Constructing the Coens: from Blood simple to Inside Llewyn Davis 9781442244849, 9781442244856, 1442244844, 1442244852

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Constructing the Coens

Constructing the Coens From Blood Simple to Inside Llewyn Davis Allen H. Redmon

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Redmon, Allen, 1972– Constructing the Coens : from Blood simple to Inside Llewyn Davis / Allen Redmon. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4422-4484-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-4485-6 (ebook) 1. Coen, Joel—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Coen, Ethan—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PN1998.3.C6635R33 2014 791.4302’330922—dc23 2014036423 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

ix

1 2 3 4

5

6 7

8 9

“It’s a Problem of . . . Perception”: Identifying the Coens’ Constructivist Sensibility “You Don’t Want to Be Tried and Found Wantin’”: Triggering the Ongoing Adaptation of The Ladykillers “I Will Destroy Him”: Negotiating the Image in Barton Fink and Raising Arizona “That Gag’s Got Whiskers on It”: Achieving Narrative Coherence in The Hudsucker Proxy and The Man Who Wasn’t There “The Coin Don’t Have No Say”: Examining Intertextuality in The Hudsucker Proxy, Intolerable Cruelty, and No Country for Old Men “A Lotta Ins, a Lotta Outs”: Interweaving Genres in The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? “Appearances Can Be Deceptive”: Investigating Sexuality in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty, and Burn after Reading “I Haven’t Done Anything Funny”: Scrutinizing Gender in the Coens’ Arrangements of a Bunch of Men around One Woman “Accept the Mystery”: Resisting the Final Construction of A Serious Man v

1 17 33

49

65 81

97 111 127

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Contents

Conclusion

143

Bibliography

155

Filmography

161

Index

165

About the Author

173

Acknowledgments

A Coen brothers movie gets better with conversation—and so does a book on the Coens. This book is no exception. The best parts of this book are what they are as a direct result of the willingness of so many to talk with me about the Coens. Friends and family members, colleagues and students have worked through the Coens’ films so regularly that my thinking on the Coens never seems finished. A new way of seeing is always just one discussion away. This was especially the case with my three most regular discussants: Aaron Kelly, Geoff Stacks, and Ryan Bayless. I cannot overstate the benefit of their practical and conceptual recommendations or their friendship. I am forever humbled by their generosity. I never would have written a book on anything if not for the confidence Glenn Hopp and Trevor Morgan had in me, the patience Victor Raskin extended me, or the mentoring Sandor Goodhart and Allen Frantzen offered. Nor would I have had the resources to continue the work these teachers indirectly prompted without the support of colleagues, such as Brent Maddux, Kate Stewart, and Red Hawk, and administrators, such as Mark Spencer and William Sakamoto White. This book is a kind of harvest of their faith in me. Everyone knows that a book like this is never the work of one person. Others have certainly helped me clarify the ideas that are now on these pages. Generations of students questioned my proposals and corrected my hyperbole when they should have. My analysis is better because of them. Those who responded to papers delivered at conferences have made a similar impact on this project. I am continually shaped by the remarks of those at the annual meetings for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association, the National Popular and American Culture Meetings, the Southwest Commission on Religious Studvii

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ies, the Reception Studies Society, the National Popular and American Culture Meeting, and the South Central Modern Language Association and the Mid-Atlantic Modern Language Association Regional meetings. Every session with these groups gave me something new to consider and helped me find a way to express my ideas more meaningfully. The efforts of Gillian Leslie and Walter Metz deserve particular praise. Professor Metz’s comments, in particular, helped me write a book I could be proud to write. I am also indebted to the encouragement of Chuck Hamilton and Lynnea Chapman King. Also of special note is the willingness of Stephen Ryan and Rowman & Littlefield to turn this project into a public rather than private affair. Above all, I must thank my family: my wife, Kimberly, my children, Jacob and Grace, my sister, Amy, my parents and grandparents, my aunts and uncles, and all the rest. Without you, I have no reward for my efforts. Lastly, I would thank the editors at Journal of Popular Film and Television, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Journal of American Studies of Turkey, who gave me permission to reprint portions of my earlier articles in their journals. PERMISSIONS Part of chapter 5 appeared in Ryan S. Bayless and Allen H. Redmon, “‘Just call it’: Identifying Competing Narratives in the Coens’ No Country for Old Men,” Literature/Film Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2013): 6–18. That portion has been reprinted by permission of Literature/Film Quarterly at Salisbury University, Salisbury, Md. 21801. Part of chapter 6 appeared in Allen H. Redmon, “How Many Lebowskis Are There? Genre, Spectatorial Authorship, and The Big Lebowski,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 40, no. 2 (2012): 52–61. That portion has been reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis LLC (http://www.tandfonline. com). Part of the introduction and chapter 6 appeared in Allen H. Redmon, “It’s a Problem of Perception: The Coen Brothers’ Constructivist Use of Genre,” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 32 (2012): 13–33. That portion has been reproduced by permission of Laurence Raw.

Introduction

One might turn to the films of Joel and Ethan Coen to explore any number of topics within film studies. The duo’s sixteen films to date bear what might be characterized as the Coen brothers’ mark, even if the details of that mark have yet to be fully defined. As such, their films beg for an auteurist consideration. According to David A. Gerstner (2003), such a demand might come as a relief to a filmgoing populace that still wants to believe in the value of an auteurist perspective: the “urge and desire to discuss theoretically and market film in relation to the auteur” lingers within film studies, even though everyone knows that film is “a collaborative medium” (5). The roots of authorship simply run too deep, Gerstner reasons, both within Western culture and within film studies itself. No amount of challenges to the idea of the authored film, or introductions of competing authorial voices, can altogether dislodge the desire for the directorially authored film. The enduring presence of directors like the Coens, who write, direct, and edit their own films, assure some that there is no need to abandon such a desire. An auteurist account might best explain their oeuvre. The Coens’ films can also reassure those within film studies interested in contemporary uses (or reuses) of genre. The duo regularly shapes its films around some generic sensibility. Darren Franich (2013), for instance, declares the brothers “the leading contemporary practitioners of the noir genre.” Nothing they have released to date would counter this claim. The Coens pepper their canon with relatively straightforward noir films, such as Blood Simple (1984), Miller’s Crossing (1990), and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). The brothers shape less overtly noir films, such as Fargo (1996), No Country for Old Men (2007), or True Grit (2010), around the long-standing genre. As such, those interested in ongoing instances of noir do well to examine the Coens. So, too, do those attentive to recent performance of ix

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classical or postclassical genres. Robert C. Sickels (2008) insists, “any discussion of the Coens’ work must start with an examination of genre classification, as all of their films are firmly rooted in one or more traditional genres” (116). Just as importantly for Sickels, the duo releases films that find ways to reconcile competing generic classifications. Sickels celebrates the Coens’ ability to blend classical screwball comedy and their own brand of postclassical romantic comedy. The brothers’ mix allows critics to investigate the ways in which the earlier form can be applied to “the tastes and expectations of contemporary audiences” (115). The Coens produce films that both resuscitate considerations of classical genres and reinvigorate analysis of contemporary issues through genre. Genre theorists thus have good reason to turn to the Coens’ filmography. Those intent on understanding American culture through film do well to turn to the Coens. The duo’s films trek, seize, and witness nearly every aspect of twentieth-century America. One can group the brothers’ films by decade: Miller’s Crossing explores the Prohibition period; O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) travels the 1930s; Barton Fink (1991) and Man Who Wasn’t There detail the 1940s; The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) apprehends the 1950s; Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) and A Serious Man (2009) consider the 1960s; Blood Simple, Raising Arizona (1987), and No Country observe the 1980s; Intolerable Cruelty (2003), The Ladykillers (2004), and Burn after Reading (2008) contract “the present day.” The Coens cover the decades of the twentieth century so systematically that the survey begs for critical attention. The Coens’ corpus just as systematically surveys America geographically, and they do so in ways that take seriously the locales of their films. As Paul Coughlin (2003) contends, the Coens typically release films beholden to their region: Blood Simple (1983) owes much of its character to its Texas setting, Raising Arizona (1987) paints a very particular picture of the inhabitants of the American South-West, The Big Lebowski (1998) gains much of its absurdist comedy from its depiction of the very absurd Los Angeles community and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) relies on the meticulous recreation of Depression-era Mississippi.

No Country seems just as intent on showing West Texas as Blood Simple; Intolerable Cruelty projects assumptions about Los Angeles as much as Big Lebowski. Ladykillers (2004) illustrates the “present day” (if you can call it that exactly) South as much as O Brother scrutinized a depressed South. Fargo and Serious Man take their upper midwestern environs as seriously as Hudsucker Proxy or Inside Llewyn Davis takes their New York settings. The Coens have shown America from sea to shining sea, which certainly gives critics concerned with national cinemas something to consider.

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The Coens’ films can just as well attract scholars interested in independent cinema. John Pierson (1995) places the Coens and their release of Blood Simple alongside other films released in 1984, such as Stranger Than Paradise, The Brother from Another Planet, Stop Making Sense, and Choose Me. These films begin a story that constitutes what Pierson calls the “veritable golden age for independent films” (28). The Coens play an important part in that drama not only in regard to their own releases, but also in terms of their influence on other independent filmmakers. Pierson posits that the duo’s “genre-skewing black comedy sensibility seemed to pop up time and again as a substitute for real comedy” (121). As such, one was, from Pierson’s perspective, often watching a Coen brothers film even when someone not named Coen was behind the script or camera. Geoff King (2005) also assigns the Coens an important part in the evolution of independent cinema in America. King contends that “independent filmmakers” such as Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Kevin Smith, Steven Soderbergh, and the Coens force scholars to question just “how independent” independent cinema is. King concludes that it is not nearly as independent as the genre once was. Studios such as Miramax and New Line have joined forces with Hollywood studios Disney and Time Warner, respectively. One no longer finds the same dramatic formal/aesthetic differences between independent and studio films. King claims the Coens succinctly epitomize the closing gap between independent and studio films—they illustrate a collective tendency toward “stylistically motivated” dialogue, “‘showy’ stylized” narratives, and “stylized visual effects” (83, 107, 151). The Coens might distinguish themselves from the lot of filmmakers applying their craft in this way, but, for King, the differences are not as meaningful as the similarities. The similarities reveal an emerging form of independent filmmaking in America that the Coens help establish. Michael Z. Newman (2011) narrates a similar story in his consideration of the Coens as indie, rather than independent, filmmakers. Interested in “describing the modes of engagement [indie film] solicits and encourages within the context of its institutional discourses,” Newman traces the “circuit of meaning-making” found within the reading communities self-identified as indie (14). He pays particular attention to the ways the Coens invite their audiences “to play [ . . . ] between the margins and mainstream,” and to do so as “outsiders” (16). Newman insists that the Coens craft films that “can be appreciated on two levels: the conventional one that pleases the average moviegoer with standard narrative appeals, and the allusive one of the imitative form—of pastiche” (180). The brothers’ ability to so often flip this twosided coin accounts for how the duo has found “more than just a small niche in the blockbuster era of American cinema” (180). Newman concludes that the Coens offer their moviegoing public an opportunity to play with a range of conventions—“genre [ . . . ] inspiring literary and cinematic sources [ . . . ]

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plot, character, setting, and theme [ . . . ] iconography and language” (181). The Coens turn their audiences into fellow game players able to participate in a “creative historiography” that repurposes “the images and ideas of the past in a new context” (181). No matter which view of independent cinema one takes, the films the Coens release have something to contribute to the discussion. The Coens’ films also prove fertile ground for those interested in postmodern cinema. The brothers’ films are undeniably postmodern, a point scored as consistently by critics looking to illustrate postmodernism as by those considering the Coens more particularly. Joseph Natoli (2002), for instance, lists the Coens in his survey of postmodernism’s key figures. Natoli contends that the Coens’ willingness to shape their films with a “sly [ . . . ] parodying of mood [ . . . ] a rush onto all paths and possibilities without fear of getting back [ . . . ] an unraveling, deconstructive journey [ . . . ] that has no clear beginning or end” performs postmodernism too perfectly to be ignored (88). M. Keith Booker (2007) makes comparable boasts. Booker believes the Coens’ fervor for deriving their characters and stories from recognizable sources rather than literal or historical realities firmly locates them within postmodern sensibilities. Booker bills O Brother as a representation of “not the Depression South, but pop cultural images of the Depression South” (79). Such efforts demonstrate to Booker that the Coens “are clearly far more interested in the world of film than the world at large” (143). Scholars more especially interested in the Coens also determine that the literal world has very little hold on the films the brothers create. Carolyn Russell (2001), for instance, describes the characters and the world those characters occupy in Raising Arizona as decidedly prefabricated and predigested. The characters speak in a “clichéd speech [that] reveals the pop cultural foundations of their existence, the extent to which the culture offers prefabricated identities easily accessible through predigested images and ready-made phrases” (41–42). Their world “utilizes a mesmerizing amalgamation of generic paradigms,” including the prison movie genre, the crime docudrama, apocalyptic science fiction/horror, the slapstick/screwball, comedy of manners, and romantic comedy, the criminal-couple subgenre, and social satire (42). The end result “is a highly entertaining example of postmodern bricolage [where] fervid absurdisms incorporate and transcend the conventions of many disparate film forms” (42–43). Erica Rowell (2007) regards the Coens in a similar manner. Rowell summarizes the duo’s prodigious career as a long series “postmodern cribbing” (327). For Rowell, the relationships the Coens establish between the various literary, cultural, and cinematic elements they bring together compose the most important aspect of the brothers’ films. The stories and characters in those stories are all equally borrowed, and recognizing the borrowing becomes part of the fun of watching a Coen brothers film.

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R. Barton Palmer (2004) provides a nuanced description of the Coens’ engagement with postmodernism. Palmer proclaims the Coens’ to be proficient practitioners of postmodern behaviors, a point proved most copiously in his discussion of Hudsucker Proxy. For Palmer, “every element of the film is a quotation in a sense” (140). Palmer explains, “never have the Coens shown themselves to be more ‘knowing’ than in Hudsucker Proxy, which offers an extended, self-conscious homage to one of the most memorable and characteristic genres of classical Hollywood, the screwball comedy” (135). The Coens’ open tribute to classical forms of expression ultimately distances the viewer from the story being told, which creates space for an “intellectual engagement” that could not otherwise be achieved (139). Such engagement ensures that the Coens’ reliance on past utterances serves more than blank or empty parody. Palmer maintains that the duo uses postmodern expressions to uncover “the fault lines in the critical vision of American virtue and national accomplishment [found in the film Hudsucker Proxy] mimes, measuring that vision against the emerging reality of a consumerist society” (141). Palmer offers a summation, “The Hudsucker Proxy makes a gesture worthy of postmodernism’s obsession with the representational past, with the world now ‘sedimented with layers of popular mythologies’ all of which cry out for the kind of engaged reinvention at which the Coens during the last two decades have proved themselves so expert” (158). Palmer properly insists that the Coens do not perform this trick in just this one film. The Coens turn the familiar into something compelling throughout their career and more typically through their use of noir and adapted texts. Palmer claims the Coens use noir to engage classical Hollywood and, in turn, their audience. Palmer contends that “the Coens’ self-conscious insertion within the continuing history of this most discussed of studio types [ . . . ] is no merely playful recycling of established forms” (46). The brothers deploy this recognizable form to create a point of entry into their films. The conventions of noir serve as “a readymade set of coordinates for texts that can then respectfully repeat, cannibalize, transform, or subvert those conventions in some fashion, thus utilizing the ‘already said’ to say something new” (47). The brothers retain adapted texts in similar ways. According to Palmer, “all Coen films are adaptations of other texts, from which are confected diegetic worlds, or, perhaps better, ontological modes that usually engage complex intertexts” (57). A film such as Man Who Wasn’t There, which is so obviously re-created, can demonstrate more than mere nostalgia; it can offer some “hope for spiritual growth [ . . . ] made possible by the embrace of meaningless” (66). In this way, the Coens create films that are both a symptom of postmodernism and, more importantly, a response to it. Their films not only illustrate postmodern tendencies, but also advance the possibilities of postmodern expression in unexpected ways.

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The Coens release films that contribute to a range of interests within film studies, and those who turn to their films gain invaluable insights. Every description of a Coen brothers film illustrates anew just how wonderfully simple and endlessly complex their films really are. The brothers’ films often demand more than one viewing and, even more regularly, more than one way of seeing. Their films can rarely if ever be reduced to a definitive way of reading. The duo loads its films with so many stylistic and narrative structures that more than one way of reading always exists. They ensconce every element with several recognizable structures. Each structure invites spectators to play with the form and function of the elements the brothers so openly borrow. As a result, an unmistakable but always elusive overdetermined indeterminacy sits at the center(s) of each release. Those who notice the presence of contesting epicenters more than likely enter a process of reconstruction that forms the most essential quality of a Coen brothers film. The proof of this claim is not in the identification of actual audience members performing this work, but in the films themselves, which can be shown to accept so many organizing principles across so much of one film that the structure itself allows if not cues reconstruction. The process being described is not entirely foreign to film studies—a point that will be explored more fully in chapter 1—but I ground the reconstruction it considers, at least initially, in the constructivist epistemologies proposed by Jean Piaget. Piaget accounts most succinctly for the cognitive activity this book assumes on the most basic level. For Piaget (1972), knowledge and reality do not exist outside the human subject; rather, they are negotiated within the mental operations of the subject. Subjects do not acquire knowledge; they produce it, and they do so through their own mental operations. Piaget explains, “all knowledge is tied to action and knowing an object or an event is to use it by assimilating it (or accommodating it) to an action scheme” (quoted in Glasersfeld 1982, 633). Action schemes refer to viable constructs already accepted or being constructed. These schemes form for Piaget the foundational pieces of cognitive development. Subjects use such schemes to build their knowledge. When confronted with information that is readily adaptable, an individual will assimilate that information into an existing action scheme; when the information fails to fit a stable scheme, the individual puts the new information through a process of accommodation until all is reconciled. Information that fails to be reconciled is simply dismissed. From this view, individuals are never isolated or alienated from some reality that exists externally from them; to the contrary, they are able adaptors, always already shaping and producing their reality through their mental action. The Coens construct films that appear especially given to Piaget’s proposal. They use a range of recognized constructs—established texts and genres, prominent ideological positions, still-evolving notions of gender and sexual-

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ity—which inevitably increases the likelihood that their films are familiar and able to be adapted by anyone who recognizes the constructs they use. The duo plays to what Linda Hutcheon (2013) terms, albeit for different reasons, “the knowing audience,” which describes those who know the adapted text being repurposed in an adaptation. The knowing audience experiences a pleasure an unknowing audience cannot, a pleasure akin to “a child’s delight in hearing the same nursery rhymes or reading the same books over and over. Like ritual, this kind of repetition brings comfort, a fuller understanding, and the confidence that comes with the sense of knowing what is about to happen next” (114). The difference between the knowing audience and the child’s delight is that even the most faithful adaptations depart from their adapted text in some way. In so doing, they stimulate a slightly different kind of pleasure wrapped in “the simple act of almost but not quite repeating, in the revisiting of a theme with revisions” (115). Such experiences offer the knowing audience member “the doubled pleasure of the palimpsest: more than one text is experienced—and knowingly so” (116). The notion of the knowing audience creates space for film theorists to reconsider the Coens and their audiences, respectively. The former are not mechanical imitators. The latter are not passive receivers. Both are capable adaptors. Hutcheon proves insightful on this point. For Hutcheon, filmmakers engaged in adaptive efforts create and interpret as much as they reproduce. The source text is present, but rarely as “a reservoir of instructions” (84). Filmmakers choose what to embrace and what to adjust in the same way their audiences will once the film is released. Similarly, foreknowledge of an adapted text will guide audience expectations, but rarely so forcefully that they no longer need to interpret the adaptation. Hutcheon likens the audience member faced with an adapted work to the experience a genre film or a second or third experience with the same director or actor can have—such “intertextual knowledge [ . . . ] might well impinge on their interpretation of the adaptation they are watching,” but it does not have to do so (126). In other words, such preknowledge might actually multiply interpretations rather than divide them. Hutcheon explains, “adaptations as adaptation involves, for its knowing audience, an interpretative doubling, a conceptual flipping back and forth between the work we know and the work we are experiencing” (139). The end result can be a highly creative and inventive response. This book looks to describe this process by noting the importance of indeterminacy in each Coen brothers film. Most Coen brothers films realize their indeterminacy may mean too many things at once, that is, by intentionally being overly determined. Later films, such as Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis, will opt for a more general sort of indeterminacy. The impact will be the same. The Coens will invite spectators to participate in the (re)making of each film’s form and function. The work will look like the effort Piaget describes. It will also resemble the more cognitive accounts of

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spectatorial activity. Robert Stam (2000) places the cognitive approach in two footholds: “(1) the processes of film spectatorship are best understood as rationally motivated attempts to make visual or narrative sense out of the textual materials; and (2) that these processes of making sense are not dissimilar to those we deploy in our everyday experience” (237). Film philosopher Noel Carroll and theorists David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson will prove particularly helpful in characterizing this position. All three will be covered more fully in chapter 1, which makes explicit the theoretical assumptions and justifications for the approach this book adopts. That chapter traces the evolution of theoretical accounts of several topics within film studies—most especially focusing on competing notions of postmodernism, the discursive aspects of genre and adaptation, and, of course, cognitive approaches—to show the way in which each discussion pushes over time toward a more constructivist sensibility. The chapter also reexamines the practice and hope of the constructivist artists of the 1920s. Ultimately, chapter 1 synthesizes these notions and applies them to the ritual scene in O Brother, which most succinctly illustrates the way in which this film triggers the specific kind of construction all Coen brothers projects prompt. Those less interested in the theoretical justifications behind this book’s approach might prefer to begin in chapter 2, which identifies the most general manner in which the Coens create space for their spectators to participate in the ongoing construction of their films. The chapter opens with a brief discussion of adaptation theory. It continues with a consideration of the early writing on translation by Jorge Luis Borges, and then of the successful adaptations of Shakespeare produced throughout the 1990s. Both sources underscore the freedoms interlocutors experience when presented with a text that balances veneration and irreverence. The chapter deems the Coens’ first admitted adaptation, Ladykillers, as the most explicit example of this balance. Chapter 3 examines the ways in which the main characters in Raising Arizona and Barton Fink come to treat the images and ideologies in their drama with the same mix of reverence and disdain found in Ladykillers. Recognized constructs become signs in need of a response. The main characters suffer under the signs that circle them until they favor creative construction to credulous consumption. The Coens intensify the need for such a response by framing both dramas around the patterns of apocalyptic storytelling identified by Elizabeth Rosen (2008). Chapter 4 similarly frames Hudsucker Proxy and Man Who Wasn’t There. Though not as committed to the apocalyptic structures as Raising Arizona and Barton Fink, these two films begin in the midst of the same kinds of textual excess. Hudsucker Proxy and Man Who Wasn’t There lean on their sources so heavily that these earlier expressions threaten to overwhelm the Coens’ own. The chapter rejects the generally accepted notion that the Coens’ borrowed expression in these films

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serves as a symptom of postmodernism. The narrative coherence the Coens openly admit within the film to be constructed prolongs creativity as much as it limits it. The abundance of elements creates an overly determined film that the characters must solve and, even then, only temporarily. The work the characters do in these films becomes the work the spectators can do if so inclined. As such, Hudsucker Proxy and Man Who Wasn’t There ultimately favor creative collaboration over credulous consumption. The book shifts gears a bit in chapter 5. Having presented the ways in which the Coens model constructive readings within the films they construct, the last five chapters discuss some of the ways the Coens prompt ongoing construction of their films. Chapter 5 investigates the ways in which Hudsucker Proxy, Intolerable Cruelty, and No Country enjoy a long engagement with well-established texts that they never admit to adapting. Spectators who know these texts find themselves peeling multiple layers of an otherwise straight remake of equally recognized traditions, genres, or literary texts. Each film tolerates a surface and embedded text that are both equally constructed. The structure occasions an additional text, the resulting text that the spectator helps fashion. Chapter 6 chronicles a comparable configuration in Big Lebowski and O Brother, respectively. The chapter argues that the confluence of so many genres encourages spectators conversant in these forms (and even when only minimally so) to enjoy an otherwise impossible level of control over the evolving and final form of the film. The Coens use a meeting of many genres to compound the significance of each element. Chapter 7 continues a line of inquiry tacitly introduced in chapter 6 by investigating the three films starring George Clooney, O Brother, Intolerable Cruelty, and Burn after Reading, through the questions of sexuality each film fashions. The chapter accepts critical proposals that deem sexuality a social construct that is every bit as negotiated as genre. From this view, any reliance on sexuality as an organizing principle can trigger the same constructivist response any other social construct elicits. Chapter 8 follows a similar line by discussing the Coens’ recurring interest in stories that assemble any number of men around one woman. The pattern marks more than half of the Coens’ first fifteen films and five of their first six. The chapter pays particular attention to five films that seem especially interested in this arrangement: Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, Ladykillers, and True Grit. The intent is to show the way in which the Coens’ use of the admittedly social construct of gender can generate the same constructive effect as genre and sexuality. Chapter 9 ponders the extent to which the Coens’ Serious Man both accepts a constructivist response without the sustained use of so many recognizable sources found in other films and offers a caution to those who would want to close too quickly the process of meaning-making this response occasions. This late entry in the Coens’ canon serves as something of an antithesis

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to earlier films. Although prior projects demonstrated the freedom that comes from accepting a constructivist perspective, Serious Man exhibits the frustrations that follow the pursuit of definitive meaning. The characters in this film pursue ultimate meaning and suffer for it, perhaps none more so than the main character, Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg). In this way, the Coens offer Larry as a diegetic demonstration for how to misread a Coen brothers film. Absolute meaning must be rejected. Some new context will always emerge, and an alternative way of seeing will eventually present itself. The Coens delight in this certainty, and they ask their audiences to do the same. The book concludes with a look at Inside Llewyn Davis. These final pages intend to reflect on the process the Coens privilege both generally and in this late film. As with every other Coen brothers release, Inside Llewyn Davis respects the images and interests of the historical context it adopts, but only so far. The same veneration and irreverence that mark other films appear in this last one. The film, therefore, begs for the kinds of creative reassessment of the form and function of the plot and story the film adopts and on which the folk tradition itself depends. Such a return is in keeping with the book itself, which demonstrates a variety of ways to approach a number of films— O Brother is discussed in slightly different ways in chapters 1, 6, and 7; Ladykillers is covered in chapters 2 and 8; Hudsucker Proxy in chapters 5 and 6. This refusal to end the discussion of any one film intends to model this book’s belief that one is never really ever finished with a Coen brothers film. As David Wyatt (1986) reminds readers, interlocutors are only really ever “finished” with a story “when we cease to second guess it” (112). The Coens construct each of their films in such a way that one can hardly keep from second-guessing it. Inside Llewyn Davis is no different. The end result of this book is not a definitive reading of the Coens, but it should be a productive one, which is to say, one that returns spectators to the films themselves in order to see something at once familiar and foreign. The readings in this book mean to open as many accounts as they close. Each suggestion is guided by a firm belief that the Coens do not bind their audiences to the sources they employ any more than they themselves remain constrained by them. Their stories tend to require more than one watching, and their ultimate meanings must never take away the most attractive part of the Coens’ artistry—namely, the way these films remain open and the manner they invite spectators to participate in an inexhaustible and undeterminable construction of what can be several films within every one.

Chapter One

“It’s a Problem of . . . Perception” Identifying the Coens’ Constructivist Sensibility

In what seems like something of a non sequitur, the Coens leave the central narrative of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) to focus on a conversation between Mississippi’s sitting governor, Pappy O’Daniel (Charles Durning) and his campaign staff. The electioneer wonders what he has to do to regain a “constituency.” Pappy’s son, Junior (Del Pentecost), suggests they try to copy the tactics of their opponent, Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall), and get “a little fella even smaller than Stokes.” Pappy explodes. The waning governor surmises that too many of his potential voters already believe he is out of fresh ideas. He would only validate this belief if he accepted the advice of his progeny. Pappy cannot let his campaign seem like “a bunch of Johnny-comelatelies.” His advisors agree: “It’s a problem of . . .”—one starts, only to have the other finish a second later—“perception.” This scene carries with it an unexpected significance not only for this one film where misperceptions come with consequences, but also for viewers who try to make sense of such a film. The films the Coens make consistently present themselves as one thing only to morph into something else as soon as their performance begins. O Brother is a perfect example. The film begins with a translation of the words from Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey: O Muse! Sing in me, and through me tell the story Of that man skilled in all ways of contending, A wanderer, harried for years on end.

It continues with a slow, left-panning shot of a flat, open field that finally settles on a group of prisoners smashing rocks unnaturally lined alongside an 1

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isolated country road. The camera passes down the line of the chain gang, capturing at various times the choral sounds of the group’s rendition of “Po’ Lazarus” and the individual voices contributing to that group. The screen dissolves and the film’s title appears. In just over two minutes, O Brother assumes the posture of an adaptation and a musical and offers what Jack Boozer (2008) refers to as a distant reference to Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), the film that suggests the Coens’ title (9). In this way, the Coens locate O Brother in several places before returning at the end of the title sequence with a title card that reads “Based upon ‘The Odyssey’ by Homer.” The card is something of a trick. The Coens try to collapse a range a references back into the one. Spectators can either refuse the gesture and keep a range of references in mind or accept that what transpires will be first and foremost an adaptation of Homer’s epic poem. The final form of the film will depend on the perception of the viewer. O Brother is not unique in its willingness to try to exist as one thing and several at the same time or in its insistence that the spectator ultimately participate in the final form of the film. Every Coen brothers film works similarly, but perhaps nowhere more explicitly than in their admitted adaptations, The Ladykillers (2004), No Country for Old Men (2007), and True Grit (2010). Each adaptation accepts the skeleton of the predecessor, but not necessarily the flesh or soul. Ladykillers explores the American South as much as it reproduces the Ealing Studios antecedent. No Country embraces Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” as much as it does the particulars of Cormac McCarthy’s novel. True Grit enters discussions of masculinity suggested in Charles Portis’ novel, but not with the force or focus that those who elect to explore the film from within the Coens’ oeuvre experience. Spectators can conceive each of these films as the adaptations they purport to be, even very literal adaptations in the case of the last two, but they can also entertain other sensibilities that the Coens suggest they consider. The fact that the Coens suggest alternative ways to arrange a film that makes perfectly good sense as one thing on the surface is of utmost importance. The Coens routinely and explicitly insert several lines along which spectators can string their characters, the action, and the story they are very much presenting. A quick discussion of the ritual scene at the center of O Brother serves as a succinct example. The scene tolerates multiple organizing principles without ever insisting on any one. To begin with, the scene can, for the reasons already discussed, be viewed as a kind of adaptation. The Coens openly admit that O Brother is “based on the Odyssey by Homer,” and the ritual scene makes use of this source. The reappearance of the one-eyed Bible salesman, Big Dan Teague (John Goodman), prompts viewers familiar with Homer’s text to think of Odysseus’ encounter with Polyphemus. The fact that Everett and his companions infiltrate the proceedings in white coats

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further associates these events with Homer’s text. Their costumes evoke some thought of the sheep Odysseus’ men use to escape their captor. The ritual scene therefore suggests an ongoing relationship between O Brother and the Odyssey. The Coens also suggest one see this scene as an adaptation of The Wizard of Oz (1939) or Sullivan’s Travels. The duo actually begins the ritual scene with a shot that is almost a direct match of the shot used to frame the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion in the moments before they try to rescue Dorothy (Judy Garland). Everett (George Clooney) and his fellow sojourners extend their heads just above the tree limbs in just the way their cinematic precursors had looked around the rocks at the witch’s castle. The Coens add an auditory link between O Brother and Wizard of Oz by using music throughout the Klan’s dance that is reminiscent of the music that accompanies the guards’ march around the witch’s castle. The scene also continues to make a distant reference to Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. One could quite easily relate the false justice being exacted by the Klan against Tommy (Chris Thomas King) in relation to the injustice John Lloyd Sullivan (Joel McCrea) endures in Sullivan’s Travels. The scene accepts an ongoing relationship with Sturges’ text, too. A film most explicitly given to the Odyssey turns on the images and sensibilities of the Wizard of Oz, on the one hand, and Sullivan’s Travels, on the other. The Coens provide a sustained interaction with at least three texts, all of which exist along the surface of the ritual scene. The Coens make still other suggestions. The Klan members dance with all the exuberance, choreography, and synchronization of a 1930s Busby Berkeley musical. One could approach this moment as a musical. When the dancing stops, and the marshal of ceremonies breaks into an a cappella performance of Ralph Stanley’s “O Death,” the Coens accept the preference for song over speech Thomas Schatz (1981) claims the studios’ nonintegrated musicals delivered. A song literally replaces the speech one expects to hear. The fact that the singer and grand marshal turns out to also be Homer Stokes, the front-runner in the gubernatorial election occurring in the film, invites some parallels between O Brother and the social problem film described by Roffman and Purdy (1981). O Brother never shies from the social problems its narrative reveals. It begins with a shot of a chain gang that reminds viewers of one of the grimmer social realities in the South during the 1920s and 1930s. It fills the middle sections with men who openly abuse the power their society or stature, in the case of Big Dan, gives them. It offers in the end an idealized speech about how the “South is gonna change,” which reminds the audience familiar with that region of the country just how little has changed. The film entertains one social problem after another without ever letting those problems overwhelm the narrative.

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Taken as a whole, the ritual scene in O Brother accepts the logic and expression of a social problem film that is also something of a musical that is also something of an adaptation. The Coens fill this one scene with a host of recognizable narrative structures. They permit their spectators to choose which structure to accept. The scene, indeed, the whole film, as chapter 6 will show, is, in a phrase, overly determined. Any element can be determined by more than one referent, and quite intentionally so. An unmistakable indeterminacy emerges as a result that only the spectator can settle and, then, only for a time. The Coens have, in the language of Noel Carroll (2003), criterially prefocused their film so that the spectator can construct a variety of forms from the one presented on the screen. A number of issues must be clarified to make sense of this last sentence. Carroll’s term needs to be isolated and redirected for the stated purpose. The cognitive activity being implied through the word “construct” needs to be made explicit. The first task, though, is to clear some critical ground so that the trick the Coens perform can be properly perceived. The Coens are hardly alone in their willingness to make movies that morph into something more than they purport to be. Any number of their contemporaries accomplish the same coup, even if their manner or method is different. Woody Allen just as often uses recognizable genres in a nostalgic manner to explore contemporary concerns. Robert Altman just as routinely admits one narrative arch only to buttress another within the walls of his stories. Tim Burton redistributes popular and pulp culture with the same level of commitment to the original while injecting those relics with his own points of emphasis. Quentin Tarantino allows a variety of cultural references to shape any one moment or element of his films. Still, one hardly confuses the films of Allen, Altman, Burton, or Tarantino with the films of the Coens. For all of their similarities, something sets the brothers apart from their contemporaries. That something lies most often in the unique response the Coens’ polysemous structure cues in spectators. Any one element can be understood according to a range of perfectly acceptable and openly suggested structures. A kind of indeterminacy exists, therefore, until the spectator determines the significance of any one element or how any one scene should be organized. The momentary choice a spectator makes on one pass—to arrange the ritual scene as a social problem film, for instance—only holds as long as that same choice is made. The Coens have embedded other structures that are just as productive. Spectators might elect for one of the alternative sensibilities on the very next pass. Viewers can, of course, ignore or remain blissfully unaware of any of the suggested ways of organizing the material and respond to the scene as they would any other. The point, here, is that the Coens release films that are initially rather than finally constructed. The brothers’ films seem especially open to reconstruction.

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In order to assess this claim accurately, one needs to create some distance between the Coens and the Jamesonian brand of postmodernism with which they are customarily associated. Too often, the perception of contemporary filmmakers, the Coens included, is that they are “a bunch of Johnny-comelatelies.” They struggle to find fresh ideas or to realize an artistic vision of their own. In desperation, they turn to the tactics of others. Imaginatively poor and hopelessly fragmented from any meaningful relationship to their own culture, filmmakers produce what Fredric Jameson (1991) refers to as the “nostalgia film (or what the French call la mode retro)” (66). In so doing, would-be artists mutate into what Jameson terms practitioners, mimics compelled to recycle forms no longer connected to any social or historical reality. From Jameson’s view, the trick appeases audiences, who are as alienated and fragmented as the practitioners cannibalizing the past for their delight. Audiences flaccidly delight in “the glossy images of 1930s-ness or 1950s-ness” they perceive on a movie screen (19). They passively watch a film such as George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973) with pleasure as Lucas resuscitates the “lost reality of the Eisenhower era” through a glossy construct of “1950sness” for a 1970s audience (ibid.). The trick simulates some real access to the past for at least as long as the images hold on the screen. Linda Hutcheon (2002) proposes that something else is at work in American Graffiti specifically and the recirculation of the past more generally. For Hutcheon, films such as American Graffiti showcase creative attempts to discuss the past. What Jameson labels “trivial and trivializing” parody, Hutcheon deems important acts of ongoing examination. Some “real” access to the past may, indeed, be lost, but that does not mean that artists and audiences are not accessing the past in meaningful ways. As Hutcheon puts it, “there is no directly and naturally accessible past ‘real’ for us today: we can only know—and construct—the past through its traces, its representations” (109). Hutcheon insists that one should not dismiss “the only kind of history we may be able to acknowledge” as vain nostalgia; instead, one should scrutinize the ways in which artists and audiences “exploit [their] ‘insider’ position in order to begin a subversion from within” (ibid.). The circulation of the past becomes for Hutcheon a trigger for meaningful and active engagement rather than an attempt to placate a hopelessly alienated and fragmented populace. Even though Hutcheon’s perspective has opened new ways to conceive any number of postmodern projects, the Jamesonian perspective continues to dominate Coen scholarship, a point already highlighted in this book’s introduction. Scholars consistently use Jameson’s language to describe essential elements of the brothers’ films if not the whole of their projects. Franich (2013) refers to the duo as “the leading contemporary practitioners of the noir genre.” King (2005) emphasizes the brothers’ “showy stylized” narratives and effects (107). Booker (2007) highlights their interest in “the world

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of film [rather] than the world at large” (143). Rowell (2007) summarizes the Coens’ career as years of “postmodern cribbing” (327). John Belton (2013) concludes that, in the Coens’ hands, “traditional genres and audience expectations about genre serve as the background against which they can perform their surfacy, postmodernist reworkings of conventions” (402). These proposals are certainly not wrong. They are, in fact, quite right. The Coens do craft films that assume a postmodern posture. The point of contention comes in regard to what one sees the Coens doing from that position. The Coens’ postmodern qualities can be better described through a view of postmodernism that emphasizes the discursive qualities of postmodern culture. Jim Collins’ (1989) Uncommon Cultures offers a solid foundation. Collins identifies postmodern culture as “discourse sensitive,” or that it is given to active reconstruction over passive reception. Individuals know that the stories circulating around them and their society shape everything they touch. They know that these stories compete for recognition, legitimacy, and, ultimately, supremacy over other organizing principles. Every formation insists on its “ability to perform certain vital functions for the same social formation” (42). Individuals must isolate the stories it deems most productive. Collins illustrates this point through Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled tradition. Chandler “attempt[s] to deny the importance of literary trappings, yet still insist[s] on demonstrating a thorough knowledge of what must be rejected” (56). Chandler’s detective, Marlowe, refuses to know who Marcel Proust is, itself a rejection of high culture, only to refer moments later to a tone poem. Chandler’s hero disavows high culture in one place only to reference it in another. This, for Collins, is the way of the postmodern text, which always keeps “the highly discursive nature of contemporary culture” on display (64). Collins’ view runs counter to the one Jameson proposes. Collins faults Jameson for attacking the postmodernist’s use of history: “Post-Modernism’s use of past styles is not haphazard activity, but carefully executed juxtaposition for specific effect” (132). Collins continues, “the use of past styles [ . . . ] is motivated not by simple escapism, but by a desire to understand our culture and ourselves as products of previous codings” (133–34). Postmodern texts incorporate the styles of the past into “the discursive and ideological conflicts of the present” as a way to recenter society and its subjects (138–39). This recentering requires an active response from individuals who “must be engaged in processes of selection and arrangement” (emphasis in the original) (144). Collins thus imagines an active subject at the center of a hotly contested competition between readily acceptable discourses. Subjects must decide which messages to hear and how to hear them. The ultimate selection and arrangement belongs to the individual subject. Collins ends his study with the insistence that it is up to scholars to conceive of a strategy for accounting for the active responses his view necessitates.

