{"id":954,"date":"2010-06-25T09:45:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-25T16:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/06\/the-killer-inside-jim-thompson.html"},"modified":"2010-06-25T09:45:00","modified_gmt":"2010-06-25T16:45:00","slug":"the-killer-inside-jim-thompson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2010\/06\/the-killer-inside-jim-thompson.html","title":{"rendered":"The Killer Inside Jim Thompson"},"content":{"rendered":"
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WITH the film adaptation of Michael Winterbotton\u2019s The Killer Inside Me <\/i>opening in Los Angeles today, I turned to the author’s biographer for insight into this very complicated pulp figure. If there is a better biography of an American writer than Robert Polito<\/a>\u2019s Savage Art, <\/i>I\u2019ve not read it. (The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award.)<\/p>\n

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Polito\u2019s book describes Thompson as a \u201cprofoundly alienated man\u2019\u2019 who belonged to the Communist party in the \u201930s, worked in oil fields and ran with the underworld during Prohibition. Thompson, he writes, produced work that seems congruent with the early rock n roll of Elvis and Little Richard, Allen Ginsberg\u2019s \u201cHowl\u201d and the films of Nicholas Ray.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Polito \u2013 a poet who heads the graduate writing program at the New School — and I spoke in the context of Winterbottom\u2019s adaptation, which I write about here<\/a>. What follows are excerpts from our discussion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Q: Let\u2019s start out by framing Jim Thompson in literary history.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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A: I very much see Thompson as the leading writer of the second generation of crime writers, along with David Goodis and Patricia Highsmith. The shift from the first generation \u2013 the Hammett\/ Chandler generation \u2013 is the shift from the detective to the criminal as the focus of the books. Thompson offers us the most complicated structures, especially in his first-person novels: The Killer Inside Me, A Hell of a Woman, Savage Night, Pop. 1280<\/i>. They\u2019re as experimental as anything in American fiction at that moment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Q: What\u2019s the structure in Killer<\/i>? <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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A: That\u2019s Lou Ford\u2019s voice \u2013 the way he treats the people in Carter City, with his mix of clich\u00e9s. He\u2019s mistreating the reader the same way he mistreats the good citizens of Center City.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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<\/a>Q: He\u2019s a classic unreliable narrator in Nabokov\u2019s sense, and very conscious \u2013 like a certain kind of novelist \u2013 that life is a performance.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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A: After working with Thompson on two films, Stanley Kubrick directed a Nabokov adaptation. [Lolita<\/i>.] Kubrick was fascinated with that kind of dangerous, repellent, charming narrator.<\/div>\n
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Q: Thompson\u2019s collaborations with Kubrick \u2013 The Killing<\/i> and Paths of Glory<\/i> \u2013 were unhappy experiences for him. And directors, especially American directors, have not had much luck adapting Thompson\u2019s books.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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A: Some of it comes from the refusal of those directors to take on the voice of the main characters, which reduces the novels to their violence and action. You have to be willing to take on those weird structures, and the weirdness around the edges.<\/div>\n
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Q: Do you feel the same way about Winterbottom\u2019s take on The Killer Inside Me<\/i>?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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A: There\u2019s a lot to like about the film \u2013 starting with the performances. Casey Affleck if terrific. And the music is terrific. But I was disappointed by the absence of energy or thought in going into what makes the book exciting: Ford\u2019s voice and the way he tells the story. Ford controls your perceptions in the novel, and you read under and around the unreliability and the slipperiness.\u00a0But it\u2019s filmed too much like the book was written in the third person.<\/div>\n
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Godard in his prime could have made a great Killer Inside Me<\/i>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Q: Those last years, in LA, sound pretty sad and did not produce great novels. Was it mostly the drinking?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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<\/a>A: He was distracted in a very serious way by the movies and the prospect of making a living from the movies. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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And he suffered from a total alleviation of the censorship he had worked under. Now Thompson could say anything rather than accomplish it through subterfuge. That had allowed Thompson to write on all cylinders. The Killer Inside Me<\/i> was an allegory for the kind of pulp novel Thompson was writing: You think you\u2019re reading one kind of novel, and you\u2019re reading another. When you have to slip something by the official channels, it enforces subtlety and experimental art.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Q: In Savage Art<\/i>, you talk about the fact that these novels, though pulp fiction, were actually taken seriously by sharp-eyes readers and critics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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A: Hell of a Woman<\/i> had reviews comparing him to Celine and Joyce \u2013 Jim Thompson was<\/i> appreciated in his lifetime. He was getting words like “experimental” attached to him before he died. It\u2019s like early rock n roll: It was meant to be disposable, and then it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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WITH the film adaptation of Michael Winterbotton\u2019s The Killer Inside Me opening in Los Angeles today, I turned to the author’s biographer for insight into this very complicated pulp figure. If there is a better biography of an American writer than Robert Polito\u2019s Savage Art, I\u2019ve not read it. (The book won the National Book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[76,243,34,134,266,29],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-954","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-film","7":"category-jim-thompson","8":"category-literary","9":"category-noir","10":"category-polito","11":"category-west-coast","12":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/954\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}