‘The Killer Inside Me’: You’re Not Anything

“The trouble with growing up in a small town,” mumbles Lou Ford, “is everybody thinks they know who you are.” As soon as he says it, you know it’s not true: no one in this West Texas town gives much thought at all to who Lou might be. And he’s not actually bothered by it.

You know this because Lou’s the narrator in Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel, The Killer Inside Me, here rejiggered as a film directed by Michael Winterbottom. As if to pile on, he’s also played by Casey Affleck, who’s making something of a career out of playing resentful, slow-processing young men (see: Gerry, Lonesome Jim, and the Coward Robert Ford). Lou’s a lawman, a deputy sheriff with a cowboy hat, a lumbering cruiser, and an apathetic appearance. As he drives down a long, dull, billboard-pocked road at film’s start, he and you both know he’s headed for trouble.

Her name is Joyce (Jessica Alba). She’s a hooker, only just arrived and already making folks uncomfortable, and Lou’s been sent to hurry her out of town. As he walks to her door, Lou explains that here in Central City, “You’re a man and a gentleman or you aren’t anything. And God help you if you’re not.” While it’s not hard to guess what happens next, but still, it’s disturbing. Following some hardboiled patter (“The only decent-looking boy I’ve seen in this stink hole and he’s a boy scout with a badge!”), they collide quite literally, each unleashing in the other an apparently thrilling violence that leaves her bottom, especially, rather red and raw.

What’s striking about the scene — and the other, increasingly violent and predictable encounters that follow — is how flat and ugly it is. The assault is grisly, the shots tight and edits clumsy, providing no pleasurable angle for viewers. No matter that Lou tells you afterward that he’s drawn again and again to Joyce’s bed or that a couple of soft close-ups show her smiling. Their relationship is conducted in shorthand: brief and breathy sex scenes, framed by Lou’s retro-masculine self-regard. Even as he says, “I loved Joyce,” you know it’s not possible.

That’s not to say Lou is unself-conscious, exactly. He offers a bit of backstory concerning childhood traumas, including a brother accused of child molestation and then murdered. As he spends long hours alone in the cavernous house he’s inherited, Lou is less self-reflective than blank. Even if he sounds aware of how bad his bad acts look, the more interesting point is that he’s performing that awareness for you, however laconically.

This selective awareness makes Lou both oddly noxious and much like other unreliable narrators. If his dark misogyny and baby-faced cynicism are typically noirish, so is his layering of schemes. He and Joyce plot to steal money from one of her wealthy, foolish clients, whom Lou also wants to punish for a long-ago infraction. But the film doesn’t throw in with Lou’s desire for righteous revenge; it never redeems him or grants his deceits any sort of moral cover. Rather, The Killer Inside Me exacerbates Lou’s unpleasantness. He can’t explain it, he says one night, but, “I started needling people, I couldn’t help it.” To illustrate, when a hobo asks for “something to warm me up,” Lou puts his cigar out on his hand. The camera cuts from the man’s horrified expression to his abuser’s impassive, vaguely smug face.

Lou’s illegibility is key to the film’s tipping in and out of what might be termed “reality.” It’s unclear when or how Lou’s lies overtake what you see, whether he’s imagining or enacting cruel fantasies. At times, the pulpy dialogue and extraordinary violence seem aligned and similarly ridiculous: as Lou beats Joyce senseless, the camera cuts between his rage and her bloody, broken face, her eyes grotesquely purpled as he gasps, “I’m sorry, I love you, goodbye.” Other scenes focus on his focus, as he watches his brutalized victims pee themselves, convulse, and gurgle. Such images notoriously inspired viewer protests at Sundance, but their insistent awkwardness is less about the movie than its audience, broadly speaking, the audience that seeks out violent storytelling that is more agreeable, in slow motion or performed by familiar action heroes.

By contrast, Lou is resolutely unfamiliar. “I got a foot on both sides of the fence,” he observes. “They were put here early and I can’t move until I split right down the middle.” These sides — in his mind and on screen — are embodied most conventionally in lustrous Joyce and pouty Amy (Kate Hudson), the girlfriend who wants to be married so badly that she believes the most rotten lies and convoluted self-defenses (when she accuses him of smelling “dirty,” he comes back with: “Don’t say the girl I’m gonna marry is running around with a guy who sleeps with whores”). Amy’s small mind (which, again, may only be his small mind’s projection) makes his contempt for her seem understandable, or at least inevitable. And so her story is foregone as soon as she first shows up, long minutes into the film, offering her man a glimpse of her new underwear and put out when he’s distracted.

Lou shows even less interest in the men and boys around him. He may or may not be mentoring young wannabe troublemaker Johnnie (Liam Aiken). But he can only begrudge his fatherly boss (Tom Bower), as well as the union man (Elias Koteas) who’s been investigating Lou’s brother’s murder, and federal agent Hendricks (ever smooth Simon Baker). When city boy Hendricks says of Lou and his neighbors, “The more I’m around you people, the less I understand you,” you’re inclined to agree. As much as Lou’s deviance looks to be his own alone, he’s also a product of his place, the small town that purports to know him, yet provides no support, the community without moral compass. He’s also a product of his more broadly defined place, the culture that markets violence, that celebrates spectacle and splatter. Here, he fits right in.