Why in the World Did They Cut the "Jesus, Tom" Line from Miller's Crossing, and What Can We Learn from It?

I wasn’t going to write a blog post this week.

I was going to neglect Bloggie.

It’s not because Bloggie did anything wrong. Bloggie did not commit sins last week that mean I should punish it with disregard this week.

I like to toy with Bloggie. That’s all. I like it when Bloggie feels lost and alone.

What can I say? Bloggie’s suffering…warms me.

Of course that’s not true. I hate it when things suffer, even—nay, especially—when those things are digital spaces I’ve created and which are incapable of having feelings because they’re not even inanimate. They’re nothing.

But I saw on Twitter this morning that the new Criterion edition of Miller’s Crossing, the Coen brothers film from 1990, which I have watched too many times, and yet still not enough times, is missing at least one crucial moment that was in it before.

The part that’s missing lasts just a second, but people who’ve watched the new edition—without knowing in advance that it’s been newly edited—noted its absence.

The protagonist, Tom Regan, played by Gabriel Byrne, is about to get roughed up by the big Italian guy whose character and actor name I can’t remember and don’t feel like looking up. Tom surprises him as he walks forward by picking up the chair he’d been sitting in, swinging it at the guy’s face, and bloodying his nose.

Ask anyone who has seen Miller’s Crossing more than one-and-a-half times, and they’ll tell you what the big guy says in response.

He says, “Jesus, Tom,” with a look of utter shock on his face, and mopes out of the room to get his smaller but more capable partner.

It’s a really good part of a really good movie, one that indicates in an utterly ironic fashion that although these gangsters are physically harming one another there is a sort of professional courtesy they’re expected to show. There’s an unspoken agreement that Tom has broken when he swings that chair.

It’s funny! It’s comedy at its best.

But that line is not in the new Criterion edition of Miller’s Crossing.

The studs of Twitter did some sleuthing and learned that a full two minutes have been extracted from the movie. It’s a director’s cut, pretty much, I guess. Or they guess.

I’ll get to what I really want to say about this in a second, but for the moment let me just say that cutting anything from Miller’s Crossing makes no sense to me. It’s not because it’s a perfect movie—I don’t know or care if it’s perfect, or was perfect—but because if anything I’ve always felt it could have stood being made longer than it is. Maybe by half an hour or so?

It’s such a tightly wound film. Maybe I’m just dumb, or I watched it for the first time when I was too young, but it wasn’t until probably the third time I saw it that I picked up on the fact that one of the bad guys is queer. That’s indicated so momentarily, and in such a vague, codified fashion, that it’s easy to miss. Or it was easy for me to miss it when I was, like, seventeen.

Some extra minutes added to the running time would’ve let the movie breathe. It would also probably make the movie less good—part of why it’s such a great movie is that it refuses to slow down. It charges along and the viewer has to try to keep up.

A lot happens in Miller’s Crossing. It’s got lots of twists and turns, and if any of the Coens’ movies could have worked better as a miniseries than as a movie it’s probably this one. And yes, I know that a whole TV show has been made out of Fargo, and that its most recent season incorporates elements of Miller’s Crossing, including a tight-lipped, intelligent Irish guy.

But that’s not even why I’m writing this blog-ass post.

The reason I’m writing it is it that there’s an important lesson we creative people can learn, here, about what we do to our work when we revise it.

And I know—believe me, I know—that Joel and Ethan Coen aren’t just “creative people.” They’re two of the most accomplished and celebrated filmmakers alive. I’m sure they had excellent reasons to cut what they did from one of their movies at this rerelease.

But I’m willing to bet that if you asked anyone who has seen Miller’s Crossing if the movie benefits in any way from having the line cut from it that they cut from it, they will tell you that the film does not benefit from it, and in fact that it makes the whole thing less good. I wouldn’t say that that’s objectively the case—who am I to say that—but come on. It’s the “Jesus, Tom” part.

Editing your own work does not necessarily make it better.

That’s all I want to say, really.

Revision can be a form of wanton destruction. And you can’t always tell the difference between when you’re doing it right and when you’re messing with something that should not be messed with.

You have to revise. I revise everything I write until I can read it all the way through, start to finish, without once using the pen that’s in my hand—my right hand—to mark anything for adjustment.

I revise with hard copies. It’s the only way I know to do it right.

You have to revise your work, but you have to remember all along that you, the writer of your work, are not the ideal reader of your work. You are not the intended audience. You’re not even a member of the audience.

As soon as you commit something to paper, it’s on its way to not even being yours anymore. You’ve already begun to give it up—and, if you’re lucky, you’re getting paid for that.

The way I see it, the only way to grow as a writer is to learn to love, or at least accept, the mistakes you committed to paper early on. You have to maintain some affection for your former self, the writer you were when you were still learning. If you made the thing thirty years ago, or if you made it three hours ago, you must accept that you’re not who you were when you first wrote the thing down. You’ve already started to change, and sometimes when you alter the thing you made before you changed you’re not improving your work so much as erasing your former self.

I’m basically paraphrasing Richard Rodriguez at this point. Again.

But trying to determine what to keep and what to lose is one of the hardest things to do. And this reality is just an echo of what it’s like to be alive.

You are, today, the compassionate, good person who’s doing your small part to make the world better by bringing something good into it, something you worked hard on.

You were also, at one time, a baby who cried a lot, peed on everything, and made the grownups who cared for you completely miserable. And maybe you also did some things as you were growing up that were callous and inconsiderate, even though you weren’t a baby anymore and should have known better.

You have to live with that. You have to let your mistakes persist in the world, if nowhere else then in the memories of others.

It’s not even a definite thing that your mistakes even are mistakes.

Do you know what I mean?