When Michael Winterbottom’s adaptation of the 1952 Jim Thompson novel “The Killer Inside Me’’ played film festivals this spring, audiences gasped and fled up the aisles, repelled by sequences in which the film’s small-town antihero graphically beats two women to death. At Q&A sessions after the screenings, the director was assailed by angry moviegoers who berated him on grounds of feminism, humanism, violence in the pop marketplace, and plain old good taste.
Everyone seemed to miss the point — that the film’s unrepentant nastiness was right there in the book. That’s why pulp novels existed in the first place: as outlets for all the lurid sin and ugliness the mid-20th century mainstream repressed. Thompson envisioned a nice young Texas deputy sheriff, Lou Ford, who behind his shades and yes-ma’am exterior is a seething caldron of psychosis. Lou’s the down-home equivalent of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley — both men are soulless and resourceful, although Lou has an additional mean streak — and as you read Thompson’s flat prose, the novel keeps pulling you further into its dank, sadistic basement, banging your head on the steps as you go.