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Jean Piaget’s cognitive psychology offers one strategy for accounting for the activity of the human subject Collins wants to consider. Piaget insists “the cognitive organism is first and foremost an organizer who interprets experience and, by interpretation shapes it into a structured world” (quoted in Glasersfeld 1982, 1). Individuals are always already able adaptors who construct rather than receive reality (artistic or otherwise). The activity Piaget describes centers on the ability of the individual to build new stimuli around existing ones. Individuals either assimilate new experiences into the structures that were in operation before being exposed to the novelty, or they accommodate the new information or their internal structure to avoid contradiction. Individuals simply dismiss information or experiences that they cannot either assimilate or accommodate. From this view, neither artists nor their audiences are ever given the chance to feel the alienation or fragmentation Jameson describes. Piaget’s constructivism refuses “the paradox of traditional epistemology that [assumes] knowledge may be called ‘true’ only if it can be considered a more or less accurate representation of a world that exists ‘in itself,’ prior to and independent of the knower’s experience of it” (Glasersfeld 1991, 13). The recirculation of recognizable constructs must engage some other sensibility. Michael Riffaterre (1994) reasons that a textual account of reception can provide one meaningful alternative to the passive accounts of human cognition assumed in Jamesonian postmodernism. Riffaterre asserts that human perception differs from computer recognition. Humans are not machines determined to note the appearance of every expression. In Riffaterre’s view, humans understand art textually, that is, within some recognized or reconstituted system of reference. Nostalgia films are no special case. Rather than inviting some sense of “past-ness” meant to placate spectators, the use of already established expressions initiates an intertextual process within the audience. Those who know both the past and present expressions locate referents (or “signals,” to use Riffaterre’s word) at least two times, once in the text in which they appear and a second time in the text from which they have been taken (780). Of greatest importance is what happens to those signals that cannot be located in this way—quite simply, they are dismissed. Only those signals that can be twice located realize any significance. The process Riffaterre describes sounds very much like the one Piaget champions. All subjects—artists and audiences alike—are first and foremost able adaptors. What the Jamesonian postmodernism labels “blank parody,” imitation for the sake of imitation, the constructivist sees as renegotiation. In keeping with Torben Grodal’s (1997) summary of the situation, contemporary filmmakers do not engage in the “sheer repetition of a previous formula”; instead, they prove themselves to be artists intent on re-creating, emphasizing, and isolating various patterns of expression so that “a complicity of fascinations between [the artist] and the spectator” can emerge (229). These

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fascinations open space for dialogue. Every text, even the most eclectic, becomes a reduction of the textual excess that everyday life provides. As such, films offer anyone who witnesses them a chance to participate in a more streamlined discussion of materials they might encounter elsewhere. This is especially the case when the text is explicitly using already established elements. The most recognizable elements in circulation today might be those conveyed through the kinds of cinematic genres the Coens so commonly employ. Genre films deliver a set of textual elements whose significance has been set, roughly speaking. The values at work in a genre may change over time, but the significance of an action or attitude will always be understood within the confines of that genre. Individual moments in a genre film will therefore be more loaded, twice-located/double-coded, when they are engaged as elements working within a genre, within some socially recognized pattern. Interestingly, contemporary genre theorists also insist that the circulation of a genre film engages active responses. Prompted in large part by John Cawelti’s (1971) analysis of the Western, theorists such as Leo Braudy, Frank McConnell, Michael Wood, Will Wright, and Thomas Schatz began to celebrate what Rick Altman (1984) calls the “audiences’ ritual relationship to genre” (9). According to Altman, “by choosing the films it would patronize, the audience revealed its preference and its beliefs, thus inducing Hollywood studios to produce films reflecting [the audiences’] desires” (ibid.). In so doing, the audience gained a kind of authorial control over the films that would be released. Only those films that matched some recognized audience’s approval would find funding. In this way, studios afforded audiences an outlet for adapting their distribution agenda. Altman (1999) amends his earlier semantic/syntactic description of genres to include a pragmatic component. Altman’s expanded approach takes keen interest in “patterns of generic change—generic origins, genre redefinition and genre repurposing”—which can more fully account for the “discursive nature of genres” (208). He places increased attention on “the diverse groups using [a] genre” so that the extent to which genres function “as regulatory schemes facilitating the integration of diverse factions into a single social fabric” might be easily identified (208). By focusing on the discourse a genre invites, genre theorists reset what might be at stake in the play of genre films (if not all films). In keeping with James Naremore’s (1995–1996) evaluation, “individual genre has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discourse—a loose evolving system of arguments and readings” (14). Every film that accepts a generic contract finds an economical way to connect viewers with established ways of seeing and thinking. The neo film might be best understood as an attempt to integrate various views into one shared statement that can, at least for a moment, seem certain. This is just the view I take concerning the Coens’ use of earlier expressions. The

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duo’s invocation of already established (or still emerging, so long as their status as borrowed can be recognized) narratives, genres, or other patterns of thought invites viewers to participate in the ever-evolving system of arguments and readings their texts raise. Even more generally, they can be shown to craft films that use these admitted and recognizable elements as a way to encourage spectators to restructure their initial expression in just the way Piaget claims subjects adapt all reality. The Coens’ practice of using multiple patterns of expression syncs equally well with recent discussions within adaptation studies. Robert Stam (2005) credits the structuralist and poststructuralist proposals of the 1960s and 1970s for finally breaking adaptation scholars from their “profoundly moralistic” discussions of cinematic adaptations of literary texts (3). Stam suggests Julia Kristeva’s insistence on the intertextuality of all texts, Roland Barthes’ refusal to regard literary expression above critical consideration, and Michel Foucault’s dislodgment of the author all encouraged “a more tolerant view of what [had] often been seen as a ‘subliterary’ and ‘parasitic’ genre—the adaption” (9). Thinkers in cultural studies, narratology, reception theory, and all of the schools of thought given to “issues of identity and oppression [ . . . ] multiculturalism, postcoloniality, normative race theory, queer theory, feminist standpoint theory” brought their own challenges to traditional notions of adaption (11). Adaptations began to be viewed as “barometers of the ideological trends circulating during the[ir] moment of production” (45). As such, adaptations gain a new importance and a new agenda. Theorists like Thomas Leitch (2007) and Linda Hutcheon (2013) recognize the newfound significance of the adaptation and push for an agenda that maximizes the contributions toward something other than the indoctrination such expressions could make. Leitch catalogues the variety of responses an adaptation can give a literary text, which ranges from celebrations or adjustments on one end of the spectrum to secondary, tertiary, and quaternary imitation and, finally, allusion on the other (93, 126). His analysis of Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet (1996) establishes the extent to which all ten positions Leitch lists on this continuum can cooperate with each other in one film (celebration; adjustment; neoclassical imitation; revision; colonization; (meta)commentary; analogy; pastiche; secondary, tertiary, and quaternary imitation; and allusion). Leitch claims that one can engage an audience from any of these positions. Adaptations tend to stimulate active responses rather than credulous consumption. Leitch’s categories of adaptation emphasize a range of “loyalties [and disloyalties] to literature” that champion a more robust understanding of literacy. Spectators transform into “active producers of the texts they might otherwise be content to simply read” (18). Hutcheon (2013) addresses the same shift toward creative re-creation by examining the ongoing process of interpretation adaptations given to an

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“overt and defining relationship to prior texts” can inspire (106). Hutcheon posits that authorial intention might be the quickest way to recognize this process. Confident that intentions “are potentially relevant to the audience’s interpretations” and that they are “often recoverable . . . their traces are visible in the text,” Hutcheon scrutinizes the (adapted) text with artistic motivation in mind (107). She reminds her reader that “auteurist film critics, musicologists, and art historians usually see little problem with rooting the authority of meaning and value . . . in artists’ personal desires and creative needs” (108). Hutcheon insists that audiences “include information about the adapter . . . when giving meaning and value to an adaptation as an adaptation” (111). She concludes, “despite being temporally second, [the adaptation] is both an interpretive and a creative act; it is story-telling as both reading and relating” (111). One must look for the “traces of the story teller,” to borrow from Walter Benjamin’s (1968, 91) appraisal, which “cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the vessel” (quoted in Hutcheon 2013, 111). To do otherwise risks arriving at an inadequate understanding of the adaptation itself. Hutcheon’s use of Benjamin both at this moment and throughout her discussions of adaptation carries a two-pronged attack on the Jamesonian postmodern sensibilities she so consistently counters. At the center of that postmodern insistence on alienation, fragmentation, and the anxiety, there sits some version of Benjamin’s [1936] concern over the loss an object suffers when mechanically reproduced. Objects captured on celluloid lose their “unique existence,” their “aura,” their “presence in time and space” (Hutcheon 2013, 793). Benjamin bids that “a plurality of copies” displaces the entity’s “unique existence” (794). Two consequences follow this displacement. To begin with, “the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions . . . photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance” (798). Spectators, in turn, transform into “unconscious” receivers (806). They absorb the work of art rather than be absorbed by it. Benjamin contends that the moving picture turns the “public [into] an examiner, but an absent-minded one” (241). Benjamin (1968) provides an interesting corrective to this concern of an absent audience in his essay “The Task of the Translator” [1923]. Here, Benjamin suggests that translations depend more on the “afterlife” of the original than any life the original might realize. The translation, Benjamin reasons, “marks [the] continued life” of the original (71). As such, the work of translation does not oblige translators to reproduce or replicate the original. Duplication is, after all, quite impossible. The translator must find a way to overwhelm the linguistic restraints of both the source and target language in order to allow the “sense” of the former to emerge more freely from its original site of being. The translator’s work can only achieve this overpowering when the translated and the translation harmonize. The co-presence of the

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two utterances forges a “linguistic flux” wherein the two languages experience a mutual affection for one another. The most meaningful utterance for Benjamin is therefore the one realized “between the lines” of the two languages, in that space where “the creative Word” finally emerges (80, 82). Somewhat counterintuitively, perhaps, Benjamin believes the translation traditionally deemed bad by the narrowest perspectives of translations— those efforts that fail or refuse to strike linguistic equivalence—produces a more productive interlinear relationship than the “good” translation. Benjamin asks, “What can fidelity really do for rendering of meaning?” (78). His answer is, quite simply, very little: “Fidelity in the translation of individual words can almost never fully reproduce the meaning they have in the original . . . sense, in its poetic significance, is not limited to meaning, but derives from the connotations conveyed by the word chosen to express it” (ibid.). The task of the translator is, as mentioned above, to harmonize rather than replicate. Benjamin’s intertextual view of the translation and the translated bears important consequences for those intent on recasting the effect the past has in contemporary film. To return to Riffaterre for a moment, if the past is lost, so, too, is the significance of any resonance associated with the item being circulated. Spectators would simply dismiss such signals. In this way, spectatorship never reveals fragmentation; it counters it. The active readings described by Riffaterre check the paralysis some imagine artists and audiences encounter and replace this idea with the notion of an active and ongoing struggle to establish some sense of textual coherence. Should this coherence not exist in the text, it will exist in the spectator’s understanding of it. If no such coherence emerges even there, spectators will either continue accommodating the expression until some sense of coherence can be established, or they will simply altogether dismiss it. The active response Piaget, Riffaterre, genre, and adaptation theorists (including Benjamin) all imagine justifies a turn, or return, perhaps, to at least two conceptions of constructive art. The first is the constructivist art movement that began most formally with the publication of photos of two metal constructions in a 1924 edition of L’Espirit Nouveau. Briony Fer (1993) describes the first piece by Konstantin Medunetsky, untitled, as an arrangement of five overlapping metal rods at various angles. The second by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, also untitled, stretched a nickel-plated coil at a 45degree angle from an iron post to the piece’s base. Fer offers that the presentation of these pieces garnered the attention it did for at least two reasons. First, these artists made “no attempt to mask the fact that they were [using] modern industrial materials” (88). Second, both pieces freely borrowed industrial elements for artistic purposes. Fer contends that by inserting commonplace or, more properly, other-placed items in an exhibit, these artists

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pushed viewers to consider what they saw as art and what it meant to see such things in such a way. This overt insertion of everyday elements into the world of art altered the perception of both art and reality. More importantly, it adjusted the work one must do when confronted by such art. Recognition was not enough. Audiences had to become a part of the reconstitution, the reworking, of the object in front of them. Artists helped ease viewers into this new kind of work by openly speaking of their pieces as constructions. The items used in the construction became as important as the final object. As Fer explains, “the single most important quality of an art object, as a constructed object, was its faktura, its surface texture, the evidence of its having been made” (100). Drawing on the comments of Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, Fer continues, “faktura, or texture . . . [was] set against ‘recognition’” (122). The impetus for reception became reconstruction rather than recognition. The constructivists believed that an openly constructed piece lifted from its original and more natural environment inherently demanded analysis and dissection. It fought to be taken apart and constituted all over again. This process of “undoing or dismantling” was, therefore, placed at the “heart of the idea of construction” and was thought to guide the viewing process. One could, of course, just dismiss these borrowed objects as art in the way some did. These acts of imitation, to return to a version of Benjamin’s argument in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) left unchecked by Benjamin’s own comments on translation, divest the reproduced of its authenticity, or its “aura” (Benjamin 1968, 221). The items that find their way to the screen seem especially subject to this loss. Any use of these imperfectly replicated items would signal an artistic defeat. The naturally occurring West Texas plains in Blood Simple (1984) or No Country for Old Men (2007) would become unnatural the moment they are placed on the screen. The Coens’ choice to set the action of The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) in the same setting as Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) would refuse the latter film an authentic setting. Or so the story goes. A return to the hopes that guided the constructivist artist in the 1920s vis-à-vis Collins’ discursive account of postmodern culture offers some correction to this view. The constructivist artists hoped for more than recognition of the items they used; they wanted their audience to ascribe their objects with some new authority. Those that recognized their items belonged in another place were particularly able to become part of the reconstruction the openly constructed art meant to cue. The Coens can be shown to follow a similar process. The brothers, too, construct films that move with some hope that they will be reconstructed. The overly determined indeterminacy that emerges from the convergence of several equally compelling patterns can be shown to exist across the whole of a film. Some patterns even stretch across several films, a point discussed in

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chapters 7 and 8. The most pressing point here is a way to conceive of the ongoing process of reconstruction this convergence necessitates in the viewer. A discussion of the cognitive approach to film analysis found in David Bordwell (1985; 1989) and Kristin Thompson (1981; 1988) provides just that. Drawing on a tradition of reading advanced by the Russian Formalists, Bordwell and Thompson both ground their proposals in the belief that the meaning of a narrative film arises from the active and imaginative work of the spectator. Both reject the communications model of art that understands art as a discernable message conveyed to receivers from senders through media. Audiences are more active than the communicative concept normally allows. Thompson (1988) submits that viewers “actively seek cues in the work and respond to them with viewing skills acquired through everyday experience of other artworks and everyday life” (10). Cues or devices, as they are later called, can be understood as “any single element or structure that plays a role in the artwork—a camera movement, a frame story, a repeated word, a costume, a theme, and so on” (15). Such elements stimulate important interactions “between the work’s structure and the spectator’s activity” (16). Bordwell and Thompson devote most of their attention both individually and collectively to a description of the interactive work the contest narrative film creates between plot and story. Plot accounts for “everything visibly and audibly present in the film,” which may include “story events that are directly depicted [and] material that is extraneous to the story” (Bordwell and Thompson, 2010, 80). The opening to O Brother offers a meaningful illustration of plot: a title card delivers the opening quote; men are heard singing; the camera passes over an open field before settling on the prison gang turned choir shown swinging hammers; the scene dissolves; a new song begins; images and additional title cards alternate. The whole accounts for the plot. Some of this directly delivers the story of the film. O Brother is a story of three prisoners, even if their story begins before their captivity. Still other parts are more extraneous. The title cards, for instance, are part of the plot, and these elements do impact how one sees the story, but they do not deliver the story per se. The story, in fact, is not delivered at all. It is presented and, later, arranged by the spectator based on the “viewer’s imaginary construction of all the events in the narrative” (493). Bordwell (1985) makes explicit the way in which this view of spectatorial activity relies on cognitive psychology’s insistence that art, like all other reality, is “necessarily incomplete, needing to be unified and fleshed out by the active participation of the perceiver” (32). Art may offer spectators significant features and a distinctive form that both motivates and measures the piece itself, but these features never “position” the spectator; rather, the “film cues the spectator to execute a definable variety of operations” (29). Form

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therefore not only activates a process, but it sets the parameters of that process. Bordwell illustrates this process through Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). The film captures both the basic and more complex aspects of the viewing experience Bordwell wants to describe: “The chairbound photographer watching without being seen; the windows across the way like movie screens; the apparent freedom from consequences yielded by the viewer’s distant vantage point” all serve as an ideal representation of the more “atomistic” aspects of “a perspectival theory of narration” (40). The film just as well “lays bare” the more nuanced operations of film cognition (ibid.). The characters perform the work typically reserved for spectators— they anticipate certain actions, they filter some details while accepting others, they form opinions about the ordeals they construe, and they see each other’s goals as their own. All of this is found in the way Lisa (Grace Kelly) and Stella (Thelma Ritter) determine to solve the mystery Jeff (Jimmy Stewart) creates for them. His goals become their goals. Bordwell boasts that the process adopted to solve the mystery further illustrates efforts normally reserved for the spectator. Jeff finds himself “in a state of tuned anticipation” when the film begins (1985, 41). His self-admitted boredom threatens to overwhelm him. He responds by deciding that his neighbor, Mr. Thorwald (Raymond Burr), has killed Mrs. Thorwald. Bordwell claims that Jeff’s actions closely approximate the hypothesis-proposing process spectators follow while in the midst of a film. In this case, both character and spectator construct a chain of events that yield a sense of coherence to otherwise random bits of data. The particular chain of events each settles on depends on the beliefs, experiences, and problem-solving potential each brings to the experience they encounter—first Jeff and then the other characters. Bordwell (1985) ultimately argues that Rear Window, like every other film, uses its features, form, and style in a way that “trains its spectator”: By the last scenes of Rear Window we have honed our story-construction schemata to expect a climax. We are prepared to slot actions into a narrow “outcome” format. We have been explicitly encouraged to construct certain hypotheses, accepting some and rejecting others. We have been trained to take purely visual cues as a sign of narrative situation. [ . . . ] We are prepared to justify events and motifs compositionally, realistically, and especially transtextually. We know that retardation will be employed to delay satisfaction of our expectations. Now, in a scene of continuous tension, the film makes maximal use of all the lessons it has taught. (45)

Spectators must determine the details, but the film has helped them know which details to consider and how to do so. The film is criterially prefocused in important ways.

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Noel Carroll (2003) contends that fiction films regularly criterially prefocus spectatorial emotions in ways that life rarely does. Whereas life distributes what Carroll calls “a massive array of unstructured stimuli” that those who perceive them ultimately organize, fiction films dispense “situations [that] have already been structured for us by filmmakers” (67, 68). Stylistic choices with “camera position and composition, editing, lighting, the use of color, and, of course, acting and the very structures of the script or narrative” all give shape to what would otherwise be a mass array of stimuli (68). When successful, these choices create particular emotional responses in spectators. Carroll offers as an example the initial anger most viewers feel toward “the father in Shine (1996) when he refuses to allow his son to accept various scholarships” (68). This emotional reaction is not in the audience as much as it is on the screen. Spectators come to experience the emotions the arrangement of stylistic choices in the film meant for them to feel. Spectators will often experience the emotional reaction a well-coordinated set of elements mean to manufacture. Such coordination will also affect spectatorial attention. Spectators become “glued to those features of the object of the emotion that are appropriate to the emotional state we are in [ . . . ] a criterially prefocused film text gives rise, in the right circumstances, to emotive focus in the audience” (69). By way of example, Carroll notes the “pro-attitude in the audience toward the crew of the battle cruiser” in Battleship Potemkin (1925), the audience’s preference for the sheriff in High Noon (1952), and the unmet desire for Eddie (Henry Fonda) to escape in You Only Live Once (1937) as examples (70–71). In each case, the filmmakers construct their story so as to trigger certain emotional responses and to focus spectatorial attention. The Coens criterially prefocus their films for something more than an emotional response. They offer audiences more than a final scene that makes maximal use of all that their film has prepared them to experience. The Coens criterially prefocus their films to trigger a process rather than a product. They train their audiences to take up the work they initially, rather than authoritatively, perform. The brothers accomplish both feats by loading their films with not one but several plots. The patterns they employ stretch across large parts if not the entirety of their films. The polysemy found at the opening O Brother or the ritual scene in that same film do not disappear as quickly as they appear. More typically, they stretch across the whole of a film. The Coens permit spectators to watch complex films that can be arranged in multiple ways. In this way, the films the Coens release seem especially apropos within the discursive society Collins describes. Individuals within such a society routinely experience the contest of messages the Coens arrange. In keeping with Carroll’s distinction between life and art, though, the Coens’ projections are prefocused in a way the everyday messages cannot be. Spectators that turn to the films the Coens construct gain

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some relief, if not practice, performing the very acts of reconstruction, recentering, their everyday existence demands. The experience can, when successful, correct any perception problems that might otherwise arise.

Chapter Two

“You Don’t Want to Be Tried and Found Wantin’” Triggering the Ongoing Adaptation of The Ladykillers

The Coens open their first admitted adaptation, The Ladykillers (2004), with a scene that could address complaints about the duo’s loose play with obscure sources as much as it establishes the drama that is about to begin. The elderly Mrs. Munson (Irma P. Hall) enters her sheriff’s office to file a complaint against a local boy who has been playing the latest “hippity-hop” music too “loud.” Her complaint goes beyond volume, though. She is most especially concerned with the language in the songs: “You know what they call colored folks in them songs,” she queries before providing the answer with all the dissatisfaction she can muster, “Niggaz.” The Coens hold the shot long enough after her reveal to give the audience time to process the moral certainty behind the pronouncement. She begs her sheriff to intercede, to “extend that helpin’ hand.” She cautions the lawman, “You don’t want to be tried and found wantin’.” She even repeats this warning a second time, albeit in a slightly altered version—“You’ve been tried and found wantin’,” which actually sounds more apocalyptic than prophetic, as though the time for change has passed. Mrs. Munson’s proclamation might fit the overly moralistic climate of adaption studies as well as it does her sleepy town. Robert Stam (2005) suggests audiences, reviewers, and critics alike have tended to use language that was “profoundly moralistic” when discussing films taken from literary sources. Terms like “‘infidelity,’ ‘betrayal,’ ‘deformation,’ ‘violation,’ ‘bastardization,’ ‘vulgarization,’ and ‘desecration’ proliferate . . . [the] . . . dis17

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course” and spot the conversation (3). Thomas Leitch (2007) illustrates Stam’s point when discussing Mira Nair’s (2004) film adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair (1847–1848). Leitch notes the manner in which Nair’s film was routinely charged with failing to realize the novel. Viewers opposed the liberties Nair took with Thackeray’s characters, conclusion, and intentions. In so doing, they ignored, in Leitch’s judgment, “fifty years of adaptation theory” (2). Leitch complains against the assumption that the value of a film should depend on its ability to realize the novel’s intention. This insistence ignores the merit an adaptation might realize on its own right. It leaves any artistry that responds to an antecedent desperately beholden to that ancestor. The latter is almost always “tried and found wantin’.” Leitch claims the assertion that an adaptation must remain faithful to its source depends as much on a “market-place of competing models” as it does anything artistic (2007, 20). Brands sell, and accepted pieces of literature are billed as brands as often as they can be. Shakespeare and Dickens sell, in part, because they are Shakespeare and Dickens. Financiers might fund a film because it is based on one of these two recognizable brands. Audiences might attend a screening of such a film for the very same reason. Both realities turn subsequent discussions about the film toward the “original” author. Leitch postulates the only way to escape this turn is for someone involved with the project to enjoy a “brand name with even greater commercial and critical cachet” than the original (6). The established bias toward literature makes the feat nearly impossible. Only a handful of filmmakers have been able to achieve the coup. Leitch names Hitchcock as one who could, and then only in so many cases. Literature’s accepted authority over all things popular— film included—makes it unlikely that a film brand will ever trump a literary one, which only reinvigorates the comparative claims adaptationists since George Bluestone (1957) have been protesting. More recently, adaptation theorists like Stam, Leitch, and others have pushed those interested in adaptation studies to have a different conversation, one that replaces the belief that “source texts cannot be rewritten” with the conviction that “source texts must be rewritten; we cannot help but rewriting them” (Leitch 2007, 16). This book accepts this proposal. One cannot fully appreciate the artistry of the Coens without accepting the idea and, just as importantly, the spectatorial work this shift assigns. This chapter delves into both issues and does so in a couple of ways. To begin with, it looks at the notion of irreverence as it is described and illustrated in the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. The chapter contends that although more than one way exists to get at what Borges champions, his views have particular relevance to the Coens, who labor along the same periphery Borges toiled. Borges’ ideas also contribute a particular point of emphasis to the trend Emma French (2006) reports concerning the reception of Shakespearean adaptations in the late

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twentieth century. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the Coens’ blend of veneration and irreverence in what, in many ways, remains their most straightforward adaptation, Ladykillers. The operative opinion throughout the chapter is that the Coens adopt the stance toward the source they adopt and the present-day climate they invent to encourage the audience to negotiate rather than merely receive the text they offer. Audiences of all sorts—the viewing public, reviewers, critics, and scholars—talk as though there are definite rules governing how to realize an adaptation. Comments begin with some assessment of the update against the original. They bemoan or celebrate the failures or feats of the latter when compared against the former. The assumption is palpable enough, namely, that a film ought to capture the essence of its source text if it wants to be a “good film.” A survey of the reactions reviewers gave two of the Coens’ more admitted adaptations, No Country for Old Men (2007) and Ladykillers, illustrates as much. Reviewers of the Cormac McCarthy novel turned Coen feature were agush over the way in which the filmmaking duo was able to bring McCarthy’s novel to the screen. A. O. Scott (2007), for instance, praises “how well matched their methods turn out to be with the novelist’s.” Scott claims that the Coens’ camera finds a word-perfect way “to disclose what the book describes.” James Berardinelli (2007) agrees. He declares that the Coens have done what many doubted could be done by providing the world “a coherent and reasonably faithful adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel.” Roger Ebert (2007) also celebrates the way in which so much of the dialogue in the film comes “out of McCarthy.” The reviewers would have one believe that the Coens create a great movie largely because they were filming a great book. Ladykillers did not receive the same positive reception, and, not surprisingly, part of the complaint against the film was its inability to achieve the artistry of Alexander Mackendrick’s original. A. O. Scott (2004) wonders why anyone would try to match the chemistry of the original actors. “It would be hard,” Scott writes, “for any cast to measure up to the one that included Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers.” The implication is that the Coens would have done well to leave the original alone. Roger Ebert (2004) further underscores this sentiment. Ebert celebrates the humor in Mackendrick’s film, which was wonderfully “self-effacing”; the humor grows “out of the contrast between nefarious schemes and low-key, almost apologetic behavior.” The Coens fail to match Mackendrick, Ebert claims, because they produce a film that is more like “a comedian who wears funny hats” in a desperate attempt to be noticed. Ebert notices the Coens’ film, but not with much to celebrate in it. James Berardinelli (2004) offers a more positive review of the Coens’ Ladykillers than his colleagues, but he does so while also admitting less of a desire to see a true update. Berardinelli writes that the Coens follow the plot

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of Mackendrick’s original, even though “many of the nuances, not to mention the funniest jokes, are pure Joel & Ethan Coen.” Berardinelli does not say more about this difference. It was enough simply to register it. The central point to be made here is not the particulars of any one review; rather, it is to show the extent to which every reviewer returns to the original, and not as a simple point of departure. Even when the reviewers do not agree on the quality of the film, they do agree that an adaptation needs to be set against its original. Those working under the assumption that an adaptation demands an evaluative comparison between source texts and the adaptation would seem to be at a loss for what to do with differences between the one and the other rather than to quantify the number of similarities or misses. Some other strategy is remarkably important, however, especially when analyzing the films of the Coens. Their entire oeuvre could be regarded as one form of adaptation or another. Not every film is, to borrow Jack Boozer’s (2008) phraseology, a “literal or close reading” or even a film exhibiting a “general correspondence” to some source. Thus every film can be shown to engage in some sort of “distant referencing,” even if only in the minds of the audience, who are free to associate any moment from one film with any other moment anywhere else. A full evaluation of the Coens demands that this idea be firmly in place because the Coens seem particularly given to constructing films that encourage mental wandering of this sort, and this is the case even when they present their effort as straightforward adaptation. A look at the writings by Borges on translation provides one of the surest foundations for how to account for this process. Sergio Waisman (2005) explains that Borges grounded his writings and translation efforts in the mantra “there are no ‘definitive texts,’ only drafts and versions” (43). Literature, Borges would contend, is always already a “series of multiply reflected versions, a textual hall of mirrors in which it is impossible to differentiate the original being reflected from its many reflections” (52). This is certainly the case when a text is translated from one language to another (enter here when a text is adapted from one context). Borges contends that it is also the case when a text is read in the same language. Using Borges’ comments in his 1926 essay “Las dos maneras de traducer,” Waisman reminds readers that Borges insists that the same temporal and spatial displacements that exist when a text is shifted from one language to another exist when a text is read by two readers of the same language: “A Chilean might read Evaristo Carriego (the minor Argentine poet)” differently than Borges would, “although both would be reading him in Spanish” (45). Such is the nature of language. Words have “different values for different readers, even if readers speak the same language” (45–46). Any attempt at a literal translation fails to account for these inescapable differences.

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Translation of a text from one language to another only exaggerates the challenges Borges describes. If two speakers of the same language can render different senses of the same words, then one has even less hope of capturing the one sense of a word in one language into the appropriate sense of that same word in another. This sort of correlation does not exist. For this reason, Borges boasts that interlingual translation has to be rejected. A broader sense of translation should be practiced, one that treats the process as “a linguistic, literary, and cultural process of transformation, as a rereading, recontextualizing, and re-writing of all or part of one or more pre-texts” (Waisman 2005, 20). Such a view of translation demands a reappraisal of the relationship between a source text and a translation. Rather than an “inferior [or] secondary” copy of the original, the translation becomes, in Borges’ estimation, a site of negotiation (21). Gone is the “definitive text” that needs to be safely brought from one language to another; in its place stands the translation and all of its “creative infidelities” (23). These infidelities become the birthplace of an ongoing creative process that begins with the translator, but it also extends to the reader who knows both texts. The work of translation thus becomes the work of the reader. Both translator and reader must utilize “the insightful sensibilities of the active translator” (Waisman 2005, 56). Both must participate in the creative re-creation of the text. This is especially the case for artists (or readers) like Borges or his compatriots in South America who were working along the periphery, beyond the dominant discourse. Their encounter with the texts of the West not only introduces the West to their audience, but just as importantly provides these artists and their readers a space for negotiation within that discourse. Borges’ ideas bring several attributes of the Coens and their work into focus. First of all, it can remind critics not to gloss the unusual dual citizenship the Coens enjoy as Hollywood and independent filmmakers. The Coens’ situation is not unlike Borges’, who existed at once in and outside the strictures of Western literature. It was from this dual place that his ideas and artistic expressions took shape. The Coens realize their visions in a similar milieu. They are not quite independent filmmakers, but neither are they at the center of Hollywood. Their films too often secure the talents of in-demand actors for them to be truly independent. Billy Bob Thornton was riding some measure of popular success when he was cast to play the lead in The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones were emerging as bona fide stars when they were cast in Intolerable Cruelty (2003). The choice to place Tom Hanks at the center of Ladykillers meant that the Coens were casting one of the most recognizable and accomplished actors in this generation of leading men. A similar statement could be made of Brad Pitt in Burn after Reading (2008) and Matt Damon and Jeff Bridges in True Grit (2010). The prominence of all three is indisputable and signals something other than the traditional independent filmmaker.

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So, too, does the fact that the Coens often enjoy the wide distribution they do. There are certainly films that never play to wide audiences—films such as A Serious Man (2009), which, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com, never played in more than 262 theaters at any one time, or Man Who Wasn’t There or The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), which played at their height in no more than 259 or 126 theaters respectively—but such is not normally the case, and certainly not recently. True Grit played in as many as 3,464 theaters at its widest release. Burn after Reading played in 2,657. Ladykillers filled 1,589 at its height, and Intolerable Cruelty was in as many as 2,570 theaters at one time. This is not the distribution treatment independent filmmakers receive. Those like the Coens who receive such treatment cannot be viewed as independent filmmakers in the strictest sense. Were the status of the Coens measured by their ability to secure some of the top talent in Hollywood or by their treatment by the distributors, one could set the duo within mainstream Hollywood. But this account is only one side of the Coens’ reality. Not quite independent filmmakers in the truest sense, the Coens have still refused the trappings normally associated with wholesale Hollywood productions. They typically work with small budgets. They tend to utilize the talents of their own acting troupe. They maintain total control of their scripts, even down to the editing of their film’s final form. The Coens have operated in this manner, in part, because there is something about a Coen brothers film that does not resonate across a wide audience, or so it would seem. Their one attempt at a wider acceptance, Hudsucker Proxy—produced by Hollywood franchise-builder Joel Silver while in the midst of his Lethal Weapon and Die Hard successes—was a commercial flop. The film failed to generate even one-tenth of its production budget. The experience led some, such as R. Barton Palmer (2004), to conclude that “unlike other independent filmmakers such as Steven Soderbergh and David Cronenberg, [the Coens] were not suited, and might never be, to conceiving big-budget films aimed at a mass audience” (11). They were, in other words, not “Hollywood,” which makes the more recent commercial success of films like True Grit all the more surprising. The Coens occupy an interesting place along the periphery of Hollywood and independent filmmaking that parallels the position Borges realized as Western/Non-Western. Not surprisingly, one also finds a similar attitude toward the established discourses between the Coens and Borges. The filmmaking duo appears to share Borges’ attitude toward source texts and his assumptions of what a “translation” ought to do. In terms of their attitude toward source texts, the Coens routinely shape their films around admitted or at least recognized sources. Miller’s Crossing (1990), for instance, freely borrows from Dashiell Hammett’s novels The Glass Key (1931) and Red Harvest (1929). Barton Fink (1991) seems indebted to Clifford Odets’ The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets. Hudsucker Proxy re-

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creates large chunks of Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). Still other films re-create scenes that are clearly reminiscent of famous sequences. As Erica Rowell (2007) notes, the opening shot of Blood Simple (1984) is clearly reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962) (My Life to Live). In none of these cases, though, is the “translation” literal. In the case of the Coens’ use of Godard’s opening in Blood Simple, important differences exist. Following Rowell, we see that both scenes capture in an unedited long take the backs of a couple talking. In the Coens’ film, though, gone is the full-length mirror that orients the actors and the audience in their present locale. In its place is a rain-soaked windshield that barely serves its purpose of letting the driver see the road. Rowell suggests that the Coens’ opening works in the same way as Godard’s, namely, as a way to “subvert tradition and expectations” (10). Set within Borges’ ideas, though, the differences between a mirror and a rain-soaked windshield prove more meaningful than do the similarities (10). The Coens’ reference to a source text signals the possibility for an alternative tradition. Their decision to defy the source text even in small ways not only rejects the notion of the definitive text, but also opens the very site of negotiation Borges’ irreverent translations opens. The viewer gains a reason to watch the film with “the insightful sensibilities of the active translator” that Borges describes. The whole process begins with some recognition of a text that is one part veneration and one part irreverence. The Coens are not alone in their willingness to adopt this attitude toward a source text. Interestingly, this balance between veneration and irreverence has been identified as a key component of the most successful Shakespearean adaptations in the last decade of the twentieth century. A discussion of this trend shows the ways in which the Coens’ career has followed the more trendy movements of their epoch. In writing on the success or failure of Shakespearean adaptations in the 1990s, French (2006) claims that the films that met the greatest success were those that were able to properly navigate “the codependent and symbiotic . . . binary of veneration and irreverence” that Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989) and Much Ado About Nothing (1993) navigated (25). Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet (1996) was one such example. Those that failed to tether both ends of this spectrum—such as Michael Hoffman’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999)—suffered for it. The trick, French reasons, is to admit a debt to Shakespeare while still locating the film in the epoch of the cinematic audience. The more successful Shakespearean adaptations marketed themselves as Shakespeare’s own and adhered to the original storyline and language, but they also filled it with contemporary stylistic elements that conveyed a break from traditional renderings of Shakespeare. Luhrmann’s film becomes the standard for such practice. The music and editing in the film is vintage twenty-first century, but the language is not. The result, in French’s estima-

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tion, is a film that belongs equally well to Shakespeare and to the audience watching “his” film. Such an arrangement affords unexpected freedoms for both artist and audience. In terms of the audience, French (2006) explains that irreverence opens a space for audiences to negotiate various hegemonic relationships. French reasons that the very suggestion of something other than veneration “provides space for . . . the audience . . . to make its own active reading” (19). Irreverence, in other words, serves as a means to negotiate the messages its culture circulates, and to do so in just the way the artists themselves are doing in their film. Those such as Branagh who were able to strike the balance between veneration and irreverence with some consistency were awarded an auteurlike status that gave Branagh the opportunity to demonstrate in later films an “attitude of defiance to both Hollywood conditions of cultural production and the reverence/irreverence relationship” (89). Branagh expressed both in his release of Hamlet (1996). Following French (2006), we can see that the film’s length, which originally ran just over four hours, more than double the industry norm, and its marketing both defied Hollywood conditions of cultural production. The marketing downplayed “the postmodern qualities” of the film and chose, instead, to emphasize its being “the full text on screen for the first time” (89–90). The hope was that the film would be deemed “an event,” but it was not. The film generated only “4.42 million dollars at the US domestic box office,” which was not even 25 percent of its $18 million budget (87). The choice to emphasize veneration without some semblance of irreverence seemingly thwarted the film. Audiences expected some veneration of Shakespeare, but they also anticipated some space to participate in the rewriting of his text. Branagh’s failure to offer both responses doomed his film financially. The Coens have long satisfied audiences expecting veneration and irreverence. They have achieved their auteur-like status in ways not unlike those traveled by Branagh. The Coens exhibit the same willingness to construct their films within the veneration/irreverence binary prominent in Branagh’s early films. Such is the case even in the Coens’ early films, which borrowed liberally from sources, even though those sources were never explicitly admitted. Blood Simple, for instance, bore a blatant commitment to James M. Cain, as Miller’s Crossing did to Dashiell Hammett, Hudsucker Proxy did to Frank Capra, or O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) did to Preston Sturges. The fact that O Brother utilized Sturges as it did is particularly interesting if only because the Coens do claim to base that release on Homer’s Odyssey. The fact that they inject another narrative thread into the mix shows that the Coens are not following the script of the veneration/irreverence script in the way Branagh does in Hamlet. The Coens ensure the audience is at once set within and apart from their admitted source text.

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Although the films the Coens release can be shown both to venerate and to break from their source texts, these breaks tend to go beyond the “exemplary postmodern Anglo-American films . . . that . . . ‘pick and mix’ historical signifiers and poach self-self-consciously from earlier cinematic texts” (French 2006, 90). The brothers sustain their use of historical signifiers, cinematic texts, and cultural references for much too much of the film to work in the way Rowell regards postmodern instances of this practice. One does well to use both Borges and French as a way to frame what the Coens are doing. Without both, one risks missing the unique way in which the Coens operate, at once on the fringes of the two camps (Hollywood and independent film) available to contemporary artists, and the unique opportunity they permit their audience to participate in the ongoing creation of the film before them. A discussion of the Coens’ Ladykillers explores both benefits. One can find the practice of veneration and irreverence described above in virtually every Coen brothers release, but perhaps never more clearly than in Ladykillers. This film becomes especially worth examining if only because it does what few Coen brothers releases do: it sticks to one story. In keeping with Paul Coughlin’s (2003) insightful account of the Coens’ films, the filmmaking duo tends to “negotiate the issue of fidelity by furnishing adaptations that reject a linear relationship to one model or source text.” As such, noting moments of irreverence or veneration can be tricky. Any moment of perceived irreverence toward one text might be veneration to some other. The untangling of the stories being negotiated can be endless. The Coens’ Ladykillers spares spectators this trouble. The adapted film sticks so closely to the original that one might consider it more of a translation than an adaptation. The changes, one could contend, arise out of the bringing an English film from the 1950s to twenty-first-century America, more than anything else. The original, like the adaptation after it, tells the story of a group of criminals who identify an elderly widow, Mrs. Wilberforce (Katie Johnson), as an unwitting accomplice in a robbery and her home as a safe house and point of escape. The well-planned robbery comes off. The rest does not. The men get in the way of themselves, blow their cover as sophisticated musicians, and then must try to rid themselves of their host, who is the one person who can expose them. The masterminds, of course, fail at their attempts to murder Mrs. Wilberforce. One thing goes wrong after another, and one by one the men end up dying themselves. By the film’s end, there is only Mrs. Wilberforce and the men’s stolen loot. Mrs. Wilberforce tries to rid herself of the money by telling the police what has happened, but the officers do not believe the story she weaves, and they suggest Mrs. Wilberforce just keep the money. Mrs. Wilberforce leaves the station a bit befuddled, but

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compliant, and even uses her newfound wealth to satisfy her desire to purchase an umbrella she has been eyeing. Anyone familiar with the Coens’ update of Mackendrick’s film would at once recognize the Coens’ reliance on their predecessor. The plot undergoes very few changes, and the ones that do exist seem necessary. One cannot, after all, simply lift a film set in England to the American South without some modifications. Charles Barr (1999) shows the impossibility of a simple transplantation in his book Ealing Studios, which discusses the ways in which the original is very much postwar England. Barr posits that the entire film can be read as “a vision, or a fable, of England”—the antiquated “village” quality of the little street on which Mrs. Wilberforce lives; the inclusion of the St. Pancras train station, itself “a monument of Victorian Gothic”; the references to “the death of the old Queen”; the fact that the “favorite parrot is named General Gordon”; each of these fleeting references point the viewer to a world quickly fading into the history books (170–71). The references to England continue even if they are made more current with the introduction of the gang. Barr reads Professor Marcus and his men’s intrusion into the “portrait of a Victorian civilization lingering on, tottering, into the postwar world” as a fairly open parody of “the post-war Labour government” attack on the ‘House’” (171). The men “gratify,” Barr reasons, “the conservative incumbent by their civilized behavior (that nice music), and decide to use at least the façade of respectability for their radical programme of redistributing the wealth” (171). Barr contends that those in the original or even the early audience would surely recognize the “Conservatives taking over power in 1951, just as the austerity years come to an end” (171–72). A story that could happen anywhere, then, becomes the story of a very particular period of English history. As appealing as the story is to future filmmakers—a story that bears all of the timelessness and universality of a medieval morality play—the dressings of that story cannot be lifted from one place and set in another if Barr’s reading has any merit. The story must be translated in some way. The Coens seem to have recognized this necessity. They keep the skeleton of William Rose’s Oscar-winning screenplay, but not its flesh. Their Ladykillers follows the story of the original point for point. A gang of five infiltrates an elderly woman’s house to pull off a robbery; they succeed in the removal of the money, but not in the getaway; their host finds them out and threatens to hand them over to the police; the men determine to kill their saboteur only to meet their own demise; the resilient lady offers to return the money to the police, but they do not believe her story any more than the English bluebottles believed Mrs. Wilberforce. The lone survivor ends up with the spoils of the crime. A simple plot summary suggests a pretty straight adaptation; an actual viewing of the film suggests something else.

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The Coens transplant the action of the film from a cul-de-sac in London to Saucier, Mississippi. They replace the diminutive Mrs. Wilberforce with the more cantankerous Marva Munson. The two heroines share a commitment to their environment; it is just that the two environments are very different. Mrs. Wilberforce was the epitome of Victorian England. Mrs. Munson embodies just about every stereotype of the religious black woman in the Deep South. For these two reasons, if for none other, the two leading ladies bear obvious differences. The gang members also change. Although both the original and remake use the gang as a way to create a social mix—Barr notes “a mix of academic (Alec Guinness), ex-officer (Cecil Parker), manual worker (Danny Green), naïve youth (Peter Sellers), and hard-liner (Herbert Lom)”—the mix devised by the Coens exchanges subtleties for exaggerated extremes. Professor Dorr (Tom Hanks) becomes the most antiquated form of academic one can imagine. He is as much a character in a Faulkner novel as he is anything else. The manual worker becomes an ideological demolition expert (J. K. Simmons). The hard-liner mutates into a chain-smoking proprietor of a donut shop (Tzi Ma). The naïve youth becomes the densest of jocks (Ryan Hurst). The Coens reconstitute the ex-officer into the most over-the-top personification of a young adult raised on rap videos (Marlon Wayans). Each change could be little more than the extension of the decision to shift the action from England to America. By approaching these changes from the notion of irreverence noted above, they must be examined nonetheless to see if they do not invite some reflection over the hegemonic concerns shaping the Coens’ film. For the spectator who knows both Ladykillers, the balance between veneration and irreverence can open some space for the artist and audience to negotiate the hegemonic structures being staged in the film and suffered in the audience. One need not know the original, but knowing both can pay dividends. In terms of artist, the Coens remind audiences that there are alternative traditions to American filmmaking other than the ones provided by Hollywood. One might contend that the Coens’ use of one of the dark comedies produced after World War II by Ealing Studios is in some way to acknowledge a source of films that the Coens have long been mining. Any one of the films in that tradition—Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Passport to Pimlico (1949), or The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)—exhibit many of the same traits that seemingly guide the Coens. Those familiar with this set of films would not be surprised to see the Coens make use of them. Nor would those familiar with the Coens’ canon be surprised that they let a British film influence their own. Following Rowell, we note that the brothers had already made extensive use of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) in Miller’s Crossing. Both films construct a narrative where one of the principal characters is believed dead. In both cases, this belief is proved false. Bernie remains after Tom is sup-

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posed to have offed him; Harry Lime (Orson Welles) appears even after his friend, Holly (Joseph Cotton), and the audience with him, attends the “dead man’s” funeral. The parallels continue when both Bernie and Harry are revealed to be “mercenary snakes” (99). The two films end in similar fashion. Both have the spurned “lover” ignoring the central character; Verna passes Tom without a word in just the way Harry’s girlfriend, Anna (Alida Valli), passes Holly. The point is that the Coens have before turned to films created in Britain, that is, beyond Hollywood. The move underscores the artist’s freedom to look beyond the dominant discourse, which, itself, becomes a sort of irreverence. There is a most interesting result of looking at the Coens’ Ladykillers through the logic of the binary of veneration/irreverence that exists for the audience, though, and especially the audience aware of Mackendrick’s Ladykillers. The differences between the Coens’ film and Mackendrick’s become opportunities for negotiation of the hegemonic power structures behind them. Two such discussions seem especially important to the film the Coens construct. The first revolves around Marva Munson’s blind commitment to religion. In truth, the film’s interest in this discussion is suggested even before Mrs. Munson appears on screen. The first shot of the film is of “the heavens,” so to speak. White clouds with glimpses of light are set against a blue sky. The image would be as appropriate as a backdrop for a greeting card conveying a religious sentiment as it is for this opening shot of this film. The playing of “Come, Let Us Go Back to God” only reinforces the religious reading, as does the font used to introduce the names of the players, as does a cut to an overhead shot that captures the bridge and river below it that will play such an integral part in the film. The opening ends with a shot of a trash heap set some distance from the bridge in the middle of the river, which suggests some significance to a reading that would contrast heaven and earth. The film continues to invite a religious reading when the action begins, and Mrs. Munson registers her complaint against a neighborhood boy’s music. Her whole speech is delivered with a presumed religious authority that will continue to mark her actions and words throughout the film. The Coens bring this presumed authority to the surface of the film most explicitly during Mrs. Munson’s protest of the use of the word “nigger” in songs “2,000 years after Jesus, 30 years after Martin Luther King, [and in] the age of Montel.” The same sentiment continues when Mrs. Munson asks the sheriff to “extend a helpin’ hand to the boy” so that he is not found “wantin’” on the Day of Judgment. The end of her speech proves most interesting: “It’s like the Apostle John says, ‘behold there is a stranger in our midst come to destroy us.’” The words sound like something out of the Bible, but they are not. The statement is more a sentiment found across the Judeo-Christian Bible than it is a statement found in John or in any one place. This misquotation of scripture becomes a clear sign that the Coens are interested in representing a

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specific kind of religious sensibility, namely, one bound in consensus as much as it is accuracy. Such a sensibility gets to the heart of the constructivist sensibility the Coens occasion and begins to account for the way one watches a Coen brothers film. There must be some source and some departure from it. The Coens offer a second source and departure through Mrs. Munson’s devotion to Bob Jones University. When learning that her unexpected visitor is a professor, she asks whether or not he has ever studied at the Bible school. She proudly shares with Professor Dorr that she sends Bob Jones University “five dollars every month” and is on their mailing list. The Coens even capture Mrs. Munson sitting at her kitchen table after the first church service making out one of her monthly checks for “Five Dollars and No Cents.” The “no cents” is particularly appropriate given the fact that Bob Jones University had a long history of racism. Black students were not able to attend the school until the 1970s, and rules against interracial dating were in place into the twenty-first century. Despite this history, Mrs. Munson declares the school “the finest [Bible school] in the country,” and even gives a large portion of the money left to her to the school following her guests’ demise. Mrs. Munson remains blissfully ignorant of any of these contradictions. These contradictions almost certainly do not escape the audience, however, and the audience aware of the original Ladykillers is sure to give this departure some additional attention. The original makes no mention of religion. The insertion of a religious sensibility belongs entirely to the Coens. Set within the reasons Borges gives for irreverence, the inclusion of such an ironic religious position at once ignorant of its own allegiances and inaccurate in the memory of its own sacred texts begs for some consideration of the uses of religion within the society watching the film. Such a discussion is likely to note the ways in which some public officials invoke religious sentiments as a means to hold some sectors of society in place. These discussions are often as ignorant of the traditions they are using or as inaccurate in the recall of the texts they are referencing as Mrs. Munson. The recognition of both tendencies opens a way for audiences to first identify and then respond to these sorts of appeals. In this way, the Coens’ irreverence works in just the way Borges claims it can. The Coens prove just as irreverent toward a second hegemonic negotiation, one that considers the failures of the attempts at social reform begun most earnestly in the 1960s. The set of criminals assembled in the film contains an Asian American (The General) and an African American (Gawain MacSam). Both are working in stereotypical places before joining Professor Dorr’s criminal enterprise. The General runs a family-operated donut store. MacSam is on the custodial staff at the Bandit Queen. One could explain MacSam’s place of employment as a necessary plot piece. Someone has to be “the proverbial inside man”; but, no such explanation exists for The

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General, nor does the explanation for MacSam work entirely. The character could have been any ethnicity. The fact that it is a young black man who looks like a person out of a rap video suggests the casting meant to play with the very stereotype it fulfills. Taken together, each occupation serves as a second point of departure from the original. Mackendrick’s Ladykillers adopts an allegorical purpose. The inclusion of this background information reminds audiences that there are some who are relegated to particular parts of society despite the promises of social advancement in America. This subtle reminder grows into a pronouncement later in the film as tensions between two of the gang, Garth Pancake and MacSam, intensify. The conflict between these two characters starts simply enough. MacSam repeatedly refers to Pancake’s girlfriend, Mountain Girl (Diane Delano), as Pancake’s “bitch” when expressing his shock that she has been brought to the Waffle Hut. When Pancake tries to intimidate MacSam in an effort to get him to stop calling her that, MacSam brandishes a firearm and stands up on the booth. The clash ceases for a moment when Dorr reminds MacSam of their location, but it erupts again in the next scene in which the two appear. Pancake misperceives MacSam’s refusal to help him carry an item into the tunnel as something personal between him and MacSam. He tries to make things “square” by sharing his participation in efforts meant to give minorities in the South their civil liberties. A very-much-unimpressed MacSam tells Pancake that he “don’t vote . . . so fuck you.” Pancake responds in turn, and the two begin to scuffle until a knock at the door stops them. The mention of the Freedom Riders can work for the person aware of the original Ladykillers in the same way that the religious sentiments worked. Neither was a part of the Ealing Studios film, so both can be deemed an act of irreverence to the original. Both can initiate a discussion over the hegemonic controls that subordinate the many to the priorities of the ruling class. In the case of the latter, the mention of the Freedom Riders set beside so many social stereotypes invites some reflection on the extent to which real progress has been made. The film itself initiates at least one part of that discussion immediately following MacSam’s failure to shoot Mrs. Munson. Pancake protests; he claims that MacSam has to “accept his responsibilities.” He further maintains to MacSam that “with equal rights come equal responsibilities.” MacSam tries to dodge his “responsibility” by telling Pancake that Mrs. Munson is just “an old colored lady” to him, which, of course, offends Pancake. He and MacSam enter into a verbal conflict that spirals into a physical confrontation until the two fall, and the gun in MacSam’s hand fires and kills him. Pancake quite literally kills a member of the very group he meant to help. His efforts, at least, must be regarded as part failure. It is up to those in the audience to determine the success or failure of the broader labors.

