NoirWorthWatching: September 2016

By Gary Deane

Ree: You always have scared me.

Teardrop: That's ‘cause you're smart.

from WINTER'S BONE (2010)

In the popular imagination, film noir is most often associated with the city, along with its "eight million stories" of world-weary private dicks, streetwise gangsters, sleazy con artists, bent cops, backstabbing femmes fatales, and just plain chumps.

However, as urban centers have strived to become precincts of gentrified vibrancy and creative wonderfulness, much of film and literary noir has packed its bags and headed for the rural heartland, where basic responses to matters at hand may not always be as "nuanced" or as "mindful" as city folks would hope for.

Welcome to the land of Rural Noir AKA Country Noir, a world that can feel like it’s about to explode in violence and frequently does, leaving kith and kin to settle scores and make things right amid a conspiracy of silence. Do what you need to but don’t call the law if you want to live past tomorrow.

If this evokes some dread, it's meant to, as rural noir works to defuse the myth of the bucolic countryside and expose a hard place of increasingly rusty edges and disposable existences. It's now a world of damaged men and wounded women who at one time might have been farmers or have found jobs in mills or factories. However, the family farm has given way to factory farming, while mills and manufacturing plants are shuttered and derelict. All that remains is economic insecurity, fraying community bonds, anarchic family structures, and the fearful aftershocks of crime.

Rural noir’s stories are often seeded in criminal happenings, though at their core they're as much about self and family identity and how people can lose their way and go wrong even while trying to do the right thing. But drug addiction, family grievances, and domestic violence leave wounds that won’t heal and struggles against poverty and fate end in despair and a life sentence of grief. Though ills may be vanquished, a stinging sense of betrayal and distrust lingers.

Gritty crime tales with backwoods settings are part of the traditional and lasting material of American noir fiction and film noir. One of the earliest and still-best examples of country noir is James Ross’ They Don’t Dance Much, published in 1940, which put a country spin on James M. Cain. Later, several of Jim Thompson’s fearsome tales, such as The Killer Inside Me (1952) and Pop. 1280 (1964), with their portrayals of depraved small-town lawmen, would find their way to the screen.

Opening the door wide for contemporary rural noir was Daniel Woodrell, whose 2006 novel Winter’s Bone, released as a film in 2010, defined both a style and sensibility now most associated with a modern genre unto itself. Woodrell’s stories of criminals trapped by their violent compulsions developed out of necessity are intimate and poetic and carry genuine emotional weight. Despite the social and economic malaise clawing at the viscera of the rural heartland, these works stay close to the local and the personal.

The same can be said of the twenty-five films below. Tense, atmospheric, and unsettling, these sinister, slow-burning tales possess a stark elegance, even at their most violent. While themes of government corruption or "big" corporate malfeasance might have been herded into the room like elephants, they never are. These films’ dark attractions reside solely in austere, contained narratives that focus on individual, more private transgressions -- the sins of which lie at the very heart of noir.

Note: The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (2007) is not among the films listed below, only because by now it's “a film that needs no introduction”.

1. SHOTGUN STORIES (2007)