The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, page 7
The charlatan Bible salesman (John Goodman) who has robbed and beaten McGill and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) now shows up at the rally. His role as the uncultured and violent Cyclops of The Odyssey mocks the office of Grand Cyclops of the Klan.
The set of allusions taken together suggests, however, something more sophisticated than satire, something that relies on irreconcilable comic incongruities within that set of allusions. Perhaps the most outrageous and resonant reference in the set piece is to The Wizard of Oz. The rescue of Tommy from the hands of the Klan visually evokes the rescue of Dorothy from the Wicked Witch of the West. The three escapees take the parts of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. The Klan becomes the army of the Wicked Witch. This creates a jarring incongruity, one that is intensified by the contextualization of the allusion outside its original historical setting. Although The Wizard of Oz was made in the final years of the Depression and is in some sense a typical thirties “road” picture, its presence in the film will resonate with most of the audience in the context of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. For many years before the advent of home video technology, the film was annually shown on television and became an anticipated event, an almost ritualized staging in the living rooms of American families. An allusion to the film generates not simply a memory but nostalgia for “a privileged lost object of desire.”[16] In an impish and insidious manner, the Coens have uprooted this warm memory and relocated it to a 1930s Klan rally and execution.
The effect of the allusion on the audience is threefold. First, there is the pleasure in simply identifying the allusion, the sense of belonging to the sophisticated coterie group I mention above. Secondly, there is the pleasure in witnessing a childhood fantasy defeat evil. It is the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion who rescue Tommy from the clutches of the Klan and flatten its Cyclops. The innocence of a childhood fantasy proves stronger than racism. But thirdly, the allusion creates a disturbing and ironic incongruity: that between the dark recess of Mississippi in the 1930s and the living rooms of postwar baby boomers and their children.
Kierkegaard is instructive in understanding the effect if not the purpose of this irony. He asserts in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript that “irony is the confinium [boundary] between the aesthetic and the ethical.”[17] The relationship between these two stages and the role that irony plays in the advancement from the former to the latter is treated extensively by Kierkegaard in Either/Or. In part I, a young man argues for the aesthetic point of view in a series of heterogeneous papers on topics as diverse as music, drama, crop rotation, and eroticism. In discussing these subjects, he asserts that one must distance oneself from commitment to any one particular form of artistic expression or to one exclusive human relationship.
The aesthete is dimly aware of the existential contradictions of life, but he would avoid them by continual y seeking out new experiences, preoccupying himself with the surfaces of life, and generally playing “shuttlecock with all existence.”[18] “Everything in life,” says the aesthete, “is regarded as a wager. The more consistently a person knows how to sustain his arbitrariness, the more amusing the combinations become.”[19] The aesthete must constantly be changing his orientation to the world.
Part II of Either/Or consists of two letters written to the young man by a judge who represents the so-called ethical point of view. He challenges the self-styled aesthete not necessarily to adopt a specific ethical perspective but to act in the world, to overcome his indifference. “It is not,” he explains, “a matter of choosing between willing good or willing evil as of choosing to will.”[20] The aesthete should, in short, cease to be the “plaything for the play of his arbitrariness.”[21] The task of the ethicist is to make the young man confront the comic contradictions of the human condition, the ironic incongruities between the body and the soul, the finite and the infinite, the necessary and the free, which inform the human condition.
Jameson’s understanding of the postmodern world and the individual enmeshed within its plethora of signs is uncanny in its similarity to Kierkegaard’s understanding of the young aesthete and his need for new and changing experiences. Jameson asserts, “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production general y: the frantic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods . . . at ever greater rates of turnover.”[22] It is precisely this consumer of aesthetic commodities whom the Coen brothers confront in their staging of the Klan rally. They do it by fashioning a disturbing comic contradiction that defies the consumptive pleasures of their audience. The filmmakers’ role is that of the judge in Either/Or who demands that the young, sophisticated aesthete confront the ironies of the human condition. Unlike The Hudsucker Proxy, whose comic perspective interrogates socioeconomic conditions of a specific era, the ironic incongruities of O Brother act against its own audience.
The Coens are mischievous boys; in this instance, their mischief challenges the complacencies of the postmodernist aesthetic.
Comic Endings
The audience is informed of parallels between O Brother and The Odyssey in the opening credits, when the invocation from Homer’s poem appears on the screen: “O Muse, sing in me and through me . . . that man . . . a wanderer, harried for years on end.”[23] This is an invitation for the audience to search out specific references to the poem as the film progresses. And indeed, we do recognize versions of the Cyclops, the Sirens, the suitors, and others in the film. But the most significant borrowing from The Odyssey is an overarching narrative framework. The structural pattern of Homer’s poem is one of loss and recovery, of wandering and return. The narrative begins with Odysseus hidden away on Kalypso’s island and is set in motion with his decision to return to Ithaca. The tale reaches its conclusion with the recognition of the hero and the reordering of home and kingdom. The episodes of the poem are contained within an overarching narrative design that seeks and achieves closure. To the extent that the narrative reaches its conclusion with the reunification of the family unit and the reaffirmation of marriage, we might also say that its pattern is comic.