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None of these social discussions take too firm a grip on the film. They may not even exist for the viewer unaware of the original Ladykillers. For the person who is aware of both films, though, they do gain some importance. The inclusion of an inaccurate and incongruous commitment to religion and the mention of specific social initiatives work as moments of irreverence to the original, which, once recognized, might prompt discussions within the audience they would otherwise not be having. These two additions alter the way in which the film engages its audience. The text of the film remains open in just the way Borges proposes it must always be. It becomes a site of negotiation that requires further translation and adaptation. The spectator is invited to participate in the creative re-creation of the film before them and the issues it raises when set against the original. One will find that the Coens consistently work to place their audiences in this position and ask them to participate in the very types of negotiation they themselves are performing. They presumably do so, in part, so that “have been tried and found wantin’” does not apply to them. The Coens’ brand of adaptation is hardly ever left wanting. To the contrary, it remains open for a very specific kind of spectatorial judgment, a judgment that one hopes will not decide the audience has “been found wantin’.”

Chapter Three

“I Will Destroy Him” Negotiating the Image in Barton Fink and Raising Arizona

At one moment of the Coens’ fourth feature film, Barton Fink (1991), the title character finds himself in a theater watching dailies of a wrestling picture. Barton’s (John Turturro) studio executive believes that the experience will inspire the struggling writer in such a way that he can overcome his writer’s block. Images of a burly wrestler leaving his corner to engage a fellow combatant loop across the screen. The Coens elect to tighten the frame on each take. The image becomes more intimidating, and his words are reduced to but one line: “I will destroy him.” The Coens’ camera eventually turns from the dailies to Barton. The audience watches as Barton’s face forms a kind of repulsion. The images of the wrestler find their way onto the screen, but only through reflection on the lenses of Barton’s glasses. Barton withers more and more the longer the sequence runs. The dailies have failed to work their magic. Barton is not inspired. He is as paralyzed as ever. This scene is wonderfully conceived and for a number of reasons. Diegetically speaking, it succinctly captures Barton’s struggle. The playwright turned Hollywood scriptwriter must find a way to translate his dramatic sensibilities to the screen. Such a leap requires some familiarization with the lesser images in circulation, if only to reject them. This scene shows that rejection. It also has some fun with the idea that the (post)modern artist suffers to produce art. The studio executive believes what Frederic Jameson believes: the artist has nowhere to turn but to the images of the past, images that are sure to suffocate him, at least for a while. At its most general, the scene conflates the artist and the spectator in interesting ways. Barton is nothing in this scene if he is not first a spectator. His authorial intentions do 33

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not change his status as spectator. Such intentions might actually inform his status as spectator, in fact. In some ways, Barton’s authorial aims reconstitute what it means to be a spectator of some films (and certainly the films the Coens construct). The previous chapter anticipated this chapter’s interests by discussing the potential freedom adaptations offer viewers when they strike a balance between veneration for and irreverence toward a recognized source. According to the observations of Borges, the proper mix of reverence and audacity toward a source text triggers an impulse within the spectators who know the source to reconstitute the text in front of them. The prior chapter shows how the Coens’ The Ladykillers (2004) works in the way Borges predicts it might. The Coens’ reliance on Mackendrick’s Ladykillers for the shape of the film works as an instance of veneration; their utilization of a range of stereotypes common to the southern setting they adopt serves as an instance of irreverence to the source. The simultaneous presence of both attitudes alters how audiences relate to the adapted and adaptation. Of greatest importance is the common denominator between the two source texts, and especially when approached through Piaget’s genetic epistemology: the presence of two texts both presented as viable constructs can prompt an ongoing reconstruction of the elements shared by and unique to each expression. This chapter investigates the extent to which two early Coen brothers films, Raising Arizona (1987) and Barton Fink, can be cast as diegetic instances of the constructivist response being herein outlined. The main characters in both films begin their dramas overwhelmed by the texts they encounter. Slowly, they find a way to take control of these elements. The endings of both films show characters who have learned to negotiate the cultural, rhetorical, and ideological constructs that threaten them at the opening of their respective dramas. In this way, H. I. (pronounced “Hi”) McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) in Raising Arizona and Barton in Barton Fink find themselves in a sort of dreamscape at the conclusion of their stories that suggests a new beginning rather than a strict ending. Both characters demonstrate a previously unimagined ability to reconstitute the assumptions, arguments, and attitudes embedded in the images that once engulfed them. The final moments of both films serve as a promise of some existence beyond an existence immersed in the image. Such an opportunity allows creative expression in the midst of such threats, and by so doing establishes a space within their films for the very sorts of imaginative reactions the worst forms of postmodernism refuse. The Coens assign particular emphasis to the end points of Raising Arizona and Barton Fink by adopting in both films aspects of traditional and secular forms of apocalypse. The cooperation of both forms of apocalyptic tales allows Raising Arizona and Barton Fink to invite audiences to the same constructivist work the balance of veneration and irreverence offered viewers

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of Ladykillers. It also brings a sense of coherence to both films not always readily apparent. Andrew Moss (2008) explains, for instance, that Raising Arizona and Barton Fink seem to refuse narrative cohesion to such an extent that they “simulate symptoms of schizophrenia in their viewers.” Moss relates the two early Coen brothers entries to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995), and David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999). All six films exist as “instances of schizophrenia,” not in the sense that they are about schizophrenia per se, but in that they “produce in the mind of the viewer a state of schizophrenia that ultimately frustrates a single, unified reading” (Moss 2008). The viewer offers the only hope for coherence, in Moss’ estimation. Only the viewer is ultimately allowed to make sense of a film that is otherwise hopelessly fragmented. This chapter builds on Moss’ proposal by showing how the narrative elements in both films recommend spectators look for the sense of coherence an apocalyptic reading of the film can offer. Coherence will be realized by the viewer, but that sense of coherence will be realized through the suggestions of the film rather than despite them. Raising Arizona and Barton Fink both operate within an apocalyptic logic that can reconstitute the whole once recognized. What looks at first like a gaggle of literary allusions working their way through the film and onto the characters becomes the initial stage of apocalypse; the violent contest between these images and the characters in the drama fills the middle section; and, the dreamscape articulated at the ending presents itself as a New Jerusalem, the promise of some order after the collapse. In the end, then, in keeping with the way of apocalyptic tales, the Coens can be shown to leave their spectators alongside the main characters of Raising Arizona and Barton Fink, who have found some New Jerusalem. The fact that they adopt two versions of apocalypse that eventually find their way to a New Jerusalem indicates a kind of hope for artistic expression that might otherwise be missed. By adopting an apocalyptic narrative, Raising Arizona and Barton Fink do cover some of the same ground. Both films address what it means to live beneath inescapable ideological positions communicated through an everincreasing barrage of images, but their courses are not identical. They at least differ in scope. Raising Arizona examines the challenges of one particular ideology, namely, marriage and family; Barton Fink works more generally by exploring the threat the image makes on inventive artistic expression. Remarkably, the Coens foreground both investigations by building these films around the special concerns of the contemporary apocalyptic film genre, which, admittedly, was still assuming its shape when these films were released. An examination of their realization of this genre not only expands the notion of contemporary apocalyptic in interesting ways, but it also privileges a particular kind of constructivist response. The Coens’ willingness to

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place spectators in the seat of deific judgment is particularly telling. A discussion of Elizabeth Rosen’s (2008) useful account of several forms of apocalypse accounts for the novelty of this choice. Rosen provides a useful starting point of the history of both traditional and secular apocalypses. The two vary according to discursive aim. Traditional apocalypses were fashioned with religious purposes in mind. Two texts from the Judeo-Christian Bible, Daniel and Revelation, provide the most formative example. Rosen finds within these books a shared tripartite narrative structure of (1) judgment against an immoral people, (2) the downfall of the debauched, and (3) the forging of an idyllic space for the faithful, a New Jerusalem. A divine entity able to sort a second group of characters into one of two camps stands at the center of this narrative: the morally lacking who meet destruction and the faithful who meet reward. The judgment served as a caution; the reward acted as a comfort. Rosen identified as the greatest act of comfort the promise of some differentiation between “those deserving punishment and those who deserve saving” according to the evenhanded estimation of an all-powerful divine (2008, xv). The traditional apocalypse ultimately worked to restore some sense of justice in the world. Secular apocalypses appease different aims. Rosen relates that a shift in aim also mandates a shift in formula. The form that was once grounded in the need to caution and comfort a wayward people began to be used as “a reflection of fears and disillusionment about the present” (Rosen 2008, xiv). This thematic shift necessitated narrative shifts. The slot normally reserved for the divine could no longer be filled by that entity. The more secularly minded writers adopting the apocalyptic narrative no longer believed in such beings. Nor did they believe in a New Jerusalem. Such a place seemed like the extension of human desire and had to be rejected. The only part of the narrative preserved by some secular apocalyptists—those that Rosen identified as neo-apocalyptic—was the middle section, the downfall. This breakdown extended beyond the wicked, though; the catastrophe, in fact, depicted an undifferentiated destruction of the entire world. This shift not only removed the neo-apocalyptic expression from the traditional apocalyptic narrative but also from the two sets of characters it delivered. No longer were there the good and bad. There were just people who happened to survive or who happened to fall. As such, the message of the neo-apocalyptic was no longer a message of comfort or caution. Interlocutors were given nothing more than the promise that the world would end for a great many people. Rosen takes greatest interest in the group of apocalyptic writers that refused both traditional and secular expression. The bulk of her book, in fact, discusses what she calls the neo-apocalyptic and the ways secularly minded apocalyptists overcome the challenges of adopting a traditional narrative used for religious purposes. A quick discussion of some of these particulars sets the stage for how one understands the Coens’ use of this form and their

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departures from it. Each artist covered by Rosen tweaks the two forms in interesting ways. For instance, Rosen’s chapter on comic book writer Alan Moore notes the way in which Moore fills the seat of judgment with characters, such as those in the Watchmen series, who “act as judges on mankind” (Rosen 2008, 21). In so doing, Rosen claims Moore not only satisfies the need for some deity in his apocalyptic tale, but he also provides readers with the chance to reflect on the complications inherent in the idea of deific oversight. In another chapter, Rosen examines the way in which the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut insists on some belief in divine differentiation. The distinction is not between the depraved and the righteous; instead, it is between those who “learn” and those who do not. Rosen points to the end of Vonnegut’s novel Galapagos as the most explicit example of this. Rosen reminds her readers that Vonnegut’s novel “ends with the words ‘you’ll learn,’ [giving the idea] that if people change . . . the end is avoidable” (67). In the final assessment, Rosen finds Vonnegut’s fiction tolerates a destruction in process but not yet complete, a catastrophe that is upon his readers even though there is still some time for an alternate ending. In still another chapter, Rosen notes the ways in which the apocalyptic movies of Terry Gilliam—Brazil (1985), The Fisher King (1991), and Twelve Monkeys (1995)—realize some version of a New Jerusalem. The new city becomes not a new place proper; rather, it becomes a new way of seeing the present world. All three films reach this new view of the world by allowing the main characters to surrender to madness. In Brazil, Sam (Jonathan Pryce) escapes his torture by entering into a fantasy world; in Fisher King, Parry (Robin Williams) retreats into madness, which saves not only himself, but “the self-absorbed DJ” (Jeff Bridges) that becomes obligated to him (82); in Twelve Monkeys, Cole (Bruce Willis) becomes intentionally “divergent,” to quote the film, rejecting the reality he knows to be true for the reality he wishes could be true. In all three cases, the choice of madness creates a sort of New Jerusalem that otherwise would not exist. Rosen’s survey of Moore, Vonnegut, and Gilliam shows that although the utility of the specific characters and limited purposes of traditional forms of apocalypse have expired, the plot and more general purposes of this genre are still very much in use by contemporary artists. Secularly minded artists continue to craft narratives that include deific judgment (even if the one making such judgments is as invented as the story being told), cultural collapse (even though this collapse is total rather than particular), and the possibility for some form of rebirth (even when that rebirth is merely mental). Rosen’s analysis helps one distinguish apocalyptic allusion from all-out appropriation. Texts that borrow the images or ideas of apocalyptic texts without any attention to the narrative structure or discursive aims of those structures might not best be described as apocalyptic texts in any generic sense. Such texts function more in line with the general tendencies of the postmodern

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cannibalization described by Jameson. Those that adopt the tripartite structure of deific judgment, cultural collapse, and some form of rebirth, and that do so as a reflection on specific anxieties or disenchantments with the present, can be called bona fide apocalyptic texts. Raising Arizona and Barton Fink offer a case in point to this position. By recognizing the ways in which the Coens adopt the tripartite structure of contemporary apocalyptic texts, one can discover the ways in which these films offer a response to living under the ever-expanding reach of imaginary stations that threaten creative expression. Some new space must be created for such activity, if such activity is even accepted. Hardly anyone can watch either Raising Arizona or Barton Fink without some thought of the apocalyptic, and for good reason: both films overtly appropriate apocalyptic themes born in the most accepted and well-known apocalyptic texts in our society. Raising Arizona, for instance, makes explicit use of Revelation, which begins most earnestly in the sixth chapter with the opening of the seals and the unleashing of the four riders. Each rider brings with it a new catastrophe. The first comes out “conquering and to conquer”; the second “to take peace from the earth”; the third holds “a pair of scales in his hand”; the fourth was named “Death, and had Hades follow with him” (Rev. 6:1–6). Raising Arizona also has its rider, which is something of a fusion of the riders in Revelation. The script encourages a direct association of the two as soon as this rider is introduced by having H. I. refer to the man who haunts his dreams, Leonard Smalls (Randall “Tex” Cobb), as “the lone biker of the apocalypse.” Every subsequent comment further justifies this association. H. I. reports this man had “all the powers of hell at his command” and that he “left scorched earth in his wake, befoulin’ even the sweet desert breeze that whipped across his brow,” which seems to realize in some measure the consequences that follow the release of horsemen in Revelation. The images placed under the voice-over further borrow from that text. Dressed in a costume fit for a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang and covered in soot and grime, the film’s rider throws hand grenades at rabbits and fires a sawedoff shotgun at lizards. The verbal and visual clues depict the crises described under the fourth seal: “I looked, and behold, an ashen horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill” (Rev. 6:8). The rider in Raising Arizona functions as a condensed version of each of the riders in Revelation, which certainly alerts one to the presence of the apocalyptic in the film. Overt similarities in the descriptions of characters in Raising Arizona and Revelation give way to the former’s appropriation of narrative sequences from the latter during the confrontation between Smalls and H. I. at the end of the film. This final conflict restages the contest between the red dragon

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and “a woman clothed with the sun,” detailed in chapter 12 of Revelation (12:1). In the biblical scene, the woman gives birth to a child. The red dragon waits to “devour her child as soon as it was born” (12:4). A force intercedes, though, that snatches the child away to the throne of God. A war results between the angels and the dragon that ends when the angels cast the dragon from heaven. The same pattern is used during the retrieval of the child in Raising Arizona. The cinematic sequence begins with a tight shot of Nathan Jr. (T. J. Kuhn) sitting in the middle of the road in his car seat. The child awaits “delivery.” The camera rises into an extreme long shot of the road that stretches into the hills behind him. Almost immediately, a burst of flames fills the street, and Smalls enters the scene. He grabs the child for a time, but loses him when Ed (Holly Hunter) intercedes with H. I.’s help. She, then, escapes from the ordeal by retreating, in the words of Revelation, “into the wilderness” (12:6). The final showdown between Smalls and H. I. follows her departure and continues until Smalls is destroyed. Those familiar with the details of chapter 12 of Revelation are sure to note the parallels between this scene and the one therein described. The parallels between these two texts do not establish Raising Arizona as truly apocalyptic (other aspects of the film do that), but it does encourage one to think apocalyptically about the film. Barton Fink assumes a similar commitment to traditional apocalyptic stories, but this film looks to the book of Daniel, and it does so even more explicitly. In a moment of utter despair, Barton opens the drawer of the desk in his hotel room to find a copy of the Holy Bible. He turns to the second chapter of Daniel. The camera tightens until all that it captures is the name of the book in the center of the page. A slight pan follows until the words “the king’s dream” appear and thematically locates the spectator in this book. The camera begins to move down the page until it reaches chapter 2, verse 30. The frame again tightens until all that can be read is Nebuchadnezzar’s proclamation that the wise men in his court should make known both his dream and its interpretation or be killed. The camera cuts to a close-up of Barton’s face. A clear sense of desperation swells across it. The camera then cuts back to the Bible, which has miraculously turned to the book of Genesis. The biblical words are no longer offered verbatim; instead, they are changed to fit the moment: “Fade in on a tenement building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Faint traffic noise is audible; as is the cry of the fishmongers. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” The sequence ends with a shot of Barton’s face, which seems to have gained some new sense of understanding. Soon after, he begins writing the script that has escaped him throughout the film. Barton appears to have discovered “the king’s dream” and the way to express its interpretation. His interpretation does not spare him, though; instead, he is left to suffer in what Matt Stefon (2008) interest-

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ingly enough compares to the story of three youths in the fiery furnace found in chapter 3 of Daniel. Stefon actually names a number of ways in which Barton Fink corresponds with Daniel. Both stories are named after their eponymous heroes. Both heroes are exiles. Both serve some higher power that has conquered the “homeland.” Both heroes have secured the admiration of their peers. However, this regard is conditional, a point conveyed in Daniel through the story of the three youths in the fiery furnace, which Barton Fink appropriates in its antepenultimate scene. Barton returns to his hotel to find the detectives waiting for him. They are certain that he is involved in the murders of Audrey and Mayhew. Charlie enters the scene as the hotel bursts into flames. The flames would seemingly consume Barton if not for the supernatural presence of Charlie, who saves Barton by delivering “an almost divine judgment on the detectives, [clearing] Barton’s name [ . . . ] and [manifesting] a preternatural feat of strength in bending the bed posts so Barton could escape.” One does not have to work terribly hard to make the connections between this scene and the one detailed in chapter 3 of Daniel. Those familiar with both are likely to appreciate the commonalities between the two. With Raising Arizona and Barton Fink both alluding to and even appropriating specific aspects of traditional apocalypses, few people would be surprised by the idea that these films invite apocalyptic thinking. What might be a surprise is the extent to which they adopt the apocalyptic plot and purpose of the contemporary apocalyptic genre as Rosen describes it, but that is what happens. An appreciation for how it happens clarifies a number of aspects of the two films and offers a sustained sense of coherence grounded in a particular form of judgment. This judgment gives way to a New Jerusalem that not only resolves the narration, but prompts the very kinds of reworking of the element being employed. Raising Arizona ends with a dream that appears to tie up every loose end in the story. Gale (John Goodman) and Evelle (William Forsythe) return themselves to prison. Glen (Sam McMurray) runs into trouble with the law. Nathan Jr. matures and accomplishes all any loving onlooker would hope he might accomplish. These story lines are, indeed, as closed as they can be. Things change a bit, though, when H. I. turns to his vision of himself and Ed. The now elderly twosome sit on their couch in their trailer. The door opens and the couple’s adult children and their children’s children enter the room. H. I. remarks, “the old couple wasn’t screwed up, and neither were their kids or their grandkids.” Much to the contrary, the family appears to be as content and pleasant as anyone could hope. A shot of the family gathering around a Thanksgiving table with all the health and happiness one can hope to experience further suggests an ideal ending to the troubling details of the story. One could, as R. Barton Palmer suggests, read this final vision as “an optical illusion of social harmony,” but to do so would neglect the profound irony

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found in everything that transpires before this idealized revelation materializes (Palmer 2004, 108–9). Spectators are likely to take the penultimate dream too seriously if the irony is allowed to slip from the image. As fitting as the narration and visual sequences are for a Norman Rockwell picture, they do not correspond to the picture of marriage and family the Coens paint in the middle section of their film. Kirsten Moana Thompson (2007) claims that apocalyptic films released in the late twentieth century shape their stories around families in crisis, and the Coens seem to do so, too. Raising Arizona pays considerable attention to various concepts of marriage and the troubles inherent to each. The most extended depiction of marriage is the one H. I. and Ed attempt. The two are not of the same world, a point that provides the punch line for most of the early jokes in the film. H. I. is a man with “a checkered past”; Ed “is an officer of the law twice decorated.” Their courtship occurs in the jailhouse with H. I. in front of the camera and Ed behind it taking his arrest photo. Their engagement occurs over fingerprinting. Their wedding ceremony takes place within the prison and is administered by an official within it. Their union becomes the ultimate account of “opposites attracting,” at least on the surface. No matter how similar the two prove to be by the end of the film, the stark differences between their beginnings never disappear completely. The Coens continue to insist on these things until the retrieval of Nathan Jr. from Smalls, through costume among other things (H. I. in his Hawaiian shirt; Ed in her police uniform). It would be tempting to associate the troubles these characters experience with the differences between them, but the Coens force their viewers to resist this temptation by filling the screen with marriages just as troubled as this one. The two most traditional marriages in the film belong to the Arizonas and Glen and Dot (Frances McDormand). Most interestingly, neither marriage is without problems, nor are they as idyllic as those desperate for such a thing—Ed and H. I. McDunnough—might make them out to be. The Coens establish as much during their first look into the Arizona household. The couple sits in recliners in opposite corners of the frame in the midst of a long shot that accentuates the distance between them. Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson) is on the phone discussing a problem at work. Florence Arizona (Lynne Kitei) is midway through Dr. Spock’s handbook on baby and child care. The scene ends with the couple looking straight into the ceiling in response to the cries they hear from the baby room. The camera cuts to H. I. in the baby room testing out the babies. When the camera returns to Nathan and Florence, it does so with much tighter framing that only allows one parent to be perceived at a time. Both looked equally perplexed. The choice of shots and their expressions in them convey an even greater separation than the initial long shot. After another cutaway, the camera returns to the couple at the moment Nathan recommends Florence check on the kids.

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There is nothing particularly off in Nathan’s request, but set as it is against the discussion Nathan had with his employee, one cannot help but wonder how different things are at home and work for this couple. Home becomes an extension of work for Nathan; both locales require the same micromanagement. The inclusion of the baby book casts home as work for Florence, too. The Arizona marriage is not, as H. I. will quip later in the film, “Ozzie and Harriet,” and this point is essential. Not even the Arizona marriage meets the version of family as depicted by the media. The fact that the Arizonas struggled as they did to have children and had to turn to “medical science” to overcome that struggle further illustrates this point. The extra help only gave the ideal in excess. The couple had quintuplets. Nathan admits the struggle of this success in his words to Ed and H. I. by describing this blessing as a sort of “vengeance,” which establishes a clear gap between the ideal and their reality. The inclusion of the family Glen and Dot present widens the gap between idea and practice even more. That family, which exists out of necessity more than an affinity for romantic or familial desire, parallels the Arizona household in interesting ways. Both families consist of five children. Both parents have settled into routine ways of managing their households. The difference between the two sets of households is the age of the children. The “Arizona quints” are newborns that can still be cuddled. Those Glen and Dot bring over are too big for such things and apparently too big to be held in check. The clan is nothing if not riotous. During their visit to the McDunnoughs’ place, they are found beating the family car, smashing the breakables, and writing vulgar words on the wall. Even if these behaviors could be restrained, the costuming of one of the children conveys the more serious risks of having children. The one girl of the group looks as though she has just left a medical ward. She has an eye patch over one eye that is held in place by a wrap encircling her head. The implicit point is that even if one could control the wilder impulses of one’s children, one has no control over the more serious health-related aspects of life. Despite the most idealistic notions of marriage, family, and parenting, all three can be just as Ed described the last: “an awful big responsibility” (with special emphasis on the awful). These admissions about family life frustrate the supposed idealism of H. I.’s final vision. The idealism it presumably assumes has already been rejected in favor of a more realistic look at marriage and family. There are no ideal marriages. There is just marriage, which is not to say that the final vision does not reveal an optical illusion. It does, but it also replaces that illusion with some personal response, which is endlessly important. Raising Arizona does project the idealistic notions of family and marriage conveyed by the imaginary stations. The focus of Raising Arizona’s final vision is the sobering admission of the frustration of living beneath cultural ideals that no one can meet. It is the articulation of the gap that exists between those

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ideologies and reality. The Coens fill this gap with H. I.’s response, which gains importance because of what he does rather than for what he says. This new telling is not entirely free of the ideological, but it is working its way toward that (if only by imagining the ideal world being found in Utah). H. I.’s move wrestles authorial control from a master-author in whatever sense one wants to conceive of such a thing—as narrowly as the writers of this particular script or as broadly as the writers of the looming cultural ideal under which the characters have struggled. The characterization of this new space is of utmost importance because it is this space that the Coens open as their New Jerusalem. H. I.’s delivery and word choice both film like the words used in Revelation to describe the place where “God Himself” lives among the people and “wipes every tear from their eyes” (21:3–4). The difference between the two visions is that the biblical version does not end on a joke or a need to rewrite itself. The biblical version has been written. The Coens’ version has not. The final form of the film, even the story that it has told, waits to be completed by the spectator. Their creation will not be ex nihilo; the Coens have limited the number of details that must be considered by drawing from certain cultural ingredients rather than others. The exact formula for the combination of these details remains undecided. The spectator will settle these issues in the space the Coens have given them. Such an invitation marks the New Jerusalem as a site that reestablishes spectators’ ability to create. The Coens push the narrative of Barton Fink along similar lines, and they do so while always challenging the cultural ideologies and closed readings they bypass. Barton enters the world of Barton Fink full of idealism. The audience first sees him backstage at a play completely absorbed by the actions in front of him. It is obvious that Barton believes something important is happening on the stage. He conveys a restrained displeasure against the stagehands whose existence breaks the illusion of the play. Luckily for Barton, he recovers in time to mouth the play’s final line with the actor who delivers it on stage. The episode not only establishes Barton’s idealism toward the cinema, but, more broadly, offers a subtle comment on the power of the theater and by extension the arts over its audience. The industry can be a reality-making enterprise for those who believe in it enough. Barton conveys during his discussion with his agent that this is just the sort of art he wants to create. He longs to establish a “new, living theater of, about, and for the common man.” This confession, and the idealism that prompts it, pushes Barton into an apocalyptic crisis pitting the individual against the ideological positions of one particular place. The middle part of the film demonstrates that those who accept such idealism must suffer for their choice. The bulk of Barton Fink indicates that this suffering occurs because such idealism is as much a construct as anything else a person encounters. Nothing in Barton’s world is authentic. All of it finds its inspiration in some aspect of

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the culture that has preceded one’s entry into the world. Erica Rowell’s (2007) description of the cultural allusions in the film supports this reading. Barton Fink makes allusion to Clifford Odets’ play Awake and Sing, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, the philosophies of Marshall W. Swain and George S. Pappas, the Faulkner screenplay Slave Ship (1937), John Keats’s poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” and more (see 124–30). The characters are as loaded as the plot pieces. The studio boss, Jack Lipnick (Michael Lerner), appears to be “a fictional hybrid of real-life movie moguls Jack Warner, Harry Cohn, and Louis B. Mayer” (104). W. P. Mayhew (John Mahoney) bears a number of similarities to William Faulkner (105). The detectives that interview Barton about Charlie (John Goodman) bear names (Mastrionotti and Deutsch) that “symbolize the two-man Axis forces,” Italy and Germany, respectively (133). Charlie, who turns out to be “Madman Mundt [is] a Hollywood wet dream . . . the stuff of which horror movies . . . are made” (113). Audrey’s (Judy Davis) presence satisfies the demands of 1940s noir, which would not be the same without the femme fatale (117). Barton is hardly in an empty space. His world is nothing if not artificial, a loose collection of popular culture and generic patterns. This is not to say that Barton is any less constructed. He carries with him the marks of figures that have preceded him. Rowell mentions playwrightturned-scriptwriter Clifford Odets as an inspiration for Barton (104). Even if one misses this particular reference, one cannot miss the extent to which Barton’s idealistic position puts him at odds with his world. Every point of idealism becomes a cause for suffering from the moment Barton reaches Los Angeles. Barton elects to stay at the Hotel Earle to be connected to the common man, his alleged source of inspiration, rather than the hotels the studio offers him. The common man turns out to be noisy and needy. He is to be suffered rather than studied. The hotel is no less a disappointment. The help is aloof. The furnishings are inadequate. The walls fail to perform their isolating functions. No aspect of the experience preserves the façade that prompted Barton to assume the accommodations he does. The common man and his place of residence quickly lose their quixotic qualities. The same thing happens when Barton meets one of his literary idols, W. P. Mayhew. Barton initially declares Mayhew to be “the finest novelist of our time.” Mayhew is exposed as a fraud. Initially, his downfall is simply his refusal to write from a place of pain. By the end of the film, though, Barton learns that this literary giant does not even write his own scripts. His secretary does that. Barton’s idealistic notion about the common man and the artist and, by extension, everything in between, is utterly frustrated. He is left in the end with nothing but his own desire to do something great, but not even this ideal fails to make it through the film unscathed. The studio that commissioned him has no appreciation for his accomplishments; they promise to never release anything he writes. His work, no matter how great, will never

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be seen. By the end of the film, Barton’s downfall is complete. He enters the final vision in the film none the wiser, but one cannot say the same thing about the audience. The vapidity of each point of idealism has been as exposed as the common man and Mayhew. The focus therefore shifts to what is left to do once one’s idols (and ideals) have fallen. Barton enters the film’s final scene stripped of his ideals, but not of his placement within cultural artifacts. The scene that at first appears to be a new start for Barton turns out to be as culturally manufactured as everything else in the film. Barton’s retreat is not a flight from the crisis that earlier held him; instead, it is a shifting from one site of cultural production to another. Barton’s new scene is little more than the presumably mass-produced photograph of the woman at the beach that hung in his room at the Hotel Earle. It is not an actual place. This shift is not without its significance. When placed within the narrative sequence of the film, one finds the final vision of Barton Fink performing the same function as the final vision of Raising Arizona. One can safely assume that Barton turns up on the beach soon after he leaves Lipnick’s office, where he has been ridiculed for believing too strongly in those things that transpire inside his head. Barton’s flight to the beach may very well be in his head, but even if that is the case, to be inside Barton’s head is to be always already inside some culturally produced product. His head is full of the idealized products culture assigns him. The question Barton Fink raises, and raises in the way Raising Arizona did before it, is “Can Barton take control of these products?” The problem is not living in a world saturated with images, but not having a response to the statements these images make. One could fail to recognize the fact that the images exist, or one could fight to sit alongside the image-makers. Barton travels both roads throughout much of the film. The final scene suggests a third way, and it does so with the same ironic spin that marked the ending of Raising Arizona. Barton asks the girl whether or not she is “in pictures.” She responds, “Don’t be silly.” The truth is that she is in the pictures just as Barton is in the pictures in just the way the spectator is in the pictures. The question is who knows it. Barton appears to have made peace with his placement in the picture that has decorated his wall and captured his attention. The way he makes peace with this placement cannot be underappreciated. Barton’s salvation is not in resistance. There is no resistance. The point of comfort in the film is that such participation is never as nuclear as one feared it might be. There are always gaps in the texts one can fill, and there are always narrative possibilities to be questioned, reorganized, and reconstituted. Such creative play serves as the realization of the New Jerusalem the Coens envision and that they offer their spectators. Raising Arizona’s and Barton Fink’s ultimate dependence on the apocalyptic genre as a sense-making strategy materializes as this New Jerusalem appears. The endings of these two films function as the most explicit picture

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of the relationship a Coen film encourages with the spectator. Unwilling to exist as an abridged version of a collection of cultural artifacts, a Coen creation awaits the final form the spectator gives them. The confluence of seemingly disparate traditions and images generates a text that is hardly one thing. The final text can be woven together in any number of ways. The Coens offer their viewers a chance to escape the spectatorial apocalypse described above by providing them with an opportunity to participate in the creative play with the final form of the film in front of them. There are certainly issues left unresolved in Raising Arizona and Barton Fink: What is in the box? What became of Barton’s family in New York? Did the McDunnoughs stay together? Did they ever have children if they did stay together? If not, how are they now? The fact that these questions linger puts to question the exact nature of both films. The Coens could fill these gaps in the way they told the stories of Gale and Evelle or Glen or Nathan. To do so, however, would close too much in their film and deny spectators the chance to play in the space the lack of resolution provides them. In short, such closures would continue the apocalypse being detailed rather than propose some cure to it. The Coens opt for the latter by naming the spectator the alpha and omega of their film and allow these suddenly empowered participants to contribute to the ongoing re-creation of the story they deliver. When read in this way, the outcome is not an ending or catastrophe at all; rather, it is the new beginning for the creative and imaginative reworking of the signs, systems, and ideologies propagated by the imaginary stations. In keeping with the best apocalyptic stories, which are always returning to the beginning of things once the wrongs have been righted, I turn, again, to the scene described at the start of this chapter. The Coens make an interesting choice in the midst of Barton watching those images of the wrestler and listening to his threats to destroy him. The brothers’ willingness to shift the images of the wrestler from the screen to the lenses of Barton’s glasses signals at least in part and at least for a moment the very shift their brand of apocalypse delivers. This is at least the case if we see the images on Barton’s glasses as an intermediary position, which they very well could be. The images projected in the dailies constitute the crisis of the film. The way in which images bombard the spectator threatens to stifle all forms of invention and creativity. The shift from the screen to Barton’s glasses signals the confrontation this crisis brings with it. One is not likely to have the continued existence of the viewer and the image. One has to defeat the other, or the two things have to find some way to coexist. That coexistence can be found if the images find their way from the lenses into the imagination of the spectator. Barton’s horror does not allow that to happen in the theater on the lot, but the Coens permit just this by film’s end. Barton finds himself “in the pictures,” which is also another way to say the pictures find their way into Barton. His

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willingness to ask questions of those images and to make declarations about them shows the benefit of the shift itself. The Coens’ New Jerusalem is realized. The viewers of a Coen brothers feature are never left powerless. Nor do they suffer from some sense of fragmentation. To the contrary, the Coens adopt recognizable conventions of both traditional and contemporary forms of expression so that spectators can find their place within their projections. They seem to expect their audience to negotiate their reality of the film in the same way individuals from any other epoch would. When confronted with information that is readily adaptable, they will adapt it. When patterns or references fail to fit standing schema, they will either accommodate it or reject it outright. Either way, the final form of the projection is left to the pleasure of spectators, and the final hope is realized when those individuals find themselves in the pictures being aligned. Raising Arizona and Barton Fink illustrate the way that response looks on the screen by having characters perform it. The two films examined in the next chapter—The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)—show another way of response. The common denominator between all four films is the way in which the Coens offer their spectators space to fight the images that threaten to destroy them.

Chapter Four

“That Gag’s Got Whiskers on It” Achieving Narrative Coherence in The Hudsucker Proxy and The Man Who Wasn’t There

If one has any doubts that the Coens are apt to insert proxies in their films— characters caught in situations that allow them to demonstrate from within some way to respond to their films—one need look no further than The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) for strong evidence to the contrary. Hudsucker Proxy has one of the most blatant diegetic demonstrations to date. Two working-class men, Benny (John Seitz) and Lou (Joe Grifasi), sit at a lunch counter. Lou complains about the aftereffects of his lunch. Benny tries to pin down the offender. Their investigation ends when Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) enters the café and their attention turns to what she must be doing there. Lou sets the stakes: “Ten bucks says she’s looking for a mark.” Benny accepts the action: “Twenty bucks says not here, she don’t find one.” The two customers turned commentators continue by offering a running account of the drama that plays out in front of them. Their remarks prove both “wise” and arbitrary. They are wise to the extent that they largely fit the happenings they narrate and in just the ways the spectator aware of the larger drama of the film might also imagine them. Their remarks prove arbitrary when they begin to tolerate revision in the midst of their reporting. Case in point: Benny suggests the invented mother in Archer’s story needs surgery to correct an adenoid problem; Lou counterproposes the problem is lumbago; Benny rejects Lou’s revision and responds, “That gag’s got whiskers on it.” Even the details of a story are up for negotiation, it seems. The trick, it would follow, is to find a way to relate a tired routine in an acceptable way. 49

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The Coens’ diegetic narrators model the exact kind of principled yet playful response a Coen brothers film initiates. Benny’s and Lou’s comments depend on the perfect mix of real-world and cinematic knowledge. The story they tell is both formulaic and inventive. Their account leans equally well on the scenes they have observed from their spot at the lunch counter or witnessed in the seats of the local movie complex. As such, the episode they fill reinforces the comments of the last chapter, which argued that the Coens allow some characters to engage the images that surround them. The Coens ask these characters to confront all of the assumptions, arguments, and attitudes carried in these things and thereby assume ultimate control of their possible meanings. The performance serves as a model of sorts for the spectatorial activity the films themselves invite. When this invitation is accepted, wise spectators arbitrarily play with the situations they encounter on screen using all of their real-world and cinematic knowledge. The sources being utilized are no longer codes loaded with definitive meaning but conventions that can be emptied and reconstituted. Lou and Benny’s response is thus akin to the response H. I. (Nicholas Cage) and Barton (John Turturro) learn to give the images that threaten them. They learn to manipulate the meaning and arrangement of the images that might otherwise silence them. All four characters learn to renounce such images as much as they revere them and, in so doing, to find a place alongside (if not over) rather than beneath cultural images. Such a response allows audiences to endure the spectatorial apocalypse that threatens them. Nothing in this moment of Hudsucker Proxy suggests that these two men are in the midst of an apocalypse, but there are apocalyptic elements in the film, a point that Erica Rowell (2007) makes. Rowell teases out a number of marks of Jewish and Christian apocalypse in Hudsucker Proxy. She regards Moses (Bill Cobbs) as a kind of prophet and Norville (Tim Robbins) as something of a messiah. The Coens tip their viewers to just this sort of reading by injecting their film with what Rowell names “the three main ingredients of an apocalyptic narrative . . . animal imagery, number symbolism, and otherworldly journeys” (163). Animal imagery occurs throughout, starting with Norville’s arrival in New York on “a Wolverine bus”; “the advertised job offerings include ‘card shark,’ ‘cat’s meat man,’ and ‘goat-herd’”; “as Amy composes her first story . . . she tosses out crossword answers “gnu” and “emu”; “on the balcony, Amy muses that people look like ants”; and the references go on (163). The Coens pepper Hudsucker Proxy with a clear and consistent use of animal imagery. The Coens also inject the film with a meaningful number symbolism. This symbolism appears most overtly, in Rowell’s estimation, during Norville’s introduction to the mailroom wherein any number of random letter–number combinations mark the walls. Rowell further finds the narrative’s emphasis on the ways in which mistakes will result in lesser pay, the clock’s control of all

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that occurs, and the number of years, forty-eight, the person Norville will be replacing has spent performing his job as moments where the numbers being used gain greater significance. One aspect of this significance connects to the third apocalyptic aspect in Hudsucker Proxy: the scene in the mailroom underscores Norville’s messianic role in the film. The animal imagery and the numeric symbolism mark the evil forces from which Norville must transcend if he is to realize the messianic function Hudsucker Proxy asks him to realize. Taken together these apocalyptic trappings become for Rowell a filter through which the spectator can interpret the action in the film. One might just as well identify the lunch counter conversation as an instance of the Coens’ apocalypse, too, following the argument of the last chapter. Lou and Benny might very well occupy the New Jerusalem realized in Raising Arizona and Barton Fink. Their place in this promised haven is secured by their willingness to adapt the drama in front of them using the formulas available to them. Such a view aligns Hudsucker Proxy with Raising Arizona and Barton Fink in interesting ways. Just as interestingly, the characterization aligns these otherwise peripheral characters with the spectators who are watching them, a move that is often made in Coen scholarship. This is the move Stanley Orr (2008) makes when he contends that the Coens arrest some of the characters “in the act of reading” as a way to portray the posture they hope their spectators to assume. The Coens leave such characters to negotiate the significance of “mundane objects,” which induces spectators “to acknowledge [their own] complicity in the production of meaning.” Orr points to a number of moments in Blood Simple (1984) that illustrate this point: the unidentified object that spins “out of the background toward the [screen] door” in Ray’s apartment; the “blade of a fan” that becomes a wipe between locales; and, ultimately, the “maze of pipes” at the end of the film. In every case, Orr reasons the spectator must mine the moment in the same way the characters must plumb them if those moments are to gain any meaningful significance. One could safely contend that this is the same situation Hudsucker Proxy creates. The film is so obviously given to a world that was artificially constructed that audiences have no choice but to note the artificiality of the space the characters occupy. This artificiality does not mean that the space is meaningless, though, a point Lou and Benny establish in their commentary. The Coens do undoubtedly implicate their characters (and their spectators with them) in texts given to an unmistakable confluence of other texts. But the brothers are just as willing to provide spectators with ways to play with the references they are given until some coherence can be constituted. The Coens even suggest some ways to arrive at this coherence by maintaining a deep and meaningful relationship to the sources they employ. As such, the overindulgence found in any one text amounts to more than evidence of some waning effect.

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The Coens consistently invite spectators to take authorial control of the arrangement of so many images and to inject the structures they construct with the meanings they deem most suitable. At times, the formulas the Coens use will suggest those meanings; at times, the meanings will be more elusive. They are always within the text, though, and this is the most essential point. The Coens inject their films with a number of recognizable elements, adopt the logic and order of the worlds from which those elements have been taken, and allow both to exist across the whole of their films. As such, every referent proposes some way to organize the whole. The viewer that recognizes the forms the Coens utilize and the shape those forms can provide can participate in the production of meaning Orr describes without being overwhelmed within a sea of references. A discussion of two of the Coens’ most textually excessive films—Hudsucker Proxy and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)—illustrates this point. Textual excess is taken here to mean a willingness to give oneself entirely to artifice. Such surrender is most often deemed postmodern, and it very much is a tendency of postmodern artists, but the choice can be more than a symptom of a period. Textual excess can be a response, and that is what this chapter contends the Coens allow in Hudsucker Proxy and Man Who Wasn’t There. This chapter supports this claim by detailing the ways in which the Coens keep their spectators afloat when set within a sea of textual references. Quite simply, they do so by encouraging active and inventive participation in the interpretative process they initiate. Hudsucker Proxy and Man Who Wasn’t There form this response through the very features that mark postmodern film. They tell stories of characters that mark a crisis of belief brought on by an inability to evolve with the times. They encourage suspicion against the assumptions that undergird their stories. They operate with a playfulness that thwarts sincerity. They fill the screen with elements that are obviously borrowed. They do all of this reportedly without any concern for the ways in which any of these things are situated in particular patterns from the past. They are, according to this view, the postmodern films par excellence. The most essential aspect of these films is the extent to which they achieve some measure of coherence. Thus this chapter continues the project initiated in the last: once characters assume some control over the images that circulate around them, they must arrange those images in some meaningful way. The main characters in Hudsucker Proxy and Man Who Wasn’t There, Norville and Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), respectively, do just this. One must sort through two commonly accepted discussions that tend to aggravate rather than advance analysis of the Coens to weigh this proof properly. The first misstep has to do with the perceived consequences of textual excess. The notion of excess is particularly important within film studies if only because the topic is, in the words of Leo Charney (1990),

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“endemic to film narrative” (23). Charney explains: “Despite the frame’s symbolic effort to contain the film inside discernable boundaries, any film is fraught with aspects of simultaneity, multiplicity, and materiality that define its textual excess . . . the screen always shows more action than the narrative can contain” (23). Some films, like the one Charney considers, Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954), exaggerate cinema’s natural excess by adopting plots that “conspire against restraint: territory expands, time recurs, genre bends, sex roles fluctuate, and, above all, socio-political realities mix allegorically into the fictional tapestry” (25). The result is a film that exceeds its boundaries. The film’s excess creates its own kind of natural limit: “a tense negotiation between containment and excess . . . manifests itself formally, diegetically, and contextually” (32). At other times, excess does not generate constraints. In these instances, one simply has a text whose reach cannot be controlled. The one text tolerates the presence of almost any other. Kaja Silverman (1983) contends that all instances of textual production encounter a problem of excess. Production, Silverman explains, must always involve the “active transformation of existing materials through new combinations of them; it is by means of these new combinations that texts always exceed the sum of their component codes” (241). This situation is exaggerated when a text assumes more than one form of expression. Silverman states that “the greater the number and diversity of codes which participate in the production of a given text, the more contradictory and unstable will be its play of significance” (241). Such texts suffer from an unavoidable instability. Silverman’s view is not the only one, but it is the one that critics interested in describing the Coens’ films have been quickest to adopt. Ronald Bergan (2000), for instance, claims Hudsucker Proxy suffers on account of its willingness to tolerate too many codes. Bergan asserts that the film belongs to at least four different decades: “The buildings are from the Twenties, the clothes . . . and the screwball comedy/fantasy screenplay and the art deco sets . . . are from the Thirties and Forties, and the furnishings from the Fifties” (151). To make matters worse for Bergan, the script adopts even more sensibilities by referencing other films, such as “the classic French children’s film, The Red Balloon (1956)” (153). Both Red Balloon and Hudsucker Proxy insert objects into their narratives that attach themselves to children—a balloon in the former and a Hula-Hoop in the latter. Bergan’s account ultimately faults Hudsucker Proxy for a perceived overabundance. The film simply tolerates too many codes and its diversity becomes too great. Bergan’s subsequent discussion emphasizes the deep commitment Hudsucker Proxy makes to the films of Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, and Howard Hawks. Bergan refers to Hudsucker Proxy as essentially a “distillation” of several well-known films from this trifecta: “Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Meet John Doe (1941), and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town

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(1936) . . . Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1940) . . . Preston Sturges’ Christmas in July (1940)” (155). For some characters, the relationship to some source is relatively linear. Amy Archer, for instance, is a straightforward “pastiche of every similar one in Hollywood movies of the 1930s, particularly His Girl Friday” (156). The film’s main character, Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), works more eclectically. He is a character caught in Bergan’s estimation between two worlds: “the guileless virtue” able to “defeat entrenched corruption” of a Sturges hero mixed with the “little man’s fight for what is right and decent” prominent in Capra’s main characters (155). The common denominator, of course, is that none of the references are organic; all spring from a recognizable fount. The various sprays produced by this wellspring fail to offer a discernable appearance. The excess Hudsucker Proxy allows simply routs the film. One can arrive at an alternative account of all this excess by casting the overabundance of borrowed elements as something more than artistic gluttony. From a constructivist perspective, every reference brings with it some logic, some organizing principle that can be used to shape the text in which it is found. A reference becomes particularly useful as organizing device when it is joined by complementary references, which can be items taken from the same referential field, if you will, or one that relates to it in some obvious way. These are just the kinds of texts the Coens can be shown to construct. That their texts tolerate excess cannot be denied, but that excess is more than superfluity. Excess becomes a way to manage such accumulations. One must clear one more misconception, though, to see how the Coens’ excess can carve a path to creative invention rather than passive reception. If one listens too long or commits too soon to postmodern accounts of artistic production or reception, one becomes convinced that the epoch promises little more than frustration. Western society has, according to Baudrillard (1994), slipped into the realm of the hyperreal and simulation, a domain where images and symbols “rejuvenate in reverse the fiction of the real” (12–13). The image no longer denotes reality; instead, it masks the disappearance of reality. Reality is what a representation says it is and nothing more. The only sense of reality that remains is the one that stands in contrast to representations that are obviously meant to portray something false or unreal, fantasies. Admitted fantasies exist so that some belief in the real can continue to exist. Baudrillard offers Disneyland as the most powerful instance of such an image. The theme park offers any who enter it a chance to experience something that is clearly make-believe. When patrons leave the park at the end of the day, they do so knowing they are leaving a place of fantasy, which is another way to say they are returning to some reality. Disneyland’s ultimate purpose is to convince the world of two realities—the one the masses escape and the one the park provides.

