The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, page 4
If there is any truth in that, then the stuff of comedy, the material to make the ends of our lives better than the beginnings, may be as accessible as our dreams. The most important thing, then, is to keep dreaming, and that is precisely what Hi is doing at the end of Raising Arizona, making it, in my estimation, a comedy not only because it is funny but also because it holds out the possibility, in the classic sense, that we can make our end better than our beginning. We can laugh in welcoming, like Plato’s philosophers, the new recruits to the realm of tenderness for each other. As Walter says in The Big Lebowski, “If you will it, Dude, it is no dream.”
Notes
Epigraphs: Peter Körte and Georg Seesslen, eds., Joel & Ethan Coen (New York: Proscenium Publishers, 2001), 172; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode with Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 99.
[1] See the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings song list for the album Darling Corey and Goofing Off Suite by Pete Seeger (1993), catalogue #40018 at www.folkways.si.edu. [<<]
[2] See the poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time, or, A Full-Time Interest,” in Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose & Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995), 251. [<<]
[3] John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), available as part of the Hanover Historical Texts Project, which is part of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Available at http://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html, 47. Raising Arizona as an American Comedy 25 [<<]
[4] In the original VHS format the title had a colon followed by the phrase “An Unbelievable Comedy.” [<<]
[5] Aristotle, Poetics I, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987). [<<]
[6] Dante’s own title was (in translation): “Begins the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine in Birth, Not in Custom.” “The Divine” was added later. A translation of Dante’s letter to Can Grande can be found at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod.cangrande.english.html. [<<]
[7] This is what Jean Paul Sartre calls “mauvais foi” (bad faith). [<<]
[8] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 328. [<<]
[9] Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hal ward (New York: Verso, 2002), 67–69. [<<]
[10] Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (New York: Continuum, 2004), 52. [<<]
[11] Georg Seesslen, “Looking for a Trail in Coen County,” in Joel & Ethan Coen, ed. Körte and Seesslen, 230, 277. [<<]
[12] Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), bk. VII, 516e–518c. [<<]
[13] Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 10. [<<]
[14] Ibid., 25. [<<]
[15] Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Mentor Books, 1964), 28. [<<]
[16] R. Barton Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2004), 129. [<<]
[17] Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), sec. 5. That section begins, “In ages of crude, primordial cultures, man thought he could come to know a second real world in dreams: this is the origin of all metaphysics.” [<<]
[18] Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1978). Schwartz borrowed and adapted the line from an epigraph to W. B. Yeats’s volume of poems, Responsibilities (1914). I am indebted to the anonymous reviewer of this manuscript for this citation. [<<]
[19] William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 251. [<<]
[20] Andrew Pulver’s original essay from the Guardian, entitled “Pictures That Do the Talking,” is from 2001 and is reprinted in The Coen Brothers: Interviews, ed. William Rodney Allen (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006), 158. [<<]
[21] Pulver, quoted in Allen, Coen Brothers, 157. [<<]
The Human Comedy Perpetuates Itself
Nihilism and Comedy in Coen Neo-Noir
Thomas S. Hibbs
Bunny Lebowski: Ulli doesn’t care about anything. He’s a nihilist.
The Dude: Ah. Must be exhausting.
— The Big Lebowski (1998)
From their inaugural film, Blood Simple (1984), through the film blanc Fargo (1996), to The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), the Coen brothers have exhibited a preoccupation with the themes, characters, and stylistic techniques of film noir. By the time they made Blood Simple in 1984, neo-noir was already established as a recognized category of film.[1] Prior to Quentin Tarantino’s darkly comedic unraveling of noir motifs in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), the Coens were already making consciously comic use of noir plots and stylistic techniques. Lacking Tarantino’s penchant for hyperactive and cultural y claustrophobic allusions to pop culture, the Coens focus, instead, on traditional noir character types and intricate plots whose complexity is bizarre.
Because it is so often characterized by self-conscious deployment of the techniques of classic noir, neo-noir evinces a strong inclination toward pastiche and the satiric. This makes comic themes more at home in the world of neo-noir than they were in the founding era of noir. Classic noir avoids overt moral lessons and leaves little room for well-adjusted, happy, virtuous types of Americans. The world of classic noir proffers a “disturbing vision . . . that qualifies all hope and suggests a potentially fatal vulnerability” against which no one is adequately protected.[2] Classic noir has deeply democratic instincts: no one wins because the unforgiving laws of the human condition apply universally to every individual. The grim pessimism of classic noir is hardly congenial to the sorts of comic films that flourished in America during the same time period.