The Coen brothers’ version of The Odyssey shares this narrative pattern.
The film begins with the hero’s escape not from an exotic island but from a chain gang. It goes on to chronicle the “adventures” of our Odysseus as he makes his way back to home and family. Although he has told his cohorts that treasure awaits them, his real goal is to prevent his wife from remarrying and to restore his position as the true paterfamilias. Within this narrative structure we encounter others who are also seeking redemptive resolutions.
When he learns that the wife of Pete’s (John Turturro) cousin has run off, McGill suggests that she might have been looking for answers. And when Delmar sees the mesmerizing procession of initiates moving ceremoniously to the baptismal waters, he impulsively hurls himself into the river, insisting that he too be redeemed. And in something of an inversion of Delmar’s passionate gesture, Tommy seeks out the Devil to acquire another form of redemption: the gift of music.
Unlike The Odyssey, however, the conclusion of O Brother is subverted.
In the final scene of the film, McGill presents his Penelope (Holly Hunter) with the ring that he believes will reunite him with his wife and finally bring him the “repose” he has been seeking. But Penny refuses to acknowledge the symbolic value of the object and tells him that this particular ring, because it is not the original ring, lacks the magical charm that will restore their marriage. The ring, like her husband, is not bona fide. The family marches off across the screen with Penny in the lead and the aspiring paterfamilias tagging along behind. The comic resolution that the audience awaits and expects is undermined by the ironic representation of an uxorious Odysseus and of a family whose reordering remains in suspense.
Once again, Kierkegaard’s distinction between the aesthetic and ethical points of view is instructive in understanding this apparently unresolved comic conclusion. In Either/Or, the young aesthete rejects marriage and asserts that eroticism should not be expressed in the context of a commitment to “everlasting love.” He sees marriage as something “everlasting,” not in the sense that it is immortal but in that it entraps one in temporal longevity. In other words, the resolution of the tension between the desire to transcend time and the reality that one necessarily lives within time is attained in the immediacy of the moment. And so the aesthete argues that “poetic infinity . . . can well be limited to one hour as to a month.”[24] It needs to be stressed that this represents something more than a desire for instant gratification. It is the attempt to resolve through the immediacy of an aesthetic experience the fundamental contradiction of life: we necessarily live within time but can concurrently imagine ourselves outside time.
The ethicist responds that marriage is a means to “bind” time in a way that acknowledges longevity and mutability. The aesthete’s “poetic infinity” is a fool’s paradise, a vain attempt to gain release from the finite and material.
Promiscuity, which the aesthete practices, is merely a form of consumption, a strategy to avoid the disturbing incongruities of life. These incongruities, however, are acknowledged in marriage: “The married man solves the great riddle, to live in eternity and yet to hear the cabinet clock strike in such a way that its striking does not shorten but lengthens his eternity . . . a contradiction.”[25] Marriage is comic, not because it brings closure but because it acknowledges contradiction. Marriage “binds” time but simultaneously acknowledges the vicissitudes of time.
At the conclusion to O Brother, McGill has not reached the state of “repose” that he had imagined would await him. As I pointed out earlier, in the final scene the family literally is in motion, passing across the screen in a direction unknown to the audience. McGill is still pleading with his wife to accept the ring, but we suspect that he will never be truly bona fide in her eyes. But although marriage has not restored the paradise McGill thought he had lost, it does provide a context for his journey, which he lacked on the road. The irony that confronts the audience at the end of O Brother is that the marriage, although in some sense restorative, is nevertheless mired in the commonplace quirks of human character. Perhaps the Coen brothers have not reached the heights of existential contradiction, but they have provided an ending to their narrative that acknowledges the incongruity between our very real aspirations and our equally real limitations. It is surely not coincidental that the reconstituted family walks past a billboard announcing the introduction of electrical power to the Tennessee Valley and offering the implicit promise of a technological utopia. Electrical power may very well provide air-conditioning, but it does not end racism, purge us of crooked pols, eliminate difficult marriages, or resolve contradictions. Upon his return to Ithaca, McGill discovers no “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” where “the sun shines every day . . . and the barns are full of hay.” He encounters instead the inescapable comic ironies of life.