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One has to wonder how Baudrillard might describe the relationship between the Disney empire and the world it currently captivates. His comments predated Disney’s expansion into virtually every aspect of American culture (and beyond). Patrons visiting Disneyland in the 1970s and 1980s were able to leave the park. Meaningful divisions remained between its world and the “regular” one. Not so anymore. Present-day visitors leave the park only to insert the latest Disney film into the DVD player in their cars. They travel home on a freeway dotted with an array of Disney-sponsored billboards. They arrive at their house only to recover from their digital video recorders all of the Disney shows they missed during their adventure. One no longer leaves Disney in any sense of the word. And, even if one could leave this particular “imaginary station”—those entities that circulate around a network of endless unreal(s) meant to conceal the haunting disappearance of a more verifiable or authentic reality—one would only do so to enter some other network of unreal(s). The images produced by the imaginary stations threaten to suffocate citizens of every walk of life. Film seems especially capable of performing the function Baudrillard assigns Disney, if only because the medium has regularly invited some reflection on its assumed connection to reality. Some, including George Bluestone (1957), have argued that one can only integrate one image into some “larger structure” when “that shot [can] be recognizable as a copy of physical reality” (19). André Bazin (1967) presents a similar argument: “cinema is committed to communicate only by way of what is real”; the task of the theorist is to “discern those elements in filming which confirm our sense of natural reality and those that destroy that feeling” (110). The accomplishment of film, it would seem, is that it avoids all of the pitfalls associated with translating something artistic into something realistic. Stanley Cavell (1971) explains this point when he contends that cinema, based as it is in the photographic, “overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting . . . by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction” (70). Cavell continues, “the idea of and wish for the world re-created in its own image was satisfied at last by cinema” (76). Such ideas would suppose film’s most vital role is to give viewers the world as it is. The medium should present reality, to return to Bazin, rather than to represent it, which is to say, to characterize it. This view unnecessarily undermines the artistry of film, which not only reduces film to its mechanical function, but also imagines the form removes the spectator from the work of textual production. Again, there are those writing about the Coens who would agree with this line of thought. Steven Carter (1999) writes quite convincingly that the Coens allow an interest in the inherent relationship between reality and film to shape Fargo (1996). Carter claims the film entertains this interest in just the way Baudrillard would expect. The brothers “blur the moral distinctions between reality and simulacra” (241). Carter contends that they ensure that

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these lines do not clarify by placing a number of simulacra across the film that come to life in “unsettling” ways: “the huge wooden statue, located on the outskirts of Brainerd . . . the miniature wooden statue of the golfer on [Jerry’s] desk at the car dealership . . . the Marlboro Man [against which Grimsrud is set] . . . a photograph of an adult ‘Accordion King’ on [Scotty’s] door” (241–42). Each representation captures something essential about the character, his interests, his appearance, or his aspirations, which further “erases the moral boundaries between human and objects” (242). Carter reserves the most dramatic instance of this erasure of human and object to Jean’s (Kristin Rudrüd) kidnapping scene, which deserves full attention if only for how succinctly it represents the postmodern handling of such moments: Jean watches an insipid morning show featuring a simulacrum-sun flaming in the background ... a stranger suddenly appears on the deck outside the fulllength window. Jean turns her gaze from the TV screen to the other screen of glass as Showalter, wearing a ski mask and carrying a crowbar, peers inside. Watching the real intruder with the same blank stare that she gave the images on television a moment before, she is transfixed, registering absolutely no emotion. This frozen moment lasts a full five seconds—a cinematic eternity. Only when Showalter shatters the glass and breaks through the screen—e.g., becomes real—does she react. (Carter 1999, 241)

In this scene, the simulacrum comes to life. Film has realized its greatest promise by presenting that which was represented in a living way. In so doing, Carter argues, the scene projects “in visual terms the waning affect that characterizes the empty inner lives . . . of many of the film’s characters” (242). From a postmodern view, the world Baudrillard describes is adrift—a world whose reality can only be fabricated from the unrealities being produced by it. The binaries that once contextualized that world have been removed, and there are only projections of a world. The world is no more. Critics have proposed alternative ways to reconstitute the items in Fargo, or any film that relies on obvious representations, for that matter. Noel Carroll (1996), for instance, claims that observing a film has always been different from observing reality. One does not look at the screen in the way one would look through one’s theater glasses, for instance. One’s theater glasses can only “enhance [one’s] visual powers . . . to see the things [they capture] themselves” (119). One sees what one would if they were to move closer to a thing. Film is different. The medium makes aesthetic choices that alter what one would see if they were to encounter something similar in the “real world.” From this view, one must accept an inherent distance between reality and film. A film is never depicting reality in the strictest sense, which means it is never parading simulacra either.

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Gilles Deleuze (1983) considers what it is film might be doing in an article expressly given to moving film critics beyond Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra. Deleuze insists that the types of conversations entertained by Bazin and others who insist on film’s ability to project reality fall into a bit of a trap. Critics and philosophers alike feel compelled to compare “the ‘thing’ itself and its images, the original and the copy, the model and the simulacrum” (45). Such a compulsion allows the binary of the “original and copy” to stay with us for too long (53). What matters for Deleuze is not the similarity between the original and its copy, or even the fidelity of the one to the other. The principal matter is “difference” between the two things (53). Deleuze’s description draws a distinction that counters Baudrillard’s proposal in interesting ways. If one does not have the binary of original and copy, then one has at most a weaker version of simulacra and less sinister work being performed by the imaginary stations that sustain such things. The former is in Deleuze’s view always “artificial . . . the factitious is always a copy of a copy” (56). The circulation of these copies “sets up a creative chaos” that invites critical activity rather than passive reception (56). Enter here the constructivist sensibility, which is predicated on the recognition of admitted representations that can be used to negotiate the “creative chaos.” Chaos is turned into coherence. An established order to the host of representations emerges that allows a meaningful narrative to be told. In this way reality is today what it always has been: an array of action schemes fully capable of organizing knowledge and reality. Individuals are what they have always been: capable assimilators of information. The age of the simulacra is no more a threat than any other age. Individuals can assimilate and accommodate information today as well as at any other time of human existence. They are just as willing to dismiss that which will not fit into their available action scheme as they have always been. They are not powerless, nor do they suffer from some sense of erasure. To the contrary, they remain individuals ready to act on their world as constructivists have contended individuals always have. Such a contention obviously changes the way one would account for moments like the one Carter so aptly characterizes. Such moments can be what Carter says they are, but they can be more. The films the Coens construct would seem to expect more, even if the decision of what that more might be is ultimately left to the viewer. One does well to introduce the Coen brothers into these larger discussions about film and reality. Tiffany Joseph (2008) articulates the reason: the Coens “mix up, dump out, and otherwise scramble any binary system of understanding the world, and their films, as a result, undermine and overthrow traditional notions of truth and identity.” The realism that interests the Coens, Joseph continues, is not “a realism about the literal or the superficial, but about the role fantasy can—perhaps even must—play in our attempts to understand reality.” Our fantasies are, after all, “active and therefore crea-

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tive.” In keeping with cognitive claims, people interpret life in the same way they interpret film. Both depend on a person’s ability to “decipher the dream.” The Coens’ Hudsucker Proxy and Man Who Wasn’t There offer important demonstrations of what this deciphering might look like. Both films fashion worlds that are obvious constructions of various “dreams,” allusions, and appropriations of films and cultural references. They weave these elements together in what must ultimately be recognized as comprehensible stories. The mix-and-match methodology they employ finally settles into stories that resolve on nearly every level. In so doing, the Coens have modeled the two-part process audiences must engage if they are to accept the work the Coens allow their audiences to complete once the film stops. Later chapters will focus more on how the Coens invite a reorganization of their films once they end; the remainder of this chapter works to clarify the process the Coens propose one follows to complete this reworking. Hudsucker Proxy and Man Who Wasn’t There both serve as clear models for how to find narrative coherence in the midst of textual excess, which one must accept if the constructivist project is to have any merit. No one would doubt that a Coen brothers film is given to excess. What is up for debate is the extent to which they find any sense of coherence in the midst of that excess. R. Barton Palmer (2004) would say they most typically do not and they certainly do not in Hudsucker Proxy. Palmer charges the Coens with borrowing almost every part of the film. The Coens very clearly lean on Capra and Sturges. The set and mannerist acting that fill that space in the end “puts quotation marks around the represented action” (135). Palmer’s comments bring the discussion to the very place the constructivist sensibility would want it to turn. The Coens do not simply mix and match a host of films from a familiar time; they borrow obviously constructed elements and arrange them in ways that beg for some playful rearrangement. Their films become equal parts veneration and irreverence and, in so doing, open space for the audience to participate in the ongoing reconstruction of the elements being used in them. Every referent offers a new variable to accept, accommodate, or dismiss entirely. Palmer’s catalogue of references proves exceptionally useful. The odd mix of Capra and Sturges, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), and a host of films Palmer mentions pushes Hudsucker Proxy into open pretense. The brothers are very clearly after something other than authenticity or accuracy to reality. Palmer declares as much: Hudsucker Proxy “is more invested in juxtaposing cultural references than in devising a narrative to connect them,” which prevents the audience from ever feeling or experiencing any of the action “with the characters” (Palmer 2004, 139). Palmer does not describe the intellectual or spectatorial engagement this experience can generate, though. For Palmer, it would seem the Coens remain beneath their references

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rather than above them, and, admittedly, they might. If they are, the point may not be to give themselves over to what Palmer refers to as “the blank parody of postmodern pastiche”; rather, it is to invite the sort of principled play Lou and Benny modeled at the lunch counter (139). The two everyday characters offer a play-by-play of the entire scene. The attitude being projected is not terribly unlike the response critics like Palmer offer for the entire film. The pair condemns the tired story being played in front of them. They regret that the one being duped isn’t “wise” to the routine. Their stance changes, however, as their predictions prove wrong or the ploy begins to work. In the end, there is only admiration: the dame is “good ... damn good.” Archer’s performance not only convinces her mark, but it delights her accidental audience. Hudsucker Proxy’s story can work similarly. The story of a small-town guy successfully stumbling into a corporate world only to lose it all before making good again might be a tired old story. It might be set within a world of artifice, but none of these traits necessarily frustrate a constructivist response to it. Much to the contrary, they occasion it. The manner of the telling, which matches some expectations and frustrates others, begs for reflection and some reconstitution of the story itself. The assumptions and attitudes these moments embody become exposed and are also reflected upon, if not reconstituted. These responses by the artist and the audience after them counter postmodern views that insist such excess would overwhelm the artist and bewilder the audience. A coherent story can be told and retold if the audience is up to the work in the midst of the excesses that should stifle such imagination. The fact that the Coens tell their story as they do—with no attempt to conceal the constructed qualities of the items they are introducing—encourages the audience to participate in the construction. The second half of the Coens’ performance of the constructivist sensibility is complete. The Coens perform a similar feat in Man Who Wasn’t There, though they do so in a slightly different way. On the surface, Man Who Wasn’t There does not suffer from the overabundance that Hudsucker Proxy does. Its commitment is more singularly inspired. The film unequivocally embraces the fiction of James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler or the films they inspired. M. Keith Booker (2007) claims the commitment to noir runs so deep that one might find this film at the summit of the mount of postmodern generic pastiche. The Coens’ ninth film marks the Coens’ literal attempt to “recreate, from beginning to end, the classic film noir—in terms of both style and content” (97). Booker’s subsequent description of the film justifies such a contention. The manner in which the Coens dress their film in black and white, pepper the story with double crosses, or center the story around a man “estranged from the world around him” could characterize any number of 1940s or 1950s noirs (98). The Coens succeed, in Booker’s estimation, in

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creating “a near-perfect imitation of a 1940s film, but it is an imitation nonetheless—and one that openly acknowledges its own secondary and mediated status” (103). Ryan Doom (2009) echoes the popularly held opinion that Man Who Wasn’t There belongs to the 1940s. Doom connects the film to that setting in a number of ways. For one, the Santa Rosa, California, setting is borrowed from Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). The location, Doom contends, “provides a connection to the past, [and] it creates the small town atmosphere in a near perfect 1950s environment” (112). Doom further relates Man Who Wasn’t There to the 1950s through its use of “bizarre circled objects and UFO sounds and sightings.” Such things capture for Doom the preoccupations of 1950s Cold War paranoia, which simply extends the mind-set delivered with the setting beyond barbershops and suburbs. The inclusion of Birdy’s (Scarlett Johansson) character further develops this worldview. Doom deems Birdy as an almost certain echo of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955); both stories present “pretty, intelligent, piano playing teenager(s)” (114). Doom further contends that the Coens use Birdy and her subsequent sexual advances for Crane as a way to erode the “expectations of a pure period” the setting suggests (122). It would appear that the Coens have forgone the play found in Hudsucker Proxy for a more faithful re-creation of but one thing, but a close read of the film suggests something else. Those who want to insist on Man Who Wasn’t There’s fidelity can do so only as long as one takes the film at face value, but there is good reason not to do so. Crane openly admits in the film’s final moments that he is being paid “five cents a word” to tell his story in a pulp magazine. Several such magazines are found on Crane’s jail-cell desk, with headlines such as “I was Abducted by Aliens,” which bear an uncomfortable relationship to the story he has just recounted. One can simply deem these details as products of the film’s setting and circumstances, but one can just as well use them as evidence that the whole story has been a “canard” (Rowell 2007, 280). Rowell offers that the narrative might be what Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995) turns out to be, a constructed narrative fashioned out of the clippings hanging from the police bulletin board in front of the film’s narrator. At least two aspects of the film would suggest that this is the case. The first is the revelation about Big Dave’s (James Gandolfini) status as a war hero. Early in the film at a dinner party at the Cranes’, Dave relates what is certainly a rehearsed account of his experiences in Buna during World War II. Dave claims that things got so desperate during one standoff between the two opposing forces that the Japanese actually ate Arnie Bragg, an American taken captive. The admitted point of the story is nothing more than to make a joke about Dave’s response to a dinner he does not like (“Jesus, Honey, Arnie Bragg again!”), but the episode carries more than a punch line. Dave’s story helps establish his persona as a man, which he might feel is under

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challenge. He does, after all, work in his wife’s family business. Dave offers a second wartime story while in his office talking to Ed (Billy Bob Thornton). He claims to have taken the knife he uses to cut his cigar from an enemy soldier in New Guinea. Doris’ (Frances McDormand) lawyer, Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shalhoub), learns during his investigation that Dave’s story was all fiction. Riedenschneider reports the “dupe spent the war sitting on his ass in some boatyard in San Diego.” In terms of the plot, the revelation simply produces a reasonable explanation for the blackmail Reidenschneider wants to claim occurred in order to create reasonable doubt in the jury. The admission can work more generally, too, signaling to the audience (another kind of jury) a need to keep some distance from the stories being spun in the movie. As Orr notes, the audience is meant to see that “like Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) . . . Dave capitalizes upon available materials in order to tell self-aggrandizing war stories: dinner becomes a pretext for the tale of the cannibalized Arnie Bragg; trimming cigars provides an allusion to a knife ‘souveniered off a Jap in New Guinea’” (Orr 2008). One has to wonder if Crane is not engaged in the same inventive process. There is good reason to suspect that he is, though, and Dave’s propensity for such behavior minimally suggests the possibility and maximally alerts the audience to its probability. A second sequence of Man Who Wasn’t There even encourages it or, at least, excuses it. Crane wakes up in the hospital after his car crash with his doctor and two police detectives before him. The police want to place Crane under arrest for murder, but they have to know he is alert enough for them to do so. The doctor and the detectives take turns trying to determine if Crane is “conscious.” Once he seems alert enough, the detectives let Crane know that he has to be moved. The exchange that follows exhibits all of the starts and stops that must take place while people must piece together a story. Crane is told he is being arrested for murder. Not terribly interested in that fact, he asks about Birdy. The doctor assumes Crane thinks he is being arrested for her murder, even though this is more than likely not the patient’s intended meaning. Once Crane learns that Birdy is all right, he returns to the subject the detectives introduced by muttering, “Big Dave?” The men cannot make out what he has said, but they assume that he has said what they expect him to say. They punctuate the exchange with the proclamation, “You’re under arrest for the murder of Creighton Tolliver.” Following these words, the camera cuts to an image of Tolliver floating in his car at the bottom of a lake, and Crane’s narration begins to fill the soundtrack. The scene and the shift to the next do little to draw attention to themselves. Both seem perfectly at place within the narrative. One would expect such an exchange to have occurred countless times in similar circumstances. A dazed patient awakes to find himself finally caught. It is the stuff of movies, to be sure. Set within tales like the ones Big Dave offers, or akin to

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the ones unreliable narrators offer, the moment works as something more than a set piece in the plot. The extent to which this moment is borrowed underscores the extent to which every item can work as more than one thing—what it was when it was first seen and what it is when it is seen again. This doubling permits audiences that know both iterations to construct the images in still new ways and to allow new possibilities of meaning to emerge. The Coens’ choice to cut from the cell to Tolliver in the lake and then to return to Crane’s narration demonstrates this very point. The fact that Crane’s story occurs in the midst of a conversation filled with presumptions illustrates if nothing else the steps interpreters will go to make sense of even the most nonsensical (if not flat wrong) discussions. The exchange demonstrates the work the constructivist sensibility assumes viewers of the film will perform even in the midst of texts overwhelmed by references. There is always already some desire for closure and resolution. Some spectators will find such things even if the film does not offer it, and, perhaps more surprisingly, they will even look for alternative ways to bring resolution to the film if there is something unsettling about the one the film explicitly offers. Crane’s voice-over in the jail cell attempts to perform just this work. The diegetic world has pronounced its reading of his story, yet he is still searching out the story he wants to tell. His account of the proceedings after his arrest provides a number of reasons he would want to do so. For one, all stories are subject to revision. The fact that the DA alters their account of the murders of Dave and Tolliver underscores this point. For another, the fact that the DA refers to Crane as a “Svengali who had forced Doris to join [his] criminal enterprise” demonstrates some reliance on fiction to make sense of our reality. Such an admission suggests that the boundaries between truth and fiction are not set where modernist claims suspect they are. The two might be more like two sides of a Möbius strip. The one is the other if followed long enough. As such, a story can never be told in a definitive sense. It can only be in the process of being told. Riedenschneider’s reminder to the jury, “that the closer they looked [at the details of the trail] the less sense it would all make,” further champions the need to search out the robustness of every telling. The lines between truth and fiction become blurred in the broadest sense, and, yet, the narrator is never overwhelmed. To the contrary, the narrator performing the work the constructivist would expect continues to assimilate, accommodate, and dismiss the details available to him. Crane’s final words return one to the constructivist response and reveal the extent to which the spectator, willing and able to engage in the ongoing construction of the story they are given, is never hopeless. Set within the right mix of veneration and irreverence, the spectator can see the openly constructed details as particulars to be excavated rather than facts to be accepted.

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Those facts are unlikely to make too much sense in the midst of an initial viewing, or, in the words of Crane, in “the maze” proper. In the middle of an experience, the significance of the details in a film—especially ones given to textual excess—are as tricky to discern as the details of one’s life. One needs the opportunity to reflect, to organize, and to reorganize. Crane’s own words: While you’re in the maze you go through willy-nilly, turning where you think you have to turn, banging into dead ends, one thing after another; but get some distance on it, and all those twists and turns, why, they’re the shape of your life . . . seeing whole gives you some peace.

The Coens confirm Crane’s words by providing a positive example of his conclusions in Hudsucker Proxy and Man Who Wasn’t There. They do so by giving the films over to all that the postmodern would expect and to achieving some sense of coherence anyway. The performance turns a film presumably given over to blank parody into an opportunity to play in all the ways a constructivist sensibility invites such a response. A focus on the extent to which the films are openly admitted performances shifts the stories from being symptoms of the postmodern condition to responses to it. The audience member aware of the particular elements being employed on screen can sit in the seat Benny and Lou occupy and narrate their own version of the film. This, it would seem, is the only way to ensure that the Coens’ gags don’t grow whiskers.

Chapter Five

“The Coin Don’t Have No Say” Examining Intertextuality in The Hudsucker Proxy, Intolerable Cruelty, and No Country for Old Men

In one of the more radical, even if subtle, alterations the Coens make to Cormac McCarthy’s story in No Country for Old Men (2007), Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) refuses to acquiesce to Chigurh’s (Javier Bardem) demand that she call his coin toss. Her refusal eliminates any chance she had to survive their encounter, and she seems to know this. She holds her ground anyway. Presumably, Carla Jean finds a world ruled by pure chance more intolerable than the thought of her own demise. Coins should not decide one’s fate. She tells Chigurh as much: “The coin don’t have no say; it’s just you.” Chigurh balks. Carla Jean’s defiance seems to unsettle him even if it does not deter him from carrying out his intentions to keep the promise he made to her husband to kill her. One can assume her boldness unnerves some in the audience, and, perhaps, none more so than those who arrive at this moment through McCarthy’s story. The Coens remain so faithful to McCarthy’s version of this fateful encounter in the novel that one has to wonder why the brothers make the break they do in these final seconds. The Coens’ subtle revision certainly unnerves Chigurh. Carla Jean’s insistence that the “coin don’t have no say” can potentially shatter Chigurh’s ethos. The audience has already witnessed the ways in which Chigurh relies on his coin as a last attempt to show compassion. The killer’s trick spared the gas station attendant. It might have just as well spared Carla Jean, but she has refused to let the coin decide. In so doing, she has refused the impulse that led Chigurh’s earlier contestant to make the call, even though he did not know what it was he had put up (as he explicitly admits). The Coens’ departure might unnerve the viewer aware of McCarthy’s story as much as it does 65

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Chigurh. Carla Jean’s insistence that the “coin don’t have no say” breaks the viewer from the script the spectator knows. A competition between stories emerges. Those who know McCarthy’s story and see the break the Coens have made must suddenly negotiate at least three story lines: the story the Coens give them, the one they remember in the story, and the one they can imagine taking place on the screen were some other creative choice made. Such viewers are engaged in conceptual constructivism. This break leads to other kinds of constructivism, too, especially when spectators also equate this moment with other sources. As this chapter will show, the Coens frame this moment in such a way that it begins to resemble the Misfit in Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955). In so doing, the Coens lay at least one more possible story line into this moment. This definitive moment proves as expansive as it is specific. A variety of possibilities begin to emerge. None of them are right or true. They only point to potential meanings. Again, those aware of and wanting to see a faithful rendition of McCarthy’s novel are most exposed. The brothers’ irreverence toward their source leaves the audience member aware of that source without a net. No longer able to dress the moment in the authority of the source, the spectator sits in the theater fully exposed. To return to Carla Jean’s verdict, “It’s just you.” Those familiar with the Coens’ modus operandi might be better prepared for this moment of spectatorial vulnerability than those who are not. The Coens have made a career loading their films with alternative ways of reading. I detail a number of those ways in this book. The idea that begins to emerge in this scene, though, is the possible motive behind each of these strategies. One might presume that the Coens have always already been playing the part of Carla Jean. They are no more inclined to follow the recognized scripts. They, too, insist that the viewer be the one who assigns their actions ultimate meaning. The viewer must be permitted to determine the final form of the story being projected, and they must do so off-script, so to speak. The Coens may follow some script for a time, but they will ultimately depart from the path their admitted sources travel. They refuse to close their stories or decide their fate. As prone as the brothers are to adaptation, their works are never simple adaptations (if such things even exist). Their ability to realize the text through inconceivable fidelity comes as one surprise, which makes their departures that much more extraordinary. Their willingness to load their texts with more than any one text should tolerate further resists the unilateral readings so many texts push to find. A Coen brothers film is always more than one thing, and it is that, in part, for all of the reasons Carla Jean cannot call Chigurh’s coin toss: spectatorship in a Coen movie depends on more than mere recognition; it hangs on some willingness to

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participate in the continued unfolding of the drama even after the story has ended. This chapter explores the ways the Coens encourage a constructive response to their films through intertextuality. The Coens are by no means the only filmmakers to tolerate the kinds of intertextual relationships herein described. If one believes Umberto Eco (1984), one cannot make a film or write a story without some type of intertextuality: “I have discovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told” (20). Eco’s admission perfectly aligns with theorist Julia Kristeva’s (1980) claim that “every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it” (quoted in Culler 1981, 116). Yet the Coens do favor a brand of intertextuality that differs from their contemporaries. One can contrast their practice of referencing other texts with, as but one example, that of Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino routinely borrows from other texts and traditions. His titles are lifted from earlier film titles. Props and characters from earlier films find their way into his. Open discussions of popular songs or heroes pepper critical moments of his projects. These references appear and fade. They require little more than recognition. The Coens’ intertextuality demands an active engagement that moves from recognition to reconstitution. When the brothers borrow the title from a work, as they do in The Ladykillers (2004), No Country for Old Men, and True Grit (2010), they adopt more than just a title. The Coens draw deeply from their admitted source. When they pirate props or characters from earlier sources, as they do in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), with Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) as but one example, they do so entirely. The Coens’ brand of intertextuality often proves itself more sustained and more substantive than Tarantino’s, if only because the Coens’ intertextuality so regularly offers spectators an alternative arrangement of elements that entertain a variety of meanings. Intertextuality therefore becomes another trigger for the constructivist response the films the brothers construct champion. A fuller discussion of three of the more robust instances of intertextuality can tease out the full character of the Coens’ brand of this practice. This chapter ultimately looks at the intertextuality found in Hudsucker Proxy, Intolerable Cruelty (2003), and No Country. The chapter examines a number of prefatory topics before turning to these films. A more general discussion of intertextuality begins things. A look at some of the ways scholars have tried to talk about intertextuality comes next. A look at the insights of Linda Hutcheon (2013), whose reassessment of adaptations has created space for critics to explore the fuller complications of the process of watching an adaptation, follows that. Hutcheon’s remarks are particularly important. She asserts that part of the pleasure of an adaptation is that the artist has admitted a source of inspiration, which, thereby, limits the number of sources the

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audiences must consider when watching a film (21–22). The constructivist sensibility being described in this chapter accounts for this pleasure and suggests another. The Coens seem to train their audiences to look for additional source texts. They reward those who accept this challenge by constructing their stories around unacknowledged pieces of literature. Such an insertion allows spectators to find underlying logics of the films they are watching that trigger the very sorts of reconstruction the constructivist sensibility claims are fundamental to human cognition and reception, in general, and that this project captures the unique appeal of the Coens more particularly. Contemporary criticism has long made space for readers to bring knowledge of any text to any other. Those who have developed reader-response theory have championed this practice for decades now. The ideas of Wolfgang Iser (1974), Stanley Fish (1980), and Peter Rabinowitz (1987) have been well circulated and sufficiently developed for their purposes. The Coens’ brand of intertextuality displays the types of responses these writers describe. The brothers’ intertextual moments depend on specific knowledge of particular texts and traditions. They surprise the reader by their presence both in any one moment of the film and across the whole of it. They present themselves as a means to reconstitute the narrative form and discursive aim of the film they are initially given. Such a process ultimately depends on issues of cognitive theory more than reception or cultural studies. Although this chapter does not tease out the break between these fields, it does recognize the need for some break from the customary ways of talking about intertextuality. The Coens create films that tolerate an abundance of references. They find a way to allow these references to feel closed in a moment—able to be read as one thing—only to open anew upon further reflection. Critics account for this status, in part, through the overt intertextuality in their films. Every item is set in the immediate moment of their film and then a second time in a place that inspired that moment. The films the Coens craft become “always already intertextual since,” in Michael Dunne’s (2001) view, “they inescapably call up our previous film experience” (105). Paul Coughlin (2003) agrees. The Coens consistently build films that “reject a relationship with just one model.” Coughlin uses Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) as two examples of this practice: Although unmistakably inspired by the style of James M. Cain, Blood Simple also carries the influences of crime fiction conventions, Alfred Hitchcock, and the uncommon landscapes of Texas. While The Man Who Wasn’t There calls not only upon Cain, but also Albert Camus, film noir, and even the Coens’ own Barton Fink.

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The end result is films that are at once faithful and irreverent. The “essence of Cain” is present, but so, too, is something else, something uniquely Coen, something Coughlin describes as “fresh expressions within well-worn frameworks.” The Coens are “looking backwards for inspiration,” to quote Coughlin one more time, “but the manipulation of the material which they summon provides their films a novel and original grounding.” In this way, a Coen brothers film is never one thing, not even when it seems especially grounded in one text. The sense of groundedness to which Coughlin refers is something more than the general forms of intertextuality. The Coens construct films that indicate more than they admit, and they do so for so much of a text that these moments present themselves as alternative means to coherence. These additional avenues encourage audiences to search out other ways to organize the Coens’ films. This idea is not entirely unprecedented among intertextual scholars. Graham Allen (2011), for instance, describes something similar when he estimates the effect of intertextuality: “Intertextual reading encourages us to resist a linear reading of texts . . . there is never a single way to read a text, since every reader brings with him or her different expectations, interests, viewpoints, and prior reading experiences” (6–7). Such a statement marks a beginning and a launching point for the constructivist project as it compares to an intertextual one. A text may always already be bound in some way to almost any other text, but the explicitly constructed text is bound to some texts more than others. For the Coens’ part, this means that they construct their films with particular texts in mind and reward the audience aware of those texts in specific ways. Audiences aware of the Coens’ source texts and comfortable working within the constructivist mode will recognize moments of irreverence as invitations to reconstitute the item they are being given. They are likely to deem those moments within the film that approximate the constructivist projects as models to be followed rather than fleeting instances of pastiche or parody. A character’s ability to play with the ideologies that encompass him becomes the audiences’ invitation to do the same. In this way, H. I. (Nicolas Cage) and Barton (John Turturro) serve as two diegetic examples of one part of the constructivist response. One must learn to talk back to the image. One must also learn to arrange the images in all of the ways such things can be arranged. No projection delivers indisputable meaning. Such coins, if you will, such variously loaded constructs, “don’t have no say, there’s just you.” Hudsucker Proxy and Man Who Wasn’t There offer a demonstration of the way in which one can play with the coins in circulation. The Coens’ willingness to translate an influx of references into a coherent narrative provides an example for the very kinds of coherence each of their films tolerate, even if they never insist on one version. Competing

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sensibilities become the grounds for different varieties of the same story. The ongoing presence of more than one genre works just the same. The fact that these competing narratives can be taken from other films, or from recognizable literary sources, means that the Coens’ brand of intertextuality is rarely ad hoc. They prefocus their material in particular ways, even if they refuse to demand those ways be accepted. Critics have noted the Coens’ regular use of literary sources, but they have yet to discuss the way in which this practice implicates spectators in a specific kind of work. This oversight does not pose these critics any alarming problem. The brothers rarely admit direct knowledge of their literary or cinematic sources, and, therefore, one can read their films without them. Still, there are moments when the Coens show their hand. The fact that they adopt the title of their first feature, Blood Simple, from Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest (1929) certainly colors how one interprets the action in that film. Hammett becomes a kind of filter for all that transpires. Erica Rowell (2007) traces other allusions or appropriations of Hammett in Miller’s Crossing: “Sections of Crossing’s story and lines of dialogue are lifted directly from The Glass Key (1931) and Red Harvest (1929)” (70). The parts that are not lifted from Hammett, Rowell reasons, are nonetheless marked by his fiction. The “milieu, relationships, and mysteries” are all Hammett’s, reckons Rowell (70). A willingness to admit indebtedness to Hammett presents the author as one way to frame what the Coens place on screen. R. Barton Palmer (2004) also develops this thought in his own discussion of Miller’s Crossing, which he deems to be little more than the Coens’ attempt “to reconstruct a version of 1930s gangland Chicago, using Dashiell Hammett as a guidebook”; the film is an ideal example, Palmer posits, for Jameson’s “la mode retro” category of film (156). Palmer proposes that the Coens’ reliance on some antecedent extends beyond this one film; the whole of the Coens’ canon is, in Palmer’s opinion, given to “a wider intertextual reach” than is commonly attributed to them (52). Every feature feeds off “other texts, literary, cinematic, and cultural” (53). Palmer’s assessment certainly has merit, especially if one does not attribute these choices to the tendencies as symptoms and nothing more. The choices the Coens make can be responses as much as symptoms. The Coens’ reliance on literary sources can work in just the way their reliance on cinematic sources have: both offer themselves as recognizable ways to reconstitute the admitted text, that is, the text the Coens admit to giving the viewer. No constructive interpretation of the Coens’ oeuvre would be complete without a more substantive account of their use of recognizable narratives. The Coens allow the narratives they exploit to work in the constructive sense being described here in at least two ways. To begin with, they make no attempt to conceal their reliance on literary sources; to the contrary, they

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borrow, as the above makes plain, titles and large sections of their films from recognizable texts. Even those films that bear an obvious commitment to cinematic traditions—such as Miller’s Crossing, which appeared, as Ryan Doom (2009) notes, “during the year of the gangster”—“fuse” together familiar plot points from literary sources (27, 29). Miller’s Crossing belongs as much to Glass Key and Red Harvest as it does to the period that saw the release of Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Coppola’s The Godfather Part III, Joanou’s State of Grace, or Ferrara’s King of New York, all released in 1990. Palmer finds a similar bifurcated relationship to cinematic and literary sources in Barton Fink, which is as given to cinematic precedents found in Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976), or to Kubrick’s The Shining (1979), as it is to Nathanael West’s novel The Day of the Locust (1939). Barton Fink relies on the films to shape its “character study of claustrophobic psychopathology” (110). It trusts West’s novel to investigate the “sadomasochistic rage” being explored (117). Taken together, Miller’s Crossing is given to both cinematic and literary patterns. The injection of the latter becomes a way to wrestle free from the former, at least when understood in a constructivist sense. The consistency with which the Coens turn to literary sources works as a second trigger for spectators to use the literary precedents in a constructivist manner. Spectators become accustomed to looking for literary sources to serve as alternate ways to organize or interpret a film’s narrative. Rowell records a number of such moments. Raising Arizona, for instance, can be viewed through the concerns of the literary texts given to exploring the double as it emerges in Heinrich Heine (William Ratcliff, 1822), Edgar Allan Poe (“William Wilson,” 1939), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1845), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Double, 1846), or Robert Louis Stevenson (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886) among others. Rowell claims the relationship between the literary tradition of the double and Raising Arizona at once situates the film in the American Gothic tradition and creates “the more sinister motif . . . of the shadow self,” albeit to more of a comedic beat because, in Raising Arizona, the hero wins (45). The perceptual gap between this literary tradition and the Coens’ use of that tradition becomes as critical as the mere presence of these references. In keeping with the proposals of Borges, such gaps set a constructivist response in motion. Rowell also finds inside H. I.’s quip, “Call me H. I.,” to open Raising Arizona a reference to Herman Melville’s seminal Moby-Dick (1851), which begins with “Call me Ishmael.” Rowell regards the invocation of Melville’s text as an important signal to the thematic impulse of the film. Both Melville and the Coens craft a story of “monomania” (51). Rowell reasons Captain Ahab adopts a no-expense-spared pursuit of the whale, and H. I. “is dead set on an illicit lifestyle” (51). Captain Ahab and H. I. both operate with such a singular focus that the rest of the characters become subsumed in their desire.

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These two narrators also share a common narrative position “as characters acting out past events and narrators in the present shifting through memories of their adventures” (51). The two are further bound in the way in which their memories are haunted by “phantoms”: the whale plumbs the depths of Ahab’s mind, and “Smalls skulks about Hi’s head” (51). Rowell’s remark is interesting, but it is also incomplete. As impressive as the correlation is, the most impressive aspect is the way in which these characters demonstrate an imaginative response to these constructs. Following the constructivist sensibility, spectators that recognize the commonality between Melville and Raising Arizona might use the former as a filter for the latter. An emphasis on the extent that a film can tolerate a literary filter can appease postmodern or constructive sensibilities. From a postmodern perspective, the insistence reminds readers of the way in which contemporary utterances have no meaning on their own. They emerge out of, in Julia Kristeva’s (1980) estimation (see Desire in Language, and more specifically, her chapters “The Bounded Text” and “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” 36–63; 64–91), examples of the way in which texts are compiled rather than created. As such, one can no longer speak of “‘sources’ or ‘influences’” in the traditional sense; rather, “the text is a practice and a productivity . . . society’s dialogic conflict over the meaning of words” (35–36). A text’s “unified meaning” can only be realized when it is set within its “social text . . . [when its] meaning is understood as its temporary rearrangement of elements with socially pre-existent meanings” (36–37). One must account for the meaning within and beyond the text if the text is to be understood. The insides of the text, if you will, will follow their own logic and arrive at their own meanings, but those meanings never transcend the texts or the ideologies that occasion them. Kristeva states that every utterance becomes “an intersection of textual surfaces” (38). Artists can only speak in clichés, in allusions to past statements. They lose all sense of artistic subjectivity. They merely occupy the social moment in which they are placed by integrating that which belongs equally and unequivocally to others. Readers do the same. They understand the text as the social projection that it is and, if so inclined, search out some coherence born out of those projections properly located in the social context that bore them. The work of art becomes but a reproduction or repetition of authentic art, to borrow the language of Walter Benjamin (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”), always already pushing reality further and further out of reach. This last claim is where the constructivist understanding breaks from the postmodern. Working backward, reproductions remain productions in some sense. They encourage new textual and ideological relations, relations the “original” never could have entertained, and they do so as realistically as ever. The exact connections to one reality or another are never predeter-

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mined, even though they are prefocused, that is, utilized by the artist for particular purposes. When this focusing, and the obviously constructed nature of the item, is recognized, audiences (readers or viewers alike) are permitted the opportunity to participate in the ongoing construction of the text before them. They can elect to read or watch any number of “texts” before them—the one set in the present, the one set in some past or pasts, or the one caught between the two. Artists sensitive to this opportunity can maximize the play the audience is afforded by injecting into their text multiple “originals” or “reproductions” that sustain themselves across the text. In so doing, a work of art becomes not one utterance with but one meaning, but several utterances with several more meanings. The final form of the text belongs as much to the audience as it does to the author. Those aware of this fact and those found to create texts that celebrate it can be deemed constructive artists. The films the Coens construct suggest they are such artists. Their films also submit that the Coens use recognized narratives as a way for spectators to participate in the ongoing reconstruction of the film from the moment it is released. A film given to one text on the surface only to be given to another just below that surface is open to the very sort of reconstitution the constructivist sensibility predicts. A look at some of the more sustained instances of constructive intertextuality supports this contention. Walter Metz (2004) provides one such example when discussing Hudsucker Proxy’s obvious commitment to the 1930s. The film exhibits, in Metz’s estimation, an obvious commitment to Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), while at the same time making reference to “virtually the entire 1930s screwball comedy canon” (171). The move allows the film to align with Jim Collins’ (1993) account of the use of genre in the 1990s and to depart from it. Most importantly, at least for the moment, such a construction invites audiences to reconstruct. Hudsucker Proxy delivers moments of Capra’s films in whole, but it also offers moments of so many others. Metz contends the Coens further complicate Hudsucker Proxy’s arrangement by inserting aspects from the 1950s, namely, Aram Khachaturian’s ballet Spartacus, which “privileges the Marxist components of the story . . . [and] engages a Leftist reworking of 1950s corporate culture,” and aspects of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) (166). The latter is the most relevant here if only because the insertion of Moses (Bill Cobbs), the film’s narrator and the person responsible for maintaining the clock in the Hudsucker office, works as a literary filter through which the whole of Hudsucker Proxy can be read (if Metz’s reading holds). Hudsucker Proxy, then, following Metz’s argument, is “a hybridization of the 1930s subversive politics of the screwball comedy to a critique of 1950s corporate capitalism . . . and the status of African Americans within 1950s American culture” (179–80). Metz argues that Hudsucker Proxy accom-

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plishes this feat by using a number of intertexts—genre, cinematic history, popular culture—that ultimately create a text that coheres rather than participate in the random projection of various cultural and cinematic allusions. Metz’s analysis contributes to the constructivist sensibility being outlined here. Metz’s reading depends on a savvy audience able to recognize and respond to the quotes around the elements being utilized. Viewers unaware of either tradition are sure to have a different experience with Hudsucker Proxy than those that do. Spectators can remain happily unaware of each and all of these elements and still make sense of the Coens’ film. Those aware of the reference to Ellison’s novel, though, will have a different experience with the film. And this is the constructivist point: the whole is not determined by the directing duo; that whole is to be reread by the audience, and that rereading is guided by literary intertexts injected into the center of the film. Pedro Lange (2008) finds a similar literary frame in Intolerable Cruelty, which he claims bears some relationship to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” (1844). Both Poe’s short story and the Coens’ film depend on the presence of a document, the purloined letter in one and the Massey Prenup in the other, that Lange estimates to work as an “elusive signifier,” if only because the content of either document is never revealed (132). What is revealed is the shifting value of the characters in each story. In Poe’s short story, the person in possession of the letter determines the significance of each character. The young woman possesses some power over the prominent person against whom the letter divulges some information. Minister D— gains the advantage when he removes the letter from the young woman’s apartment. The police are kept at a decisive disadvantage when they are unable to retrieve the letter, even though they know Minister D— has it. The detective in Poe’s story, C. Auguste Dupin, proves the most formidable, which initially casts him as something of a hero, especially on the heels of publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” wherein Dupin is introduced. This assessment changes a bit for some, though, when the successful sleuth admits to having taken an interest in this case only to repay Minister D— for an earlier insult. Even the audience’s attitude toward the hero of the text is open for revision. Lange claims the same sort of spectatorial shifting exists in Intolerable Cruelty. The Massey Prenup identifies two “subject positions—the deceiver and the deceived” and the characters in the film “shift” between these positions. Lange contends the Coens initiate most earnestly the game the film will play between these possibilities when Marylin (Catherine Zeta-Jones) returns to Miles’ (George Clooney) office with Howard D. Doyle (Billy Bob Thornton) under the pretense that the two would like to be married. Marylin wants to sign the impregnable Massey Prenup before the two enter marital bliss to ensure that her motives are deemed pure. On their wedding day, Howard returns the favor and literally eats the agreement between them,

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which presents the rich tycoon as “the deceived,” at least for the moment (Lange 2008). Miles recognizes the trick Marylin has played and even has her admit to it, thereby taking on the role of deceiver. The joke, of course, is on Miles because the entire episode is a charade. Marylin is the deceiver, but her ultimate deception has been dealt to Miles, who later marries Marylin under the impression that she is the richer party. When Marylin “repeats the ruse she has had Howard enact at the previous wedding,” Lange argues, the circle of deception is complete. Miles thinks his new bride is exposed when, in fact, he is the sitting duck between them, a point that is brought to the surface the next day when Miles sees “Howard” playing the part of doctor on a daytime soap opera. For Lange, the whole of Intolerable Cruelty, especially when set alongside Poe’s short story, addresses contemporary conceptions of marriage. Lange asserts, “we must remember that it is [only] from the Victorian era onwards that marriage, previously a prearranged financial transaction unencumbered of the trappings of sentimentality, finds itself justified in romantic love.” The only way to express such love in contemporary times is through the Massey Prenup. All other arrangements might be deemed a return to economic motivations. Lange claims that the actual language in the prenup matters as little as the letter in Poe’s story. None of its contents are ever even revealed with any specifics. The prenuptial agreement is “an empty signifier that determines the orientations of all subjects who come into contact with it” (Lange 2008). Assessments of the characters must always be in flux. Their positions are always changing. The Coens further emphasize the changing nature of their characters by allowing Marylin to fit the parameters of “the femme fatale endemic to film noir.” Lange contends that Marylin plays the part perfectly: “A woman seduces rich men into marrying her, deceives them, and then divorces them for their money.” The sequence simply announces marriage as a new avenue to the traditional ends of the classic femme fatale. The audience, aligned as they are along the demands of the constructivist project, must determine the ultimate significance or reference of such things. The Coens do not insist on any one way of reading. They merely suggest some possible ways of reading. Ryan Bayless and Allen H. Redmon (2013) offer a similar reading of the Coens’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2007). On the surface, the Coens’ No Country is all McCarthy’s. Critics and viewers alike have been quick to celebrate as much. The Coens have supposedly brought McCarthy’s story to screen without any of the failures of most novels-turned-film. A close reading of the film suggests that the Coens’ realization of McCarthy’s novel depends on an unacknowledged source, namely, Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” which, by film’s end, establishes itself as important a source of inspiration as McCarthy’s novel proves to be. Bayless and Redmon contend that the appro-

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priation of “A Good Man” is perhaps no more evident than in the scene where Chigurh enters the office of Wells’ (Woody Harrelson) employer and kills him in front of an innocent office worker. The man left standing asks whether or not Chigurh will kill him, too. Chigurh responds, “That depends. Do you see me?” The question directly echoes O’Connor’s story wherein the Misfit tells the grandmother, “it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me” (127). In that story, the Misfit’s statement signals that the grandmother will die. One could conclude that Chigurh’s statement indicates the same here. Bayless and Redmon, however, offer that the Coens place an unmistakable irony within Chigurh’s response that leaves the outcome less certain. Chigurh’s question might be just what it is on the surface, that is, a question, in which case, the man must certainly be killed after providing his answer. On the other hand, the question could have been offered as a riddle of sorts. Should the man sufficiently convince Chigurh that he does not see him in any sense that makes the killer vulnerable later, Chigurh might have spared his life. No matter how impractical this possibility is, it is a possibility an honest assessment of the lines and cinematography allow. The Coens refuse to resolve this ambiguity, and even emphasize it by following the shot-reverse shot during the above exchange with a long shot that lingers for several seconds in which neither character moves. Chigurh’s question and the image framed in the long shot beg the audience to consider a possibility that might follow some other rule than the one Chigurh articulates. This man may have seen Chigurh in the most literal sense and lived— or he may have been killed. Either way, the visual pause forces audiences to consider Chigurh in a way they might not otherwise. Even if Chigurh decides to kill this witness, he will do so as a human and not as some sort of machine as some read him. The need to consider Chigurh’s humanity and decisionmaking process intensifies when this moment is set within the context of O’Connor’s story, and the scenes that follow suggest that it is. The fact that the Coens set a voice-over of Carla Jean’s mother (Beth Grant) complaining over the long shot of Chigurh and the man whose fate is being decided significantly reinforces some association with O’Connor’s story. The long shot dissolves into a shot of Carla Jean and her mother in the backseat of a cab. The blocking in the scene is extremely reminiscent of the imagined position of the grandmother in “A Good Man.” The mother sits with her purse in her lap in just the way the literary predecessor might and in a dress that calls to former to mind. The resemblances firmly plant those already thinking of O’Connor’s text in that story. Those who have not yet seen this intertext have every chance to do so as a result of this image. The correlation between the two matriarchs grows with every word Carla Jean’s mother utters. The latter expresses the same disapproval of her family and the same dissatisfaction with her situation as her literary predecessor.