This does not mean, however, that comedy is utterly alien to classic noir. The depiction of characters as trapped in a labyrinth at the mercy of a hostile fate can transform the tone of the action from the gravely tragic to the absurdly comic. What initially seems serious and ominous can, over time, come to seem humorous. Angst and fear can be sustained for only so long; endless and pointless terror becomes predictable and laughable. But the shift to a comic perspective involves more than the mere passage of time; comedy is more than tragedy plus time. What matters is the passage of time without any prospect of hope or intelligibility. Life in an absurd universe is rife with comic possibilities. Struggle and striving begin to appear superfluous and foolish. A classic noir film such as Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945) toys with its main character to such an extent that his continued gravity can come to seem a self-inflicted farce. Similarly, the degradation of affection—the perverse erotic attractions in which noir often wallows—lends itself to wry, detached irony, the dominant tone in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950).
The baroque sensibility of noir has always contained the seeds of stylistic excess, even of the celebration of style for its own sake. In neo-noir, the accentuation of hopelessness and the overtly self-conscious deployment of artistic technique make the turn to dark comedy nearly inevitable. By contrast with classic noir films, whose style is reserved and less self-conscious, neo-noirs almost inevitably draw attention to their style, going so far in some cases as to make style itself the subject of the film. In the very act of recognizing the artifice, we are in on the joke, on the sleight of hand performed by the filmmaker. The result is amusement, even laughter.
As Foster Hirsch points out, one of the distinguishing features of neonoir is a “cavalier amorality” that can steep viewers in a “depraved point of view.”[3] Jean-Pierre Chartier’s early and negative reaction to noir seems to apply more aptly to certain neo-noir films. Chartier lamented noir’s “pessimism and disgust toward humanity.” Devoid of even the most “fleeting image of love” or of characters who might “rouse our pity or sympathy,” noir, he felt, presents “monsters, criminals whose evils nothing can excuse, whose actions imply that the only source for the fatality of evil is in themselves.”[4]
Nietzsche and Nihilism
There are, then, important links between neo-noir and nihilism. According to its most trenchant analysts, nihilism involves the dissolution of standards of judgment; for the nihilist, there is no longer any basis for distinguishing truth from falsity, good from evil, noble from base action, or higher from lower ways of life. Nietzsche thought that nihilism would be the defining characteristic of the twentieth century, an epoch in which “the highest values” would “devalue themselves” and the “question ‘why?’” would find “no answer.”[5] Nietzsche is most famous for proclaiming the death of God. He certainly does not mean that a previously existing supreme being has suddenly expired; instead, he holds that the notion of God, created by humans to serve a variety of needs, is becoming increasingly less credible. But Nietzsche does not limit the effects of nihilism to religion; nihilism undermines al transcendent claims and standards, including those underlying modern science and democratic politics. The great questions and animating visions—those regarding truth, justice, love, and beauty—that previously gave shape and purpose to human life no longer resonate in the human soul. Al moral codes are seen to be merely conventional and, hence, optional.
For most human beings, decline, diminution, and despair accompany nihilism. The bulk of humanity falls into the category of the last man: “Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. What is love? What is a star? Thus asks the last man and blinks. The earth has become small and on it hops the last man who makes everything small.” The contented, petty last men create a society that is ruthlessly homogeneous (“everybody wants the same, everybody is the same”) and addicted to physical comfort (“one has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night; one has a regard for health”).[6] These are the passive nihilists, the pessimists, the representatives of “the decline and recession of the power of the spirit.”[7] But nihilism is “ambiguous.” If, in one sense, nihilism is the “unwelcome guest,” it is also an opportunity, clearing a path for “increased power of the spirit.”[8] Active nihilists see the decline of traditional moral and religious systems as an occasion for the thoroughgoing destruction of desiccated ways of life and the creation of a new order of values. Active nihilists, the philosopher-artists of the future, wil engage in the “transvaluation of values.” They stand beyond good and evil and engage in aesthetic self-creation, a project that is an affront to society’s religious and democratic conventions, rooted, as they are, in moral absolutes or democratic consensus.
At times, Nietzsche’s remedy for the nihilistic epoch, his path beyond nihilism, promotes a particularly virulent form of aristocracy. As he puts it frankly in the chapter “What Is Noble?” in Beyond Good and Evil,
Every enhancement of the type “man” has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—and so it will be again and again—a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or another. With that pathos of distance that grows out of the ingrained difference between strata . . . keeping down and keeping at a distance, that other, more mysterious pathos could not have grown up either—the craving for an ever new widening of distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rare, more remote, further-stretching, more comprehensive states . . . the continual “self-overcoming of man.”[9]
What Nietzsche calls the pathos of distance is at work in a variety of neo-noir dramas, from Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981) and Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991) and Basic Instinct (Paul Verhoeven, 1992) to The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995).[10] In these neo-noir films, certain characters rise above the noir labyrinth, not by passing through it or learning to navigate its shifting waters but by acts of diabolical will. Impervious to the laws of the human condition, these characters get away with lives of criminality. This shift constitutes a movement in the direction of nihilism and a recoiling from the fundamentally democratic world of classic noir. The human condition is no longer universal; the noir trap is no longer seen as an indelible feature. Instead, it constrains only those who lack the willpower, or will to power, necessary to rise above, and control, conventions. Neo-noir’s greatest departure from classic noir consists in a turn to aristocratic nihilism. The most resourceful of these characters are in control of the noir plot, using their cunning and artistry to ensnare others. Were it not so cumbersome, we might call this the nihilistic myth of the American super-antihero.