Comic Absurdities
I began with Groucho. Let me conclude with Joel and Ethan. In an interview in 1996, the brothers explained their understanding of comedy: “But it seems to us that comedy is a part of life. Look at the recent example of the people who tried to blow up the World Trade Center. They rented a panel truck to use for the explosion and then, after committing the crime, went back to the rental agency to get back the money they left on deposit. The absurdity of this kind of behavior is terribly funny in itself.”[26] The whims of personality, the odd relationship between mind and body, the ludicrous conjunction of the transcendent and the ordinary, the disturbing incongruities of evil and innocence, the comic ironies of good intentions and awkward missteps are some of the contradictions that inform the human condition and are aptly represented in O Brother, Where Art Thou? How fitting that the title of the film should be posed as a question and not an answer.
Notes
[1] Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments,” ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 523. [<<]
[2] Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (1956; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), 80. [<<]
[3] Ibid., 84. [<<]
[4] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 80. [<<]
[5] Bergson, “Laughter,” 72. [<<]
[6] Ibid., 80. [<<]
[7] Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, trans. Alan Upchurch (London: Methuen, 1988), 23, quoted in Steven Dillon, The Solaris Effect: Art and Artifice in Contemporary American Film (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2006), 123. [<<]
[8] Dillon, Solaris Effect, 125. [<<]
[9] Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 555. [<<]
[10] Thomas C. Oden, introduction to The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004), 12–13. [<<]
[11] Wylie Sypher, “The Meanings of Comedy,” appendix to Comedy, ed. Sypher, 209. [<<]
[12] For “engaged reinvention,” see R. Barton Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2004), 158. [<<]
[13] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1992), 17–18. [<<]
[14] For “exclusive community,” see Jonathan Raban, Soft City (London: Collins Harvill, 1974), 129. [<<]
[15] Jameson, Postmodernism, 20. [<<]
[16] Ibid., 19. [<<]
[17] Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 501–2. [<<]
[18] Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, in The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 57. [<<]
[19] Ibid., 61. [<<]
[20] Ibid., 75. [<<]
[21] Ibid., 81. [<<]
[22] Jameson, Postmodernism, 4. [<<]
[23] The quotation at the beginning of the film is from Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 1. The Coens introduce only one minor rewording, changing Fitzgerald’s “Sing in me, Muse, and through me” to “O Muse, sing in me and through me.” [<<]
[24] Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 60. [<<]
[25] Ibid., 70. [<<]
[26] Joel Coen, interview by Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret for Positif: Revue périodique du cinéma (Paris), September 1991, translated in Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen, 192. [<<]
“No Country for Old Men”
The Coens’ Tragic Western
Richard Gilmore
The point is there aint no point.
—Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Coen Irony
No Country for Old Men (2007) is, one might say, one more step in Joel and Ethan Coen’s cinematic effort to say something about this country and about being a member, a citizen of this country, the United States of America. No Country for Old Men feels like a very different kind of movie from every other Coen brothers film. It is more serious, or it is serious in a different way from their other movies. It is not unusual for the Coens to take on dark themes in their movies, but previous to No Country for Old Men there was always a level of what I will call meta-irony. That is, there was a level of detachment, a sense that their movies were meant to be taken as just stories, that you should not take them too seriously. To be offended by Fargo (1996) because it seems to be making fun of midwesterners is to take it too seriously. Irony, however, is a tricky business. People are suspicious of the ironic because those who are ironic never quite mean what they say. The ironic, for their part, are more or less invulnerable to attack, since to take them seriously is to miss the point, and not to take them seriously precludes an attack. With No Country for Old Men, the Coens have given up their ironic detachment and made a much more straightforward movie. Certainly, there is irony within the movie, but the movie itself lacks the sheen of ironic detachment that is a part of a movie like Fargo.
One reason for this change may be the fact that this is the first movie that they have made based on a novel. It is not irrelevant to the tone of the movie that that novel was written by Cormac McCarthy. That the Coens chose this novel by this writer, however, also reflects an evolution in their cinematic and storytelling concerns. It is a sign of their willingness to give up some of their ironic detachment, to give up a posture of invulnerability, in order to say something more straightforward about their perceptions of how the world is. This, it seems to me, is a step into philosophy.
The previous Coen brothers movie that has the most in common with No Country for Old Men is, in fact, Fargo. In Fargo there is an older, wiser police chief, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and her less experienced or savvy deputy, Lou (Bruce Bohne), just as there is in No Country for Old Men. In both movies, a local police officer is confronted with some grisly murders committed by men who are not from his or her town. In both movies, greed lies behind the plots. Both movies feature as a central character a cold-blooded killer who does not seem quite human and whom the police officer seeks to apprehend. No Country for Old Men, therefore, is not completely new territory for the Coens, but no one in Fargo has much of a sense of irony, although the movie itself is ironic, whereas Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), for example, certainly does have a sense of irony although the movie No Country for Old Men does not feel ironic at all.