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The grandmother in O’Connor’s story refers to the mannerisms of her day in one breath and the cuteness of the “little pickaninny [ . . . ] standing in the door of a shack” in the next (119). Similarly, Carla Jean’s mother eventually expresses her astonishment that there is “one gentleman left in West Texas” in one sentence and her surprise at seeing a “Mexican in a suit” immediately after. The Coens realize McCarthy’s character as though she were also O’Connor’s. Perhaps most importantly, the Coens assign Carla Jean’s mother the same narrative function as O’Connor’s grandmother. Both characters become the catalyst for the tragedies that occur in their stories. The grandmother’s misguided detour that brings about the cat’s escape from her purse causes the accident that allows the Misfit to come upon her and her family. Carla Jean’s mother provides the drug gang with Moss’ location, which ultimately leads to his demise. The Coens use the visual and narrative insertion of O’Connor’s grandmother as a key for how to navigate the heightened ambiguities they manufacture throughout the remainder of their film. This key is not meant to solve the film, per se, but to support the unique direction the Coens take McCarthy’s story. To fully appreciate the benefits of this inserted competing narrative, one does well to return to the climax of O’Connor’s story, especially to the final interaction between the Misfit and the grandmother. The Coens appear to adopt point for point the moves that take place during and after that exchange. To return to the film, the same sorts of considerations mark the scenes that follow the most overt references to O’Connor’s short story in the Coens’ No Country. The most obvious example occurs during the discussion between Chigurh and Carla Jean. The Coens refuse to have Carla Jean call Chigurh’s coin flip. The Coens refuse this moment of defeat. This is not to say the entire exchange belongs to the Coens. It doesn’t. As in the opening monologue, most of it is taken verbatim from the novel, but this fidelity only accentuates the one key difference in the scene, namely, that Carla Jean never accepts Chigurh’s demand to “call it.” The cinematic Carla Jean silences Chigurh and supposes an authority she is never given in the novel. She refuses that a coin should determine Chigurh’s action or her fate. She remains undeterred when Chigurh asserts that coin is her only chance for survival. Carla Jean claims otherwise: “The coin don’t have no say . . . it’s just you.” She can survive if Chigurh decides that she is to survive. One can presume that he refuses this choice. He might act as involuntarily as the Misfit in O’Connor’s story. Even still, that impulsive act might also prompt Chigurh to the same kinds of personal reflection, if not revision. There is enough in the Coens’ No Country to suggest that it does. Chigurh does, after all, let the boys who see him after his accident live—“You didn’t see me.” He even pays one boy for the shirt he gives him. Such moments do suggest Chigurh’s encounter with Carla Jean has affected him.

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The most crucial point is the manner in which the Coens’ encounter with O’Connor’s story might impact the spectator. By having Carla Jean insist on the choice Chigurh has to make, the Coens introduce a sense of agency McCarthy’s text never considers in earnest. The relationship between O’Connor’s short story and the Coens’ film belongs first to the Coens and then to the audience that recognizes it. The recognition of this moment invites the audience to reconstitute the Coens’ No Country in the same way the Coens have reconstituted McCarthy’s novel. The choice permits spectators to hold at least two narrative threads in their hand at once and to read the story that emerges first one way and then another. The spectator can braid the two threads together in ways that generate a third story. The viewer has a choice, a choice that is built into the Coens’ brand of intertextuality. One finds the same sort of unannounced intertextuality described in No Country in at least the other two films described in this chapter, Hudsucker Proxy and Intolerable Cruelty. The Coens’ willingness to embed unannounced texts across large portions of their films trains audiences to look for additional narratives within the ones they admit to be adapting. A remake of virtually the entire 1930s becomes a text borrowing its critique from Ellison’s Invisible Man. An adapted screenplay finds a way to utilize the logic of Poe’s “Purloined Letter.” A faithful adaptation of McCarthy’s novel slips into a text reminiscent of O’Connor’s “A Good Man.” The use of these unexpected elements necessitates a second layer of quotes around the whole of a Coen brothers film. Audiences are left to negotiate and reconstitute the relationships between various plot points and the relationships between the competing logic each narrative provides. As interesting as these proposals are, the most interesting aspect of them is the way in which they prepare audiences to look for such things in other films. The Coens’ readiness to reward those who meet this expectation allows audiences to play with the surface text (the one the Coens admit to be adapting), the embedded text (the one the Coens unexpectedly stretch across a large part of the surface), and the resulting text that emerges when the audience participates in the constructive work the arrangement allows. Viewers can wrestle with the significance of individual images until they become increasingly unreal and pliable. Their final form is left to the inclinations of the audience working within and around the parameters proposed by the Coens’ presentation. The fact that the audience knows the formulas or the formations that are being used as well as the directors do occasions the creative play afforded by the constructivist sensibility rather than signals the loss of creative expression. The steady insertion of literary sources into films already loaded with cinematic and cultural references just expands the circle around each film and engages more active readings. Though never the only way to read a film, the constructivist mode realized through awareness of

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literary antecedents does emerge as one of many ways to understand a Coen brothers film.

Chapter Six

“A Lotta Ins, a Lotta Outs” Interweaving Genres in The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The discussions that occur once a Coen brothers film ends sometimes sound a lot like the discussion between The Dude (Jeff Bridges) and Maude (Julianne Moore) at the midway point of The Big Lebowski (1998). The Dude arrives at Maude’s house to tell her that he can no longer sleuth for her. He is more convinced than ever that Maude’s stepmother, Bunny (Tara Reid), was, indeed, kidnapped, having held what he believes to be her dismembered toe in his hand. Maude insists that Bunny was “definitely the perpetrator and not the victim.” When she presses The Dude to learn the reason for his counterposition, The Dude stammers a bit: “This is a very complicated case, Maude . . . a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have yous . . . a lotta strands to keep in my head.” The scene shifts after this moment in a way that does not bear on the present in the way this phrase does. The Dude’s declaration that there are “a lotta ins, a lotta outs” sounds like something those wanting to account for the Coens’ output might say. The Coens load their films with “a lotta strands.” No thread is so important that it must be recognized if the meaning is to be discerned. The Coens circulate potential meanings rather than definitive ones. These potential meanings, though, prove more substantive in a Coen brothers film than one might imagine. The Coens’ sustained use of a variety of references, intertextual and otherwise, provides a sense of coherence to those who recognize them and can “keep them in [their] head.” The previous chapter addressed the impact the Coens’ insertion of unexpected narratives can have on their films. This chapter looks at the influence the Coens’ use of genre can have. Admittedly, the Coens’ dependence on genre is recognized more holistically than their willingness to extend refer81

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ences to unannounced texts across the whole of their films. R. Barton Palmer (2004), in fact, indicates, “Most, but not all, Coen brothers films are genre exercises” (107). Robert C. Sickels (2008) agrees. Sickels suggests that all thirteen (up to that time) Coen brothers films can be grouped into one of two generic categories: romantic comedies or crime films (116). He further advises that spectators would do well to pay attention to which genre a film belongs, as the film is sure to keep to the conventions of that genre in substantive ways. One cannot call The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) a romantic comedy or The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) a crime film and leave it at that. Sickles submits that one must use the designation to etch out the particulars of each film if only because the Coens have done this very thing themselves. Sickels’ proposal anticipates the present one in important ways. The Coens’ reliance on genre cannot be overrated if only because genre so consistently becomes a critical component of their films. And it does so through multiplication rather than one-to-one equivalence. The Coens rarely make a genre film in the traditional sense, where one genre takes control of every element. They tend to inject one film with multiple genres, allowing one element to be read in multiple ways. One could illustrate this tendency through any number of releases (all but A Serious Man [2009] and Inside Llewyn Davis [2013], really), but the practice is most salient in Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). The Coens allow both films to profess allegiance to one genre—Big Lebowski presents itself as a detective story; O Brother is billed as an adaptation—only to infuse these stories with several additional generic sensibilities. Both films benefit from more than one generic reading. Big Lebowski can be read as a detective film to be sure, but it can also be read as a particular kind of war drama (the sort dealing with the veteran returning home), and as a queer film. O Brother can be read as a kind of loose adaptation, but it can also be viewed as a second kind of adaptation, a musical, and a social problem film. The films permit spectators to arrange the elements in a variety of substantive ways. Those familiar with the genres the Coens use or, more generally, the concept of genre itself, are more likely to see the ins and outs the Coens open. They are also likely to have more to manage as a result. The Coens’ commitment to genre runs counter to the expectations normally associated with filmmakers working in the postmodern period. Their films use genre differently, for instance, than Jim Collins (1993) describes in his important essay on genre in the 1990s. The Coens’ use of genre does not match Kevin Costner’s New Sincerity in Dances with Wolves (1990) or Robert Zemeckis’ Eclectic Irony in Back to the Future (1985); the Coens engage in both—and something more unexpected. The Coens’ use of genre does not long for an idealized past, nor does it mix and match a variety of references in flashes. The Coens ensure that viewers are rewarded for whichever generic reading

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they chose by going beyond simply dressing their films in the vestments of the genres they use. Each pattern works as a lifeline for a variety of sustainable structures—every item can be commuted against the higher-level logic the genres they use offer. The densest generic films await an astute audience willing and able to disentangle the competing elements in order to consider one side of a complex film. Such a possibility permits spectators to work as active collaborators in the authorial process of the film rather than its recipients. A discussion of Big Lebowski and O Brother demonstrates how this process works and how it does so in the manner the constructivist sensibility would predict. The Coens utilize three genres in Big Lebowski—the detective, the war, and the queer genre. Admittedly, these three genres do not enjoy the same footing. Although detective films are one of the most recognizable and established film types in the American oeuvre, the particulars of the other two genres are less defined. The strict features of the war film, for instance, especially those that consider the struggle the veteran faces to reenter society after a war ends, which is the sort of war film we have in Big Lebowski, has yet to be fully defined by critics, even if some notion of it exists in popular consciousness (see Neale 2000, 125–33). The state of the queer genre is equally “underdeveloped” in comparison to detective films. The practice of queering films is young enough and still diverse enough that there simply has not been enough time to articulate the exact qualities of this burgeoning generic formula. One ought not think about still nascent genres as deficient. As Rick Altman (1999) states, “most films now associated with a particular genre . . . [predate] . . . the establishment of genre norms” (144). Filmmakers can build a film through patterns that have yet to be fully institutionalized. Spectators can respond to such patterns. The still-evolving nature of a genre might actually intensify a constructive impulse in those familiar with the debates occurring around budding constructs. The discussion of topics still in development demands as much. All that is necessary for the constructivist response suggested herein is some recognition and awareness of the logical structures—in this case, genres—buttressing a film. All three of the genres identified in Big Lebowski pass this test, which means that all three can be used as an organizing principle able to align the maze of materials the film flaunts. The detective genre is the most explicit film type utilized in Big Lebowski. Not only does the film follow the action of detective films—complete with a crime, a process of investigation involving oscillatory incrimination, and, finally, revelation—the ensemble of characters also matches the standard set of players. The Dude plays the part of the detective. Walter serves as the less able sidekick, a staple in detective films during the 1930s. The two leading ladies in the film, Bunny and Maude, satisfy the expectation for first the femme fatale and the latter development for some counterpoint to that

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character. The host of characters treated as suspects in the film—from Little Larry Sellers (Jesse Flanagan) to the Nihilists—fulfills the expectation that a mass of criminals is to be introduced. Even if the role each of these characters assumes within the detective genre is not immediately evident, one has little trouble making these sorts of connections when prompted to do so. The narrative structure of Big Lebowski moves like a detective film from beginning to end. In truth, those familiar with Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946) or Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) might feel compelled to make connections even before the film begins. If the title of the film does not suggest some connection to Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe character, then the first image of The Dude is sure to do so. Big Lebowski opens as Long Goodbye does, with the hero of the film on a late-night grocery run. The Coens continue to follow the script of Altman’s movie by having The Dude, like Marlowe (Elliott Gould) before him, return home only to become entangled in someone else’s wrongdoing. The confusion over which Lebowski Jackie Treehorn’s (Ben Gazzara) goons want introduces the first of several puzzles meant to be solved in the film. It also justifies the choice to think about Big Lebowski as a detective film from the opening moments of the movie. Nothing in the film discourages an association with the detective film, either. The way in which the resulting action moves The Dude through each stratum of society even further aligns it with the tendencies of American detective films. For its part, Big Lebowski moves The Dude into the epicenter of the porn industry, through the halls of a police department wagged by that industry, and at the residence of the well-respected Big Lebowski, whose home is no less affected by said industry. The journey showcases the very thing all detective films display, namely, the extent to which the inherent conflicts and corruption once ascribed to the savage parts of society now infiltrate all aspects of the social order. Each sector is equally menacing for the detective. In response to these threats, the sleuth must adopt a countercultural mode of operation able to protect him from the failures of the world around him. Enter here The Dude, whose countercultural mode of operation is one of the most overt aspects of the film. When situated as he is within the detective genre, though, the narrative function of The Dude’s existence changes a bit from what it would be without it. Without reference to the detective genre, The Dude’s ability to forge an alternative identity exists as little more than a bit of “cultural nostalgia” in the way critics like Marc Singer (2008) have suggested. Such “nostalgia” works differently in a detective film, however; the detective is always pining for some previously established mode of existence. The sleuth chooses his profession, in part, to adhere to a different code. Thomas Schatz (1981) explains that such alternatives are a staple of detective films of the postwar period, which intend to show “the only solution to the crime of modern

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existence is personal integrity and self-sufficiency, which are, in the last analysis, their own reward” (136). The final scene of Big Lebowski suggests that the Coens want The Dude to perform this very service. The Stranger sits at the bar and repeats The Dude’s final declaration that “The Dude abides.” The Stranger declares that he takes comfort in these words, in “knowin’ he’s out there, The Dude, takin’ her easy for all us sinners.” The audience can take comfort in these words, too, and likely would if they were constructing the film according to the conventions of the detective genre. In ending in this way, Big Lebowski shows itself to work as a detective film from beginning to end. Big Lebowski works just as well as a war film, at least the sort of war film that examines the plight of the returning soldier, what one might call the veteran film. One can point to William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) or Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989) as examples of such films. Critics such as J. W. Chambers (1994) have discussed the viability of discussing stories that adopt an antiwar attitude as a genre in their own right, and it seems just as viable to discuss films that focus on the battle soldiers fight upon their return from their initial conflict as a stand-alone genre, too. Such films move to a unique impulse. They explore the challenges soldiers returning from war face as they attempt to reenter society. Returning-veteran films document the various battlefields on which this struggle takes place and the difficulties such a person has reclaiming his identity as a regular citizen. The story is told with sympathy toward the veteran, too. Big Lebowski satisfies each of these criteria, but the most important and most powerful criterion might be the manner in which it achieves its sympathy toward its veteran, Walter (John Goodman). It is the sudden sympathy one feels for Walter toward the end of the film that triggers the need to even consider the film as a war film at all. Admittedly, most viewers are not likely to extend much sympathy to Walter initially. Walter’s buffoonery seems entirely idiosyncratic, largely, because this is the manner in which The Dude consistently casts it. Two scenes toward the end of the film suggest that the Coens fashion a script that can accept a more general understanding if not sympathy for this character. The first scene occurs immediately after the physical conflict with the Nihilists. The Coens fill their script and the screen with words and images that bring Walter’s reality to the surface. Donny (Steve Buscemi) collapses with a heart attack, and Walter and The Dude rush to his side. Walter orders The Dude to “call the medics.” He tells Donny to “rest easy, good buddy, you’re doing fine. We got help choppering in.” Both phrases would be more fitting for a soldier in the field than a bowler in a parking lot. The subsequent choice of shot and framing further fixes the characters and spectator in two places at once. The Coens zoom out as Walter consoles his friend. Eventually, the shot settles into the sort of overhead long shot so typical of war films. The shot

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darkens until only the neon lights on the exterior of the bowling alley remain. The image doubles, for just a moment, as bombs bursting overhead. The audience sits in the same dually loaded reality Walter occupies as a man holding a friend in a parking lot and, at the same time, a fallen soldier on the field of war. The Coens amplify their sympathy for Walter in a scene that follows this dramatic moment. Walter and The Dude have attempted to spread Donny’s ashes in the Pacific Ocean only to have the wind blow the remains of their friend back into The Dude’s face. This final “fuck-up,” as The Dude describes it, pushes the otherwise mellow, relaxed hero into an unrestrained outburst more in keeping with Walter. The Dude protests, among other things, Walter’s mention of Vietnam in the impromptu eulogy for Donny: “What was that shit about Vietnam . . . what the fuck does anything have to do with Vietnam?” The Coens load The Dude’s protest with a visual irony that is unmistakable. The Dude’s face is covered in Donny’s ashes. Walter literally cannot look at The Dude without seeing Donny’s remains. Just as importantly, the audience cannot hear his protest without seeing Donny’s ashes. The shot captures in a very literal sense Walter’s perspective in the film. He has ashes on his face from beginning to end; he cannot see the situations he faces without also seeing ashes. The Coens provide a visual picture for what this means for Walter in the sequence of shots that follow this one. The Dude’s tirade continues, and Walter’s sense of dejection grows with every word spoken against him. The Coens shift from the close-ups that mark this exchange to a long shot that positions the two characters on opposite sides of the screen. Walter stands screen left on the “western” side of the ocean. The Dude stands screen right safely inside the mainland. The Pacific Ocean hangs between them. The shot explicitly projects the distance Walter is always trying to cross to return to society. The Coens suggest that this crossing occurs, if even only for a moment, by having Walter and The Dude stumble into an embrace that places both characters screen right with the ocean to their left. The differences in this embrace mark the differences between the veteran and the everyday citizen. The Dude endures an awkward man hug; Walter bear-hugs his friend as if his life depended on it. And, if the elements of the veteran film have resonated with the spectator, it is likely they understand that his life does, to some extent, depend on that embrace. The Stranger’s final words fit a veteran war film as well as they fit a detective film: “Things seemed to have worked out pretty good for The Dude and Walter.” The words not only offer a bit of comfort, but they also collapse the entire story, if only for a moment, into a tale of The Dude and Walter. The focus shifts to the latter’s ability to find a meaningful relationship with the former and the society he represents—a representation, it must be noted, that spans the very decades over which Walter’s battle has existed. Big Le-

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bowski turns out to observe a link to the veteran war film every bit as viable as the association it held with the detective film. These two dramatic moments prompt the observant and suddenly sympathetic spectator to view the film again in order to construct a second Lebowski, so to speak, one that assumes the structure of the veteran war film. The Coens reward those who return to Big Lebowski to rebuild its narrative elements using the characteristics of the veteran war film with a movie that sustains itself as such from beginning to end. The film’s attention to war in general begins almost immediately with a television broadcast of George H. W. Bush’s “call for collective action,” which can be heard while The Dude checks out at the grocer. The president’s pronouncement that “this aggression will not stand” becomes one of the running jokes in the early parts of the film. Just as importantly, the statement offers spectators the opportunity to frame all they see around such declarations and the price it costs society to enforce them. This frame has especial interpretative significance for Walter. It provides a twofold logic for his outbursts and subverts what would otherwise justify further ridicule of that character. In terms of the former, Walter’s sacrifice and the definitive sacrifice he watched others make will not allow him to accept someone’s toe crossing the line during a bowling match or the possibility that a young wife faked her own kidnapping to collect money from her miserly husband. This is not the society he fought to preserve, and, as a result, he must fight to demand it not be this sort of society. Walter’s protests suddenly gain a seriousness that makes them something other than a punch line. Walter’s divorce works in a similar fashion. When set within the veteran war film, Walter’s divorce follows the course of other veterans who return home only to find that they have lost the home they had. This element and all of the rest of the aspects of the film change their hue when read as a veteran film. The fact that a film that works so well as a detective film also works so well as a war film detailing the struggles of the veteran reentering society is a bit unexpected. The fact that Big Lebowski has an equally compelling third narrative thread grounded in yet another genre entirely is nearly inconceivable. Yet, that is the film the Coens have with Big Lebowski. The film works just as well as the sort of queer film described by Benshoff and Griffin in their introduction to Queer Cinema (2004). Although admittedly not as identifiable as the detective genre or even as singularly focused as the veteran film, queer films do bear some unmistakable traits and, more to the point, can be shown to share a common discursive aim. In terms of the former, queer films present characters whose sexual identity challenges the dominant social belief in “heterosexual, procreative, monogamy” as the most desired form of sexuality (1). This challenge comes in the form of a story that demonstrates sexuality as “vast and complex” in an attempt to show the limitations of the “the social, cultural, and historical factors that define and create the condi-

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tions for [sexual] orientation and behavior” (ibid.). The characters run into the limitations of these factors as they move through a set of actions that test the bounds of “normative heterosexuality . . . [ultimately] shown to be an unstable performative sexual identity” (2). The end result of such stories, at least ideally speaking, is the occasion for viewers to recognize the need for a more complex concept of sexuality than mainstream society allows. Big Lebowski certainly meets each of these expectations, and it does so throughout the film rather than in fleeting moments. A number of the instances of sexuality are so transparent that they hardly seem worthy of mention. They exist as punch lines to the visual or verbal gags the film offers. The role of the porn industry, for instance, or the threat the Nihilists make against The Dude’s “Johnson” would be such examples. These aspects never push themselves to the forefront in a serious manner, nor do they provide a coherent or cohesive critique of normative sexual attitudes. These aspects can hardly be used to construct a legitimately queer film. To the contrary, their presence signals the difference between postmodern play in general and the constructivist sensibility the Coens practice. The former deals in gags; the latter forms the basis for some systematic critique. The extent to which Big Lebowski works as a queer film, rather than a film with queer elements, depends on the extent to which its queer elements tempt some critique. Big Lebowski can be shown to offer a steady critique of marriage as a working relationship, a workable institution, or as a necessary arrangement for childbearing. The film initiates this critique against the practicality of marriage from the outset of its action. One of the most pivotal plot points of The Dude’s exchange with the intruders he confronts upon his return from the grocery store is that he is not married. The Dude offers this detail as a defense that he, therefore, cannot have a wife who owes someone money. The comment can just as surely establish that this character has yet to achieve the cultural ideal to grow up, marry a woman, and make a baby. This fact begins the attack against the validity of this assumed ideal. The ongoing evidence offered throughout the film against marriage as a workable institution furthers that attack. The senior Lebowski lost his first wife to death and is currently in a sham of a marriage. Something other than love or child-rearing certainly brought the real Lebowski and his young trophy wife together, and the film uses that something as a catalyst for the mayhem in the film. A more embedded charge against marriage exists in Walter’s aforementioned status as a divorced man. The fact that he is left babysitting his ex-wife’s show dog, or faced with a debate following his divorce over his status as a legitimate Jew, exposes some of the more catastrophic results of failed marriage. Taken together, the three-pronged attack on the stability or desirability of marriage exists as one segment of Big Lebowski’s queer critique.

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A second section of that critique, and, perhaps, the most enduring, is Maude’s steady pursuit of The Dude as a sperm donor for a child. Maude manufactures a number of situations to justify a reason for The Dude to visit her doctor so that she can learn if he is a sensible choice for making a child. The fact that her desire to have a child has nothing to do with having a husband—a point she explicitly shares with The Dude—is crucial to a queer construction of the film. Having already challenged the credibility of marriage as a productive relationship, the film uses the possibility for a child without marriage as something of a deathblow against that institution. If one can have a child without the headaches of marriage, why have marriage? In keeping with their use of The Stranger’s epilogue, the Coens tie up this narrative thread in the film’s epilogue. The Stranger happily reports that he “know(s) that there’s a little Lebowski on the way.” He responds to that detail with the statement, “I guess that’s the way the whole darn human comedy perpetuates itself down through the generations.” Consistent with the work of queer films, his (mis)statement becomes the pronouncement against traditional sexual constructs. The truth is that this is not the way in which the human comedy has perpetuated itself, not historically; it is the way in which the human comedy has come to perpetuate itself, though, and that’s all right. The impossibility of such arrangements would comprise the legitimate sexual orientation of some of the characters within the story and some of the spectators watching the film. This attention to the spectator extends beyond the notice the Coens confer on cultural categories of sexuality. It touches on the very act of viewership they create for their audience. Rather than insist on any one film, the Coens can be found to create multiple ones in Big Lebowski, multiple films from multiple genres. Spectators can tether the film the way they want using these elements and the interests those genres persistently provide. The Coens afford audiences the same opportunity in O Brother. The same attention to the multiple senses of individual elements and willingness to reconstitute those elements accordingly results in more than one final form for the film. A fuller discussion of O Brother illustrates this point, a film that works equally well as an adaptation, a classical Hollywood musical, and a social problem film. O Brother initiates the constructive response through genre being described even before the film begins by taking its title from Preston Sturges’ classic comedy Sullivan’s Travels (1941). The eponymous character, John Lloyd Sullivan (Joel McCrea), is a film director who wants a break from making the escapist films his audience craves in order to craft a serious movie. The proposed title for this project is “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” One need not know this history to appreciate the Coens’ O Brother. The Coens make but a distant reference, to use the language of Jack Boozer (2008), to Sturges’ film; thus, those who know this history are sure to put that knowledge to use throughout their watching of O Brother. The inclusion of

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the chain gang at the opening of O Brother, for instance, would carry with it an additional seriousness that it might not if separated from Sullivan’s Travels. McCrea’s time in such a prison in Sullivan’s Travels was so clearly undeserved. Responses to the mania over “The Soggy-Bottom Boys” changes a bit, too. Set within the epiphany Sullivan has in Sullivan’s Travels during the moment in the church when he realizes the value of entertainment, the unexplained popularity of the group’s song lacks the criticism of popular culture it might otherwise proffer. Such things speak as much to the difficulty of life as they do to anything else. None of these qualities have an exclusive hold on any of the items mentioned. These connections could even go unnoticed and O Brother would not change much. The Coens offer Sturges’ film as a frame of reference for those who can see it and who choose to do so. The offering in itself is enough to justify the kind of intertextual response I described in chapter 5, for those who choose to engage in such. Those who do not know the connection, or who remain unmoved by its suggestion, are under no obligation to consider it. Sullivan’s Travels is no key to the meaning of O Brother; at most, it is, like everything else mentioned in this chapter, a lens through which the Coens’ film can be read. The same can be said about O Brother’s relationship to Homer’s Odyssey. The bard’s epic poem does not provide the way of seeing O Brother. It does, however, offer a way of seeing it. The Odyssey serves as but a second organizing principle for the whole that can be enacted or shelved. Other textualities must certainly exist. According to Gerard Genette (1997), such textuality is endlessly permitted. One text is overtly or more discreetly set within another at the time of its release or upon its reception. The adapting spectator can adjust a film in the same way subjects engage knowledge. Adaptation scholars have shown that viewers look at texts, especially adapted texts, with other texts in mind. The constructivist sensibility insists on this same point, but it also maintains that the Coens are making films and their viewers are watching their films with more than just bits of texts in mind; they are just as often relying on the logic, structure, and meaning of entire genres. This shift to higher-level sorts of schema (higher-level because generic readings tend to work from the top down rather than from the text up) allows, in the case of O Brother, an admitted adaptation to at once exhibit the characteristics of generic adaptation. The film need not insist on this additional relationship or formation, but it is available if viewers are prepared and inclined to see it. One such additional formation arises in O Brother through the Coens’ consistent use of the nonintegrated musical. Reviewers have consistently commented on the contribution the music makes in O Brother. Peter Travers (2000) calls the film an “ear-candy score of bluegrass, gospel, and country.” A. O. Scott (2000) goes one step further by noting the way in which the music in the film holds the whole together by adding “an emotional reso-

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nance that would otherwise be missing.” Roger Ebert (2000) identified the music as “the heart of the film.” The reviewers emphasized what careful analysis would reveal, namely, that O Brother functions as a legitimate musical. Those who know the tendencies of musicals are rewarded for their knowledge, too, as O Brother bears more than fleeting references to the Hollywood musical. A look at the particulars of the musical demonstrates as much. According to Thomas Schatz (1981), the musical assembles a set of characters that includes (1) a male lead who is at once lover and performer, (2) a womanly domesticator, (3) a “morally questionable” male and female alternative for each of the leads, and (4) a host of other characters meant to hinder the union of the two leads the audience anticipates. Musicals place this community of characters in a narrative that both makes space for musical and/or performative interludes and works toward “the show.” It is during the show that all of the conflicts confining the characters are magically removed, which integrates them all into a world that exists at least as long as the show does. Both of these feats are encapsulated in “the embrace” enjoyed by the film’s principals at the conclusion of the show, which was typically extended into an epilogue, thereby reinforcing the legitimacy of an otherwise improbable social and, more specifically, domestic integration of the male hero. A comparison of these generic expectations and O Brother reveals that the Coens’ film is more than a movie with a bunch of good music in it. The film depends on its music to not only express all that the characters want to say, but also “to determine the attitudes, values, and demeanor of the principal characters” (Schatz 1981, 194). More to the point of the constructivist use of genre, the music triggers the viewer to think of the musical as an interpretative framework for the film. This impulse to think of the film as a musical intensifies each time the music becomes the principal means to establish the disposition of, or turns in, the narrative. The Coens mark their narrative with music from the moment the film opens. The first two stanzas of the old spiritual “Po Lazarus” fill the soundtrack before shifting to the more fanciful “Big Rock Candy Mountain” that overplays the credits. Both songs help establish the droll reality in which the characters move and the whimsical illusion the audience will be able to observe, which is not surprising because this is just the bifurcation musicals tend to tolerate at the beginning of their stories. The images running over both songs could easily be considered performance, too, which further permits viewers aware of the musical to read O Brother through this construct. Inmates methodically sing and swing their hammers during “Po Lazarus,” emphasizing the oppression and monotony of their world. When the second song begins, the Coens cut to the three escapees fleeing the chain gang with impossible ease. The aural and visual cooperate to establish the very contrast between reality and the world of music so necessary in Hollywood musicals.

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The next two songs, “Down to the River to Pray,” and the first rendition of “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow,” reveal the other half of the music’s work in the film. These songs successfully lure characters and audiences into the fanciful world musicals create. Delmar’s decision to enter the baptismal waters during the first song illustrates the power of song over the characters; the diegetic audiences’ response to the second, which imitates the eventual response of the cinematic audience, exhibits the power of song for the audience. Collectively, the film’s first four songs meet the expectations of the musical by indicating the way in which the music in the film establishes the nature of the diegetic world and removing those who hear it from that world. O Brother maintains its structure as a musical as it creates space for additional interludes throughout the remainder of the film. Each moment builds toward the climax of musicals, “the show,” which occurs in O Brother during the political event at which “The Soggy-Bottom Boys” perform. In keeping with the realization of such moments in studio musicals, the Coens blur the lines between performer and their diegetic audience and between the diegetic world and the audience watching that world. The Coens capture the collapse of these worlds through a steady editing style that implicates all parties into one shot at the end of the sequence. The placement of the camera throughout the scene serves as a materialization of the emotional and practical effect of the music. Hard cuts from individual audience members to the band and then to other audience members slowly get replaced with long shots that erase the distance between the performers and their audience. The extreme long shot used during the sing-along of “You Are My Sunshine” brings the audience into the screen. Schatz mentions the way in which singalongs like these were typical of musicals, which offered a visual inclusion of all parties into a “wondrous locale where everyone makes music” (1981, 196). The effect was not just to conjoin diegetic and cinematic audiences, but to permit the latter to enjoy the same freedoms being realized on the screen, if only for a moment. And, so, O Brother works from beginning to end as a musical, but it can work just as well as a social problem film for those who know the tendencies of that genre. Those happily unaware of the social problem film will not lose anything save a chance to constitute the film according to a new logic. Anyone familiar with Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels—or, if not that film, at least the comments made by those eager to make a connection between that film and O Brother—knows the Coens intend to situate their film at least nominally within the impulse to make a serious social film. The Coens even admit as much in an interview they gave in 2000: “[O Brother] pretends to be a big important movie, but the grandiosity is obviously a joke; it is what it is, it’s a comedy” (Romney 127). Even though the apparent path paved by the source text and pronounced by the writers of the primary text both caution against dressing O Brother in the garments of a serious Hollywood social

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problem film, the film begs one to do so. The characteristics of social problem films identified by Roffman and Purdy (1981) appear with surprising consistency across O Brother, which very well might prompt viewers to measure individual items against this generic logic. Roffman and Purdy locate the birth of the social problem film proper within post-Depression audiences’ need for entertaining relief that gave “at least token recognition to the ever-pressing social realities of the time” (11). Such films were not so heavy-handed that they made an outright call for social change or even offered a sustained look at any one specific issue. They tended to work more globally, ridiculing “the basic tenets” of social interaction (8). Audiences accepted such ridicule, in part, Roffman and Purdy argue, because the criticism existed in a cinematic world that was buffered from the “real world” of the film, which was achieved by grounding the social problem film in a more recognizable genre. Even when that was not the case, it would create a world so zany that viewers were “safely removed from the readily identifiable standard ‘reality’” (ibid.). Just as routinely, social problem films would operate with a distinct social irreverence “played out within the confines of the Formula where the hero would eventually go straight and the ending inevitably turns out happy” (ibid.). O Brother accepts the terms of the social problem film contract in every sense. To begin with, the film openly embraces its task to entertain. For some, there is the pleasure of recognizing the ways in which the Coens find space to include sequences from the Odyssey; for others, there is pleasure in observing the story of three hayseed characters meandering through the depressed South. And, if these attractions do not entertain enough, there is the presence of the soundtrack that exists with an entertainment value that no one debates. O Brother does not want for entertainment value; neither does it refrain from recognizing and criticizing social realities of “the time.” Safely removed from any reality other than the one some might imagine existed once in the backward South, the film registers a number of social ills that jeopardize all hope for social progress. The film opens with the sound of hammers and singing associated with southern chain gangs prominent during the 1920s and 1930s. The Coens subtly articulate at least one problem with this practice when they have the camera pan across the chained prisoners to reveal that all the “criminals” are black. In this way, O Brother expresses a twofold complaint against this society: racism and legal responses to misconduct. A number of other social ills also appear as the story unfolds. The world through which the film’s three heroes move is beset by social problems: economic hardship, familial instability, spiritual uncertainty, political duplicity, religious profiteering, and institutional bigotry. Such is the nature of social problem films. The characters’ responses to these problems offer another important connection between O Brother and social problem films. Characters must move

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with enough social irreverence that some sympathy for their problems emerge even if they are unable to see beyond the social crisis that engulfs them. The audience must ultimately recognize what none of the characters can. O Brother certainly meets this expectation. Everett’s speech after the trio’s deliverance from the noose signals as much. Everett is sure that “the South is gonna change,” that “a brave new world where they run everyone a wire and hook us all up to a grid” is going to cure the “backward ways” so clearly documented in O Brother. The audience knows better, though. The grid did not change things all that much, and the changes it did make only created other problems. This moment of clarity for the audience and false hope for the characters is point for point what the social problem film delivers. This opportunity to align oneself against a society so fraught with trouble further associates O Brother with social problem films. Roffman and Purdy contend that audiences needed to feel safely removed from the world on screen to be able to consider the problems being conveyed in the way the genre would want them to be considered. Without some artificiality, the film loses its ability to look at problems. The Coens mark the ending of O Brother in a manner that ensures some distance from the problems that still linger in the world just depicted, even if some of the issues have been resolved. Chain gangs still swing their hammers, citizens still struggle to find gainful employment, banks still foreclose on them when they can no longer pay their bills, politicians still swindle their constituencies, and people in power still operate against those who threaten that power. But these problems occur in a world that is not the world the spectators occupy. The Coens reinforce this idea in the final shot by washing the color from the screen in favor of black and white. The railroad hand ascends up screen in the push car he occupies into a place that is clearly not the audience’s. Those problems he leaves behind him are the very same problems the audience abandons in the theater. The film the Coens put in front of their audience tolerates several different formations. It exists as another entry in the Coen brothers canon, which suggests one kind of reading. It is an adaptation of a canonical literary text and a distant adaptation of a classic Hollywood film, which asks for another sort of engagement. It is just as well a classic Hollywood musical, and the more contemporary social problem film, too. And these are just a few of the formations O Brother tolerates. One could add others. For instance, the film’s geographic selection relates the film to other films set in the South. Although it is not a formally established genre, there may very well be enough of an idea of the “southern” in circulation to justify organizing O Brother in this way. The use of genres that are only popularly perceived rather than critically established would not seem to pose much of a problem. The only problem, it seems, is trying to insist on too narrow a perception of

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what it is a Coen brothers film actually is. That is yet to be determined and depends greatly on how one treats the material. The critical insight here is that the Coens’ spectators are never left powerless. They are never lost beneath a wave of unfathomable references that can never be reconciled. To the contrary, they are permitted to push and pull the elements in the film in whatever ways their cultural and cinematic astuteness will allow. Those in the theater aware of the generic patterns being utilized across the film will find individual elements being injected with multiple senses that contribute to different organizing principles. Those not yet aware or unwilling to commute elements against higher-level principles might find their own reading of the film. Either way, the audience shares authorial responsibility for the film they watch. The result is a film that is not one thing but several, a film with “a lotta ins, a lotta outs.”

