Element of Crime meets Blood Meridian

By Mark David  

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I have just finished reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I had the thought when I finished it that this book is a book as a film is a film when made by Lars Von Trier. I was curious about the idea and expand on it in this blog, starting with that film of Trier's The Element of Crime (the Von bit was a pun made at his expense by his fellow students ....)

The Element of Crime is the first and in many ways the most difficult to place of all of Lars Von Trier's films. The only instructor I can compare the feeling this movie creates to is David Lynch. I am no expert, but Mulholland Drive springs to mind. Where the the two directors differ is in approach - Lynch makes extensive use of 'between realities' - the journey into and out of the inner world of the mind and the outside world beyond and vice versa. This can be the subject of a new blog so I'll stop here. Trier is very taken with atmosphere, technique while sharing the inner-world focus of Lynch (this is my own interpretation and entirely subjective). The bottom line is both directors reward viewing with experiences few others can match.

The Element of Crime was made in 1984. I won't go into the details of the film. You can either browse wikipedia of see an  in depth coverage of Element of Crime on Film Walrus reviews.

Blood Meridian The Evening Redness in the West was written in 1985 and is probably the most famous of the books by American author Cormac McCarthy, perhaps the greatest living author in the US. McCarthy can today be regarded as a living legend - to compare with all the greats of US fiction like Steinbeck or Hemmingway. He writes in his own ballsy style waving indifference in the face of convention.

Both use a descriptive language of places and scenes. Both render details vivid. Both are prose in motion. Both are a journey. Both enter places unhealthy for the body and soul and both embark on a journey in inhospitable terrain. Both when seen or read are journey's of the mind. Our minds.

This is an essay and an experiment

The aim of this blog is foremost though an experiment - to explore the boundaries between two mediums and two comparable projects - the book and film. The idea is to find common traits and artistic similarities. I do this to focus on what it is that makes great fiction - whatever the medium - in the hope of gaining a little insight. I want insight, but like anything else in life this has to be worked at. So lets cut to the chase:

In both and for the sake of argument there is neither storyline or recognisable plot, other than the blurred focus on a character -  Fisher in EofC and in BM the two diffuse characters of The Kid and Judge Horton. Both work on a cause-and-effect sequence of events.

As Film Walrus writes:

The Element of Crime is told in a cryptic style, full of symbols, allusions, ambiguities and contradictions. The lighting is done with high-pressure sodium bulbs [1] that lend the film an orange tone (quite a bit more intense than sepia) broken only occasionally by highlights of green or blue. The shooting was done exclusively at night, usually during the rain. The narration is in strict monotone that distances the audience from any emotional connection to the characters. The camerawork is highly experimental, with a preponderance of overhead shots. The mise-en-scene is dense and disturbing, full of abandoned buildings, pools of dripping water, dead and dying horses and, everywhere, the decrepit and broken artifacts of decaying post-war Europe. Almost every minor character is bald.

Allusions and Ambiguities

As in E of C the journey is the detective seeking to discover, entering a shadow - or literally - night world apocalyptic and full to the brim with methods to catch our own fantasy where one act leads to the next without a guidebook to show us the way. Death is all around us and made vivid in ways we have never seen before, a world populated by figures unlike any we have encountered. A world that is a hypnosis-induiced flashback, a journey of the mind, full of the mind's associative ability to couple together fragments from the most remote and obscure of libraries that reach deep down into the wells of the human psyche. Like a dream E of C is a visual journey we are a part of but also one we ourselves are the creators of - by making something that is not served on a plate and making it our own.

Similarly, BM is also a symbolic overdrive full of allusions and ambiguities. For example, in the obscure ending in Blood Meridian. McCarthy writes:

"In the dawn there is a man progressing over the plain by means of holes which he is making in the ground ... he sinks fire in the hole and drains out his steel. Then they move on again."

Wikipedia says of the ending:

"The images of the epilogue seem to serve as a harbinger of the more ordered and settled civilization which will soon replace the war-torn chaos of the West, with its own rituals and codes very unlike those portrayed in the novel's setting."