Nihilistic comedy has no limits on the targets of its humor; it turns the most atrocious of human acts—rape and beating in Cape Fear, cannibalism in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), and maiming in Reservoir Dogs—into quasi-comic expressions of exuberant amoral energy.
It mocks our longing for justice, for the protection of the innocent and the punishment of the heinous criminal, and for truth and understanding. The comic unraveling of the horror genre from within begins with the celebration of the evil antihero as beyond good and evil, as more interesting, attractive, and complex than the purportedly good characters in a story. Once this nihilistic move has been made, it is quite natural to repudiate and mock properly human longing for justice, truth, and love. Nihilism, as Nietzsche saw, entails the diminution of human aspiration to the vanishing point; it involves the death of man.
These are the consequences of the nihilistic turn in neo-noir, which repudiates justice, love, and truth in favor of aesthetic self-creation. Criticisms of conventional conceptions of justice, truth, and other ideals are not necessarily nihilistic. Indeed, the very notion of a critique presupposes that one has, implicitly at least, an awareness that things are not as they should be, that it would be better for things to be otherwise. As Shakespeare writes in King Lear, “This is not the worst, so long as we can say ‘this is the worst’” (4.1). But thoroughgoing nihilism eviscerates any such standards or, what is more to the point, even the intelligibility of the quest for such standards.
Gravity cannot be sustained. Audiences are entertained by the demonic superheroes who put on a good show and are much more clever and wittier than other, conventional characters. A character such as Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) in The Silence of the Lambs is at first terrifying, then entertaining, and finally humorous as, in the film’s final frames, he responds to a question as to his plans by saying, wryly, that he’ll be having an old friend for dinner.
Noir, Nihilism, and Comedy in The Big Lebowski
The comic denouement of The Silence of the Lambs signals the unraveling of the hero genre from within, a point driven home with great gusto in such spoofs of the genre as Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) and Scary Movie (Keenan Ivory Wayans, 2000) and their sequels. If the gravity of the quest to understand and fend off evil produces no great insight about good or evil, just the surface aesthetics of the evildoer, then the audience, having become jaded, anticipates the aesthetics of evil and sees the whole drama as a farce. There is, thus, an opening for a democratic rejoinder to the sort of angst-ridden nihilism that celebrates the tragic heroism of the loner who faces the meaninglessness of life with gravity. The democratic and comic response is: Why bother? What’s all the fuss about? If there is no meaning, then why get worked up about anything? And what, in a pointless universe, could possibly provide a basis for distinguishing, as Nietzsche wants to, between noble and base ways of facing the abyss? This sort of comedy mocks radicals of all sorts, whether they be nihilists or zealous reformers. Such is the inspiration for the Coen brothers’ comic leveling of nihilism in The Big Lebowski (1998).
The Big Lebowski begins and ends with the noir commonplace: voiceover narration. As a tumbleweed blows down the streets of Los Angeles and over a beach, the narrator introduces “the Dude,” a name no one else would “self-apply.” “Our story,” he relates, is set in the early 1990s, at the time of our national “conflict with Saddam and the Iraqis.” Sometimes, the narrator continues, “a man is, I won’t say a hero, but sometimes a man is just right for his time and place.” That man is the Dude, the “laziest man in LA County,” an achievement that puts him high in the “running for laziest worldwide.” The camera turns to the Dude, wearing shorts and a bathrobe and shopping for groceries. A television in the store plays President George H. W. Bush’s speech about the Iraqi threat: “This aggression will not stand.” Later that day, the Dude is attacked at home by intruders who call him Lebowski, stuff his head in the toilet, and demand that he repay the money his wife owes Jackie Treehorn. A perplexed Dude objects that no one calls him Lebowski and that he’s not married—gesturing to the raised toilet seat as confirming evidence. The intruders suddenly come to their senses and one of them asks, “Isn’t this guy supposed to be a millionaire?” In a parting gesture, they urinate on the rug—an act of defilement that the Dude regrets because “that rug really tied the room together.” These opening scenes introduce readily identifiable neo-noir themes.
There is the theme of the loner, certainly not the hero of the old westerns, but rather the uprooted drifter, symbolized in the tumbleweed blown by chance forces beyond its control or comprehension. Then there is the motif of a shallow and artificially constructed political culture, suggested in the television coverage of the Gulf War. As we shall see, the film replays 1960s themes of the establishment versus the antiestablishment, especially in the contrast between the two Lebowskis. Finally, there is the noir staple of the “wrong man,” the chance misidentification of an ordinary man as a culprit or criminal of some sort, a misidentification that sparks a series of trials on the part of the wrongly accused. Comic incongruity arises from the theme of the wrong man and from the repeated presence of the Dude in settings where he clearly does not belong, what the Coens call the anachronism of incompatibility.