Chapter Seven

“Appearances Can Be Deceptive” Investigating Sexuality in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Intolerable Cruelty, and Burn after Reading

Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) arrives at an arranged meeting with Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) in Burn after Reading (2008) to retrieve the $50,000 he believes Cox is willing to pay to have his files returned to him. Chad dons a costume that only the audience can know is not his usual attire. Having never seen his blackmailer before, Cox has no way to know that Chad has exchanged his normal workout apparel for a suit. But the former CIA operative can, of course, detect that Chad is not what he seems. Cox implicitly mocks Chad’s choice to call himself Mr. Black and explicitly rebuffs the notion that Chad presents him any danger. Perhaps aware that his ruse is not accomplishing what it intends, Chad tries to regain control of the exchange by contending, as sinisterly as he can, “Appearances can be deceptive.” Pitt’s delivery, which is searching rather than commanding, draws particular attention to the linguistic error he has made. The line he wanted, it would seem, is the popular idiom “appearances can be deceiving.” He exchanges “deceiving” for “deceptive,” which does not do anything more than confirm what Cox and the audience can already gather, namely, that Chad is a fool. Chad is not simply a fool, though. He is also an important alternative to the anxieties that drive most of the characters in Burn after Reading. Each of the film’s main characters, save Chad, looks to couple. Three of the four individuals married when the film opens—the Coxes and the Pfarrers—engage in extramarital affairs in an effort to find a more suitable mate. Those who are not married, Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Ted (Richard Jenkins), pine for a companion. Only Chad stands outside this impulse. The reasons for his withdrawal are never articulated, but they are suggested. Pitt 97

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performs Chad’s character in such a way that one might reasonably suspect that he is gay. The Coens play on this possibility by having him shot by Harry (Clooney) while literally “in the closet,” the significance of which increases when set among and against the other characters Clooney has played for the Coens. Clooney has starred in three films for the Coens: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Intolerable Cruelty (2003), and Burn after Reading. Clooney tells Reuters.com that the Coens deem this set of films his “trilogy of idiots.” The truth is that this set of films belongs to the brothers as much as it does to Clooney. The Coens did, after all, write the characters Clooney plays, choose to cast Clooney in those roles, and direct his performance. The trilogy can quite reasonably be called the Coens’ idiot trilogy, and a close examination of the three films through these characters suggests that there is good reason to do so. One might not see the opportunity for construction the Coens create without doing so. The Coens place Clooney in roles that gain their greatest significance when read progressively and against his star persona. Richard Dyer (2003) explains that “stars matter because they act out aspects of life that matter to us . . . they touch on things that are deep and constant features of human existence” (17). Marilyn Monroe becomes a star because she captures the sexual ideologies of her generation; Paul Robeson because he embodies “a set of specifically black qualities . . . equally valued and similarly evoked, but for different reasons, by whites and blacks” (67); Judy Garland becomes a star, in part, because she maintained a mass appeal that relied on an “image . . . that spoke to different elements of the male gay subcultures” (138). Such reasons for stardom should not surprise. Dyer contends that the star is always a “social phenomenon [that] functions crucially in relation to contradictions within and between ideologies, which they seek to manage or resolve” (34). The star develops a persona that can play an important part in intertextual and constructive readings of contemporary films. Walter Metz (2004) offers a compelling example of the part star persona can play in intertextual readings by looking at Wolfgang Petersen’s Outbreak (1995). Metz argues that the casting of Dustin Hoffman and Donald Sutherland establishes the ideological tension of the film that reveals “deep rifts between the people [represented by Hoffman], and the American military [represented by Sutherland]” (30). Metz grounds Hoffman’s intertext in two roles that play important parts in Outbreak, which is found most primarily in Hoffman’s portrayal of the good doctor fighting on behalf of the people, echoing his role as Carl Bernstein in Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men (1976). In Outbreak and in Pakula’s film, Hoffman is playing a character working to reveal “government corruption” that is threatening the conceptual and, in Outbreak, literal existence of the American people (30). More subtly, Hoffman’s intertext in Outbreak relies on his character Ted Kramer, who

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must reconcile his work and family life in Robert Benton’s Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). Metz finds the same balance in Outbreak: “Daniels only discovers the cure for the disease at the moment he has decided to reconcile with his wife” (32). The argument, then, is that audiences are likely to borrow what they know about Hoffman’s other performances to negotiate the ideological significance of material in Petersen’s film. Metz states that audiences will put Donald Sutherland’s presence in the film to similar work, even though he is cast “against type,” so his persona will work a bit differently. Sutherland’s performance as General McClintock, a man willing to “immolate the population of Cedar Creek rather than use the antitoxin he has developed,” runs counter to the criticisms of such behavior through characters in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970) or Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) (32). The result is an ideological expression that is undermined in some part, no matter how wonderfully played. Audiences would bring their knowledge of Sutherland’s criticism of the very actions he is performing in Outbreak as an implicit criticism against him. Metz concludes that Sutherland’s very presence in Petersen’s film “exposes . . . the rationale that immoral behavior was acceptable because it was performed ‘in the interest of national security’ . . . as hyperbolic and paranoid” (33). The film’s casting becomes part of its message. Casting works similarly in the Coens’ idiot trilogy. In O Brother, Clooney plays the part of the paterfamilias struggling to keep his position as head of the house. In Intolerable Cruelty, he struggles to strike a marital union worth having. In Burn after Reading, he suffers the consequences of his own failures. Each of these characters endures an experience one would not normally expect Clooney to have to suffer. He is, after all, a matinee idol, and the Coens know this when they cast him for these parts. Eddie Robson (2007), in fact, captures the Coens reflecting on their decision to cast Clooney in O Brother: He was the only actor we considered for the part, but the reasons for that are hard to pin down . . . As an actor you never catch him straining for effect . . . you put that little thin mustache on him and you’ve got the matinee idol look, that mix of Clark Gable and Cary Grant . . . He looks like a movie star of the period, and you imagine the character as imagining himself looking that way. (228)

The comments underscore a number of points anticipated by Dyer and Metz. To begin with, they reveal the Coens’ awareness of the ways an actor’s body arrests specific ideologies in the way Dyer finds Monroe, Robeson, or Garland to do. These remarks also imply some awareness of the ways in which Clooney’s other ventures have capitalized on this quality of Clooney. Audiences are sure to have some knowledge of this persona being exploited by the producers of the television series ER, which brought Clooney to mass atten-

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tion, or in films such as One Fine Day (1996) or Out of Sight (1998). The Coens exploit this persona in their trilogy. The contest between the persona Clooney brings to the roles the Coens write realizes its most important outcome when set within the concerns of queer cinema. B. Ruby Rich (2013) asserts in her landmark article, published first in Village Voice (1992) and later that same year in Sight and Sound, that the queer film is one of the more significant genres to emerge in the last twenty years. Rich estimates that 1992 was “a watershed year for independent gay and lesbian film and video” (16). Writers and directors were announcing a time for “doing something new, renegotiating subjectivities, annexing whole genres, revising histories in their image [a queer image]” (16–17). The release of films such as Paris is Burning, Tongues United in 1990; Poison, My Own Private Idaho, Young Soul Rebels, R.S.V.P., Edward II, Khush, and The Hours and Times in 1991; and Swoon and The Living End in 1992, all entertained open and mainstream discussions of queer sexuality. Michele Aaron (2004) claims that films like these were “unapologetic about their characters’ faults,” they refused any presumed “sanctity of the past,” and they demonstrated a palpable defiance of “cinematic convention in terms of form, content, and genre,” and, more generally, “death” (3–5). As such, they gave voice to the otherwise marginalized (Aaron specifically mentions black gay males, male prostitutes, gay and transsexual Hispanic and Latino youths, etc.). Moreover, the popular and critical success of these films ushered in a “queerer culture . . . queer themes and queer characters” (8–9). Sean Griffin (2009) demonstrates that this queering of sexuality should impact how one views all forms of sexuality, heterosexuality included. All sexualities, are, after all, social constructions. As such, Griffin argues, “queer theory needs to draw out the bland, white bread, vanilla, missionary position, monogamous, married, patriarchal form of heterosexuality and point out it is just as much a social construct as any minoritized sexuality” (4). In the absence of such a study, one is left with a suffocating “heteronormativity, which asserts but one form of ‘proper’ heterosexuality and denies or pathologizes the multiple other forms of heterosexuality that exist” (6). Griffin’s edited collection demonstrates the way in which “motion pictures provide ample evidence of the shifting conceptions of heterosexuality” (8). This edited collection offers studies of early cinema, classic Hollywood, the films that appeared during the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and, more recently, in films from Quentin Tarantino and Ben Stiller, to name but two, to substantiate Griffin’s claim. The Coens’ idiot trilogy offers a similar justification for and demonstration of the need to queer heterosexuality. And it does so most effectively when Clooney’s persona triggers the constructive response the Coens’ use of well-recognized source texts, ideologies, textual excess, alternate intertexts, and multiple genres triggered in other places. In fact, this demonstration

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leans on lines of inquiry initiated in other Coen brothers films. As chapter 6 showed, the Coens place within The Big Lebowski (1998) an unequivocal critique of marriage. The Coens’ script allows The Dude (Jeff Bridges) to make a special point at the beginning of the film of his being unmarried. Their script further highlights through the senior Lebowski (David Huddleston) the pains that come with marriage. One can, as Lebowski knows, lose a spouse to death or to one’s own shortcomings. Marriage can also go the way of divorce, which the Coens register through Walter (John Goodman). In keeping with the argument of the last chapter, Big Lebowski ultimately shows through Maude (Julianne Moore) that one can realize the most practical benefit of marriage, namely, children, without ever exposing oneself to the perilous institution of marriage. Big Lebowski is a queer film in that the film’s incorporation of sexual relations outside of the traditional marriage, its steady critique of marriage, and its alternative means to childbearing all posit it as a film challenging traditional notions of sexuality. The Coens have already shown the contemporary perils of marriage. This exposé continues in O Brother, first vis-à-vis the genre associations it accepts, then through Clooney’s character, and, finally, by the inclusion of Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson). O Brother’s generic commitments ensure that issues of sexuality work and similarly demonstrate some interest in these topics, if only through its reliance on the musical genre, which is always already at least implicitly raising questions of gender and sexuality. One could deem these moments as passing interests or by-products of the genres being employed, but an examination of the Coens’ catalogue suggests that issues of sexuality and gender might prove a central rather than coincidental interest. The duo constructs a series of films around Clooney that offer a sustained investigation into competing notions of male sexuality. The inclusion of men in each film that refuse the “normal” bonds of matrimony— Delmar in O Brother, Wrigley (Paul Adelstein) in Intolerable Cruelty, and Chad in Burn after Reading—intensify this competition. The result is three distinctively “queer” films that share an interest in the perils of marriage and the possibilities of other arrangements. A discussion of the sexual aspects of each film illustrates the progression and ultimate pronouncement made by the whole of the trilogy. The especially relevant contributions O Brother makes to a queer reading of the Coens’ idiot trilogy begin to emerge during the political rally, where Everett (Clooney) is reunited first with his girls and then with his wife, Penny (Holly Hunter). When Everett asks the girls why they are singing under the last name “Wharvey,” the youngest daughter explains they changed their name after their daddy, Everett, was “hit by a train.” The three girls continue to alert the audience to what Everett already knows, what has set, unbeknownst to everyone save Everett, the entire film in motion, by announcing that their mother is engaged to be married the very next day. Everett protests

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the youngest daughter’s claim that “Uncle Vernon” will become “Daddy” with what becomes a recurring joke for the next several minutes: “I’m the only daddy you got! I’m the damn paterfamilias!” An exchange in the movie-house theater between Everett and Delmar brings to the surface the more serious aspects of the paterfamilias joke. Delmar remarks that he “never figured [Everett] for a paterfamilias.” Everett responds: “Oh-ho-ho yes, I’ve spread my seed and you see what it’s earned me.” The exchange is interesting for several reasons. One has to wonder what it is about Everett that led Delmar never to consider him a family man. Some answers are readily available: Everett was just in prison; he does not seem terribly interested in others; he appears like the philandering type. A more intriguing possibility emerges in the course of Everett and Delmar’s conversation, a conversation that has Clooney bemoaning the problems having fulfilled his duty as a man have brought upon him. Somewhat surprisingly, Everett questions the validity of his choice when he ends his confession with “and you see what [marriage] has gotten me.” The quip might be little more than a moment of exasperation for Everett, but it could very easily encapsulate more for those in the audience. There are certainly those who have followed the socially prescribed formula to happiness only to end up in despair. One role of queer films is to show just how vapid this goal is for some. The Coens develop this aspect of Everett’s remark in the final moment of the film. Everett successfully reestablishes himself as the paterfamilias, only to lose that status more quickly than he regained it. Husband and wife walk side by side until Penny learns that Everett has failed to retrieve the right ring from the bureau, which prompts Penny to call off the wedding. The family becomes unstable again, a point emphasized visually when the camera pans across the members of that family, who are literally bound by a string. The entire episode punctuates the statement that the film has made since Everett’s motive to reunite with his wife has been revealed. Everett is a “man of constant sorrow” precisely because he is “the damn paterfamilias.” The site of privilege becomes a promise of peril. Interestingly, the Coens’ script opens space for some alternative to the position of paterfamilias during the aforementioned exchange between Everett and Delmar in the movie-house theater. Everett asks Delmar, “You ever been with a woman?” Delmar responds, “Well, uh, I—I gotta get the family farm back before I can start thinkin’ about that.” Tim Blake Nelson’s performance of this line delivers the real punch in it. He squirms in his chair and contorts his face while struggling to find a response to Everett’s question. The performance and the line could convey little more than Delmar’s shyness or lack of ease around women. Delmar did, after all, seem the most suspicious of the sirens and unsure of what to do with their advances.

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One could just as well cast Delmar’s words and actions in this scene as a kind of confession for some alternative sexual preferences. He might prefer to remain single and forgo the requirement of having a wife and children, or he might prefer men. The lines the Coens write for Everett’s questioning of Delmar shift the topic, even if only by degree. Everett’s question is “have you ever been with a woman?” not “have you ever been married?” The shift calls Delmar’s sexuality into question. This question may be nothing more than a question, which is a passive admittance that alternatives to the social construct that has entangled Everett do exist. Their existence is all one needs to frustrate the sexuality of O Brother. The questions of sexuality and the perils of marriage that were only embryonic in O Brother develop more fully in Intolerable Cruelty. A suspicion of marriage and some alternative to that arrangement set the purview of Intolerable Cruelty, where marriage is shown to be the utmost cruelty ever devised by man (to echo the sentiments of O Brother). The entire premise of Intolerable Cruelty extends this proposal, which opens with one husband’s discovery of his wife in bed with another man. The subsequent action accentuates that marriage is little more than a means to secure one’s financial situation. The jilted husband knows this and captures on film his wife’s lover’s vehicle in the couple’s driveway before the evidence gets away. He also documents the results of her stabbing him using his “Daytime Television Lifetime Achievement” trophy. The choice to allow a trophy marking professional success to be the wife’s prime form of weaponry is certainly not without significance. The threat marriage poses to the professional and financial success one achieves in life emerges as the initial inquiry of the film. One bad act, which might be nothing more than the hiring of the wrong lawyer, could cost one the resources one has taken a lifetime to accumulate. Intolerable Cruelty bypasses this aspect of marriage, though, to ponder most earnestly a more general threat of marriage. It does so by casting the women in the film as the “deceitful, two-faced, she-woman” that Everett protests in O Brother. Women have, in the time between the decades O Brother and Intolerable Cruelty chart, the Depression of the 1930s and the time of financial rebirth later in the century, become empowered to obtain more than clarinet lessons from their unfaithful husbands. Allowed under law to pursue divorce and to obtain at least half of the marital assets, women can, in the words of Intolerable Cruelty’s heroine, Marylin (Catherine ZetaJones), use marriage and the eventual divorce it promises to obtain “money [and] independence.” All one has to do is “nail his ass,” which is to say catch the man in the arms of another. The woman no longer needs to find another suitor. The financial reward of divorce makes another husband unnecessary. Intolerable Cruelty’s leading man, Miles Massey (Clooney), stands as the only sure way to protect oneself. His protection comes in two forms. Most ideally, he has drafted the ironclad Massey Prenup, which guarantees that

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neither party should profit by a marriage. The two parties can only take out of it what they bring to it. When someone did not have the prudence to protect themselves with the Massey Prenup before marriage, Miles’ existence as an able-bodied divorce attorney serves as his second form of protection. It is this form of protection that Intolerable Cruelty most develops and relies on to set the film in motion and to queer its events. The film puts both outcomes on display during the Rexroth divorce proceeding. Rex Rexroth (Edward Herrmann) did not have the forethought to protect his assets with a Massey Prenup before cheating on his wife and allowing the episode to be caught on videotape, but he did have the sagacity to hire Miles as his divorce lawyer. Though shocked at Rex’s desire to leave his wife with nothing, despite being the guilty party, Miles determines to protect his client. To do so, he must discredit the wife. He does so by bringing in Heinz (Jonathan Hadary), the Baron Krauss von Espy, who can expose Marylin’s original intentions with Rex. The Baron recounts at Miles’ strategic prompting the eventual couple’s meeting five years earlier, which began with Marylin’s request for a husband. The Coens follow this line of testimony with all the tricks needed to heighten the drama: a discordant clash followed by an ominous single note on the soundtrack; a cut to a single shot of Marylin, who raises her head with an expression of clear concern across her face; a cut to a two-shot that includes Rex with an equally palpable look of shock on his face. One has the feeling that Miles has hit on the discovery that will thwart Marylin’s plan. His case is made as the Baron elaborates on Marylin’s original request, which asked for “a man, who, though clever at making money, would be easily duped and controlled . . . a man with a wandering pee-pee . . . whose affairs would be transparent to the world . . . a man whom she could herself brazenly cuckold.” The Baron’s words seal Marylin’s chances, and Miles secures Rex’s wealth. The exchange also seizes through a double entendre the competing notions of marriage being pursued in Intolerable Cruelty. In what appears at first as a non sequitur, the Baron shifts his attention after declaring that Marylin requested a husband to attend to his dog. He asks, “Do you want some bones? Huh? Does Elsbieta want some bones? Has anyone any bones?” The choice of words here captures the most traditional reasons for marriage. One could not have sex, in the Middle Ages, say, outside of marriage without risking tremendous hazard. Marriage was, as the “Miller’s Tale” in the Canterbury Tales reminds readers, the means to sexual freedom both in and outside of marriage. If one wanted “a bone,” one would need to marry. Marriage provides another kind of freedom more presently. Women on this side of the sexual revolution do not require a reason to have sex. The expectation for matrimonial coitus can even be turned on its head and be used as a justification for divorce. Intolerable Cruelty brings this view to the surface during the Gutmans’ divorce proceedings. Mrs. Gutman’s (Judith Drake)

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lawyer (George Ives) refers to his client as “her husband’s sex slave for thirty-six years during their marriage.” Women do, however, demand some means to independence and wealth. Marriage, and the divorce that follows, is, for some, the only means to either. The arrangement shifts from one means to another, from an opportunity to have sex to a means to independence and wealth. This shift in reasons to marry introduces a second end of marriage in Intolerable Cruelty: marriage becomes a competition between discerner and deceiver. The deceiver who dupes the deceived gains material prizes, a point the Coens reiterate throughout their film. The brothers leave the greatest prize to the discerner, that is, the one who sees through the schemes in play. The film suggests the competition between these two positions is what initially draws together Miles and Marylin. Miles admits his desire for competition during the Gutman trial. Uninterested in Mrs. Gutman’s testimony, Miles confesses his boredom to his associate. Miles imagines the reason for his boredom is people’s willingness to “compromise.” The problem with “the institution of marriage,” in Miles’ estimation, is that “it is based on compromise,” which Miles views as nothing but the promise of death. Miles continues, “struggle and challenge and the ultimate destruction of your opponent . . . that’s life.” The institution of marriage does not allow such things, at least not until Miles meets Marylin. Marylin openly treats marriage as a competition. Her willingness to confess this freely makes her a mark for Miles, who seeks some new challenge. He is “fascinated” by her, especially after she seemingly dupes Howard D. Doyle, first by signing the Massey Prenup as a sign that she is not after the oil tycoon because of his money, then, through “the power of suggestion,” to have her new husband eat the legal agreement as a wedding present on their wedding day. Miles marvels at her accomplishment. What becomes clear a few scenes later is that Miles’ inability to see the act as a ruse exposes him in the worst way. He is not an able discerner, which makes him open to Marylin’s deception. For Marylin’s part, the plan is set in motion following her inability to discern Miles’ talents as a lawyer. Having been left with nothing following Miles’ use of the Baron, she determines to strip the able lawyer of his lifetime achievements. The whole of Intolerable Cruelty thus works to develop further the ideas of marriage and sexuality suggested in O Brother. Marriage is not what it used to be. It does not provide one the status it once did, nor does it exist as the ideal it once was. Men and women are better off tending to the “family farm” before thinking about marriage. They must mind the “family farm” after marriage, too, a point that the inclusion of Marylin’s friend, Sarah Sorkin (Julia Duffy), highlights. Sarah has amassed all the wealth one could imagine, but she remains locked in her house, alone, because seeing people is, in Sarah’s words, “risky.” The wrong relationship could strip her of her

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hard-earned alimony. Such statements take on a different view when set within the Coens’ canon or within the particulars of O Brother. The Coens trigger a constructivist reading of these two films, once through Clooney’s involvement in both projects and a second time through the recurrence of an interest in the subject of marriage and sexuality just below the surface of the earlier film. Intolerable Cruelty rewards those who approach it through O Brother not only by showing marriage in crisis, but also by expressing some of the reasons for it to be so. Miles suggests early on that the problem with marriage is that it is based on compromise. Compromise, as noted earlier, is death. Marylin’s actions illustrate that marriage is undermined by a legal system that promises some profit to those who play “fair and square.” If you wait long enough, you can “nail the ass” of a spouse with a “wandering pee-pee.” This hope suggests a third threat to marriage: infidelity. The plotting wife waits for her husband to enter indiscreetly an extramarital affair. Intolerable Cruelty’s opening and the Gutman trial show that the infidelity can, of course, work in the opposite direction. Bonnie Donaly (Stacey Travis) takes her lover; Mrs. Gutman writes to her own lover. The real threat to marriage in the film’s sensibility, at least sexually speaking, seems to be male sexuality, which is explored most directly in the fourth threat to marriage. Miles is surprisingly a-sexual in Intolerable Cruelty. His interest in Marylin depends as much on her ability to overmatch the rich men she traps as it does her appearance. She exists for Miles not as a woman to attend, but a woman to combat and best. This is true at least until the end of the film, when all of the contradictions the plot proposes are erased at the service of the romantic comedy formula the film ultimately embraces. Until that point, Miles seems more committed to winning a competition than he does finding a woman or a family. Miles wants what others do not have. At no place is this point clearer than in the improvised keynote address Miles gives at the N.O.M.A.N conference. The “very different Miles Massey” addresses matters of the heart rather than technical points of law. Miles claims the difference is that he is now “in love,” but one has to wonder if he knows what love is. He certainly understands the “emotion” as something out of place among his legal colleagues, but he struggles to describe much about love. He can simply claim that “love is good.” His speech does not find energy, though, until he begins to talk about cynicism and its destroying force. Miles concludes his speech with a surprising despondency. He walks through the crowd as a defeated man until the crowd begins to cheer for him. Little by little, he recognizes the applause as a sort of victory and shrugs off the earlier emotion. The scene ends with Wrigley emerging from the other men at the back of the room with arms extended. Wrigley proclaims his love for Miles. The two embrace. Miles and Wrigley turn to the rest of the room, and Wrigley grabs

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Miles’ arm and thrusts it into the air. They leave the room like victors, or, not without coincidence, as a couple leaves a wedding reception. The sequence draws particular attention to the relationship of Miles and Wrigley and to Wrigley’s role in the film. Miles and Wrigley leave the proceedings of the N.O.M.A.N conference with such jubilation that one cannot help but identify their relationship as one of the only genuine relationships in the film. Neither party seems to seek some advantage over the other. They simply embrace each other, and in so doing show a more appealing social arrangement than the marriages found throughout the film. Wrigley emerges as an alternative to a wife a second time when the camera settles on his home, which is clearly a home for one. Wrigley has not pursued marriage any more than Delmar had. Both characters, whether marked homosexual or not, exist as an alternative to that ideal. One could question the sexuality of Wrigley and even Miles, but Intolerable Cruelty refuses to go beyond anything more than suggestion. When juxtaposed with O Brother, those suggestions do swell to some extent. The parallels between the two films reinforce what the one fails to articulate fully without the other. The suggestions become declarations when set against Burn after Reading, which offers the most blatant examination of male sexuality. Again, the consideration centers on Clooney’s character, Harry Pfarrer, and that consideration begins from his introduction in the film. Harry acts with an uncomfortable ease—chatty enough to suggest some charisma, but punchy enough that one has to wonder what he is hiding. The answer to this question is presumably given when the action cuts to the kitchen. Harry protests to the hostess of the party, Katie (Tilda Swinton), that her husband knows about the affair between them. Katie assures Harry that is not the case. The important issue in the early moments of the film is not whose spouse knows what, but what the audience knows, namely, that Harry is a philanderer. During the drive home from the party, the exchange between Harry and his wife, Sandy (Elizabeth Marvel), maximizes the response most in the audience will have against Harry by making it clear that Sandy suspects what Katie was certain her husband did not. The opening moments of the film place both marriages on unstable ground. The script allows Harry to offer a rationale for his behavior the next time the film turns to his story. He lies in bed with Katie and recounts his history with Sandy. The two married young. He, at least, thought “it was forever.” But things changed as he got older: “You start to feel your mortality, you start to say there’s no more time for dishonesty, for subterfuge. You say you’re not that person.” The brief monologue registers “idealism” as another challenge to marriage. Harry’s words capture all that marriage should be and the difficulties one has holding onto this sense of “ought-ness” as time passes. Katie tires of Harry’s musings and tells her lover that she is thinking of divorcing her husband. The declaration clearly unnerves Harry. He re-

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alizes that, and explicitly admits, if Katie gets a divorce, he will need to “settle things with Sandy.” His affair with Katie is, after all, more than “just frivolity.” The scene returns in its final moments to the same two-shot of Harry’s and Katie’s heads on the pillows with which it started. Harry possesses the same distraught expression, even if the reason for his desolation has shifted. Marriage and affairs are, as Harry ultimately declares, “not just fun and games.” Harry responds to this realization, somewhat surprisingly, by starting another affair. He arranges to meet Linda (Frances McDormand), and the two go through virtually the same date Linda had earlier in the film with another stray husband. Burn after Reading complicates Harry’s motivations in important ways on what is presumably his and Linda’s second date. Harry brings Linda to his house to reveal the sex chair he saw “advertised in a gentleman’s magazine.” The apparatus consists of a chair with a hole in the center, stirrups, speedrail, and a dildo that moves up and down as the chair rocks back and forth. Linda is amazed and intrigued. She declares, “That’s fantastic!” The audience has to wonder what made Harry build such a thing. At least two possibilities present themselves. Harry might feel as though he is unable to satisfy his wife. The contraption might be an attempt to please her. The machine could just as well be for Harry, however, a point that gains greater significance when one remembers Harry saw the device in “a gentleman’s magazine.” Such items are not commonly found in the most widely circulating “gentlemen’s magazines.” They belong to publications that cater to more particular sensibilities. One can speculate what those particular sensibilities are. The commonality across each is that they are one version or another of queer sexuality, which is to say that they revel in sexualities that go beyond monogamous, procreative heterosexual intercourse. One has to wonder whether or not the contrivance does not reveal some part of Harry that he is not admitting. Brook and Campbell (2003) present a particularly relevant reading of Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) in The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). They suggest, “an accretion of story elements, details of character, and aspects of mise-en-scene point to Crane’s . . . ‘deeply closeted’ gayness.” The phrase “deeply closeted” is borrowed from a review by Klawans (2001) in The Nation. The idea is that Crane’s sexuality differs from other closeted gay men—they are aware of “taboo desires” even if they are “unwilling to disclose them publically,” but Crane “is unwilling to admit his desires even to himself.” Yet, there are plenty of markers that Crane is gay: he is writing for a men’s magazine; he has “a copy of such magazine, Muscle Power,” on his desk in his prison cell; he admits to “not having ‘performed the sex act’ with his voluptuous wife, Doris, ‘for several years’”; he rebuffs Birdy’s sexual advances and does not flinch at Tolliver’s. Moreover, Ed works as a barber, which, Brook and Campbell estimate as “one of the few public professions in

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which a man is not only allowed but encouraged . . . to fondle . . . the whole range of the male population with no gay stigma attached.” Man Who Wasn’t There offers enough queer evidence to suggest a queer reading of the film. Nolan (2008) queers Miller’s Crossing (1990) in a similar way. A number of queer elements exist along the surface of the Coens’ third film. Three of the characters are openly gay: Bernie (John Turturro), the Dane (J. E. Freeman), and Mink (Steve Buscemi). The lone woman in the film, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), is involved in a relationship with one man, Leo (Albert Finney) and having an affair with another, Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne). She also purportedly tried to teach her brother, Bernie, “a thing or two about bed artistry.” But the most interesting queer element in the film relates to Tom. Nolan suggests that the descriptions admittedly gay characters in the Miller’s Crossing give Tom suggest another instance of a “deeply closeted” character in the Coens’ oeuvre. The Dane calls Tom “straight as a corkscrew.” Bernie declares that he and Tom are not like “those animals . . . they can’t make us different than we are.” Nolan offers Tom’s relationship with Verna as the most overt suggestion of Tom’s sexuality. Adopting the logic of Sedgwick (1991), Nolan views Tom’s affair with Verna, Leo’s girl, as an example of “male-male desire [becoming] widely intelligible primarily by being routed through triangular relations involving a woman” (Sedgwick, 15; Nolan). There is at least the possibility that Tom is gay, which would add another queer film to the mix. Burn after Reading queers Harry in much the same way Ed and Tom are queered. The accumulation of story details and aspects of Harry’s character already registered conspire with the mise-en-scène during Harry’s final moments on screen to support such a reading. Chad is forced to find a hiding place when Harry unexpectedly returns from a run. The trapped man runs up the stairs and enters a room screen left. The camera hangs for just a moment on a low-angle shot of the hallway in the house that is reminiscent of the hallway where Caspar (Jon Polito) and Bernie meet their end in Miller’s Crossing. Chad hears Harry walking up the stairs, so he retreats into the closet and waits for a moment to escape. Such a moment seems to present itself when Harry enters the shower, but he finishes so quickly, Chad must continue to wait. Unfortunately, Harry requires items in the closet and discovers the unexpected intruder. In panic, Harry shoots Chad in the face, killing him instantly. The star personae and the placement of the characters combine in interesting ways. Harry does not know Chad, but Clooney and Pitt are closely intertwined, cinematically speaking, if only because of the Ocean’s movies (2001, 2004, 2007). The two were both at the top of fan-favorite lists produced at the turn of the century. It is not uncommon for the two leading men to be confused for one another. These nondiegetic elements make the placement of the characters in this moment particularly interesting. The fact that

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one of the characters/actors is in the closet implicates the other in the same place. The scene is given to the same double entendres found in the Baron’s testimony. The Coens continue the double entendres when Harry returns to the room to see what he has done. He says some version of “fuck” seven times in the thirty seconds he spends looking over Chad’s dead body. It is by far the most repeated word, which is significant. The most distinguishing aspect of Harry’s character throughout the film has been who he is “fucking.” His behavior demands some explanation, and the best account might be the one communicated here through violence. Harry’s action was not premeditated. It was impulsive and instinctual. One has to wonder what his sexual life would be like if it was impulsive and instinctual rather than ritualistic and reasoned. The queer aspects of Burn after Reading, Intolerable Cruelty, or O Brother do not push themselves on viewers any more than the various generic readings in O Brother or Big Lebowski do. They are left for the viewer to construct. The Coens help the construction along by casting Clooney in pivotal roles in all three films. Clooney’s consistent presence encourages viewers to look for commonalities across the three films. Once set in motion, the way in which all three films queer heterosexual marriage and male sexuality comes to the surface. Their surfacing reveals the ways in which the appearance of marriage as a stable social arrangement may be deceptive. It certainly will be for some, at least as long as the intended outcomes are something other than what they once were.

Chapter Eight

“I Haven’t Done Anything Funny” Scrutinizing Gender in the Coens’ Arrangements of a Bunch of Men around One Woman

As the dramatic action of the Coens’ first feature, Blood Simple (1984), begins to reach its final moments, and the confusions begin to give way to some clarity, Abby (Frances McDormand) utters the phrase her husband predicted she would: “What’re you talking about, Ray? I haven’t done anything funny.” The words return the couple to an earlier moment in the film when Abby’s husband, Marty (Dan Hedaya), predicted she would one day express these words to her newfound lover, Ray (John Getz). The denotations are not what Marty thought they would be, though. The “funny thing” is not an affair; rather, it is a murder. Ray suspects that Abby tried to kill her husband, and he has spent the night finishing the job only to learn here, in this moment, that his assumptions were wrong. Ray was cleaning up someone else’s murder. Abby really had not done the “funny thing” Marty suspected. That is not to say Abby has not done something funny—she has, if only by existing as the one significant female character in a story filled with a range of frustrated men. In truth, Abby realizes what will be a familiar arrangement of men around one woman. Those who recognize the ways in which the Coens offer a systematic examination of the evolving nature of male sexuality in their idiot trilogy would hardly be surprised to learn that the Coens investigate gender in a similar manner. Issues of gender naturally arise when questions of sexuality are entertained. It can be difficult at times to distinguish where a discussion of sexuality stops and gender begins. An early scene in Burn after Reading (2008) illustrates just this point. Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) and Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), the principal male 111

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characters in the film, participate in an exchange charged with sexual connotations. Harry is talking with a group at Osborne’s party about his work in the U.S. Marshal’s office. Osborne grows tired of the discussion and interjects, “if you want, he’ll show you his great big gun.” Malkovich emphasizes the last three words in such a way that the rest of the guests do not miss the intended double entendre either. Harry looks to regain control of the conversation by returning the conversation to his actual gun: the “gun’s no big deal . . . twenty years of Marshal service I never discharged my weapon.” Osborne returns the discussion to underlying meaning of his earlier quip by offering, “that sounds like something you should be telling your psychiatrist.” The banter carries overt sexual overtones, but the exchange is a contest between two men, which is to say, a contest of masculinities. A careful look at the Coens’ canon reveals that they routinely stage similar contests in their films. They regularly organize a cast of men around one woman and create subtle enough distinctions between each of the men that a range of masculinities is put on display. Eight of the Coens’ sixteen films to date deliver stories of all men and one woman (Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Ladykillers, and True Grit). The pattern marks five of their first six films (only Raising Arizona breaks from the pattern and then only by degrees). The brothers arrange their comedies and their crime films in this way, in their original screenplays and in their adaptations. The formula occurs so frequently that the pattern itself deserves attention. This chapter does just that, and it does so, in part, to show the way in which the Coens trigger a constructivist response through gender. Gender currently exists as one of the most recognizable constructs of the present epoch. It follows that any film assuming a critical interest in questions of gender can alert constructivist sensibilities. Judith Butler’s (1990) seminal description of gender in Gender Trouble explains the reason why this is the case: Gender ought not be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow: rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted over time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts. The effect of gender is produced through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which the bodily gestures, movements, and style of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self. (140)

A gender representation, like all presentations, is always a re-presentation. It is never inherently accurate, or inaccurate, which is to say, a depiction of what gender is; to the contrary, it is always an interpretation of what gender can be. As such, a gender representation can invite reflection over the partic-

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ulars of its depiction. Most succinctly, a gender projection is always already an invitation to participate in ongoing formation of the gendered self. A film that draws particular focus to gender is even more inclined to invite such considerations and, when properly engaged, the constructivist response being outlined in this book. This is especially the case when a filmmaker routinely delves into such questions. One should add the Coens to the list of directors who possess a particular interest in gender. The brothers repeatedly and explicitly raise questions of gender in their films. Take, for example, Lebowski’s (David Huddleston) question to The Dude (Jeff Bridges), “What makes a man?” or Frank’s (Michael Badalucco) outburst in The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), “What kind of man are you?!” These explicit moments raise questions of gender, but nearly as meaningfully is the implicit way the brothers’ recurring arrangement of stories filled with a range of men and one woman raises such questions. A combination of the explicit and implicit questions does alter the focus of these questions, as both have much to say about men and masculinity, a point that has not always been noted in Coen brothers scholarship. Coen scholars have taken an interest in gender, but that interest tends to focus on the women, or woman, in the brothers’ films rather than the men. This is particularly the case with Fargo (1996). The film is full of men, but it is the one female character who has garnered most of the attention. Hilary Radner (1998), for instance, investigates the way both Marge (Frances McDormand) in Fargo and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) must deal with “the problems of the lunatic violence of men” (248). From Radner’s perspective, Marge becomes a counterpoint, even the point, of the Coens’ project. Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly (2009) argues something similar by noting the “specific textual functions that [Marge’s] (exceedingly visible) sexual difference and pregnancy perform” (16). Goodwin-Kelly determines that “Marge’s identity as a pregnant woman” lends itself to a humor that would otherwise be absent in the film (19). In both cases, Marge becomes the primary point of identification in the film. The men are cast as foils to this point of identification or at least the catalyst for the violence that ensues. Jans Wager (2009) and Jakub Kazecki (2008) offer interesting counterperspectives to the argument that Marge is the point of identification in the film. Wager focuses on the range of masculine representations captured in Fargo. The importance of Norm (John Carroll Lynch), Mike Yanagita (Steve Park), Shep Proudfoot (Steve Reevis), and Gaear (Peter Stormare) is considered in succession (133–35). Wager’s point is that the gender arrangement adheres to the Coens’ penchant for “presenting audiences with bizarre and inexplicable characters and story lines” (135). According to Wager, the differences between the men serve something mindless rather than substantive. Kazecki offers a similar analysis of the men in The Big Lebowski (1998),

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even if the intent is to reveal something more substantive. Kazecki contends that the male characters belong to one obviously constructed male persona after another: The Dude is at once “the hero of a cowboy saga or detective in a big city”; Walter is cast as a “war veteran”; Donny is dressed as a “sportsman” (Kazecki 2008). None of these men are “real” men in the traditional sense. Each man borrows his persona from some other time or place, and, in so doing, audiences are permitted to see a variety of men as they have been conceived in various times and places. What all four of these studies show is that gender is an admittedly constructed category. This book maintains that the open use of openly constructed categories prompts a constructivist response. The Coens’ chronic interest in stories filled with a range of men but only one woman can trigger a constructivist response, and for all the reasons the above critics noted. A close reading of the films that leans most heavily on their gendered arrangement illustrates this point. Five of their first six films deliver stories of a bunch of men and one woman. Raising Arizona is the only film in the Coens’ first six films that does not rely on the recurring arrangement, and even that film raises questions of gender, a point Robert Castle (2002) details quite skillfully. The Coens address these contradictions and impediments most often through their arrangement of a range of masculinities around one female. The one female serves as the lens through which these men can be viewed. In this way, one gender construct serves as the point of reference for the other. But the woman in these films also reminds audiences that all of the men in the movie are men. The presence of one lone woman disallows the feminization of some. This is especially the case in five Coen brothers films: Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, Ladykillers, and True Grit. These five films not only assume the favored gender arrangement of so many Coen features, but they also seem especially given to a reading of the masculine crisis they portray through the lone woman in the film. In speaking about the Coens’ first feature film, Blood Simple, Erica Rowell (2007) states that the Coens invert noir conventions through the film’s “doubled pair of partnerships: Abby and Ray versus Marty and Visser”; somewhat unexpectedly, the Coens chose to “shift away from the femme fatale scenario” common in noir and to push “the blame for all of the destruction onto the two men” (31). Marty and Visser die instead of Abby and Ray. The latter pairing simply responds to situations the former initiates. The men undo one another and themselves until the only person left is the “the victimized woman” (13). R. Barton Palmer (2004) hits on the irony at work here: “At film’s end the only survivor in this world ruled by the principle of red tooth and claw is the woman whose weakness and dissatisfaction set the story into motion” (16–17). Palmer claims that the result emphasizes the “inalterable” fact that isolation defines the “condition of human experience,” at least as existence is described in this film (17). Blood Simple certainly

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supports such a view, but it develops others more particularly when the gender aspects of the film are properly tuned. The most important aspect of Blood Simple would seem to be the differences between the three leading males, but close analysis of the film reveals that Abby’s inability to distinguish the three men becomes the most important aspect of the film. Marty (Dan Hedaya), Ray (John Getz), and Visser (M. Emmet Walsh) do not appear to hold much in common. Marty runs a successful and somewhat respectable business. He wears clothing that fits the times. He has a beautiful wife, and they live in a nice home. Ray’s existence is less established. He lives in a small, one-bedroom suburban house and holds a job off which he lives paycheck-to-paycheck. He is very much a social middleman. Visser completes the picture of the period, existing as he does just on the edges of his society. He dresses like all good detectives, according to an outdated code, and drives an equally archaic car. He lives without connections or without the benefits his occupation ought to provide him. The three men cover a range of possible lives and exist on something very much akin to a medieval wheel of fortune. The irony is that all three of the men await the same fate no matter which position they assume at any one moment. All three men end up dead by film’s end. The shared outcome signals a kind of masculine crisis that can best be explained when the action is read through the lone woman. Abby’s inability to distinguish the three men from each other becomes more important than the differences audiences can arbitrarily draw between them. The film opens with Abby in the arms of a lover, which blurs the lines between Marty and Ray. It closes with Abby shooting Visser by mistake after thinking Marty was attacking her. She says just moments after firing a shot through the bathroom door that she knows hits her man, “I ain’t afraid of you, Marty.” To her surprise, Visser breaks into an unfamiliar laugh and lets her know that he will give Marty the message if he sees him. The final comment reveals rhetorically what the rest of the film exposed thematically: the men in this film remain indistinguishable from one another from the one point of view that matters most, namely, Abby’s. The lone woman is unable to rightly demarcate the men from one another, which ensures that all three end up dead by film’s end. The Coens return to the inconsequential distinctions between men in their third feature, Miller’s Crossing (1990), which again arranges a series of masculine projections around one woman. The difference between Miller’s Crossing and Blood Simple is that the former makes explicit what the latter only implied. The men in Miller’s Crossing are virtually indistinguishable, a point the Coens underscore through mise-en-scène and their script. The Coens signal this aspect of their film by arranging the actors in the first scene in a virtual match. Caspar (Jon Polito) sits with his man, Eddie Dane (J. E. Freeman) behind him; Leo (Albert Finney) sits with his man, Tom Reagan

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(Gabriel Byrne), behind him. The two sides are indistinguishable save for the piece of furniture that keeps them apart. The Coens create dialogue that establishes the trouble these men are having distinguishing one from the other when they have the film open with Caspar trying to distinguish Bernie (John Turturro) from the rest. Caspar wants to have Bernie killed for tipping others to his “fixes.” Leo refuses, in part, because the bookie is his girlfriend’s brother, and, more importantly, because Caspar’s attempt to differentiate Bernie from the rest fails. No meaningful, that is, stable, point of distinction emerges, which locates what follows in the crisis announced in Blood Simple. One might follow William Nolan (2008) and contend that there are important differences between some of the men in Miller’s Crossing. The film does veil the sexual preferences of the men pretty thinly, and one could consider this difference significant. Sexual orientation becomes more of a red herring, though, especially when Miller’s Crossing is set within the context of the other films featuring stories of a bunch of men and one woman. The Coens seem more especially concerned with the constructed notions of masculinity in this film and the crisis these competing notions of masculinity creates. The protest against Bernie is never, after all, that he is gay; rather, it is that he lacks “ethics.” Interestingly, the film establishes this point, too. Bernie has double-crossed Caspar, and he will double-cross others. The most significant outing in the film is of Bernie’s double-crossing nature, not of his sexual orientation. One might just as well contend that the crisis depicted in Miller’s Crossing is not a gay crisis, but a masculine crisis, or, more properly, a crisis of competing notions of masculinity. The points of distinction arbitrary but still apparent in Blood Simple disappear in Miller’s Crossing. One is left with nothing but sameness, a point established before film’s end visually, verbally, and thematically. Visually speaking, all of the characters wear the same dress and fill the same positions. One could contend that this is little more than a by-product of a commitment to genre, but the staging of the characters in similar positions throughout the film suggests otherwise. As already mentioned, the film opens with the four participants filling each other’s positions. Caspar and his man are on one side; Leo and his are on the other. Their mirrored alignment reduces the characters to roles rather than subjective realities. Other staging choices in the movie do the same thing. The mayor and police chief sit across from Leo in one scene, only to find themselves in front of Caspar still later in the film. Leo, Bernie, and Tom all take turns sitting in the same chair in Tom’s apartment at different times in the movie. The choice of staging, as the choice of clothing, reduces the men to versions of one another. The language in the film does the same thing. All of the characters use the same language. Again, one could contend that this is simply a symptom of

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the Coens’ commitment to genre, but even if some commitment to genre explains its presence, it does not adequately measure its result. A tracing of the characters that use the word “rumpus” illustrates the point. The word first appears when Leo visits Tom. Leo apologizes for the late hour. Tom responds, “I’ll live. What’s the rumpus?” The choice of words does not seem terribly significant; instead, it seems like an attempt to place the action in another time and place. Interestingly, Mink asks the same question when he stops Tom in the club. Bernie asks the same question when he and Tom meet in Tom’s apartment. Caspar does the same when Tom enters his office a few scenes later. Drop (Mario Todisco) asks the same question when Tom visits him to inquire about whether or not his next fight is fixed. The question belongs to several characters, which is also to say that it does not belong to any one of them. All of the characters are borrowing their language from the same linguistic fount. The same point is registered through the consistent use of the word “dangle,” which Leo, the police chief, and Tom both use at one point or another. There are certainly explanations that would account for this commonality (the Coens are writing a genre film; people that share a time and place tend to share language), but the point could just as well be read as the Coens’ attempt to blur the lines between the characters so that some explanation for the crisis might appear. Miller’s Crossing’s thematic interest suggests that this is just what the linguistic blurring means to establish. Having established a world where differences are difficult to discern, Miller’s Crossing shifts attention to a consideration of the heart, that which exists below the surface. This deliberation occurs most explicitly during the scene in the woods between Bernie and Tom where Bernie repeatedly asks Tom to “look into [his] heart,” but it begins even earlier than that. Leo refers to himself in the first scene as “a bighearted slob,” who is going to “square” things between Tom and his bookie. In Tom’s apartment, Leo attempts to get Tom to reconsider Verna by saying that Tom “don’t know what’s in Verna’s heart.” Verna does the same in her exchange with Tom in the powder room at the club by saying Leo is “honest and he’s got a heart.” In all three instances, the reference to the heart encourages one to look below the surface, where meaningful distinctions between characters can be found. This is the shift that Bernie wants Tom to make when in the woods faced with his own death. Bernie repeatedly cries out, “I’m praying to you. Look into your heart.” The most telling part of Bernie’s words while trying to save his life, however, is the distinction he draws between the other men in the film and between himself and Tom: “We’re not like those animals,” Bernie insists. Bernie assumes that Tom will distinguish himself from the others if he just looks into his heart. From at least one side of a constructivist perspective, this need to find some point of distinction is paramount. If the role of spectators is to participate in the ongoing construction of the text before them, then they must be

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able to make some meaningful distinctions unless, of course—and this may very well be the point in the Coens’ third film—such distinctions cannot be made. This would seem to be the view one could adopt for Bernie and Tom. By film’s end, Bernie has contradicted his own testimony by committing every act he claims in the woods never to have committed. Bernie turns into “muscle.” He crosses his friends—first Mink and then Tom. He kills the former and would have killed the latter if given the chance. Bernie is no different from the animals despite his own insistence that he is, and Tom is no different. Tom explicitly rejects the notion that he has a heart, that is, some point of distinction from the other men in the film. He is, in Verna’s words, “all lie and no heart.” Paul Coughlin (2008) begins to articulate the significance of this point when he notes the way in which Miller’s Crossing takes the idea that the Coens exhibit in several films, namely, that “performances are constructed in everyday life,” to “its logical conclusion wherein the self-consciousness of performance ultimately alienates Tom from his ‘true self’” (227). Coughlin’s belief in a “true self,” a sense of “self” born beyond representation, works against him, however. The point Miller’s Crossing seems to make is that no such place exists. As such, those held beneath a common sense of inspiration are doomed to eventually eliminate one another since they remain unable to negotiate some unique space to call their own. This observation can, of course, apply to male and female. The point at the moment is the way in which the Coens put this observation to work against competing and, therefore, endangered notions of masculinities. The men in Miller’s Crossing are caught in a crisis only a few of them will be able to escape, and only if at some point the last two standing turn from one another, which is, of course, what Leo and Tom do in the end. The Coens’ next two features cover some of the same ground as Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing, but they do so with both genders in mind more than just their men. Barton Fink (1991) and Hudsucker Proxy (1994) confront issues that transcend gender. Barton (John Turturro) struggles to articulate his artistic voice. The lone woman in the film, Audrey (Judy Davis), faces the same struggle. Presumably a great writer in her own right—she does after all pen several successful novels—she must publish her work in her male lover’s name. Man and woman alike face constraints to authorship. The same thing occurs in Hudsucker Proxy. Norville (Tim Robbins) faces the same professional challenges that Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh) must face: both must rise above the limitations of their professional world. The gender issues, especially as they relate to men in particular, take a back seat to other concerns, at least until the release of Fargo. Fargo returns to the all men and one woman schema used in Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing, and it does so with a renewed interest in a range of masculinity. This is not the view that many have taken of the film,

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nor is it essential to an appreciation of the Coens’ first critical and popular success. The normal view, as suggested, is to focus on the lone female in the film. Marge becomes, in keeping with the morality-play reading Mary Ann Beavis (2000) gives the film, the moral center. She represents all of the virtues: law, wisdom, and family. The men represent all of the vices: lawlessness, foolishness, greed, and betrayal. Beavis even reserves more distinct representations of these evils in each of the male characters. Gaear is billed as “pure evil—a Satan figure.” He exhibits “virtually no personality.” Carl is cast as “an imp of Satan—a nasty, greedy, cowardly, ‘funny-looking’ little demon.” Jerry is the fool who sets the whole tragedy into motion. Although such a reading does offer some interesting ways to think about the men in this film, this view does not strike the chord the Coens have held in earlier films. For that, one must recognize and reconstitute the men in this film, a film that offers one of the most earnest purviews of modern masculinity imaginable. This consideration is admittedly not on the surface of the film per se; rather, viewers aware of the Coens’ recurring interest in the subject bring matters of masculinity to the film after viewing it. Such work would do well to begin with placing Marge’s husband, Norm (John Carroll Lynch), at the center of the film. He’s certainly not the most exciting character, but he does seem to offer the “norm” against which every other male character reacts in the film. The most daunting counter to the normal male is Wade (Harve Presnell), whose financial resources permit him to exercise a palpable range of power and influence. The Coens stage this power and influence most dramatically during the dinner scene at Jerry’s (William H. Macy) house. Wade holds the home under his control in surprising ways. Jerry is thoroughly emasculated in the scene, not just as a parent, but as a provider, too. Jerry could go the way of Norm and ignore Wade’s presence, but he proves unable to do so. He devises a series of schemes in trying to match Wade’s success. The issue for Jerry is not greed, as it would seem, but an ability to match the model Wade establishes. This same motivation might account for the actions of other men in Fargo, too, and most notably Carl (Steve Buscemi). Coughlin rightly recognizes that Carl shares more in common with Jerry than either would recognize. Both men must “manufacture for themselves alter egos—Carl as master criminal, Jerry as deceptive car-salesman—with which they hope to maintain control over others” (226). Their plans fail when other more “manly” men squash them. Jerry is pressed by Wade’s physical and financial presence. Carl is constrained by Gaear (Peter Stormare), who possesses, if not the financial advantage, the physical one. The Coens enact the threat Gaear is always already projecting against Carl by having the former overcome the latter with an axe before feeding him into a woodchipper at film’s end. The act becomes more than a horrific act to punctuate a criminal relationship gone south; it literally realizes the threat one form of

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masculinity imposes over another. Men that are consistently confronted by ominous versions of masculinity must do something to overcome those threats or they will at some point be overrun by them. Somewhat ironically, Gaear is unable to articulate his advantage over Carl, or anyone else in the film for that matter. He is as emasculated as his partner was because of his inability (or unwillingness) to speak. The Coens emphasize Gaear’s inability to speak in several places in the film. Gaear’s reticence serves as a punch line during the drive to Minneapolis. Carl bemoans his partner’s silence in an extended protest. The trait becomes something more than a joke after the kidnapping. Gaear sees Carl’s attempts to talk his way out of the trouble with the officer, and he shoots the policeman in the face. This move from word to action reduces Gaear in a way that aligns the taciturn character with the other emasculated men in the film. He refuses to speak, not as a matter of choice, but as a demonstration of his inability to articulate himself. Gaear is nothing but physical force. By film’s end, Gaear is stripped even of his physical force. Gaear’s final moments on screen have him inside a cage in the back of Marge’s police car. Her questions to her prisoner and his inability to respond to those questions conjoin the figurative cage around this character with the literal one the audience can see. Gaear’s masculinity is kept in check by his inability to express himself. He can only look out the window in the same way he has looked into the television screen. Set in this way, Marge’s statement that “there’s more to life than money, you know” participates in the misreading the Coens present in Fargo. Just as Miller’s Crossing was not ultimately about homosexuality, Fargo is not principally about money; rather, it is about masculinities struggling to realize the ideal that Wade establishes. The only stable masculine position in Fargo is the one Norm occupies, and that position is negotiated independent of the one Wade projects and to which the other male characters aspire. The intense competition that follows these aspirations locks the men into a contest against one another that is as catastrophic as the one portrayed in Miller’s Crossing, and for similar reasons. The men in Fargo are as encoded as the men in Miller’s Crossing. Both sets of men are motivated by the impulses and desires their milieu gives them, and both suffer for it. Fargo does not announce this aspect of the story any more than Blood Simple or Miller’s Crossing announced their concern with gender; instead, the film implies the point through its arrangement of characters and its insistence that the men be read through the one woman. Such an arrangement pushes the assumptions of one construct through the assumptions of another, which highlights the temporary validity of both. The Coens construct a story that asks the audience to consider aspects of gender constructions that the characters themselves are never aware of.

