The Enigma of Mr. Blue
The other night I rewatched Reservoir Dogs for the first time since I was a teenager. It didn’t blow my lid off like it did when I first saw it all those years ago, but I still found it to be an incredible film. Watching it again as an adult it was a pretty pleasurable thing to tie all the elements of obfuscation, subterfuge and blind chance into one cohesive, deliciously nihilistic narrative where the best laid plans count for shit and everyone is forced to act in a depressingly realistic miasma of confusion and rage.
Yet the thing that stands out most to me, moreso than any specific performance or scene, is this motherfucker:
When discussing Reservoir Dogs it’s tempting to write off Mr. Blue as a minor character, little more than a cameo role for novelist/real-life scary criminal Eddie Bunker. He has only two lines in the entire film and only speaks in one of two scenes in which he appears. I thought maybe some scenes involving his character were cut from the final version of the movie, but in fact the diner scene at the beginning was apparently an ad-hoc addition to the script just so him and Mr. Brown could have something to say in the film at all. Dialogue concerning him is limited to whether or not he made it out of the heist alive and a line from Joe confirming that he did not. He has no bearing on the plot of the film.
Except…that can’t be true, right? Near the beginning of the movie, Mr. White informs the viewer that after the heist everyone was supposed to meet up at the warehouse, and Mr. Blue distinctly falls under the umbrella of “everyone.” So automatically his presence has bearing on the narrative: as long as the rat remains unexposed and any of the heist members stay scattered to the four winds, Mr. White, Mr. Orange and Mr. Pink have to remain in limbo while they wait for word from their superiors. So immediately, his lack of presence informs a key aspect of the plot of Reservoir Dogs.
There’s also just something intangibly strange about his character as a whole. Mr. Blue kind of…haunts the world of Reservoir Dogs. All of the dialogue in the film regarding his character — and there’s an oddly prevalent amount of it considering how minor of a role he plays — is about wondering whether he’s alive or not, and again, considering how small of a role he plays the mystery of his fate is discussed in fairly panicked tones. This of course is partially because the entire scenario of the film is a desperate, panicky situation, but the shock that comes over Mr. White as Joe tells him Mr. Blue didn’t make it is notable.
Hey, here’s another thing: How the fuck does Joe know what happened to Mr. Blue? He’s completely removed from the situation, and when we first see Nice Guy Eddie, his son, in the present tense, he’s relaying information about the calamity as he gets it: he doesn’t know anything more about the situation than what he gets in scattered chunks from Mr. Blonde, who also doesn’t know what happened to Mr. Blue. And clearly no one learns what happened when Eddie, Mr. Pink and Mr. White are out getting rid of the cars, because since they were all together the news would have been as much of a surprise to Pink and Eddie as it was to White. Remember, a key thing that makes this movie’s plot work is that no one knows anything more than anyone else. So someone would have to have told Joe about Mr. Blue’s demise, but who? The news? No one in this movie listens to the news, they all receive information only from each other as of the heist. It would have broken the world of the film if Joe had heard it from a broadcast, since the only thing played over the air are classic ’70s pop hits.
One thing to note in Reservoir Dogs is the equilibrium that permeates the heist. Roughly speaking, the roles in the heist can be divided into 2 supervisors (Nice Guy Eddie and Joe Cabot), 2 young guns (Mr. Orange and Mr. Brown), 2 old hands (Mr. White and Mr. Blue) and 2 intermediary characters (Mr. Pink and Mr. Blonde). Both supervisors die simultaneously, 1 young gun and 1 old hand die off screen (Mr. Brown and Mr. Blue), 1 young gun and 1 old hand die at the very end of the film (Mr. Orange and Mr. White), and both intermediary characters are the only ones who show up to the safehouse solo and are both killed by unpredictable actors (Mr. Pink and Mr. Blonde, killed by a police ambuscade and an undercover policeman respectively). So given that there is a structure to this thing (not an airtight one, but a structure nonetheless), what is the significance of Mr. Blue’s role in the film?
One of the things of particular note about Mr. Blue is that Bunker plays him in his brief roles with an uncanny air of authority. He is the only heist member to keep completely quiet during Cabot’s briefing, a telltale sign of professionalism. And the fact that White and Pink worry so much about his fate is also telling: it can’t be because they have a personal connection to him, because aside from Blonde’s personal connection to Eddie and Joe, White is the only character who reveals any distinct information about himself to his cohorts. It might be just because he’s an old pro, but if you’ll notice, Mr. White is in that same category and no one in the movie save Orange seems to like him very much. He’s a toxic combination of sentimental and combative, and he erroneously murders his superiors for the sake of protecting an undercover cop.
The subtext, to my mind, is that if their roles were reversed Mr. Blue would not have made this same mistake. Remember that Reservoir Dogs is kind of a Rube Goldberg machine that carries out Murphy’s Law in the most dramatic ways possible: this heist gone awry is not the outcome of bad planning or unprofessional behavior but rather a seeming curse from the gods. Mr. Blue’s disappearance is not a minor thing; it is an indication more than anything else that something is deeply, deeply fucked. Everything from his cool demeanor to the worried tones he is spoken of in to the mysterious and borderline illogical reveal of his death point to a dependable and steadfast character whose absence throws everything into chaos. Mr. Blue does not cause the chaos, but he is symbolic of the shambles the world of the thieves has fallen into.
Again, there’s so little to go on with Mr. Blue that this reading could be read as wildly overthought. But Tarantino is the sort of writer/director to pull your attention to what’s missing as much as what’s there, and I think the absence of Mr. Blue is something that more film scholars should find worthy of study as Reservoir Dogs grows even further in esteem and recognition as time goes on.
