Ray (no last name given) is the leading male character in the Coen Brothers’ first feature film, Blood Simple. (1984). He is portrayed by actor John Getz. Ray, along with his lover Abby (played by Frances McDormand), are the protagonists of Blood Simple. because the audience can feel more sympathetic towards their struggle than the struggle of the other two lead characters.

When the film opens, Ray is having an affair with his boss’s wife. His boss, Marty (Dan Hedaya), hires a private investigator, Loren (M. Emmett Walsh), to kill them. The beauty and simplicity of the plot of the film is that none of the characters really know the whole story. The audience is the only one aware of everything that is going on. When Loren betrays Marty by faking ray and Abby’s death and then killing Marty, Ray is completely oblivious to this fact. Ray happens to enter the bar right after Marty has been shot. He finds Abby’s gun at the scene of the crime, planted there by Loren. In a panic, he takes back the gun and buries the body. After Ray buries Marty alive, he returns home. He and Abby get into an argument. Ray, thinking he had just finished what Abby had started, gets frustrated because she does not know what he is talking about. He leaves in anger. He later returns to try and again explain to Abby what has been going on. After another fight, he returns to the bar and finds one of the faked photographs. He goes back to the apartment. Later, Abby arrives and leaves the light on because she no longer trusts Ray. Then, Loren shoots Ray in the back through the window, and thus ends Ray’s part in Blood Simple.

Compared to most of the Coen Brothers’ characters, Ray is relatively two-dimensional. This is not a mark against the film however. The most important part of Blood Simple .is its intricate plot. Everything else in this film is second tier to its plot. This makes an analysis of Ray quite difficult, especially since the audience is given no back story for Ray, except that he works at Marty’s bar. What little can be derived from the screen is as follows.

Getz portrays Ray as the quite Texan type. He is not given too much to say, but at that, neither are the rest of the characters, except Loren. His communication skills are very lacking. His conversations with others are usually straight and to the point. He resembles the stereotypical “no nonsense” type of Texan. The lines “I’m not a marriage counselor” and “I told you I like you” are uttered several times throughout the film. His lack of communicating with Abby cost him his life. If He and Abby would have just explained to each other about what they had really seen instead of dancing around the issue, he could have easily avoided being shot by Loren.

He is apparently a very gullible man. When he visits Marty to get his paycheck, Marty tells him that Abby will leave him for someone else. As soon as Ray gets home, he starts mistrusting Abby. When he finds Abby’s revolver at the scene of the crime, he cleans up the mess and never once asks her about it. It is entirely possible that Ray and Abby were caught up in a moment of passion, though, and that when everything started to settle down, he realizes that he is in over his head. Ray is the type of man to trust what he sees and hears and never questions his own eyes and ears.

The notion that Ray is the protagonist of the story is almost comical. He is not really a “good guy.” He has no control over the situations around him. When he thinks Abby has killed Marty, he buries him alive. He’s not a very intelligent man. The only reason that the audience identifies with Ray is because Marty is a despicable character and Loren is too strange for a person to completely identify with, on top of the fact that hired assassins have never been great targets for sympathy in the cinema. Since Ray only qualifies as the protagonist because he is less evil and strange than the other two, it further hits the point home that Blood Simple. is really more about plot than its characters. Even with this taken into account, Ray is still a key part to understanding the plot for the film, and understanding his actions help with one’s understanding of the film as a whole.