Casey Affleck’s portrayal of Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me (2010) is brilliant and cold. Something about his cheeks and upper lip simultaneously portray a stunning evil and nothing at all. That is what makes him an unusual noir leading man— he is never befuddled, never two things at once (cynical and kind, for example), never goes against his own character because there was nothing there to begin with. I suppose that the ‘Lost Man’ archetype is the best fit for him, but he is certainly the outsider in this category. Perhaps that is what makes him ‘lost’; he doesn’t really belong anywhere. Considering the vileness of his character, I think it’s a good thing that noir film hasn’t had to carve out a place for men like him.
Other lost men, like Al Roberts in Detour (1945), Harry Powell in Night of the Hunter (1955), and Kevin Collins in After Dark, My Sweet (1990), are wanderers with no set home, no guaranteed place to stay. Kevin Collins’ character is perhaps the most physically lost of the bunch— his sloping gait, tucked chin, and little tics make him seem the most vulnerable when out there on the open road. He’s also the only one without a direction in mind, or rather, a specific direction, something more than “anywhere but this mental hospital.” I would argue that he’s the most morally lost as well, as he often jumps the fence between good and evil. Al Roberts is in a similar predicament; he doesn’t quite know how far he will go. His moral boundaries are pushed every minute, so he can be considered lost in the sense that he is always changing. Harry Powell, particularly to young John’s eyes, oscillates quickly between displays of violence and displays of gentleness. Any time we see him holding Pearl, we want to believe, like she does, that he means no harm. However, he is thoroughly evil, lost mainly in the sense that he can easily confuse and that he literally loses the children and the money. Lou Ford, on the other hand, has never staked a claim on either side of the fence of good and evil and never really pretended to. From the beginning of the film, it is clear that Lou is an abyss of a man, and he knows it too. Even if his actions are somewhat unpredictable, the vacant core remains the same. No, I don’t think the man we see in this film is particularly lost. Rather, I think that he was lost, a long time ago, when he was still a child. As we see in the few flashbacks, certain events from his childhood irrevocably decided the outline of his adulthood. Lou Ford has been on one path for a very long time, and the movie simply tracks the events leading to his deterministic end. As he says himself, “I guess I kind of got a foot on both fences, Johnny. I planted ‘em there early and now they’ve taken root, and I can’t move either way and I can’t jump. All I can do is wait until I split. Right down the middle.”
This is part of a series of posts I wrote for a film noir class I took in graduate school. This movie was by far the most disturbing of the bunch (even more disturbing than any of the horror movies I watched for another class). You can find the rest of my film noir posts here.