The above is very insightful and certainly resonates with meaning that renders words into something more - a comment on the essence of a time as chaotic and lawless as any other in the diverse histories of human affairs. I feel therefore a deep resonance between both works both my masters and seek to compare. 

A key

I prefer however for my own subjective reasons to think of the above epilogue in BM as a key - a key to unlocking the experience of reading the text. This for me is the journey - a figurative journey. The reading of the epilogue in BM is not the track of holes but the moment of making one and moving on to the next. This suggests the moment-by-moment state of existence that in the story - a gang of renegade scalp hunters paid by the authorities of the land to cut scalps from natives - each moment of violence degrading the group to a more primitive state.

I have read a handful of reviews on Blood Meridian and I am appreciative of it. I believe the book is like good music - the greater the submersion the greater the appreciation. But and this is a big but. This is not a book of entertainment. Not for me at least. All books are read subjectively so I'm not interested if someone disagrees with me on this one. 

Let's look at the book as a coin with an upside and a downside. Starting with the downside I see the reading of the book as a wander in the desert of existence as much as it is for the diffusely sketched characters. I find the running descriptions of setting page after page of verbal exploration tedious and long for something else - the zooming into an important macro detail foreshadowing a meaningful event for example. The book procrastinates to the extreme in the wandering descriptive. I do not therefore, elevate Blood Meridian to the gods but nevertheless curse the day when there are no more Cormac McCarthy's around to whom we can only aspire.

Many critics agree that there are Gnostic elements present in Blood Meridian, but they disagree on the precise meaning and implication of those elements. One of the most detailed of these arguments is made by Leo Daugherty in his 1992 article, "Blood Meridian as Gnostic Tragedy." Daugherty argues "gnostic thought is central to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian" (Daugherty, 122); specifically, the Zoroastrian branch of Gnosticism. He describes the novel as a "rare coupling of Gnostic 'ideology' with the 'affect' of Hellenic tragedy by means of depicting how power works in the making and erasing of culture, and of what the human condition amounts to when a person opposes that power and thence gets introduced to fate.


The point of this blog

What would Blood Meridian be like if it was made into a film visualised by the likes of Trier? Let's face it, Von Trier's films do not grip. But they are at time subliminal. The world would be a boring place without the funding for people like Von Trier.

I would vouch that the enjoyment is not in the entertainment value but in the appreciation of the ascetic and aesthetic of the setting - the raw west with raw people sunken to a level of depravity that sinks below any contemplation concerning the meaning of life. This is man here and now at his most primeval, acting according to one the genetic encoded need to kill arisen from a need to survive. To exist at all. Like the holes in the epilogue, the random movement from event to event, place to place, act to act, follow a law devoid of laws other than the law that is all laws and that law is survival. And yes, I wish to establish a resonance akin to The Element of Crime ...

McCarthy and Von Trier are artists extraordinaire - each in their respective mediums. In an age when half of the stars are wearing stupid superhero costumes and losing a certain artistic credibility into the bargain (Gwinneth Paltrow in Iron Man for example. Skycaptain I can buy - but Iron Man ... christ money really shouts out loud in Hollywood for people who already have plenty of it. Now half the movies are the local cinema are for kids past the age of eighteen...) 

I fear if Von Trier took Blood Meridian he would take something and make it more extreme than it already is - away into his own inner worlds mortals like us probably don't really want to go and see. I would therefore voucher for Clint Eastwood or even Paul Greengrass (The Bourne trilogy). Greengrass could take something silent and breath life into it as Eastwood would lavish in the poetic setting of the West that vanished for ever with the making of those holes in the grounds for the poles of the border and segregation and the permanence of nations.

If Von Trier would for once cater for others than his self then perhaps he could create something sublime. Perhaps. He would need a bloody good cinemaphotographer as in Antichrist with a passion for detail and stop masturbating.

Making the dead: Reinventing the bog body

By author Mark David (author's homepage) 

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Okay, I admit a pun to the famous BBC crime series Waking The Dead. I love this TV-series because it works with:

1. A time perspective - time, place and people

2. Death

3. A story explaining the above requiring discovery by the investigating team

4. The use of modern techniques to discover information previously unavailable

Re. 1 - Time - here I mean the perspective that something that happened in the past is conditioning the present to inform the future.

