Killer Joe

For a brief time during my infamous Phoenix residency I was working early-morning hours and for reasons you, I and she will likely never know my friend and roommate Laila became intrigued with "The Jerry Springer Show." (I feel it very necessary to stress that Laila was not and is not a person you would suspect of possessing interest in such a show.) She wasn’t intrigued for long – thank God – but because it typically aired when I had just returned home and was sitting down to lunch, there were a couple instances when I found myself eating and watching Jerry Springer. And more than once I had to stop eating. And I had to stop eating because I couldn’t eat. And I couldn’t eat because what I was forced to bear witness to was so repulsive it genuinely upset my stomach. In fact, just thinking about it at this moment makes me feel as if I ingested too much Cheese Whiz straight from the can.

This is why I haven’t written anything about “Killer Joe” since seeing it two months ago. It’s a trailer trash opera, a Coen Brothers film if Jerry Springer was Art Director and had a Story By credit. Don’t get me wrong, it’s really well done – even if Juno Temple generally doesn’t seem naïve or virginal enough for her pivotal role – and really funny – especially Thomas Haden Church whose deadpan delivery fits in perfectly – and Matthew McConaughey, cool, reserved, calculating from a distance all the hysteria surrounding him, is pretty much how I like to think Jerry Springer viewed himself on his own show. Until, of course, he gets behind closed doors and it is revealed that McConaughey is the most deranged of ‘em all.

And so the more I think about what I want to write about “Killer Joe”, the less I want to eat dinner.

So let’s never speak of it again.