hunker-down-in-your-soul, how-deep-can-you-dig, release-the-fucking-bats territory.
I doubt most of Jim Thompson’s catalog could get published by a mainstream press these days. But it’s the reason I still read the stuff, hoping against hope that something’ll come along that’s just as big and terrifying.
