The Killer Inside Me: In a Dark Place
Michael Winterbottom finds his depth
Winterbottom underscores these splits with every stylistic choice. Lou's a fugitive hiding out in broad daylight, his crimes brightly lit and shot plainly, without the softening of artifice or ellipsis. That jaunty Texas swing on the sound track? Some of it is performed by Spade Cooley, a country star who beat his wife to death when she asked for a divorce. "That music felt connected to the story," Winterbottom notes. "People like Spade Cooley, their lives were similar — lots of violence. The story of the music is tragedy but with that bright, shiny, quite happy quality to it."
The Killer Inside Me is Winterbottom's first film shot in the States, but he's not a stranger to America as a loaded concept. Three of his last four films — The Road to Guantanamo, A Mighty Heart and The Shock Doctrine — focus on varieties of unanticipated collateral fallout from America's self-serving political actions and accompanying ideology. (The odd man out is 2008's Genova, a wonderfully nuanced family drama starring Colin Firth, which has never been released in the U.S. due to the collapse of distributor ThinkFilm.) To some extent, Killer is one of a piece with other recent Winterbottom films, as an exploration of the pitch-black flip side to bright Americana. To steal a line from the book and the film, "It's always lightest just before the dark."
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"It's hard to get away from America," Winterbottom says, smiling wryly, though he maintains that Killer only uses the place to talk about people. File Killer in the same noir subgenre as something like Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place: It's an extreme parable of romantic self-destruction. "In noir, there are conventions, the world is very melodramatic, very extreme, but it's also kind of true in some way about the world — it's a parallel world," says the filmmaker. "A lot of people, in a very mundane way, behave like Lou behaves — they do things that are destructive, out of weakness, which are horrible to people. It seems to me that Thompson is trying to create a world that magnifies and dramatizes the way the real world is."
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