William Friedkin is a director well known for giving us one
of the greatest car chase sequences in film history, The French Connection (1971), and one of the greatest horror
pictures in film history, The Exorcist (1973).
Nearly 40 years later Friedkin remains to be a powerful force in the industry, finding a partnership with the American playwright Tracy Letts in his film
adaptations of Letts’ plays Bug (2006)
and Killer Joe (2012). In each film
Friedkin and Letts, who also wrote the screenplay for both films, present the
audience with characters on the fringe of society: hollow characters who look
around them to find a compass of morality. Unfortunately, the backgrounds and
surroundings of these characters doom them into seeking love, help and guidance
in the wrong places.
The bold tone of each of these films is one which Friedkin
and Letts both confess to hold as an interest in their work, the notion that
the human condition is split, we each hold a Hyde somewhere amongst our Dr
Jekyll. By looking into the aspects of our personalities that are paranoid and
cruel, these two artists allow the darker sides of their psyche to manifest in
their fiction, a process which Friedkin joked probably kept him from becoming a
serial killer.
Although we are presented with the dichotomies of the
individual, it is their darkness which consumes the characters of these films.
In their first collaboration Bug, we
see Agnes White (Ashley Judd) deteriorate as a result of reaching out and
clinging to the most powerful thing around her. At the beginning of the film
this is drug-use, a habit which started when she lost her young son some years
earlier. Agnes, at this point, is a lonely mother whose personality has been
fractured and is in need of someone to mend it. In Friedkin’s world, however,
there are no people who are universally good and helpful, no knights of old
ready to help guide Agnes back to balance. Instead, Agnes is introduced to Peter
Evans (Michael Shannon), a recently released soldier who, unknown to Agnes, is
mentally ill. Peter’s paranoid personality, manifested in his belief that
Agnes’ apartment is riddled with bugs planted there by the US government,
becomes infectious as Peter’s conviction in his delusion causes Agnes to allow
the paranoid aspects of her personality to rise to the surface.
It is Friedkin and
Letts’ projection of a shared world view which allows this to work so well. At
first, Peter doesn’t appear mentally ill, nor does he seem a bad influence in
Agnes’ life. In fact, when considered alongside Agnes’ abusive ex-boyfriend who
has recently got out of jail, Peter’s courteous and lonely character seems a
perfect match for a woman who has lost her bearing in the world. As the movie
unravels, however, so to do Agnes and Peter’s mental states as paranoia and
delusion set in and the sane aspects of Agnes’ personality are repressed under
Peter’s influence.
If Bug is a film
about sanity hanging in the balance, then Killer
Joe is a work which focuses on the morality of characters not too
dissimilar to the pair’s first collaboration. The setting of the film is
contained mostly in the trailer park home of a family who belong to the fringes of
society, not far from the motel room of Bug.
Polarity is once again the issue which is played out in the characters as
we see good people doing bad things due to the malevolent influence of a
powerful agent. In this case, he comes in form of Joe (McConaughey), a
detective who also moonlights as a contract killer; polarity personified. After
hiring Joe to kill his neglectful mother in order to pay back some drug dealers,
Chris Smith (Hirsh) and his family are forced to play by Joe’s rules, whose power
over them strengthens to an unbelievable length as the film continues. Letts
described Joe as having ‘a strong moral code’ which, ‘as bent as it is’[2],
draws the fractured people in society toward him and under his control. Their
ability to relate to any goodness in him betrays them as his grip on them
allows him to display his cruelty with all the more vivacity towards the end of
the film.
For Chris’ family, and for Agnes, it is their inability to fit
into society which forces them to seek help in those who, unlike themselves,
have conviction. This conviction, for Friedkin and Letts, is not necessarily
good and so leads each film towards an intense crescendo similar to that of a
Jacobean tragedy. In her 1926 essay ‘The Cinema’, Virginia Woolf described the
primitiveness of a cinema which ‘endow[ed] one man with the attributes of the
race.’[3]
It would seem that these two collaborators want to dismantle such
generalisations before our eyes, a process which viscerally shocks the
audience.
Hollywood has long been chastised for presenting their
audiences with stock characters, the archetypes of good conquering over the
archetypes of bad. In the collaborations of Friedkin and Letts, we see this
battle of good and bad take place within individual characters set amongst the
backdrop of a world which appears gritty and frighteningly real. It is this world
which has been dexterously transposed from stage to screen, leaving the
audience to transpose such characters into the real world or, indeed, to find such
polarity in themselves.
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