Midwestern Noir

ISSUE #198

I spent last Friday watching the three Evil Dead movies with a bottle of pre-mixed blood orange margaritas—my attempt at a thematic pairing. It was my first successful triple feature, which was aided by the fact that each hovers around 80 minutes and are full of bloody hijinks. Though I’d seen them all before, I still had a blast.

The director, Sam Raimi, is from Michigan, and so is the hunky, hilarious lead Bruce Campbell, one of our greatest and most underrated comedians. At one point in the 1980s, the two shared an apartment with fellow Midwesterners and famous brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, along with Frances McDormand, Kathy Bates, and Atlanta native Holly Hunter. I mention this because I find the Evil Dead trilogy shares a sensibility with the films of the Coen Brothers—a sensibility I can only call Midwestern Noir.

Atlanta’s Tayari Jones, on the meaning of “noir”:

“These stories[…] all share the quality of exposing the rot underneath[…] Noir in my opinion, is more a question of tone than content. The moral universe of the story is as significant as the physical space. Noir is a realm where the good guys seldom win; perhaps they hardly exist at all. Few bad deeds go unrewarded, and good intentions are not the road to hell, but are hell itself.”

In the Evil Dead, Bruce Campbell’s Ash unleashes a cursed evil from a cabin in the woods—through no true fault of his own—and is subsequently cursed to live out his days pestered and pursued by bloodthirsty demons. He can never escape. They often possess his girlfriends, forcing him to kill and dismember his lovers at least three times. The films are very funny. In Coen Brothers movies, poor, hapless morons do everything they can to get rich quick, often via a ransom or a briefcase full of money. They are either evil and stupid or well-intentioned and stupid—but often all at once, because that is what it is to be human. The films are very funny.

I call this sensibility Midwestern because it’s an attitude inherent to life on the plains, where you can see storms gather from miles away and can do nothing for hours but brace for the worst. The winters are some of the coldest in the country. There’s a reason some of the only immigrants who could bear it were Swedes, Russians, Norwegians, and Finns.

As a farmer, God spits in your face every day, often in the same breath that she has blessed you with all you hold dear. Evil exists and there is no running from it—it courses through our very veins. Those from other regions can ignore this fact, through sun or sand or cultural abundance, often simply making things worse. The Midwestern sensibility is to know that it’s around every corner, and to stay humble, expect the worst and take it with a laugh.

Still, after saying all that, I know it’s not fully true—there are other parts of the country that hold these beliefs. I’ve been reading the anthology Atlanta Noir, edited by the aforementioned Tayari Jones. Here’s more from the intro:

“Atlanta itself is a crime scene. After all, Georgia was founded as a de facto penal colony and in 1864, Sherman burned the city to the ground. We might argue about whether the arson was the crime or the response to the crime, but this is indisputable: Atlanta is a city sewn from the ashes and everything that grows here is at once fertilized and corrupted by the past.”

Jones calls this the noir-est of cities. I found myself agreeing, and loving Atlanta more for it. I noticed the towering, sinister trees that stand between Johns Creek’s egregious strip malls, remembered the ghostly mist that floats up from the Chattahoochee as I cross it every evening. I thought of the Evil Dead’s cabin in the woods, the forest on the poster for the Coens’ Miller’s Crossing. It’s yet another connection between my two homes—that poison goes down best with a side of humor.

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