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The Coens also offer audiences a similar opportunity to recognize the constructed nature of the men in Ladykillers (2004). Again, the film proposes that a desire for money results in death. The Coens’ first admitted adaptation becomes one of the most interesting investigations of masculinity, if only because it finds a place for men that earlier films fail to imagine. The fact that Ladykillers creates room to explore competing versions of masculinity has not escaped critics. David L. G. Arnold (2008) assigns each member of the gang (save one) some place on a masculine continuum. Dorr (Hanks), for instance, establishes himself as the brains of the operation, which should establish him as an alpha male of some sort; however, the Coens quite literally dress him in more effeminate ways. His sweeping coat looks at times like a dress, and even when it does not, it does not align him with any contemporary notion of masculine apparel. In this way, Dorr becomes “a stereotype of intellectual effeminacy.” Arnold proposes that the Coens play with the conventions of the “muscle” in similar ways by placing Lump (Ryan Hurst) “at the other end” of the “continuum of masculine impotency.” The Coens empty Lump of any meaningful sense of strength at the moment of his introduction. The character is tossed to and fro on the football field totally unable to hold his position. There is a bit of a surprise when the camera finally reveals Lump to the audience and he is as big as he is. Arnold writes, “despite being convincingly large . . . the aptly named Lump initially seems incapable of even the most basic physical effectiveness.” Lump might be a brute in some circles, but his abilities are qualified, to say the least. In this way, Lump is as much a mix of masculinity and something else as the professor is. The Coens save their greatest gender mix for the third and fourth members of the entourage, Garth (J. K. Simmons) and MacSam (Marlon Wayans). Arnold aptly notes that Garth is a “confusing mélange of gender codes and signals . . . at once rugged masculinity, nurturing sensitivity, and pathetic ineffectuality.” More than that, Garth is a man who “habitually attempts to assert himself only to continually cave in.” The Coens play this trait to comedic effect. The scene wherein Garth tries to argue for a greater share of the money because he lost a digit serves as an example. He begins a reasonable argument but is ultimately unable to sustain it long enough to have it succeed. His best ideas and intentions are ultimately frustrated by his own inefficacy that exists in part because of his psychological awareness and sociological sensitivities. Arnold asserts that the Coens complicate MacSam in similar ways. MacSam exhibits “signifiers of conventionally coded masculinity,” but he is ultimately unable to act on any of these, crippled as he is psychologically. This point is especially palpable during his failed attempt to murder Mrs. Munson. MacSam flashes back to a scene from his childhood where his mother’s dominance over him frustrated him to such an extent that he can never act in the ways he imagines himself to need to act.

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Each of these compromised versions of men fall to the elderly Mrs. Munson. Arnold rightly reflects on the underlying statement behind this fact: the modern American male is marked for all of its vulnerability. The ease with which Mrs. Munson handles the men and escapes their worst intentions exposes each version of the men. The most influential man in the house, in fact, is Othar, Mrs. Munson’s late husband. His expressions dictate the action in the film in ways that none of the living men can. Arnold hints at this point: “Othar is an important presence in the house and in Marva’s life, and his portrait, gazing sternly over her sitting room, acts as her moral compass.” What Arnold does not establish is the way in which this looming presence reads back onto the men who are unable to exert the same level of influence. The men in Ladykillers can, at best, masquerade as men. They are unable to act according to any meaningful version of masculinity. Richard Gaughran (2009) says that the pretext the men adopt as musicians mirrors the way in which many of the characters of the Coens “fashion a style or a mask” in an attempt to fool others (231). This move belongs almost exclusively to the men in the Coens’ oeuvre (think Charlie Meadows in Barton Fink, Big Dan Teague in O Brother, or any of the men in Ladykillers). Such projections not only remind audiences of the extent to which identity in general is so openly constructed, but it shows, in the case of the films set against one lone female, the extent to which contemporary constructions of masculinity effectively read against the modern man who aspires to the projections they offer. The only men who remain at the end of these ordeals are the men who remain blissfully unrelated to or ignorant of the models that would otherwise overwhelm them. The way in which Othar is ultimately implicated in this crisis in Ladykillers is most interesting. The Coens elect to have Mrs. Munson project her thoughts onto the portrait of her husband. “His” expression changes, and “his” opinion sways his widowed wife, but these influences are always filtered through Mrs. Munson. She determines what he thinks and how to act as a result. This situation is particularly meaningful when set within the series of films built around one woman and a range of men. By so explicitly allowing Mrs. Munson to determine the opinion and existence of her husband, the Coens bring to the surface what they have been doing most subtly in similar films before Ladykillers. Interestingly, those handling the promotional campaign for the Coens’ first admitted adaptation reveal this shift in the poster for the film. The five men stand facing front in something of a fan across the middle section of the poster. Dorr stands at the center with two colleagues flanking both sides of him. The position of the five men gives the men some significance until one notices the position of Mrs. Munson: she stands facing the men with her back to the camera. The resulting picture approximates the sort of scene one might find during a rehearsal; Mrs. Munson fills the role of director, and the men in

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front of her assume the position of players in the charade. The poster itself alerts audiences to the fact that the men will be held to the judgment of the lone woman. The Coens alert audiences to the fact that the men in the film will be viewed through the one feminine perspective, even before the film begins. Any attempt to see the men apart from the lone woman is frustrated or sure to result in a reading from outside the narrative parameters the Coens construct. The Coens continue to develop the very same themes strung throughout each of the films they construct around a bunch of men and one woman when they adapt Charles Portis’ novel True Grit (1968), and, by extension, if only by association, the 1969 film by the same name. One should hardly be surprised that such a story would interest the Coens. The tale Portis provides acts as the perfect petri dish for the Coens to further evolve their consideration of masculinity. The theme of a masculine gender crisis first announced in Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing, explained more fully in Fargo, and finally articulated in Ladykillers, is given proper space in the Coens’ adaptation of Portis’ story to develop more fully the role of contemporary man in a world that, at best, tolerates his existence. The Coens accomplish this feat using many of the same strategies they have negotiated on other films. For instance, the Coens’ True Grit is very much seen through the eyes of the lone heroine, Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld, and with adult voice-over by Elizabeth Marvel), which very much aligns the film with the narrative perspective eventually struck in Blood Simple or Fargo. The Coens convey this perspective more immediately in True Grit. The adaption opens just as it had in their adaptation of McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men, with a voice-over narration given by the one character through whom any reading of the film must pass. Mattie offers her account of how her story of revenge began with a speech that merely accepts the words first written by Portis. The script the Coens arrive at only compresses the opening narrative. The act does more than save time; most importantly, it engages in open evaluation of the men in the film, which begins with Mattie’s assessment of Chaney (Josh Brolin) as a coward. This open evaluation of the men in the film continues as the film unfolds, always playing a more important role in the narrative of the film. The film begins with the hanging of three men who have been found guilty of various crimes. The Coens inherit the triple-hanging scene from Portis’ novel. They could have just as easily left this scene out of their script, but to do so would have missed the chance to encourage the audience to follow Mattie’s lead to scrutinize the quality of men in the film. The Coens further intensify a spectatorial judgment against the men in True Grit by also including a scene between Mattie and the sheriff in Fort Smith (Leon Russom) wherein the two weigh who is the best marshal. The sheriff considers several men who might meet Mattie’s demand:

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The remarks demonstrate an important aspect of such discussions, namely, that the ideal for any construct depends on the criterion being used. Spectators have more than one way to construe the “best” man in the film. As such, the opinions will vary. This variance is an important part of the constructive sensibility the Coens encourage. Spectators are left to determine the quality and character of the men they are given, and they are given a range of representations of masculinity to consider before making their determinations. What the audience is not given is unequivocal freedom to measure the men according to their own terms. Mattie’s assessments are too central and too forceful to ignore. One could quite easily accept her view as the right view, at least until the end of the film. The men are what she says they are until she says they are something else. This point is most especially conveyed through Mattie’s treatment of LeBoeuf (Matt Damon). Her initial evaluation of LeBoeuf as a “rodeo clown” or an “ineffectual” pursuant of Chaney certainly affects how audiences view that character as long as Mattie holds that opinion. Only when she reconsiders her assessment of Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) and then LeBoeuf following the marshal’s drunkenness does the audience realize any space to adjust their view of him. Mattie’s admission that she had a “misjudgment” of LeBoeuf opens the way for the audience to reconsider their judgment of the Texas Ranger. Mattie continues her appraisal of the men she encounters, and the audience is sure to at least consider her view as the authoritative opinion. This point is especially pronounced in the epilogue of the film, which has an older Mattie arriving at the site of a Wild West show in Memphis about twentyfive years after the ordeal the film relates. The Coens emphasize this point in a humorous manner by having Mattie share Cogburn’s note to her, “brief as it was, was rife with misspellings.” They articulate the point again by having Mattie refer to the man who refuses to remove his hat or rise from his seat as trash. The audience can presume that Mattie has lived the intervening years between the two periods depicted in the film as she has the earliest moments. She has never lost her tenacity or her willingness to evaluate the quality of the man before her. The Coens frame this last scene with two pronounced images that beg the audience to reconsider the role of the men in this story and the ability of these men to impact the world in which they are placed. Both shots capture the elder Mattie from behind in such a way that her missing arm cannot be

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ignored. The first shot appears as she moves through the train station. The voice-over recounts what had happened after Cogburn carried her to Bagby’s store. The camera begins at her feet and slowly moves upward until it settles on a medium shot that looks like a silhouette. Her entire frame is in black. The pronounced light coming from the tall window in front of the character highlights Mattie’s missing arm. The final shot of the film works in virtually the same manner. The Coens cut from an extreme long shot of Mattie at Cogburn’s grave, to a long shot of her walking away from the gravesite. Mattie is dressed in black and set against a brightly lit sky. The absence of her arm is exceptionally pronounced. These two images of Mattie offer a subtle check to the judgments she has leveled against the men in the film, and that the Coens have offered against men across their canon. Mattie would offer what so many Coen films offer, namely, that man is little more than an obstacle. Their time of unquestioned significance has passed. The absence of her arm suggests otherwise. Had LeBoeuf not come to Mattie’s aid when Chaney attacked her, she would be dead. Had Cogburn not carried her to safety, she would be dead. She has gone through life without an arm, but she would have fared much worse had it not been for the two men the film has treated as little more than commodities. These final two shots ensure that the audience does not leave the theater without having noted this point. If there is a warning levied against masculinity in True Grit, it is a warning against arriving at concepts of masculinity through feminist concerns. The Coens have made a career filtering the perceptions of the men they depict through the perception of a lone female. Abby announces her assessments of the men in Blood Simple. Verna ultimately determines the relationships of the men in Miller’s Crossing. Marge serves as the ethical lens that determines the value of each of the men in Fargo. Even the motley crew assembled in Ladykillers must stand the judgment of the elderly woman at the center of that film. The difference between the relationship between the men and the one woman in the films before Ladykillers, and that film and True Grit, is the allowance the latter two films make for some positive role for some of the men in those worlds. The Coens do not insist that their audiences see this shift, but they do provide a way for them to do so. Ladykillers places a picture of Mrs. Munson’s late husband above the mantle and allows that picture to change expressions in such a way that Othar’s ongoing influence over his wife is visible. This influence is admittedly filtered through the widow herself, but the fact that this man has any influence is significant. Hardly any other man in a Coen brothers film built around a bunch of men and one woman allows as much. On the surface, True Grit would seem to be more like the earlier films than Ladykillers. The narrative and visual emphasis of Mattie’s lost arm suggests otherwise. The audience is asked to assign the men in the Coens’ True Grit a place of

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positive significance they have not been asked to assign men in other Coen films. This question emerges most emphatically for the audience trained in the constructivist ways of reading the Coens’ films. The familiar pattern of a bunch of men and one woman works as a way to recognize gender constructs and to participate in the ongoing construction of those constructs as they appear in the movie and circulate outside of it. The audience, in the end, is the one permitted to do something “funny.”

Chapter Nine

“Accept the Mystery” Resisting the Final Construction of A Serious Man

The Coens offer in the middle section of their fourteenth release, A Serious Man (2009), a concise depiction of the invocation so many of their films make. Mr. Park (Steve Park) arrives at his son’s professor’s house to convince the principled professor to accept a bribe in exchange for a higher grade on an exam. Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg) refuses. Mr. Park threatens to bring legal charges of defamation against the stubborn professor if he will not yield. Larry tries to explain the legal reasons such charges would not hold: he cannot be guilty of defamation since he has never expressed his suspicions about Clive’s (David Kang) bribe to anyone; moreover, Larry cannot be guilty of defamation if Clive actually left the money, which the father very nearly admits he did. Aware that his logic is not connecting with his surprise guest, Larry adjusts his strategy and says he could just “pretend the money never appeared.” This proposal pleases Mr. Park most especially: “Yes, and a passing grade.” Larry is flabbergasted. Mr. Park remains as unwavering as Larry, though, and the scene ends with the father asking the professor, “Please, accept the mystery.” Larry might very well serve as a stand-in for the Coens’ audience member who recognizes the ways in which the brothers’ films tolerate so many meanings. The duo’s doggedly loaded dramas leave spectators at an interpretative impasse. Those who recognize the competition of plots any one Coen brothers film occasions have to sort through a series of plots before they can begin to discern the stories these arrangements mean to convey. The contest never fully collapses. As soon as one final form and focus emerges, some other equally compelling and productive arrangement suggests itself. The most engrossed spectators find themselves engaged in a process of reconstruction 127

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that never really ends. No one arrangement ever cracks a safe of meaning that holds some true meaning. The mutual presence of so many possibilities sustained across the whole as they are denies the probability of any one true meaning even existing. The result is an invitation to a spectatorial process meant to negotiate the unmistakable indeterminacy that possesses each film. Only the spectator can solve this indeterminacy and, even then, only temporarily. The Coens realize this indeterminacy in one of two ways. Most films work in the way Berys Gaut (2010) describes Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) does. The brothers fill their films with so many competing sensibilities that every action can be read in multiple ways. Their practice invites particular kinds of construction that are at once aided and, at times, limited by the sources they use. In this way, their films are indeterminate because they are substantially determined by so many equally significant influences. The brothers bind a string of references in such a way that each can alternatively influence how an audience reads their stories. Every signifier—every character, every action, every attitude, and so on—exists within multiple signs. The situation is not unlike Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which recounts four conflicting stories of rape and murder. Gaut states that “there is no way to reconcile the accounts or to establish, which [story], if any, is true” (186). Truth is not in the film. Viewers must bring truth to it if it is to be realized at all. The brothers’ releases before Serious Man, and once after it with True Grit (2010), work similarly. Each film tolerates so many lines of meaning that spectators must bring to the film whatever truth those projects hold. The spectators hold the final form and function of each film in their hands. The preceding chapters illustrated as much, not only in the way audiences discuss any one film, but in the way the films must be discussed anew. One can balance the Coens’ The Ladykillers (2004) using Borges’ notion of reverence and irreverence (chapter 2), but the film also equalizes under the Coens’ recurring examination of a range of masculinities around one woman (chapter 8). The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) achieves textual coherence in the midst of undeniable textual excess (chapter 4), but it also depends on its intertexts as a way to realize some wholly dependent artistic shape and discursive aim (chapter 5). One never rightly reads a Coen brothers film as one thing. The same creative impulse toward synthesis and meaning-making emerges that Kurosawa’s four stories of rape and murder initiated in Rashomon, and for much the same reason: human beings maintain a strong desire to resolve indeterminacy. The Coens ensure this indeterminacy exists by maintaining contact with a range of sources throughout their films. Such consistency increases a spectator’s chance to recognize these influences and to put them to meaningful use.

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Most Coen brothers films work in the way that Gaut describes Rashomon does, but other films, such as Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), achieve their sense of indeterminacy more generally. One might suspect in these two late films the same kinds of intertextual relationships that other films abide, but these influences do not span the entirety of these projects in the way they do in some others. For instance, one might see flashes of The Graduate (1967) in Serious Man, but the relationship exists in but one relatively limited moment. Mike Nichols’ film does not buttress the whole of Serious Man in the way, as one counterexample, No Country for Old Men (2007) relies on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (1955). The indeterminacy in Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis work more like Gaut’s assessment of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa: Our drive to interpret human beings is so strong that we do not experience the facial expression [in Mona Lisa] as indeterminate . . . but seek to resolve it by certain interpretative hypotheses. The fact that the information we are given is compatible with several of these hypotheses means that we move from one interpretation to another, consequently seeing the expression as having one determinate characteristic and then as having a different one. Here, even though the expression is in fact indeterminate, it is legitimate to resolve the indeterminacy in various ways by imagining of the figure some determinate facial expression and experiencing it in the light of that imagining. (189)

Gaut insists that any responsible response to da Vinci’s painting must admit its indeterminacy, “but merely to do so without also seeking to resolve it in one way or another would be to refuse to respond to the work in a way that is appropriate to it” (189). One can say the same for Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis. Both films refuse to entrench their stories in plot elements that signal their first causes or final meanings. They refuse to express their own judgment on the characters or their choices. They refuse definitive meanings. The camera captures the whole with a palpable indifference that the spectator will have to decide to swallow or flavor in some particular way. The end result is not a meaningless film, but a film that begs spectators to imagine the meaning of the expression. This shift by the Coens toward a more generally indifferent projection is somewhat unprecedented. The duo has similar moments in earlier films. They do not judge Abby (Frances McDormand) for her infidelity or Norville (Tim Robbins) for his naïveté. They do, however, set those characters in recognized sources, generative genres, and recurring authorial interests that limit the interpretative work their spectators must perform to settle on some determinate expression. The brothers do suggest particular expressions. Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis refuse these interpretative aids. They travel the path toward indeterminacy set in da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. A face is set before the audience. Interlocutors must introduce their own hypotheses as

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to what that expression means. As such, both films offer an interesting theoretical pivot point between the very specific conditions of constructivism explored in earlier chapters and the more general understanding of constructivism proposed independently of their work. This chapter illustrates this argument through a consideration of intentionalism and constructivism. The concluding chapter looks at the ways in which the Coens trigger an impulse to reread or rewatch Inside Llewyn Davis, which itself becomes a catalyst to the constructive sensibility this book champions. Gaut doubts the efficacy of either intentionalism or constructivism as a way to make sense of cinema. The philosopher questions whether authorial intentions can be “wholly” realized in the collaborative arts or whether a spectator can “make the meaning of” a film (emphasis mine) (2010, 174). I have accepted a qualified notion of both concepts. Though never contending that the Coens’ intentions could be wholly realized, this book has adopted Linda Hutcheon’s (2013) confidence that some intentions are “recoverable . . . in the text” (107). Gaut claims that cinema inherently frustrates the possibility for any intention to reach the screen, and, therefore, any real reason to explore matters of intentionalism for too long. The industry is, after all, collaborative, limited by financial concerns, and, just as importantly, given to photographic commitments. Gaut concludes that each condition impedes authorial intentions from reaching the screen. Even the most harmonious production, it must be reasoned, struggles to bear the impression of one vision. Filmmaking simply includes too many collaborators. Even if some singular impulse could emerge, Gaut worries that financial constraints would prevent those intentions from being realized fully. Terry Gilliam’s struggle to project his vision of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605)—captured in the muchadmired documentary Lost in La Mancha (2002)—seemingly legitimates Gaut’s concern. Gilliam’s vision was clear enough. His financial support was just not deep enough, and the project had to be abandoned. Lost in La Mancha also underscores Gaut’s third claim: even moments that were funded enough to allow filming to take place struggled to capture what was on Gilliam’s storyboards. This final struggle illustrates what Gaut calls the “hazards of the real: taking a photograph exposes one to whatever is in front of the camera” (2010, 157). A host of impediments prevents filmmakers from realizing their intentions on screen. The emergence of digital cinema might mitigate some of these concerns: “Unwanted details can,” after all, “be removed from the digital cinema with relative ease, however, given the greater role of collaboration in digital film” (192). Still, Gaut reasons that these advances just introduce another layer of collaborators, which gets one back to the initial complication for intentionalists. The Coens contract an interesting case study for those wanting to test intentionalism. The fact that they perform so many aspects of the filmmaking process together would seemingly frustrate the appearance of any one vision.

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The screen can only be filled with their intention. The brothers share too much of the filmmaking process. Screenplays are collaboratively written. Storyboards are jointly conceived. The collaborators cooperatively direct the action when it is captured on film and manipulate those images together in the editing bay. No one person can claim ownership of their process. One might safely assume that the Coens’ output is nothing but a series of compromises. Still, the Coens maintain control over so many aspects of the filmmaking process that one might talk about their intention with greater confidence than most productions allow. The fact that the Coens so often assemble the same crew and the same set of house actors further justifies one looking for some shared vision emerging from their collaborations. Their determination to work outside the ready-made channels Hollywood provides suggests another avenue of independence. One never has in a Coen brothers project the one, sole source of creation some arts allow, but one does have a process that makes it reasonable to suspect that some shared vision, some intention, exists. Hutcheon emboldens those looking for intentions in a Coen brothers project to continue their work. No matter how battered one’s vision might be before it reaches the screen, there should still be, in Hutcheon’s view, evidence of the filmmaker’s intention “visible in the text” they release (2013, 107). One might have even more confidence that the Coens realize their intention on the screen, especially if their intention is taken to be the kinds of indeterminacy proposed herein. The fact that the Coens control the confluence of influences from the moment the script and storyboards take shape should only bolster confidence in their ability to bring their vision to the screen. Either way, the final products possess an indeterminacy apprehended so judiciously that one can quite confidently conclude that the brothers intend to create movies that are more than one thing at the time of their release. Even Gaut makes space for this possibility when he reminds his readers that films are “artworks,” which means they are actions, and actions are “necessarily intentional,” which necessitates some “appeal to intentions” (2010, 180). Such an appeal seems especially warranted in the case of the Coens, and it does so in a way that leads to matters of constructivism. This book initially grounded its understanding of constructivism in Piaget’s more general account of the process. The decision to invoke Piaget rather than cognitive film theorists interested in the same phenomenon was a matter of principle. This book is first about the films the Coens make. It tries to explain what distinguishes the Coens’ films from others. A direct turn to cognitive film theory was only fully necessary when an initial review was complete and when a Coen release demanded it. Both conditions are satisfied at this point. The previous comments provide a foundation for more general speculations, and Serious Man requires that same move.

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Gaut links a variety of constructivist proposals around the bet that “crucial features of a work” can be “partly constructed by its spectators” (2010, 165). From the constructivist’s perspective, meaning is made rather than found or uncovered. In Kristin Thompson’s (1988) words, “all of those qualities that are of interest to the analyst—[a film’s] unity; its repetitions and variations; its representations of action, space, and time; its meanings—result from the interaction between the work’s formal structures and the mental operations we perform in response to them” (26). To return to Gaut’s account, spectators perform these operations with “some degree of latitude or discretion in how [they] construct [their text]” (2010, 166). A film is not from the constructivist’s view a message to be received or a code to be broken. It is a text to be assembled. The questions become, “What does this assemblage look like?” and “Does that work constitute true meaning-making?” Gaut addresses these two interrelated questions by looking at four distinct types of construction proposed by Bordwell as they arise most primarily in Bordwell’s Narration in the Fiction Film (1985) and Making Meaning (1989). Gaut labels the broadest category conceptual constructivism. From this view, spectators use their “background knowledge [of] . . . the external world . . . other films, of generic practices . . . and so on” to make sense of a film (2010, 170–71). One might, as Torben Grodal (2004) suggests, include an assumed notion of authorial intent in this equation. Spectators do, after all, attend a movie with the filmmaker in mind, and they often do so expecting to see something with the filmmaker’s signature on it. Gaut does not reject this idea, but he questions whether it really indicates an act of construction. From Gaut’s view, the work seems more akin to detection than construction: spectators find a “meaning . . . determined independently of them” (2010, 171). This is not construction. Gaut’s conclusion might be fitting for most filmmakers, but it fails to address the Coens. Their willingness to introduce multiple sensibilities into their films results in a kind of finding that results in indeterminacy. This indeterminacy initiates construction. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) offers the perfect example. The film entertains the particulars of several different genres and intertexts without ever insisting on any of them. The polysemous construction encourages those spectators who recognize more than one construct stretching itself across large portions of the film to arrange this one film in one of several alternative ways. An admitted adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, for instance, morphs into an implied adaptation of Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941) or a distant referencing of MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). The characters and their actions bear a different sensibility when placed under the influence of each of these texts. Spectators determine rather than find the significance of these individual meanings, and they especially find any cooperative meaning the film holds. These orienta-

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tions are there to be found, but the finding of one does not end construction; rather, it initiates constructive activity. The mutual presence of more than one alignment means that the process never reaches a definitive ending. Serious Man offers spectators the same opportunity to participate in a sort of conceptual constructionism, even if it does so a bit differently. The Coens do not align Serious Man with any recognizable genres. Nor do they inject this late story with any intertextual interests that prove a stable interpretative footing. The absence of such things becomes part of the conceptual construction rather than an impediment to it. The Coens have conditioned audiences to expect extended generic connections or sustained intertextual engagement. When potential stories run amok, as each does, this failure becomes part of the equation. For example, one might recognize some allusion in Serious Man to the David and Bathsheba story contained in Larry’s viewing of his neighbor sunbathing in her backyard. Those familiar with similar references in earlier films might reasonably expect this signal to work its way across the film. References to King Nebuchadnezzar in Barton Fink (1991) helped shape the apocalyptic qualities of that story. The nod toward David and Bathsheba becomes a failed intertext because it never materializes into a coherent intertext across Serious Man. The reference is there, but only for a moment. It proposes a hypothesis, but that hypothesis must be rejected as a key to this particular film. No such keys will exist in this movie. Possible readings become provisional readings almost as soon as they are introduced. Intertextual references fail to organize Serious Man in the way they have other Coen brothers films. The appearance and disappearance of possible intertexts occurs so often, in fact, that it becomes reasonable to conclude that the rejection of intertextual references becomes part of the meaning-making process of this film. A consideration of other suggested intertexts illustrates how so. References to the Hebrew book of Job prove as supposititious as flashes of David and Bathsheba. Serious Man encourages spectators to think of Larry’s plight as something of a modern update to Job, but the connections between Serious Man and the book of Job prove too unstable to keep a hold on the Coens’ story. The Coens place Larry in the same milieu as his potential antecedent; they even cause their main character to suffer unjustly in an unjust world. The Coens elect to have Job inform multiple characters, instead of just Larry, who would seem to be the Job of the Coens’ story. It is Larry’s brother, Arthur (Richard Kind), who most vehemently protests the ordeal he faces. It should be Larry. It is Larry’s son, Danny (Aaron Wolff), who faces the cyclone at the end of the movie. References to the book of Job exist in Serious Man, but, uncharacteristically, they create as much confusion as they do clarity. This confusion is not wrong, per se; in fact, it emphasizes the interpretative process the Coens emphasize. Allusions to the book of Job

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result in a negative or a false-positive rather than extend a stable interpretative platform. Other false-positives exist. Critics have proposed that Serious Man entertains general references to Kafka and Kubrick alike. As to the former, J. M. Tyree (2010) reports that Serious Man operates “in the spirit of Kafka,” even though it does not make any direct appeals to the author (35). In Tyree’s view, the Coens create a character in Larry Gopnik that bears similarities to Josef K., the hero in The Trial (1925). Both characters bear an “earnest[ness],” and both suffer a “mysterious smear campaign” (37). Still, the connections between the Coens and Kafka fail to activate a logic that sustains itself across the film, at least not one that Tyree mentions. Walter Metz’s (2011) link between Kubrick and Serious Man follows the same tenuous trajectory. Metz relates Larry’s plight to the ordeals experienced by so many Kubrick heroes. All become “victims . . . [of] . . . a cruel, insoluble, joke.” The connections between Kubrick and the Coens really stop there. The influence of Kubrick is no more specific than the mention of Kafka. Serious Man fails to engage either potential intertext in the way Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) informed Hudsucker Proxy, or Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” informed Intolerable Cruelty (2003), or Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” influenced the last half of No Country. Some echoes exist, but one does not find in Serious Man the same sustained engagement with an intertext that one finds in the Coens’ earlier films. Needless to say, it seems unlikely that the Coens meant any of those earlier intertexts to captivate their earlier films any more definitively than references to Kafka or Kubrick hold Serious Man. Such references were always potentialities rather than proofs. Earlier references were aids meant to facilitate one kind of interpretive process. The Coens intend a different process in Serious Man, one that results in failed hypotheses rather than cooperative victories. The conceptual constructivism the Coens’ fourteenth film invites would fail to work in the way it does if that project held any intertext too tightly. Serious Man also invites the second kind of constructivism Gaut describes. Normative constructivism accounts for all of the ways film pushes spectators to imagine “something more or other than what [they are] actually seeing” (2010, 172). The perception of moving pictures itself falls into this category. The perceived movement of still pictures is, after all, an illusion. The imaginative processes by which spectators turn actors into characters or props into other realities also depend on illusory actions. Films rarely intend for their audience to see Bela Lugosi; they expect audiences to see Dracula. Gaut explains, “when Lugosi places his mouth on an actress’ neck, and red paint runs down, one is to imagine Dracula biting into his victim’s throat and blood gushing out” (173). Similarly, movies expect spectators to place the events placed on screen in a temporal order that sometimes differs from the

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order in which it was projected. Gaut mentions crime film as one such example: “The commission of the crime in a flashback at the end of a detective film” requires viewers to organize the story being presented in ways more linear plots would not (173). Critics might bill each of these projects as acts of construction, but Gaut wonders if they should. These processes “show spectators play a role in determining what ought to be imagined—they do not prove that the audience makes the meaning of films” (174). Gaut’s reluctance to accept normative construction as a general type of meaning-making seems less justifiable when applied to the Coens, who frustrate rather than placate the normal acts of perception on which normative constructivism depends. Their films show the seams so many projections try to hide. The brothers’ use of George Clooney in the idiot trilogy serves as one example. Spectators that ignore the fact that Clooney plays the part of Everett McGill, Miles Massey, or Harry Pfarrer miss the tension his casting creates between the actor’s star persona and the steady collapse of sexual identity depicted in these characters. The differences between actor and character are too stark to think the Coens do not intend their spectators to play in the space between these two constructs. Those who keep this bifurcation in mind can construct from it several types of meaning. Clooney’s characters transcend the conventions of the genres or narratives in which they are placed and depict a more pervasive collapse of male sexuality in contemporary culture when read alongside one another. One could quite easily miss this steady critique if not for the common actor behind each role. The critical point only appears when spectators construct it using the breakdown of the cognitive processes Clooney’s casting creates. One arrives at a similar instance of normative constructivism in the contest the Coens craft between reality and dreams in Serious Man. The Coens have demonstrated in other films a willingness to push their dramas to a space between dream and reality. One might read much of Raising Arizona (1987), Barton Fink, or The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) as almost entirely a dream. H. I. McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) and Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) might have dreamed their movies from a jail cell. Barton (John Turturro) might have imagined his ordeal from New York. The Coens suggest this possibility subtly, to be sure, but the suggestion is there to entertain. This entertainment would likely begin after the film ends, which means that it works differently than does Serious Man, in which the Coens present three separate events that turn out to be dreams. The first instance places Larry in his classroom giving what seems to be his second on-screen lecture to a class. Things are more exaggerated in this version than they were the first time. His class is much larger. The board is impossibly large. The Coens emphasize both in an extreme long shot that makes the difference almost impossible to ignore. Still, nothing seems particularly out of place until the students exit. Sy (Fred Melamed) posthumously appears and begins a dialogue with Larry

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about the validity of the proof he has just shown. The camera tightens on each of the men’s faces as the pace quickens. Suddenly, Sy appears at the front of the class with Larry in the very same frame. The normally passive man pounds Larry’s head against the wall as he tells him, “I fucked your wife, Larry. I seriously fucked her!” The thrashing stops when the Coens have Larry wake from his sleep and reveal the whole scene was just a dream. The Coens turn this same trick a few scenes later when they cut from a conversation between Larry and a colleague to an image of Larry having intercourse with his neighbor, Mrs. Samsky (Amy Landecker). Larry is naked on his back. Mrs. Samsky wears a black bra and smokes a cigarette. The siren eventually leans forward and blows smoke into Larry’s face. The smoke turns into the planks of an old, wooden casket, and the Coens cut to another posthumous shot of Sy, who is now dressed for a funeral. A second plank drops and the screen goes black. Larry rises from his sleep. A scrutinizing spectator might have anticipated another dream sequence, but slowly rather than all at once. This second use of dreams awakens the same constructive impulse Clooney’s playing a particular kind of character would. Both notices make the spectator at least tacitly aware of the normative constructivism film requires. Suddenly awakened, the spectator begins to play with the whole of the film in the way the Coens play in these moments. A kind of indifference to the question of what is real and what is imaginary emerges, and spectators are suddenly free to decide the actuality of every scene in unusual ways. Such freedom is not for every viewer. Some, who want to insist on a separation between dreams and reality, will find the experience as frustrating as Larry does. The Coens link this group and Larry in the third use of a dream, which leaves Larry and the spectator alike unsure of what was dream and what was reality. The brothers do not make clear even after Larry wakes whether his dream comprises one or two scenes. The possible sequence begins when Larry supposedly rouses to sounds of his brother sobbing. Arthur leaves the room almost immediately, and Larry runs after him. Arthur sits in an emptied pool in the dark at the Jolly Roger. He complains of all his misfortunes. Larry tries to console him, albeit unsuccessfully. An abrupt cut takes the viewer from the poolside to a second scene of what could be taken as one extended dream sequence. The camera follows a car as it travels a small country road. Larry and Arthur occupy the front seats. When they arrive at a lake, the two men exit the car and begin preparations for Arthur to make his passage to Canada. Larry gives Arthur the money Clive offered him for a higher grade and bids his brother farewell. All seems well until Arthur’s head explodes from a gunshot and Larry’s “goy neighbor” and son appear. They take aim on Larry only to have Larry wake up before they can land their shot. Larry awakes. He looks around awkwardly until he sees Arthur

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sitting on the edge of his bed. Larry asks, “Were we out at the pool last night?” Arthur nods they were. Larry’s question is an important one. The viewer has no idea where the boundaries of dream and reality stop and start. The question brings a point of distinction that spectators never could make on their own. One cannot deem the poolside scene any more realistic than the shooting at the lake without Arthur’s input. In truth, one might not know for sure even with it. The Coens have played too loosely with such distinctions for a clear difference to emerge between them. Spectators must perform the activities attributed to normative constructivism with their eyes open to what they are doing. This awareness becomes a means to the same interpretative, meaning-making processes all forms of constructivism require. Of course, one could simply deem the blurring of these lines as a postmodern trick and not give them a second thought. Those who elect this route would be working within the third branch of constructivism Gaut considers, critical school constructivism. This brand of constructivism works more generally than any other in that it has the least to do with the specific demands of moving pictures. Yet it has probably had the most pervasive impact on how people perceive the Coens. As suggested in the early parts of this book, an overly general brand of postmodernism has been applied so often to the Coens that one struggles to see them as anything else. When something else is seen, it is likely some other approach developed beyond the particulars of the texts the Coens construct. Those proposals become instances of critical school constructivism. A history of “approaches” can be drawn from this practice—the passage from “New Criticism [to] myth criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, deconstruction,” and so on. “Various schools of criticism” appear, Bordwell (1989) explains, “each with its own interests and purposes,” and its own promise of “fresh critical interpretations” (27). Films, it follows, wait for eager supporters of these schools to unearth the sensibilities of that perspective each project tolerates. Criticism becomes as much about the school of theory as the film. In terms of constructivism, the most essential aspect of critical school constructivism is the belief that the meanings of films can be “determined by critics operating within qualified schools” (Gaut 2010, 175). Gaut concludes that this third branch of constructivism proves too weak a doctrine to really elicit meaning from a text. Critics might just as naturally attribute the meaning in a film to the historical context as they would anything else. Gaut offers the kinds of comments one reads about Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), or Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon as examples. All three films can be read from particular critical vantage points, but those perspectives might conceal as many historical and cultural aspects as they reveal. Gaut concludes that “the norms relevant to the interpretation of” a great part of these films “are those of Japanese [or Danish, or

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American] society, and have no special expressive force” (176). One must approach such critical school constructivism with some trepidation as a result. One should not deny the postmodern qualities of the Coens’ films. The films the Coens release certainly entertain postmodern sensibilities. They just deal in more than this one sensibility. One can talk about a film like Hudsucker Proxy or Man Who Wasn’t There as examples of postmodern films marching to the beat of postmodern cinema. To limit oneself to just this one note, however, is to miss the unique confidence these projects extend to those worried about the possibility for creative expression. The narrative coherence created in the midst of textual excess in both Hudsucker Proxy and Man Who Wasn’t There become more important than the references or allusions in the films. Such coherence demonstrates the ongoing possibility for creative expression, rather than the one-time product that this process provides in any one moment. One finds a similar focus on process over product in Serious Man in Larry’s visits (or attempted visits) to the three rabbis. The mere presence of multiple rabbis places the film within a rabbinic tradition that celebrates differing opinions rather than looks to eradicate them. Jacob Neusner (1999) reasons the rabbinic tradition is founded on a negotiation between “the dual Torah, which refers to revelation through two media: writing, on the one side; oral formulation and oral transmission through memory, on the other” (xx). Those wanting some sense of coherence within the Jewish tradition have to connect two seemingly contradictory documents. The work of the rabbis is to articulate these differences and to provide some coherence within them, but never in such a way that the tension between contradictory readings disappears entirely. Neusner explains that the conflict that exists before any agreement is reached must remain part of the message. The disputes on the specific relationships between one tradition and another, or even the significance of those connections, determined “the range of permissible disagreement” (xxiii). The rabbinic process acquires a consensus at some point that suggests a “single, timeless continuum . . . [a] representative . . . single” view, but, just beneath that agreement, is always the process that balanced hearing and seeing, which is to say the oral and written traditions (xxiv). The Coens play off the dual nature of rabbinic tradition and the assumption of more than one influence on these traditions by organizing their film around three rabbis. Each rabbi expresses a unique message, one born equally well out of some secular and religious tradition. Rabbi Scott (Simon Helberg), for instance, provides a naïve and simplistic notion of the world that depends as much on literary traditions as religious ones. The junior rabbi offers advice especially given to the sentiments of the brand of American Romanticism articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson. His description of the parking lot sounds like a modernized section of Emerson’s essay Nature

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(1836): “Somebody who isn’t familiar with these autos and such, somebody still with the capacity for wonder, somebody with a fresh perspective . . . with the right perspective you can see Hashem.” One just has to substitute “stars” for “autos” and one has Emerson. The Coens pit Rabbi Scott’s literary and religious insight against one another and refuse to resolve the binary. Spectators must synthesize the two if any synthesis is to be realized. Those who accept this task essentially perform the interpretative work of a rabbi. Larry’s visit to the second rabbi tempts the same spectatorial work. Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner) establishes a contest between biblical and pulp wisdom with his story “The Goy’s Teeth.” A Jewish dentist finds a cry for help etched in Hebrew into the teeth of a client. The dentist becomes obsessed with finding an explanation for this message. He searches other people’s teeth. He employs his knowledge of Kabbalah to decode the numerical value of the message. He calls the phone number the seven-digit combination might reference. Failing to find a satisfactory result through these pursuits, the dentist turns to Rabbi Nachtner, who offers little more than good advice. The parallels between the dentist and Larry are palpable, but Nachtner never insists on these. Larry never recognizes them. The dentist’s eventual return to a normal life only frustrates Larry even more. The exchange holds the greatest promise for the spectators that recognize a similar conflation of worldly and religious sensibilities. Nachtner does not hold a key to life’s mysteries. He can only offer his own telling of them. The second rabbi demonstrates a process to be imitated rather than a product to be carried from his office. The Coens’ script refuses Larry an audience with the senior rabbi, Marshak (Alan Mandell), but it does grant spectators an interview with the sage through Danny’s bar mitzvah. In the context of the first two visits, Marshak’s refusal to see Larry becomes as important as anything Marshak says. The rabbi’s refusal provokes unparalleled angst in Larry. The Coens accentuate Larry’s desperation for some answer and the basis for which such a meaning is due him. The distraught congregant offers all of the reasons why he should be permitted to see Marshak: the former has tried to be “a serious man,” he has “tried to do right . . . [to] be a member of the community,” his children go to Hebrew school, and so on. His remarks underline Larry’s miscalculation because the formula he describes has clearly failed to deliver the result he expected. His disappointment continues when Marshak denies him an audience. Larry’s last hope for some answer is dashed. The Coens do not leave their spectators to speculate over whether or not Larry would have found any more insight with Marshak than Rabbi Scott or Rabbi Nachtner. They reveal that Marshak engages in the same process of meaning-making as his junior rabbi does, which suggests that Larry would have left with the same frustration. Marshak’s message settles on popular culture rather than American Romanticism or pulp wisdom. He recites portions of Jefferson Airplane’s song “Somebody to Love,” lists the name of the

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band members, and tells Danny to “be a good boy.” The meeting deals in platitudes rather than prophecy. The whole movie pushes toward a meeting with Marshak, and, when it gets there, it offers little more than what the soundtrack has delivered during the opening credits. The timing and context of this message become the only real difference. The message of Serious Man twists and turns with all the indeterminacy of da Vinci’s still face in Mona Lisa. The film becomes as much a mystery to the spectator as Larry’s experiences have been to him. The only hope for meaning arises out of the discretionary constructivism—the fourth type of constructivism described by Gaut—ascribed to an experience. Gaut identifies discretionary constructivism as the only form of constructivism that represents true construction. Such construction exists when films prompt viewers to imagine actions that are inferred rather than shown. Drawing on the insights of V. F. Perkins (1972) of Ealing Studio’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), Gaut describes the way in which that film leaves viewers to imagine important parts of the story. Those interested in what happens to the main character, Louis (Dennis Price), after police find his notebook confession have to imagine the resulting action. The film ends before bringing that action to the screen. The production offers some clues for how that imagining might work, but ultimate decisions belong to the viewer. In the end, “it is the viewer who selects, according to her own temperament and value system, which interpretation of the film she will adopt” (179). The adoption being herein described exposes a clear act of construction. The Coens certainly offer the same opportunities for discretionary constructivism in their films. One leaves Barton Fink, for instance, wondering about the contents of the box the titular character carried with him. The narrative suggests some possibilities, but never so strongly that one can say with certainty what it contains. The same sort of thing happens at the end of No Country. The Coens end that movie quite literally in the blink of an eye. Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) has merely relayed his dreams to his wife and, by extension, the audience. The significance of his two stories has yet to be established. Spectators who want to find some value to these dreams can do so. It will just be they who are finding it. Spectators can finish what Bell’s stories initiate, and, if they elect to do so, they will participate in a form of discretionary constructivism. Serious Man offers a series of similar events in need of completion, and it does so from the opening moments of the prologue. After placing a statement from Rashi—“Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you” across a blacked-out screen, the Coens shift to an omniscient overhead shot of a man leading his horse and carriage through a snow-covered street. The Coens cut to a medium shot of the weary traveler who repeats the words “what a marvel” as he walks. When he enters the house, he tells his wife, Dora (Yelena Shmulenson), about the wonder he has experienced. His cart

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had lost a wheel, and, out of nowhere, Treitle Groshkover (Fyvush Finkel) appears to help him. Dora does not share her husband’s enthusiasm for the story. She is certain Treitle Groshkover is dead and that the man her husband saw was a “dybbuk.” Husband and wife find themselves at an impasse. A contest between two stories emerges. The stakes of this contest intensify only moments later when the “dybbuk” enters the house and appears very much alive. When presented with the gridlock between competing stories, Reb Groshkover insists that he never died. Dora remains adamant, though. Every movement confirms her suspicions even more. Eventually, she stabs the elderly man in the chest with an icepick to prove her point. In due course, a pool of blood forms around the ice pick, and it would seem Dora has killed a man who was very much alive. Even still, Dora remains resolute. Once her mark has left the premises, the unwavering wife calmly moves to the door and says, “Blessed be the Lord. Good riddance to evil.” The scene delivers in just over seven minutes the warning the film will tease out in a number of ways (and the counsel the Coens have given in each of their films): guard against your perspective; some other might be just as valid. This is just the situation between Dora and her husband. One claims Reb Groshkover is dead. The other suspects that he must be alive. The Coens never resolve this matter, which means that audiences wanting to know the answer will have to search for one of their own making once the film ends. Such conversation will require not only a reimagining of the scene in which the question first appeared, but also all other related scenes. The most striking aspect of this discussion might be the ease with which discretionary constructivism can lead to other forms of construction. That which began as discretionary constructivism gives way to critical school constructivism as spectators use some critical paradigms to make sense of the incomplete world. The resulting conversation points to gaps that the meta-diegetic qualities of the projection bring to light. Discretionary or critical school constructivism turns into normative constructivism. Eventually, spectators appeal to other Coen brothers features or knowledge of a genre or narrative to support their position. They perform a version of conceptual constructivism. Once a film prompts one act of construction, the possibility for all forms of construction intensifies. The diegetic worlds the Coens craft thus differ from those other filmmakers might. Their worlds run counter to the world Larry wishes existed. Larry insists that some ultimate meaning must exist. He pushes and pulls for that meaning throughout the film, but his effort only intensifies his suffering. His ongoing belief in a way to reconcile the whole proves endlessly frustrating. Spectators wanting to read the Coens’ film in the way Larry reads his life are sure to experience a similar frustration. The Coens consistently empty their films of definitive meaning. They prefer stories that mean several things

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rather than any one particular thing. In Serious Man, this preference even supplants cursory meanings made from prefabricated sources. They focus, instead, on a series of people living by the cryptograms of discretionary constructivism. Larry’s visits to the rabbis uncover men engaged in the process of making meaning rather finding it. They are not poring over the pages of the Torah for answers to life’s questions. The rabbis adapt their environment into messages that can comfort their congregants. The lawyers, doctors, and professors in the film do the same thing. The lawyers look for ways to construct arguments that will prove Larry’s point about property lines. The doctors construct the significance of Larry’s test results. The tenure committee constructs the value of Larry’s contributions to the department. The whole becomes a demonstration of characters constructing reality rather than finding it. Their work is arbitrary, it is true, and it is also meaningful—that is, full of meaning. The Coens routinely offer their spectators films that are full of meaning. They pit a variety of potential meanings against one another in such a way that only the spectator can propose a way out of the confusion their onslaught of references creates. These proposals will only work temporarily. Every suggestion incorporates a new way of seeing into the mix. The mix itself disarms those who want to insist on some ultimate agent who can make sense of the whole in one particular way. A Coen brothers film works in the way of Roland Barthes’ (1974) “writerly texts,” texts that corral “networks that are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by entrances, none of which can prove authoritatively declared to be the main one” (5). Serious Man begs its characters and, by extension, its audience to refuse any one way of seeing. New possibilities are always possible. New ways to see can always surface. As such, one can only trust one’s answers so long. The point is never the answer, anyway. The Coens favor process over product, and in so doing ask the spectators who note the indeterminacy of their films to accept the mystery contained therein. Each element will mean multiple things at once. The only way to misread any element of the films themselves, it would seem, is to insist that there is but one way to read it.

