Texas. In the hands of Joel and Ethan Coen, it's an expanse where the report of a pearl‑handled .38 dies a slow, lugubrious death before it reaches the nearest ear. It's the sawdust from a saloon's floor kicked up by the boots of a topless dancer—powder on the upturned faces of the clientele. It's a flask of whiskey and a Zippo lighter, a series of smoke rings and ringing cash registers that clank and rattle before opening their maws to the dollar bills that are exchanged for bottled beer. It's an open sky, a fat stretch of road and an oil field sucked dry by the metal heads which bob toward the earth and then away with purposeful indifference. It's a sedan, a pick‑up truck and the auto courts which house them. It's both a jilted lover and a jealous husband, murderous thoughts and the humid nights that produced them. In short, Texas is the only thing it could be to brothers who grew up in the blank innocence of Minnesota—what they call "Siberia with family‑style restaurants": it's a strange, dangerous and romantic landscape made more so by some eighty years of cinematic exaggeration.

Perhaps you missed their acclaimed film about Minnesota (Fargo—1996), a mural of America with blizzardly whites, police uniform blues and the grooved reds left in snow by stripes of warm blood. Ambiance challenged well‑rounded characters who had to crunch and slip over its wintry obstacles (the story was slippery, too—although we had to wait until the end for its stomach‑turning crunch). It was the culmination of a twelve‑year study in atmosphere which announced with a sing‑song accent that the Coens had finally conceded to the fact that a setting just wasn't a setting without a real person to walk through it.

They didn't know this when they made their movie about Arizona (Raising Arizona—1987). Here was a backdrop that had escaped its moorings to become a star. Blond suburban starter‑homes trimmed with turquoise and other examples of desert decor recalled a hyper‑farcical southwest. The film produces nostalgia in the manner of a stranger's old photographs: we share not in the specifics of the reminiscence but in the sense that we all have pasts—more often tacky and embarrassing than not. Unfortunately, the individuals within the film didn't trigger the same familiarity. They were window dressings fashioned to fit an environment that was clearly the project's impetus.

The same can be said of the Coens' first film Blood Simple (1984). It's most concerned with Texas, hopelessly interested in its own unconventional narrative, and pries only peripherally into the motivations of its players. But unlike Raising Arizona, it doesn't announce its genre. There's no introductory declaration that says, "I am a comedy," or "I am noir." Instead, it states what becomes obvious in a hurry: "I am Texas. I'm whatever I want to be and you had better hang on."

The film begins and ends with M. Emmet Walsh whose voice bends and breaks like a fiddle with loose strings. He's the narrator and a central character but really personifies the region's weathered vistas which undulate peacefully before exploding into orange fire where they meet the setting sun. As his opening monologue suggests, he's the prime mover, a god‑like figure who will propel the action, determine its outcome and comment on the happenings along the way: "Now in Russia they've got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That's the theory anyway. But what I know about is Texas and down here you're on your own."

Walsh as Private Detective Visser does indeed know about Texas. He's as low as they come, as slow and unimpressed by the reaction to his presence as a raccoon rifling through your garbage—which pretty much summarizes his occupation. But he's also intelligent. It's not exactly street smarts; there's no such thing in his neck of the woods. It's closer akin to the liar who believes in nothing. He's scum and so expects the worst from others.

It may be impossible to place too much importance on this character. With a budget of $1.5 million, the film chose the veteran Walsh as its one extravagance. Blood Simple works because he's at once detestable and endearing. He's the only person in the movie who looks before he leaps, has a genuine grasp on human nature, and understands the Coens' Texas enough to see that it's by resisting its rustic blatancy—by refusing to go "simple"—that he will survive.

This is no small task. Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya), a greasy bar owner whose slick hair and Bronx accent make him as awkward and obvious as a rodeo clown on Fifth Avenue, hires Walsh's Detective Visser to tail his wife Abby (Frances McDormand) and the employee (John Getz) he assumes is her lover. Julian's jealousy is an obtrusive beast. He calls the hotel room (the site of the infidelity) the moment Visser confirms his suspicions. Abby and Ray are even less subtle. They know they are being followed, answer the phone when it rings, and return to the bar to collect Ray's back pay. None of this comes as a surprise to Visser who banks not only on the stereotypical pride of these Texans but also on the inevitabilities of movie convention. He knows as well as the audience—as well as Abby and Ray—that murder is next on the agenda. So he subverts everyone's expectation of the destined and works our collective bloodlust to his benefit.

To delve further into the plot would be to remove the frail cotter pin by which the film is fastened. Like nearly all creative firsts, Blood Simple is a thrifty endeavor held together by the most rudimentary of materials; it's a jerry‑rigged webbing of toothpicks and gum. The film is supported by the fine threads of its story which seem to run pell‑mell but are really part of an expert tapestry woven so tight that the grand design is visible only in the end and from above.

This is not to say that Blood Simple lacks technique. Prior to its conception, Joel Coen was an assistant editor for director Sam Raimi. Best known for his Evil Dead series, Raimi invented a broad range of camera perspectives for his gory oeuvre, the most famous being the "flying eyeball shot" where the audience hurtles alongside an airborne organ until it lands in the mouth of a young woman. It's from this source that Blood Simple gets its whiplash style. More than once, what we assume to be a docile camera makes a sudden, mad dash for some far corner of its field of vision. We are abruptly drawn, as if tethered to a zip‑line, into the face of the action. The Coens employ this and other acrobatic maneuvers to lend life to their low‑rent sets which exude a certain rigidity and fallaciousness.

Their story shares in this artificiality, but it does so on purpose. The Coens are sons of college professors. Joel is a graduate of the New York University Film School and Ethan was a philosophy major at Princeton. They are bright lads raised on De Palma and Descartes, and Blood Simple is an academic's film—self‑conscious cinema aimed at the junky for whom movies have lost their magic and become instead an ordered assortment of cuts, pans and zooms. It plays across the clichés of Hollywood like a virtuoso banging absent‑mindedly away at Chopsticks. But it evolves into its own unique—spontaneous—composition in tune only within the minds of it composers. In this sense, the film is wholly of the moment, a one‑time performance that is mesmerizing in its uniqueness but is sure to reveal its limitations with repeated screenings.

What keeps Blood Simple timeless is its bloated impression of Texas. It's as memorable as any of the Coens' portraits of America (including their portrayal of Los Angeles in the recent The Big Lebowski). Like Fargo and Raising Arizona, it embellishes not on the actuality of its respective setting but on a memory of it—or, to be more precise, on a memory of another film about it. While condescending, it's also good‑natured. While disturbing and insulting in its generalities, it's also fairly accurate, and therefore comical, in its particulars. One would think that the Coens had never visited Texas before making this version of it. Even if this were the case, more power to them. Blood Simple initiated the independent movement in film by refusing to go simple, by being exactly what it wanted to be without compromise. So here's hoping that they continue to address the state of our union. In fact, here's hoping that their next movie is about Guam.