The Killer Inside Me

2010_9_09 The Killer Inside Me
Lou Ford, the killer in THE KILLER INSIDE ME, was ironically, a deputy sheriff in his home town of Central City, Texas, a small town somewhere in western Texas. He was 29 years old, lived in the home of his dead parents, and was about to get engaged to a nice girl named Amy Stanton (Kate Hawn.) His father was a doctor with unsavory habits that no one knew about: he liked to beat his wife and she liked it too. The housekeeper used to beat on Lou, which he didn’t like. Then after his father died his mother taught him how to beat her with his belt just like his daddy had done while she lay bare-ass naked on her bed. Incest was suggested both in the book and the recent movie made from the book, but it was not explicit in either. In any case, Lou grew up liking the sadistic lust he felt with his mother. But he had learned to repress those experiences and tendencies in his nature and adapted to his tedious and humdrum existence as a deputy sheriff.

Two things sparked the violence and madness inside him; they were like traps lying in wait for him, One day the Sheriff asked Lou (Casey Affleck) to run out to the house that the prostitute was using as her home base and to tell her she had to leave town. Word had come down from Chester Conway (Ned Beatty), the rich oil man who dominated Central City that she had to go because his son was spending too much time and money with the woman. He was willing to give her some money to get established elsewhere. Lou was reluctant to do it but his boss insisted so off he went, with his Stenson on and his white shirt gleamingly clean. But when he got there the woman, Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba), put up a lively resistance to leaving. Finally, she slapped him hard twice in the face. That did it; she unleashed a fury in him that was deep and fierce; it came welling out of his depths and took him out of himself, as if he was in a trance or having an out-of-the-body experience. He pounded on the woman sitting on top of her on her bed. When he came back to himself, he started apologizing for losing his temper. Her reaction was, “Don’t be sorry, kiss me.” Fact was she enjoyed being roughed up; for her it was just a prelude to intercourse. They made furious love that day and several days in a row. Sometimes he beat her with his belt, other times he slipped it around her throat and tighten it as he pumped her. They seemed made for each other. Just like his father and mother.

So in brief, the cat was out of the bag, and it eventually turned into a raving beast. He eventually kills Joyce, or thinks he has, and shoots Chester’s son in the forehead, so the sheriff will thinks the two had an argument and both ended up dead. This begins a killing spree for Lou that doesn’t end to the very end of the book and movie, which has one hell of a finale.

The second thing that I saw as essential to the character of Lou Ford and what drove him to go on a killing spree was a discovery he made one night at home by himself. He had reason to take down his father’s old bible high on a book shelf, as if he was going to look for some passage. But he was distracted by some photographs inside the bible. They are of his mother when she was young and pretty. She was naked and tied up for his father’s pleasure. The good book was full of surprises, just like Lou’s inside world was. In one photo she was on the bed her ass up in the air waiting for penetration. Porn in the Bible; that hit home for Lou; there was his family history in a nutshell. Those images are memories that were demons in his psyche, writ large, dark, perverse and outrageous, like skeletons in his closet, forever dancing before his mind’s eye. Finding those pictures was like the “return of the repressed,” to use a Freudian term and Jim Thompson I would say was well-schooled in psychoanalysis. He had written the book at his sister’s house in Virginia. She was horrified by the book and asked where it came from. All he would tell her was “a lot of research.”

Thompson wrote pulp fiction but sometimes he transcended the genre, which was certainly true with THE KILLER INSIDE ME. His grasp of Freudian theory was impressive, especially how childhood was the father of the man. Lou’s career as a killer gets more and more complicated; he even kills his fiancée to cover up the fact he was being blackmailed. The local D.A. figure out Lou was the killer but it was intuitive. Lou always remained cool and in control and defiant. But finally the noose began to close and he prepared a finale scenario he bets his adversaries won’t expect. He filled the house with flammable fluid and with material that will explode and waits for the termination point to arrive. So when the D.A., Chester Conway, 3 deputies and a surprise guest show up and come in the house, he is ready to go out in a blaze of glory, taking his adversaries with him.

Casey Affleck is the right guy to play Lou Ford. He can play the cold fish well and has that faraway look in his eyes. The two women are playing against type, as they are in mostly fluff movies. Both do a credible job in this chilling movie..