The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers
In 2008 No Country for Old Men won the Academy Award for Best Picture, adding to the reputation of filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, who were already known for pushing the boundaries of genre. They had already made films that redefined the gangster movie, the screwball comedy, the fable, and the film noir, among others. No Country is just one of many Coen brothers films to center on the struggles of complex characters to understand themselves and their places in the strange worlds they inhabit. To borrow a phrase from Barton Fink, all Coen films explore “the life of the mind” and show that the human condition can often be simultaneously comic and tragic, profound and absurd.
In The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, editor Mark T. Conard and other noted scholars explore the challenging moral and philosophical terrain of the Coen repertoire. Several authors connect the Coens’ most widely known plots and characters to the shadowy, violent, and morally ambiguous world of classic film noir and its modern counterpart, neo-noir. As these essays reveal, Coen films often share noir’s essential philosophical assumptions: power corrupts, evil is real, and human control of fate is an illusion. In Fargo, not even Minnesota’s blankets of snow can hide Jerry Lundegaard’s crimes or brighten his long, dark night of the soul. Coen films that stylistically depart from film noir still bear the influence of the genre’s prevailing philosophical systems. The tale of love, marriage, betrayal, and divorce in Intolerable Cruelty transcends the plight of the characters to illuminate competing theories of justice. Even in lighter fare, such as Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, the comedy emerges from characters’ journeys to the brink of an amoral abyss.
However, the Coens often knowingly and gleefully subvert conventions and occasionally offer symbolic rebirths and other hopeful outcomes. At the end of The Big Lebowski, the Dude abides, his laziness has become a virtue, and the human comedy is perpetuating itself with the promised arrival of a newborn Lebowski.
The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers sheds new light on these cinematic visionaries and their films’ stirring philosophical insights. From Blood Simple to No Country for Old Men, the Coens’ films feature characters who hunger for meaning in shared human experience -- they are looking for answers. A select few of their protagonists find affirmation and redemption, but for many others, the quest for answers leads, at best, only to more questions.
Mark T. Conard
The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers
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Mark T. Conard, 2009
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THE PHILOSOPHY OF POPULAR CULTURE
The books published in the Philosophy of Popular Culture series will illuminate and explore philosophical themes and ideas that occur in popular culture. The goal of this series is to demonstrate how philosophical inquiry has been reinvigorated by increased scholarly interest in the intersection of popular culture and philosophy, as well as to explore through philosophical analysis beloved modes of entertainment, such as movies, TV shows, and music. Philosophical concepts will be made accessible to the general reader through examples in popular culture. This series seeks to publish both established and emerging scholars who will engage a major area of popular culture for philosophical interpretation and examine the philosophical underpinnings of its themes. Eschewing ephemeral trends of philosophical and cultural theory, authors will establish and elaborate on connections between traditional philosophical ideas from important thinkers and the ever-expanding world of popular culture.
Series Editor
Mark T. Conard,
Marymount Manhattan College, NY
Acknowledgments
First, I’d like to thank the contributors to this volume for all their hard work and patience, which are clearly evident in these terrific essays. Many thanks are also due to all the good people at the University Press of Kentucky, with whom it continues to be a real pleasure to work. Last, for all their love and support I want to thank my family and friends, especially Nayia Frangouli, Brad Herling, Chris Landis, John and Linda Pappas, Yvonne Roen, Aeon Skoble, and Jerry Williams.
Introduction
Mark T. Conard
Since arriving on the cinematic scene in 1984 with Blood Simple, Joel and Ethan Coen have amassed an impressive body of work that has garnered them critical acclaim and a devoted following. Their highly original works include both comedies and dramas and cover various genres (neo-noir, the romantic comedy, the western, the gangster film). However, most, if not all, of the Coens’ films defy exact categorization, and they always bear the brothers’ unmistakable stamp. From the Irish gangster morality play Miller’s Crossing (1990) to the film blanc Fargo (1996), from the neo-noir comedy The Big Lebowski (1998) to the Odyssean O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), the Coens never fail to have something interesting to say and always say it in a unique and entertaining fashion.
As I’ve already hinted, much of the Coens’ work can be characterized as neo-noir, whatever other styles or genres the brothers are working in. For those unfamiliar with the term, “film noir” refers to a body of Hollywood films from the 1940s and 1950s that share certain visual features, such as stark contrasts between light and shadow and oblique camera angles meant to disorient the viewer, as well as particular themes, such as alienation, pessimism, and moral ambiguity. Classic noirs include The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), and Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947). Any film coming after the classic period that displays these themes and has a similar feeling to it we refer to as “neonoir.” Later films, such as Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981), and L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997), fall into this category, as do many of the Coens’ films. Blood Simple is a quite self-conscious neo-noir, for example, and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) is clearly an homage to classic noir. As we’ll see later, many or most of the brothers’ other movies can likewise be identified as noirs.
This work investigates the philosophical themes and underpinnings of the films of these master filmmakers and uses the movies as a vehicle for exploring and explicating traditional philosophical ideas. It comprises sixteen essays from scholars in both philosophy and film and media studies.
