William Friedkin’s ‘Killer Joe’

Jared Leto, lead singer of 30 Seconds to Mars and Academy-Award nominee, told MTV in 2010 that his band’s then-upcoming short film featuring their song “Hurricane” was a “meditation on the violence of sex, and the sex of violence.”

Leto, who joins “Killer Joe” (2011) star Matthew McConaughey in this year’s Oscar-nominated “Dallas Buyers Club,” was unknowingly illustrating exactly what William Friedkin‘s “Killer Joe” delivers.

The first word of the movie title implies violence. However, the film rarely showcases Joe’s expertise. Instead, his sexual oddities draw more attention.

“Killer Joe”—written by the story’s playwright, Tracy Letts—follows a dysfunctional Texas family who hire a lawman/hitman (McConaughey) to off the father’s ex-wife. When they can’t produce money up front to Killer Joe Cooper, he uses the dim-witted 20-year-old virgin daughter, Dottie (Juno Temple), as a retainer for his services.

Joe’s first scene and first meeting with Dottie involves him talking about violent things he has seen, done and will do as a hired killer and as a detective, but Dottie’s erotic fascination and the pair’s sexual tension slice through any horror from graphic, bloody details.

But it’s Joe and Dottie’s sex scene that perhaps initially introduces how Joe uses sex as a method of power, order and control, all of which can also drive one to violence.

Although Joe is a ruthless killer, he removes all aspects of his violent lifestyle (including handcuffs and gun) from his belt before ushering Dottie, to whom his back is turned, to him. Once he is properly aroused, Joe pulls Dottie in front of him to engage in intercourse, putting his hand around her throat (which she seems to enjoy).

Later, Dottie’s brother, Chris (Emile Hirsch), comes home late at night while everyone is asleep only to be jumped by a naked, gun-toting Joe, who apparently has just sprung from a hot bed with Dottie.

The final scene of the movie is so iconic that I don’t even want to list it here with a spoiler alert preceding it. All I’ll say is it drives home the sex of violence point that Leto talked about. With some help from Colonel Sanders.

Violence and sex as they are presented in the film are not connected or even categorized by rape, which likely first comes to mind when the two are mentioned together. Violence is something the characters lust for and think about as often as a teenage boy thinks about the new porn websites he’s found. Sex is used as a means to get something that someone else may not want to give up—not limited to virginity—just as a gun is used in a robbery.

The two are entwined and are both the cause and effect of the other. They cannot operate without each other, just as Joe cannot sexually perform with only one of the two present.

“Killer Joe” is an entertaining and quotable movie that audiences widely ignored, but it’s the marriage between sex and violence that viewers shouldn’t miss among the interesting story. I’ve never seen a film so eloquently explain motives, desires and recesses of the human mind that we may not have realized exist.

Especially in our own.