Re. 2 - we as people like it or not have an obsession with death. We all know deep down, especially for us past the half-way stage that the clock is ticking ... tick tick tick

Re. 3 - Stories are those aspects of humanity that link us as people with our inner worlds and the inner worlds of our forefathers. 

Re. 4 - The idea that techniques in forensices, scientific excavation, analysis, intelligence, image capture, CCTV - all play an increasing part in solving the case or mystery.

I am working with all of the above in The Elements. This blog really is the recording of my source material for sharing with anyone with an interest. The picture above is of my own construction, an artistic creation that combines two macabre aspects: 

1. The x-ray of a bog body that has been mutilated with:

2. The legendary Viking Blood Eagle. 

It is not intended to be taken literally, not with the wings of an eagle at any rate.

In The Elements I have constructed a story revolving around the discovery of a bog body. A perfectly preserved body that has also undergone the macabre ritual of the blood eagle, with the exception that the body is the murdered victim of more recent times. The body also happens to be dressed in the uniform of the SS. A preview of the opening scenes charting the discovery of the body and the characters assigned to discovering more of what is going on can accessed on Issuu. The book is nearly in place and called Naked Ground. It is also the first in a series of four books foreshadowing a great deal more to come. Anyway, back to the blog ...

The Viking blood eagle

Concerning the blood eagle, as far as I am able to tell, despite a certain skepticism concerning the validity of the blood eagle, the fact that the macabre ritual of carving an eagle on the back of a victim by blade before cutting the flesh from the back and hacking the ribs down the sides of the spine, pulled apart in the recreation of an eagle has to be believed. My argument rests with reference to the Wikipedia link above that too much is written in old Norse to vindicate that such practices did exist. Wikipedia also brings attention to the rock carving from Gotland, that supposedly shows a victim being laid over a stone prior to or in the process of having the blood eagle carved. 

The image below is open to your own interpretation, and I for one see the form of the person over the chair or table as being that of the child. Hmm, a child being given the pleasure of having it's back cut open? On the other hand the eagle is present too, is it one of Odin's ravens, the other flying above? (There are always two, one called Hugin, one called Munin, fly away Hugin, fly away Munin ...)

Bog bodies

Then there's the discovery of bog bodies mostly in Northern Europe. The preservative conditions in the acidic air-starved boglands of Northern Europe are perfect environments for the preservation of skin and tissue. Over time, bone is dissolved, leaving the soft and most often flattened, dried tissue preserving skin, hair, and virtually everything else apart from bone. Of course, this is a time-consuming process, and many bodies going back over two thousand years are in an amazing state of preservation. It has been experience of seeing these bodies that has helped shape much of what is written in Naked Ground.

Tollund Man

The Tollund Man is the naturally mummified corpse of a man who lived during the 4th century BCE, during the period characterised in Scandinavia as the Pre-Roman Iron Age. He was found in 1950 on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark, buried in a peat bog which preserved his body. Such a find is known as a bog body. The man's physical features were so well-preserved that he was mistaken at the time of discovery for a recent murder victim. Twelve years before Tollund Man's discovery, another bog body, Elling Woman, had been discovered in the same bog. Ancient bodies have been found in bogs in England and Ireland as well. Image courtesy of National Geographic.

Grauballe Man

I have been to see Grauballe Man at Moesgaard museum in Jutland, Denmark. The museum also houses the finds of nearby Illerup Ådal, or Illerup stream valley as the name can be translated. Moesgaard is also noteworthy for the setting for Europes biggest Viking festival and battle reenactments. For anyone interested, I can thoroughly recommend a visit. The market stalls alone are worth the time spent getting here and there is really something for everyone. But I digress. As can be seen in the body picture of Grauballe man above, the preservation of bogs is really remarkable. Witness the detail on the face of Tollund man:

Can you believe, this face is of a person who lived in the 3rd. century? BC. Stubble, every crease and wrinkle of his face preserved for eternity. 

Reinventing the bog body requires not much imagination with the above examples to guide us along the way. Never the less, the idea of preservation and preservation of acts of violence in the act of ... murder, or sacrifice is something worthy of Waking the Dead.