The essays are written in nontechnical language and require no knowledge of philosophy or media theory to appreciate or understand.
Part 1 of the volume, “The Coen Brand of Comedy and Tragedy,” begins with Richard Gilmore’s “Raising Arizona as an American Comedy,” in which he argues that the aspirations for improvement of the outlaw protagonist of the film, Hi McDunnough, are quintessentially American in nature. Next, in “The Human Comedy Perpetuates Itself: Nihilism and Comedy in Coen Neo-Noir,” Thomas S. Hibbs claims that the threat of nihilism, often prominent in classic noir, becomes a working assumption in much of neo-noir, revealing the various quests of the noir protagonist to be pointless, absurd, and thus comic and that the most representative examples of this turn to the comedic in noir are the films of the Coen brothers. In “Philosophies of Comedy in O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Douglas McFarland claims that the film’s comic underpinnings can best be understood through concepts of the mechanical, the contradictory, and the absurd articulated in Henri Bergson’s Laughter and Søren Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Richard Gilmore discusses the hubris and fatal flaws of Llewelyn Moss as he confronts his fate in the form of the killer Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men: The Coens’ Tragic Western.” Last, in “Deceit, Desire, and Dark Comedy: Postmodern Dead Ends in Blood Simple,” Alan Woolfolk argues that the Coens’ first film has many of th
e classic noir conventions and themes but is at the same time thoroughly postmodern insofar as it frustrates the characters’ attempts to make sense out of their lives and to communicate with one another.
Part 2, “Ethics: Shame, Justice, and Virtue,” opens with “‘And It’s Such a Beautiful Day!’ Shame and Fargo,” by Rebecca Hanrahan and David Stearns, in which they claim that the film can be read as a meditation on shame, insofar as the primary characters are repeatedly presented with the chance to look at themselves through the eyes of others. Shai Biderman and William J. Devlin, in “Justice, Power, and Love: The Political Philosophy of Intolerable Cruelty,” argue that the Coens’ tale of love, marriage, betrayal, and divorce can explain much about competing theories of justice within political philosophy. “Ethics, Heart, and Violence in Miller’s Crossing,” by Bradley L. Herling, avers that the brothers’ period noir is set in a gangster world run by an ethics of power that is enforced by violence but in which the primary characters at times display “heart,” or attachment to one another based on positive emotions and sympathy. Matthew K. Douglass and Jerry L. Walls, in “‘Takin’ ’er Easy for All Us Sinners’: Laziness as a Virtue in The Big Lebowski,” examine the life philosophy of über-slacker Jeffrey Lebowski, a.k.a. “the Dude,” and find that, especially in contrast to the hedonism, nihilism, and rugged individualism manifested in the other characters, the Dude’s laziness is indeed a virtue. Last, Douglas McFarland, in “No Country for Old Men as Moral Philosophy,” discusses the ethical landscape of the Coens’ adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel set in a bleak and violent region of west Texas.
Part 3, “Postmodernity, Interpretation, and the Construction of History,” begins with my chapter “Heidegger and the Problem of Interpretation in Barton Fink.” In it I claim that the things and events in the life of the screen-writing protagonist lose their sense and meaning because he lives the “life of the mind” as an isolated Cartesian subject cut off from practical engagement with the world. Next, in “The Past Is Now: History and The Hudsucker Proxy,” Paul Coughlin discusses how the Coens in their meditations on the past don’t simply allude to or recreate history; rather, they cinematically investigate how history as a narrative is constructed and question the ideologies underpinning that narrative. Last, Jerold J. Abrams, in “‘A Homespun Murder Story’: Film Noir and the Problem of Modernity in Fargo,” argues that the Coen noir Fargo reveals the isolation and alienation of humanity within modernity and its social fragmentation and radical individuation.
Part 4, “Existentialism, Alienation, and Despair,” kicks off with “‘What Kind of Man Are You?’: The Coen Brothers and Existentialist Role Playing,” in which Richard Gaughran discusses the dilemma of existential selfcreation—the problem of the need to create identities for ourselves coupled with the lack of any hope of success, given the lack of a human nature and values to guide us in that self-creation—which is at the heart of so much of the Coens’ work. Karen D. Hoffman, in “Being the Barber: Kierkegaardian Despair in The Man Who Wasn’t There,” uses Kierkegaard’s account of various types of despair to examine the life of Ed Crane, the barber protagonist of the brothers’ noir homage. Finally, in “Thinking beyond the Failed Community: Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn’t There,” R. Barton Palmer discusses the alienation of the antiheroes of these two Coen films, which is a result of the failure of community that engenders in those protagonists a deep desire for connection to others. Palmer notes the influence of the great hard-boiled author James M. Cain and existentialists Sartre and Camus on these two fine Coen noirs.
Whether you’re a longtime fan of the Coen brothers or have seen relatively few of their movies, we hope and trust that you’ll find this volume engaging and insightful and that it wil deepen and enrich your understanding and appreciation of the work of these master auteurs.
Part 1
The Coen Brand of Comedy and Tragedy
“Raising Arizona” as an American Comedy
Richard Gilmore
We grew up in America, and we tel American stories in American settings within American frames of reference.
—Ethan Coen
Our American literature and spiritual history are . . . in the optative mood.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist”
Raising Arizona (1987) begins with what sounds like the slamming of some prison doors. It is, to be sure, an ominous sound, and proleptic in at least two ways. First, it anticipates the sound that our protagonist is about to hear within minutes of our first meeting him, and second, it anticipates one of the major themes of the movie, which is, in the words of Ethan Coen, “family life versus being an outlaw.” That is, presumably, to the outlaw, family life can seem like some prison doors swung shut. Immediately following the sound of the slamming prison doors there is banjo music and an image of what we learn is a police height measure for photographing suspected criminals. A young man (Nicolas Cage) is thrown into the point of view of the camera so that we can take his measure against the height chart. In a voice-over we hear, “My name is H. I. McDunnough. Call me Hi.” I understand Hi’s name (constructed from his first two initials) to suggest a spatial metaphor, a description of his ambitions, which are, I want to say, very American ambitions. The banjo music in the background is Pete Seeger’s “Goofing Off Suite,” which, like America itself, is a fascinating medley of American folk music, motifs from high European classical music (Bach and Beethoven), Russian folk music, and even yodeling.[1] Hi is the central protagonist of the film and provides the voice-over narrative that accompanies the regular narrative of the film. Although Hi is the main protagonist, it is Ed (Holly Hunter), short for Edwina, who engages the action of the plot of the movie with her strong sense of what she wants and what constitutes natural justice, as did Antigone (except in this case the natural justice takes the form of stealing a live baby from a family that, it could be argued, has too many, rather than burying one’s dead brother against the laws of the state).
Goofing off pretty much describes the sense one gets of what the Coens are doing in the opening sequence of the movie. There is one disjunctive discontinuity after another, each one constituting a kind of slapstick joke, and yet each one reverberates with a deeper truth. There is the overall structural discontinuity between Hi’s voice-over narrative and what we see him doing.
Hi sounds, in the voice-over, like he speaks from a place of detached, even philosophical, wisdom, but what we actually see him doing shows him to be a not very bright repeat offender, a petty criminal with an enthusiasm for robbing convenience stores. That disjunction is funny. His enthusiasm for robbing convenience stores is funny in itself, as is his evident incompetence at it, which is why he goes to jail so often. He seems to accept jail time as just part of life, and it is a significant part of his life. That he uses his time between crimes, that is, his time being booked for the crimes he has committed, to woo Ed, who is a police officer and the photographer for his mug shots, is funny and ridiculous. Their marriage, “starter home,” “salad days,” infertility, despair, and kidnapping scheme are all a little ridiculous, and yet, even though they are presented as basically funny, there is a sort of underlying truth to all of it. America does have a fascination or love affair with the image of the outlaw, so choosing to be an outlaw is not really that crazy. And it is hard starting a family in this modern world, even if, or especially if, you are an outlaw by trade. And starter homes sometimes are little mobile homes in the desert. And sometimes, in spite of your best efforts, nature does not cooperate; infertility is a fact of life.
When Hi says, for example, “I tried to stand up and fly straight, but it wasn’t easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House. . . . I dunno, they say he is a decent man, so . . . maybe his advisers are confused,” it is such a mishmash of deep political wisdom, weird, folksy compassion, and just raw, self-serving excuse that it is hard to find one’s way with it. It is funny and true and crazy all at the same time. It also has a vaguely socialist ring to i
t, and of course Pete Seeger, the creator of the “Goofing Off Suite” we are hearing in the background, was a famous socialist and defender of the people, which further suggests some deeper political message behind the craziness. This, one might say, quoting the American poet Robert Frost, is “play for mortal stakes.”[2]
The Optative Mood and America
We, in America, are weaned on the milk of aspiration. This is what I understand Emerson to mean when he describes our spiritual history as being in the “optative mood.” “Optative,” from the Latin optio, meaning “free choice,” is Emerson’s slightly archaic word for the American sense of being free to determine one’s own life, to be whomever one wants to be. The great advantage of this spiritual history is the energy and the inventiveness it calls forth in American people. The downside of this ethos is how demanding and difficult it is on a person. There is very high expectation that everyone will be an “individual” and that a person will have high aspirations, but not much direction is given to us about what aspirations to have or how to achieve them, except that one should aspire to work hard. So much is expected of us to be something original and so little is given to us about how to do that that the problem of who we are to be can drive us a little crazy. We do not inherit an identity so much as find ourselves tasked with (to use a Coen expression from Fargo [1996]) creating an identity. That is an easier task for some than for others, and certainly there are some deep deceptions in the American mythos of self-creation, deceptions about the irrelevance of the conditions of one’s birth, the role of social class, or money, or race. So, on the one hand, we have more freedom than most in history to make of ourselves what we will. On the other hand, that puts a considerable burden on each of us as individuals to come up with a unique self to be.