Conclusion

I have explored the wonderfully simple and endlessly complex structure of Coen brothers films and the extent to which such arrangements can occasion a constructive response in the spectator. Although the focus of this book was always the films and not the theory or even the spectator in any “real” sense, the book began with a theoretical overview of a variety of constructivist proposals. The idea was that one could not talk about the films anew without some discussion of that perspective. The constructivist sensibility that took shape drew first on Jean Piaget’s constructivist epistemologies and the practices of the constructivist artists of the early twentieth century. Piaget and the constructivist artists both highlight the ongoing process that an idea or piece of art can initiate when it is presented and processed as a constructed item. In the case of cinematic art, this book offered that openly constructed plots push spectators to participate in the ongoing (re)construction of the work they witness. This participation progresses in the way the cognitive accounts of film reception predict they will, and especially as David Bordwell, Kristen Thompson, and Noel Carroll describe the cognitive activity of the spectator. The more discursive aspects of recent film genre and adaption theory also proved important. By focusing on the discussion a genre or adaptation means to initiate, these theories begin to align themselves with other constructive perspectives. A genre film or adaptation becomes a reason to investigate and reassess a known structure as much as anything else. Taken together, this synthesis of philosophy, practice, and film theory suggested a way to discuss the Coens’ films, which always already seem more interested in an interpretative process than any one interpretation. The discussions of the films themselves highlighted the various ways in which the films the Coens release trigger constructivist responses. The discussion began with the aspect of the films that most fundamentally accounts 143

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for such a response, namely, the Coens’ willingness to revere and renounce the sources they openly and repeatedly utilize. Jorge Luis Borges proposes that art given to both attitudes activates active responses to texts that must be negotiated rather than simply received. This willingness marks almost any Coen brothers film, but is most apparent in their admitted adaptations—The Ladykillers, No Country for Old Men, and True Grit. The Coens very nearly reproduce the source text in these three films while at the same time exposing each text to their own inclinations. Those who can twice locate the resulting plots and stories—once in the original and once in the Coens’ offering—can quite easily find themselves constructing the Coens’ film and the film, text, or tradition the Coens put to use in that film. The constructivist sensibility is triggered. Less obvious adaptations elicit the same active response, even if in a different way. The Coens place characters at the center of early films like Raising Arizona or Barton Fink, who learn to talk back to the ideologies or images that circle them. The brothers saturate the worlds of films like The Hudsucker Proxy or The Man Who Wasn’t There with artifice, only to have the characters emerge from such excess in such a way that they can create their own narrative. These four films thus stage a constructivist response by the characters in their stories. The presence of unannounced source texts in the deep structure of films such as Intolerable Cruelty or No Country for Old Men or unexpected generic commitments throughout The Big Lebowski or O Brother, Where Art Thou? demonstrate the constructive responses spectators might have to a film. Spectators escape the confines of the codes a wellknown narrative or genre provides in order to enter a creative exchange with the text the Coens create. Individual elements denote multiple possibilities of meaning. Each possibility belongs to some recognizable narrative, generic sensibility, or other cultural construct that can inform the film’s significance in a different way. These sensibilities extend across large sections, if not the whole of a film, and, more importantly, compete with the other equally salient and satisfactory categorizations also on display. The resulting sense of overdeterminacy creates an unavoidable indeterminacy that spectators can never quite resolve. They can only enter a process of construction that never really ends. A new possibility of meaning is always justified within the text. The Coens achieve a similar level of indeterminacy in more recent projects, albeit in more indirect ways. Films such as Burn after Reading and True Grit neutralize the constraints of well-known genres or narratives by centering their plots most especially around competing notions of sexuality, in the case of the former, or gender, in the case of the latter. The fact that a great many Coen brothers films take interest in these multifarious constructs only intensifies these aspects for those who know the brothers’ entire catalogue. By the time one gets to Burn after Reading or True Grit, one has at least implicitly reflected on both issues across multiple films. Within this

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wider context, Burn after Reading exists as a kind of conclusion to ideas of sexuality introduced in O Brother and further developed in Intolerable Cruelty. True Grit stages a contest between competing notions of masculinity realized in at least half of the brothers’ releases. The apocalyptic qualities of Burn after Reading and True Grit, that is, the way in which both films clear the stage of all but the presumed powers in their drama, offer contemporary audiences a reason to negotiate sexuality and gender in ways that prevent the all-against-all conflicts in these two late films. A nonconstructivist response in a world so obviously constructed becomes a zero-sum game. Very few can survive. The endings of Burn after Reading and True Grit can depict the contrast between the nonconstructivist and constructivist response one can give obvious constructions. The characters at the end of Burn after Reading perform a nonconstructivist response. CIA officer Palmer (David Rasche) and his superior, Simmons (J. K. Simmons), recount where they are at the end of the ordeal they have been tracking. Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) is in a holding room trying to board a plane to Venezuela. “The gym guy’s body,” Chad’s (Brad Pitt), has been disposed. The analyst, Cox (John Malkovich), is in a coma. Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) is in CIA custody. The debriefing reduces each character in just the way a genre, adaptation, or some postmodern projects are thought to reduce plot pieces. Simmons never protests the reduction. His only desire is to bring the tale to a close. He orders that Pfarrer be allowed to board the plane. He hopes Cox dies. He approves CIA payment for Litzke’s cosmetic surgery in exchange for her silence. Each situation is read linearly. Every problem has a natural solution. All stories have a desired outcome. Simmons’ final words attempt to reduce the story Burn after Reading tells even more by searching for some moral: “What did we learn, Palmer?” His answer is as reductive as the question itself: “I guess we learned not to do it again.” Simmons closes the file. The scene doubles as a picture of the most passive form of artistic expression and cinematic viewing. The writer and audience members are compelled to search for some way to close the file. They feel an impulse to find a meaning to the whole. These searches and impulses end the interpretative process. The Coens’ decision to create a contest between visual and voice-over narration at the end of True Grit gives those who want a more expansive ending a way to it. A much older Mattie Ross (Elizabeth Marvel) recounts the events as they happened after she and Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) reached Bagby’s store twenty-five years earlier. Cogburn’s efforts saved Mattie’s life, but not her arm, a point the Coens accent visually in two key moments of Mattie’s summation. The first moment occurs in a train station as Mattie reveals she lost the arm. The camera follows from behind Mattie in a medium shot into a brightly lit window. The contrast of brightly lit foreground and Mattie’s silhouette accent the absence of her arm. Mattie’s voice-over narra-

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tion moves to the present of the film’s finale, and it does so with the same judgment and condemnation against Mattie’s male counterparts found throughout the film. Only now, one hears these remarks through the image wrought in the train station. Mattie notes the misspellings in Cogburn’s letter and refers to the seated gentleman she encounters at the Wild West show as “trash.” Mattie remembers while at Cogburn’s graveside still many more years later the starch in LaBoeuf’s (Matt Damon) “cowlick” with the same sense of authority. Mattie bucks presumed public opinion about her decision to have Cogburn buried in the family plot or her refusal to get married. Mattie talks and walks with a certainty and independence that the camera ultimately undermines. This proud woman’s independence was at least partially given to her by the sacrificial actions of Cogburn and LaBoeuf. The film ends with the camera again behind a silhouetted Mattie, whose dark costuming contrasts sharply with the bright foreground. The absence of her left arm suggests a value to the men that Mattie struggles to admit. It is not for Mattie to admit either; the Coens leave this work to the spectator who notes the contract between narrative and image. An opportunity for a constructivist response begins again even in the last seconds of the film. One could deem the Coens’ manner of triggering a constructivist response in overly determined films like Man Who Wasn’t There or Big Lebowski or openly discursive films like Burn after Reading or True Grit as limited or even invented instances of constructivism. To some extent, they might be. The kinds of constructivism described throughout most of this book might be reserved only for, to borrow Linda Hutcheon’s (2013) lexicon, “the knowing audience,” those who know the sources or concepts the Coens employ. If that is the case, the films the Coens release require no less construction, but they do limit who can or would perform these acts of constructivism. Things shift with the release of A Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis. These more recent films flicker with the same indeterminacy, but they do so more generally, that is, with some distance from an acknowledged source or socially accepted construct. Each film can, of course, conjure the same intertextual relationships that all texts invite, but they do not appear to lean on those texts in the way earlier Coen brothers films may have. One would struggle to find some unannounced text fighting to organize the whole of either story. The only competition for meaning is the one created in the story itself, and that meaning is more cautionary than commanding. The angst Larry (Michael Stuhlbarg) feels as he tries to search out some ultimate meaning warns spectators not to make the same mistake. Meaning and significance can and should be sought, but with the knowledge that it will never be grasped. It will never be delimited. The process of meaning-making begins afresh the moment it seems to reach an end point. The Coens seem especially comfortable in this knowledge, and their films create space for the audiences to make peace with this realization. The broth-

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ers construct films that are never really finished. They can never really be finished. Every ending becomes a new beginning. Matei Calinescu (1993) accounts for such texts in her seminal book Rereading. Calinescu writes, “Since the time of reading is at once linear and circular, differences between beginnings and endings can be at once categorical and so relative as to vanish altogether. Beginnings and endings may therefore become interchangeable” (273). Both Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis seem to revel in this possibility. The former ends with the promise of another round of trials and tribulations. The latter literally loops back on itself. The end of Inside Llewyn Davis is quite literally the beginning, or what was presented as the beginning. Katie McQuerrey, an editor on Inside Llewyn Davis, explains to Sarv Kreindler (2013) that the Coens very much wanted to create this unexpected, even seamless, return: “The audience may not realize at first that they are back at the beginning of the story. This was filmed only one time, but each scene was edited in a slightly different way, so initially you aren’t quite sure if you’ve seen this before or not. Actions in the first scene are abbreviated, but are then resolved with more exposition at the end.” The editing trick explicitly performs spectatorial construction. Events in the film expand as audience members add exposition, relate one moment to another, or seek some sense of coherence. Spectators add to a scene or a film in just the way the Coens add the performance of the second song, “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song),” into Llewyn’s (Oscar Isaac) set at the Gaslight. The Coens literally reread their own scene. The Coens’ choice to reread the initial scene creates and corrects interesting gaps in their story. In terms of the gaps it generates, there is no denying that bringing the audience back to the same performance undermines any sense of progress in the story. Llewyn quite literally ends up going nowhere. He is what he is and where he is both at the beginning and the end of the story. Any difference is a perceived difference. Perceived differences are important, though, and especially for those who want to account for the interactive relationship the Coens create between their films and their audience. The opening scene has its gaps, and spectators are sure to fill those gaps in particular ways. They will offer hypotheses about who is singing, how successful he is, and, ultimately, why he would receive a beating and whether or not it was justified. The Coens’ arrangement allows them to return to this scene and to fill these initial gaps in the way their version of the story would have them filled. Over the course of the film, the brothers realign spectatorial sympathies. Spectators might feel a sense of sadness in the last performance that they did not feel at the beginning; Llewyn’s set is a farewell, after all, more than the opportunity it might have initially been billed. These same spectators might feel less sympathy for Llewyn during his beating, which, in the end, seems at least partially justified. The Coens’ rearrangement of sympathies underscores

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the relatively arbitrary or entirely prefocused sentiment found in cinematic art. The admission of an arbitrary or prefocused sentiment actually undermines the likelihood that sentiment in this film is capricious or coerced. Spectators will have to construct and defend their constructions against other proposals. The Coens’ choice to reread the opening scene also creates a reason to scrutinize what has occurred and what might have only been imagined. The Coens have circulated films that might have been purely imagined. H. I. McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) and Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) might have dreamed their stories from their prison cell. Barton (John Turturro) might have imagined the Hollywood portion of his story from his New York apartment. The Coens tolerate these possibilities. They abide the same possibility in Inside Llewyn Davis. Llewyn might have dreamed much of what he experienced from the Gorfeins’ couch. The use of the same low-angle shot of the cat atop Llewyn waking him from his slumber early and late in the film suggests these two events might be the same event. If they are, then one has some reason to entertain the possibility that the cat never escapes from the Gorfeins’ apartment. Llewyn does stop the cat from escaping the second time this scene is shown. The camera could be capturing an independent scene. The cat could both escape and be refrained from escaping, but one cannot be entirely sure. Such certainty would undercut an interpretative impulse. So long as the scene can be one or two events, the spectator has a reason to speculate. If one entertains the possibility that the cat never escapes, then one must consider anew the role of the cat. The orange tabby might serve as a marker between what is dreamed and what “occurs.” Every scene with the cat save the waking scenes might constitute a dream: the conversation with Mitch Gorfeins’ (Ethan Phillips) secretary; the initial conversation with Jean (Carey Mulligan) when she reveals she is pregnant; their exchange in the park or at the café; the blowup over Lillian (Robin Bartlett) singing Mike’s part; the trip to Chicago; the events on the highway outside of Akron—each of these moments might only exist in Llewyn’s dreams. There is an important sense in which distinctions between dreams and reality hardly matter in film, so such a divide hardly matters. All of the above events could happen in just the way they are presented on screen and things would hardly change. Real or dreamed events in a film are equally constructed. Neither actually occurs. Both become part of the whole the audience must negotiate the moment they are projected on screen. A good case in point occurs in No Country for Old Men. Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) supposedly decides to return to the El Paso hotel room where Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) was shot. Moments before he pushes open the door, the camera cuts to a strange image of Chigurh, who stands within the shadows alongside one corner of the room. Bell enters the room, but Chigurh is nowhere to be found. He has somehow avoided detection. The scene begs to be understood as a

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conflation of two events or, perhaps, a dream of some sort. Chigurh does not huddle in the shadows in any other scene. He does not hesitate to eliminate those who hunt him in other places in the movie and certainly not when he has an advantage on them, and he has the advantage on Bell in this moment. The entire episode seems more like a dream than reality. Even still, the “experience” has important consequences on Bell’s decision to retire. Whether dreamed or actually encountered, Bell’s experience at the hotel in El Paso influences how he views himself and how the audience view him. The situation is the same in Inside Llewyn Davis. Llewyn and the audience experience the episodes involving the cat on screen, whether they occur in reality or not. These moments play a critical role for the opinions spectators come to hold. An inability to decide what is dreamed and what is lived hardly affects how one comprehends Inside Llewyn Davis; it might, however, influence how one interprets the action, and it does so in at least two important ways. On the one hand, the irreconcilable divide between dream and reality emphasizes Llewyn’s psychological perspective in interesting ways. Every scenario suddenly gains an ability to deliver some psychological insight that further explains Llewyn’s very real paralysis. Llewyn is always on the outside of the scenarios that involve the cat. He calls Mitch’s office at Columbia University from a street-side pay phone. He learns that he has illegitimately fathered a child with Jean. He is reminded that his partner is dead. He debates the legitimacy of folk music with a jazz musician. He suffers Bud Grossman’s (F. Murray Abraham) rejection. He imagines getting close to Diane, the woman who bore his child. Every moment with the cat exposes Llewyn’s outsider status. At the same time, the dream/reality divide also distances the viewer from the story on the screen. Spectators are never quite inside Inside Llewyn Davis. The film offers no inside except that which spectators gain through their own imaginative efforts. The Coens emphasize this very point in the audition at the Gates of Horn. Bud Grossman asks Llewyn to play something from “inside Llewyn Davis.” The request exists within its own ambiguity. It could be a request to hear something off the album, ironically titled Inside Llewyn Davis, or it could be a request to hear something from inside the man, Llewyn Davis. Davis almost certainly understands the request to hear something off his album. As inspired as his playing of “The Death of Queen Jane” is, it is not from inside the artist, at least not in Grossman’s final view. One might rightly wonder if the Coens ever present something from inside Llewyn Davis. If they do, it might only be in the form of dreams. The content is there, but it is there in the form of a dream. Spectators play the role of therapist by offering speculation and hypotheses meant to understand what has happened, when, and to what effect. The film refuses to settle these matters, and it even finds ways to unsettle them. One can find reasons to

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conclude that some of the cat sequences or even all of them are as real as anything else in the film, but that conclusion does not eliminate the distance the mere suggestion of a dream creates from the story. The spectator would ultimately have to construct this reality, and they would have to do so from the outside. The Coens further distance spectators from any inside in Inside Llewyn Davis during each of Llewyn’s three performances. The brothers’ sense of editing creates distance from some center in the opening performance. Inside Llewyn Davis begins with a tuning of a guitar and the title card “Gas Light Café 1961.” A microphone sits in the center of the screen until an unnamed singer, Llewyn, leans in and begins to sing. The camera moves ever so slightly, never yielding the tight hold it has on the microphone and Llewyn’s face. This lasts for roughly one full minute, which is more than enough time to forget that Llewyn is even in front of an audience. A reverse shot reminds the Coens’ movie audience that Llewyn has an audience, but one that cannot be seen. The lights from the stage prohibit the movie audience from seeing Llewyn’s immediate audience. Another cut a few edits later places the Coens’ spectators in the midst of the Gaslight audience, but even then the shot emphasizes the distance between Llewyn and those in his room. The music cannot be heard either, and Llewyn seems exceptionally small. Performer and audience remain at a distance from one another. Llewyn’s second and third live performances occur at a similar distance. In the above-mentioned scene with Bud Grossman, Grossman sits unmoved by Llewyn’s performance. Llewyn’s song can only beget a judgment from Grossman: “I don’t see a lot of money here.” The exchange that follows offers at least one reason for this pronouncement: Llewyn fails to connect with people the way, say, Troy Nelson (Stark Sands) does. Grossman’s posture and expression changes when Troy is mentioned. He smiles and remarks at how Troy “connects with people.” Grossman’s pronouncement is as much against Llewyn as it is for Troy. Llewyn does not connect with people for reasons that are never really articulated. Spectators can only speculate on the reason for his failures. The Coens remain content to simply show Llewyn’s inadequacies as a performer. These shortcomings are particularly the focus of Llewyn’s third live performance in the film, the one he offers his father. Llewyn begins the performance by telling his dad, “here’s this; you used to like this.” Throughout the performance, the father remains totally unresponsive despite an impressive recital. The father’s only response, in fact, is to defecate himself, a point the Coens reveal with perfect comedic (and tragic) timing. In the end, all three of Llewyn’s performances fail to connect with their intended audience. The live performances also refuse to blend into the narrative of the film, which suits the genre of music being showcased in this film. The importance of the setting, the folk music scene as it existed in 1961, provides to Inside

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Llewyn Davis cannot go overestimated. The folk tradition depends on the reinterpretation, the remaking of expressions that are constantly being adapted to the situations in which they are being alternatively realized. Mark Slobin (2011) stresses that folk songs exist to be reimagined by every player. The performance means to be shared rather than presented. Slobin explains, “Things loop back, spiral out, and sometimes even repeat themselves. No musician can step in the same cultural flow twice” (3). Taken as such, folk music is “not a set of songs and tunes; it is more of a working practice” (ibid.). Unfortunately for Llewyn, he seems particularly unsuited to this working practice. He plays sets of songs that are folk songs, to be sure, but they fail to reinvent themselves in the way the best folk songs do. His performances might mesmerize some, but they fail to energize any. They induce passive reception rather than active participation. Such a passive response runs counter to the reaction so many Coen brothers films, Inside Llewyn Davis included, allow. Richard Brody (2013) claims, “There’s something folk-like about [the Coens’] entire body of art,” and, if understood as the kind of practice Slobin describes, he is certainly right. Brody’s analysis of the brothers’ film as a “tall tale, the story that has come down orally and that grows into its heroic or mock-heroic dimensions through repeated telling” rings true. His idea that Dylan’s appearance at the end of Inside Llewyn Davis serves as a “repudiation of pure folk” seems useful, too. Brody explains: “Llewyn Davis interprets traditional songs and invests them with the full force of his emotional turmoil, his grand depth of feeling [ . . . ] Dylan turns up and radically refashions the elements of folk music by way of his own poetic gift [ . . . ] and remakes it even to the breaking point, to the point of his own break with it.” Inside Llewyn Davis notes the ways in which the kinds of spectatorship the Coens request assumes a role assigned to folk music. Their films afford audiences the chance to reinterpret and remake the “songs” circulated in any film. Spectators are able to rearrange verses and adapt melodies to fit their situation. In this way, the Coens’ films, this late entry included, provide audiences an opportunity to participate in the performance of each expression. In further keeping with the folk music tradition, every subsequent Coen expression becomes a reason to reexamine the whole. Inside Llewyn Davis certainly accepts this task. The film gives Coen brothers audiences a reason to think again about earlier Coen brothers projects. Motifs from earlier films find their way inside Inside Llewyn Davis. The Coens make quick references to earlier projects with the shots of the hallway in Jim and Jean’s or Al Cody’s apartment, which provide some echo of the hallway scenes in Barton Fink. The insertion of Johnny Five (Garrett Hedlund) makes a subtle and passing reference to the silent, chain-smoking driver in Fargo, Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare). A moment during the drive to Chicago harkens to the rain and windshield wipers at the opening of Blood Simple. Some might see

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buried within Llewyn’s bus ride and moments at the lunch counter a distant reference to Hudsucker Proxy. None of these suggestions merit quotation or necessarily influence the action in which they occur. They might provide little more than the momentary delight that comes with recognition and familiarity. Or they might prompt viewers to relate or investigate the assumptions of the worlds in which the stories in each film occur. Two other allusions to earlier Coen brothers efforts seem especially likely to tempt viewers to scrutinize the conventions or customs of earlier films. The orange tabby cat offers a point of entry to both allusions. The first occurs when Llewyn tries to call Mitch to arrange for him to retrieve his cat. Llewyn tells the secretary taking his message that he has the cat. The secretary mishears his statement and reports back, “Llewyn is a cat.” The slip recalls the confusions in Serious Man around Larry’s (Michael Stuhlbarg) story of the cat and whether the feline is alive or dead. One could safely argue that Inside Llewyn Davis means to lean on this text. For one, there are legitimate questions at various points in the film as to whether the cat is alive or dead. For another, there is the question that Llewyn explicitly raises in a conversation with his sister about what it means to exist. Llewyn’s desire to do more than just exist parallels Larry’s pursuit to find some ultimate meaning. Both characters suffer from their noble pursuits. The sufferings in the former might recast the sufferings in the latter, that is, one might understand Llewyn better through Larry. Either way, one has legitimate reasons to relate Serious Man and Inside Llewyn Davis. One has just enough reason to relate Inside Llewyn Davis and Miller’s Crossing. Allusions to Miller’s Crossing begin in the alley with the beating Llewyn takes at the beginning of the film. The man from Arkansas is dressed like a gangster. He talks and acts like a gangster. One is not out of line to see him as such, and especially not before we learn the man’s real identity. Llewyn could have just as easily double-crossed some member of organized crime as offended some woman’s husband. Even if one does not relate the mysterious man to organized crime, those who know the milieu of Miller’s Crossing might take the man’s opening remark that Llewyn is “a funny boy” as a reason to connect the two films. The men in Miller’s Crossing are “funny boys.” The tie this remark offers could hardly hold Miller’s Crossing and Inside Llewyn Davis together on its own. It is too tenuous to be sure, but more significant relationships exist, the most notable of which occurs each time Llewyn chases the cat. A connection would depend on a play on words between “cat” and “hat.” Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) tells his boss’s girlfriend, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), about a dream he had: “Wind came up an blew me hat off.” Verna asked if he chased it. Tom tells her he did not: “Nothin’ more foolish than a man chasin’ his hat.” Nothing more foolish than a man chasing a hat, except, perhaps, a man chasing his cat, which Llewyn does on the subway, in an alley, through a neighborhood, and along a high-

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way. Llewyn seems to lack some insight that Tom already had gained. He would do better to let the cat go if he can. Something will not let him do that, though, and that something might began to appear through a juxtaposition of Miller’s Crossing and Inside Llewyn Davis. When set beside one another, one has a way to understand the devastation Llewyn feels at the loss of his partner. The Coens do not insist on this relationship, but they do give those who know Miller’s Crossing a reason to consider it. Inside Llewyn Davis is certainly different from Serious Man and Miller’s Crossing, but it invites the same constructive response that each of those films tempts. The specific temptation it offers might just as well depend on earlier acts of construction, too. The efforts expended to make sense of Serious Man and Miller’s Crossing might shape the work one does on Inside Llewyn Davis. One can watch any of the three films without thinking about anything more than what the surface offers and find reasons to delight over them. The performances in Inside Llewyn Davis, which fail to connect with the intended audience, certainly connect with the cinematic audience. Isaac’s playing and singing is delightful. The sound is perfectly balanced. There is every reason to applaud what Llewyn offers, but there is even more reason to construct what the Coens offer. The Coens’ own rereading of their first scene in the final moments of the film corrects at least one error found in the opening moments of the film. Pappi’s (Max Casella) statement in the first scene, “You and Mikey used to do that song,” is actually, technically speaking, wrong. The only song the Coens’ audience hears Llewyn play is “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” which Davis and Timlin presumably do not play. Pappi’s statement becomes true only after Llewyn plays the last song of his set, “Fare Thee Well (Dink’s Song).” The Coens’ script twice emphasizes this particular song as Llewyn and Mike’s, once when Llewyn plays the song from the record in the Gorfeins’ apartment, and again when Llewyn plays for the Gorfeins’ dinner party. Llewyn’s protest of Lillian’s singing of Mike’s part makes it explicit that this is the former duo’s song. The fact that Llewyn protests others singing this part so forcefully might best explain his lack of success as a solo artist. The songs he sings are never his, not if they are going to work as folk songs. They always already belong to the audience. The Coens seem especially aware of this point, too, both in this one film and in their efforts as filmmakers. They release films that await participation and reinvention. Their stories are as inaccurate or incomplete as the first scene of Inside Llewyn Davis, at least until they are reread. The Coens encourage their audience, the spectators, to negotiate the final form and function of the films they give them. The brothers inspire spectators to construct the films, if not construct the Coens themselves.

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Filmography

All the President’s Men. Directed by Alan J. Pakula. 1976. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2006. DVD. American Graffiti. Directed by George Lucas. 1973. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 1998. DVD. Barton Fink. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 1991. Los Angeles: Circle Films, 2003. DVD. Battleship Potemkin. Directed by Sergei M. Eisenstein. 1925. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 1998. DVD. The Big Lebowski. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 1998. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2002. DVD. The Big Sleep. Directed by Howard Hawks. 1946. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2006. DVD. Blood Simple. Directed by Joel Coen. 1984. Los Angeles: Circle Films, 2001. DVD. Brazil. Directed by Terry Gilliam. 1985. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 1998. DVD. The Brother from Another Planet. Directed by John Sayles. 1984. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM, 2003. DVD. Burn after Reading. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 2008. Universal City, CA: Focus Features, 2008. DVD. Choose Me. Directed by Alan Rudolph. 1984. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM, 2001. DVD. Christmas in July. Directed by Preston Sturges. 1940. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2011. DVD. Citizen Kane. Directed by Orson Welles. 1941. Burbank, CA: Warner Bros., 2011. DVD. ER. (TV Series). Directed by Christopher Chulack, Jonathan Kaplan, and Richard Thorpe. 1994–2009. Universal City, CA: Constant C Productions, 2011. DVD. Eyes Wide Shut. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1999. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2001. DVD. Fargo. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 1996. Century City, CA: Fox Searchlight, 2003. DVD. Fight Club. Directed by David Fincher. 1999. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight, 2002. DVD. The Fisher King. Directed by Terry Gilliam. 1991. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 1999. DVD. The Godfather Part III. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. 1990. Los Angeles: Paramount, 2008. DVD. Goodfellas. Directed by Martin Scorsese. 1990. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2007. DVD.

161

162

Filmography

The Graduate. Directed by Mike Nichols. 1967. Culver City, CA: Embassy Pictures Corporation, 2005. DVD. Hamlet. Directed by Kenneth Branagh. 1996. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2007. DVD. Henry V. Directed by Kenneth Branagh. 1989. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM, 2000. DVD. High Noon. Directed by Fred Zinnemann. 1952. Studio City, CA: Republic Pictures, 1998. DVD. His Girl Friday. Directed by Howard Hawks. 1940. Stuart, FL: Reel Enterprises, 2006. DVD. The Hudsucker Proxy. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 1994. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 1999. DVD. Inside Llewyn Davis. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 2013. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2014. DVD. Intolerable Cruelty. Directed by Joel Coen. 2003. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2004. DVD. It’s a Wonderful Life. Directed by Frank Capra. 1946. Studio City, CA: Republic Pictures, 1995. DVD. JFK. Directed by Oliver Stone. 1991. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2011. DVD. Johnny Guitar. Directed by Nicholas Ray. 1954. St. Charles, IL: Olive Films, 2012. DVD. Kind Hearts and Coronets. Directed by Robert Hamer. 1949. London: Ealing Studios, 2002. DVD. King of New York. Directed by Abel Ferrara. 1990. Santa Monica, CA: Lions Gate, 2004. DVD. Kramer vs. Kramer. Directed by Robert Benton. 1979. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD. The Ladykillers. Directed by Alexander Mackendrick. 1955. Beverly Hills, CA: Starz/Anchor Bay, 2002. DVD. The Ladykillers. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 2004. Burbank, CA: Touchstone Pictures, 2004. DVD. The Lavender Hill Mob. Directed by Charles Crichton. 1951. Beverly Hills, CA: Starz/Anchor Bay, 2002. DVD. The Long Goodbye. Directed by Robert Altman. 1973. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM, 2002. DVD. Lost in La Mancha. Directed by Terry Gilliam. 2002. New York: Docurama, 2003. DVD. The Man Who Wasn’t There. Directed by Joel Coen. 2001. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2002. DVD. M*A*S*H. Directed by Robert Altman. 1970. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight, 2004. DVD. Meet John Doe. Directed by Frank Capra. 1941. Orlando, FL: Synergy Entertainment, 2007. DVD. Metropolis. Directed by Fritz Lang. 1926. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 2004. DVD. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Directed by Michael Hoffman. Universal City, CA: 20th Century Fox, 2003. DVD. Miller’s Crossing. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 1990. Century City, CA: Fox Searchlight, 2003. DVD. Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Directed by Frank Capra. 1936. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD. Much Ado about Nothing. Directed by Kenneth Branagh. 1993. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM, 2003. DVD. No Country for Old Men. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 2007. Santa Monica, CA: Miramax Films, 2008. DVD. O Brother, Where Art Thou? Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 2000. Burbank, CA: Touchstone Pictures, 2001. DVD. One Fine Day. Directed by Michael Hoffman. 1996. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight, 2003. DVD. Ordet. Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer. 1955. Stockholm, Sweden: Palladium Film, 2004. DVD. Outbreak. Directed by Wolfgang Petersen. 1995. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2009. DVD.

Filmography

163

Out of Sight. Directed by Steven Soderbergh. 1998. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2006. DVD. Passport to Pimlico. Directed by Henry Cornelius. 1949. Orlando, FL: Synergy Entertainment, 2007. DVD. Raising Arizona. Directed by Joel Coen. 1987. Universal City, CA: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD. Rashomon. Directed by Akira Kurosawa. 1950. New York: Criterion, 2002. DVD. Rear Window. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 1954. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2012. DVD. The Red Balloon. Directed by Albert Lamorisse. 1956. New York: Janus Films, 2008. DVD. Repulsion. Directed by Roman Polanski. 1965. New York: Criterion, 2009. DVD. A Serious Man. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 2009. Universal City, CA: Focus Features, 2010. DVD. Shadow of a Doubt. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock. 1943. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2006. DVD. Shine. Directed by Scott Hicks. 1996. Burbank, CA: New Line Home Video, 1997. DVD. The Shining. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. 1980. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2010. DVD. State of Grace. Directed by Phil Joanou. 1990. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM, 2002. DVD. Stop Making Sense. Directed by Jonathan Demme. 1984. Universal City, CA: Vivende Entertainment, 2009. DVD. Stranger Than Paradise. Directed by Jim Jarmusch. 1984. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM, 2000. DVD. Sullivan’s Travels. Directed by Preston Sturges. 1941. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2012. DVD. The Tenant. Directed by Roman Polanski. 1976. Los Angeles: Paramount, 2003. DVD. The Third Man. Directed by Carol Reed. 1949. New York: Criterion, 1999. DVD. True Grit. Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. 2010. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures, 2011. DVD. True Grit. Directed by Henry Hathaway. 1969. Los Angeles: Paramount, 2007. DVD. Twelve Monkeys. Directed by Terry Gilliam. 1995. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 1999. DVD. The Usual Suspects. Directed by Bryan Singer. 1995. Los Angeles: Fox Searchlight, 2002. DVD. Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live). Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. 1962. New York: Criterion, 2010. DVD. William Shakespeare’s Romeo+Juliet. Directed by Baz Luhrmann. 1996. Universal City, CA : 20th Century Fox, 2002. DVD. The Wizard of Oz. Directed by Victor Fleming. 1939. Beverly Hills, CA: MGM, 1999. DVD. You Only Live Once. Directed by Fritz Lang. 1937. Chatsworth, CA: Image Entertainment, 2003. DVD.

Index

Aaron, Michele, 100 Abraham, F. Murray, 149 adaptation, xv, xvi, xvii, 2, 9, 10, 11, 17, 17–19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 47, 66, 67, 90, 143, 145 Adelstein, Paul, 101 Allen, Graham, 69 Allen, Woody, 4 Altman, Rick, 8, 83 Altman, Robert, 4; The Long Goodbye, 84; M*A*S*H, 99 American Graffiti, 5 apocalypse, xii, xvi, 17, 34–39, 40, 41, 43, 45–46, 50–51 Arnold, David L. G., 121 audience: expectations of, xv, 24; knowing audience, xv, 63, 66, 74, 78, 89, 99, 127, 132, 146; participation of, xii, xv, xvi, 2, 12, 15, 25, 31, 46, 52, 67, 73, 83, 95, 117–118, 132, 143, 146–147, 151 auteur, ix, 10, 24 Badalucco, Michael, 113 Bardem, Javier, 65 Barr, Charles, 26, 27 Barthes, Roland, 9, 142 Bartlett, Robin, 148 Barton Fink, x, xvi, 33–35, 38, 39–40, 43–47, 51, 68, 69, 71, 135, 140, 144, 151; adaptation, as, 22; allusions in, 44, 133; gender in, 112, 118, 122

Battleship Potemkin, 15 Baudrillard, Jean, 54–57 Bayless, Ryan, 75–76 Bazin, André, 55 Beavis, Mary Ann, 119 Belton, John, 6 Benjamin, Walter, 10–11, 11, 12, 72 Benshoff, Harry, 87 Benton, Robert: Kramer vs. Kramer, 99 Berardinelli, James, 19, 20 Bergan, Ronald, 53–54 Berkeley, Busby, 3 The Bible, 28, 36, 38; Daniel, 36, 39–40; David and Bathsheba, 133; Genesis, 39; Job, 133; King Nebuchadnezzar, 133; Revelation, 36, 38–39, 43 The Big Lebowski, xvii, 81, 82, 83, 101, 144, 146; gender and, 113–114; genre of, 82, 83–89, 110; queer film, as a, 87–89, 101; setting of, x Blood Simple, ix, x, xi, 23, 51, 68, 111, 112, 123, 152; sources of, 23, 24, 70; gender and, xvii, 114–115, 116, 125; setting of, x, 12, 68 Bluestone, George, 18, 55 Bob Jones University, 29 Booker, M. Keith, xii, 5, 59–60 Boozer, Jack, 2, 20, 89 Bordwell, David, xvi, 13–14, 132, 137, 143 Borges, Jorge Luis, xvi, 18, 20–21, 22, 23, 25, 29, 31, 34, 71, 128, 144 165

166

Index

Branagh, Kenneth: Hamlet, 24; Henry V, 23; Much Ado about Nothing, 23 Braudy, Leo, 8 Bridges, Jeff, 21, 37, 81, 101, 113, 124, 145 Brody, Richard, 151 Brolin, Josh, 148 Brook, Vincent, 108–109 The Brother from Another Planet, xi Burn after Reading, x, xvii, 21, 22, 97–98, 99, 101, 144–145, 146; gender in, 101, 107–108, 111–112; queer film, as, 101, 107, 110 Burr, Raymond, 14 Burton, Tim, 4 Buscemi, Steve, 85, 109, 119 Butler, Judith, 112 Byrne, Gabriel, 109, 116, 152

cognitive psychology, xiv, xv–xvi, 4, 7, 13, 68, 131, 143 Collins, Jim, 6–7, 12, 73, 82 comedy: absurdist, x; black, xi; romantic, x, 82; screwball, x, xiii, 53, 73 constructivism, xiv, xvi, xvii, 7, 11–12, 29, 34, 35, 54, 57, 58, 59, 63, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71–73, 74, 75, 78, 83, 88, 90, 91, 106, 112, 113, 114, 117–118, 130, 131–136, 137–138, 140–141, 143–146, 153 Coppola, Francis Ford: The Godfather Part III, 71 Costner, Kevin: Dances with Wolves, 82 Cotton, Joseph, 28 Coughlin, Paul, x, 25, 68–69, 118, 119 Cronenberg, David, 22 Culler, Jonathan, 67

Cage, Nicolas, 34, 50, 69, 135, 148 Cain, James M., 24, 59, 68–69 Calinescu, Matei, 146 Campbell, Allan, 108–109 Camus, Albert, 68 The Canterbury Tales, 104 Capra, Frank, 24, 58, 73; It’s a Wonderful Life, 53; Meet John Doe, 53; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 23, 53, 73 Carriego, Evaristo, 20 Carroll, Noel, xvi, 4, 15, 56, 143 Carter, Steven, 55–56, 57 Casella, Max, 153 Castle, Robert, 114 Cavell, Stanley, 55 Cawelti, John, 8 Cervantes, Miguel de, 130 Chambers, J.W., 85 Chandler, Raymond, 6, 59, 84 Charney, Leo, 52–53 Choose Me, xi Clooney, George, xvii, 3, 21, 74, 98, 99–100, 100–102, 103–104, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 135, 136, 145 Cobb, Randall “Tex”, 38 Cobbs, Bill, 50, 73 Coen, Joel and Ethan: collaboration of, 131; independent filmmakers, as, xi, 21–22; intention of, 131, 132

Damon, Matt, 21, 124, 146 da Vinci, Leonardo: Mona Lisa, 129, 140 Davis, Judy, 44, 118 Delano, Diane, 30 Deleuze, Gilles, 57 Dickens, Charles, 18 Die Hard, 22 Disneyland, 54–55 Disney Studios, xi, 55 Doom, Ryan, 60, 71 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Double, 71 Drake, Judith, 104 Dreyer, Carl Theodor: Ordet, 137 Duffy, Julia, 105 Dunne, Michael, 68 Durning, Charles, 1 Duvall, Wayne, 1 Dyer, Richard, 98, 99 Dylan, Bob, 151 Ealing Studios, 2, 27, 30, 140 Ebert, Robert, 19, 90 Eco, Umberto, 67 Edward II, 100 Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man, 73, 74, 78, 134 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: Nature, 138–139 ER, 99

Index Fargo, ix, 55–56, 123, 152; gender and, xvii, 112, 113–114, 118–120, 125; setting of, x Faulkner, William, 27, 44; Slave Ship, 44 femme fatale, 44, 75, 83, 114 Fer, Briony, 11, 12 Ferrara, Abel: King of New York, 71 Fincher, David: Fight Club, 35 Finkel, Fyvush, 141 Finney, Albert, 109, 115 Fish, Stanley, 68 Flanagan, Jesse, 84 Fonda, Henry, 15 Forsythe, William, 40 Foucault, Michel, 9 Franich, Darren, ix, 5 Freeman, J.E., 109, 115 French, Emma, 18, 23–24, 24, 25 Gable, Clark, 99 Gandolfini, James, 60 Garland, Judy, 3, 98 Gaughran, Richard, 122 Gaut, Berys, 128, 129–130, 131–132, 134–135, 137–138, 140 Gazzara, Ben, 84 gender, xiv, xvii, 101, 111–114, 118–119, 120, 121, 125 Genette, Gerard, 90 genre, ix–x, xi, xii, xiv, xvi, xvii, 8, 73, 81–83, 89, 91, 94, 100, 133, 143, 144, 145 genre films, xv, 8, 81–82 Gerstner, David A., ix Getz, John, 111, 115 Gilliam, Terry, 130; Brazil, 37; The Fisher King, 37; Twelve Monkeys, 35, 37 Glasersfeld, Ernst von, xiv, 7 Godard, Jean-Luc: Vivre Sa Vie, 23 Goodman, John, 2, 40, 44, 85, 101 Goodwin-Kelly, Mary Kate, 113 Gould, Elliott, 84 Grant, Beth, 76 Grant, Cary, 99 Grifasi, Joe, 49 Griffin, Sean, 87 Grodal, Torben, 7, 132 Green, Danny, 27 Griffin, Sean, 100

167

Guinness, Alex, 19, 27 Hadary, Jonathan, 104 Hall, Irma P., 17 Hamilton, Linda, 113 Hammett, Dashiell, 24, 70; The Glass Key, 22, 70, 71; Red Harvest, 22, 70, 71 Hanks, Tom, 27, 121 Harden, Marcia Gay, 109, 152 Harrelson, Woody, 76 Hawks, Howard: The Big Sleep, 84; His Girl Friday, 54 Hedaya, Dan, 111, 115 Hedlund, Garrett, 151 Heine, Heinrich: William Ratcliff, 71 Helberg, Simon, 138 Herrmann, Edward, 104 High Noon, 15 Hitchcock, Alfred, 18, 68; Rear Window, 14; Shadow of a Doubt, 12, 60 Hoffman, Dustin, 98–99 Hoffman, Michael: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 23 Hollywood, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, 54; classical, xiii; studios, xi, 8 Homer, 1, 2, 24 The Hours and Times, 100 Huddleston, David, 101, 113 The Hudsucker Proxy, x, xvi, xvii, xviii, 22, 24, 47, 49–54, 58–59, 60, 63, 67, 69, 73–74, 78, 82, 128, 134, 144, 152; adaptation, as, 23, 58; gender in, 112, 118; postmodernism and, xiii, 138; setting, x Hunter, Holly, 39, 101 Hurst, Ryan, 27, 121 Hutcheon, Linda, xv, 5, 9, 9–10, 67, 130, 131, 146 independent film, xi, 21, 25 indeterminacy, xv, 4, 12, 127–131, 132, 144, 146 Inside Llewyn Davis, x, xviii, 82, 146–153; indeterminacy of, xv, 129–130, 146; music in, 150–152; setting, x, 150 Intolerable Cruelty, x, xvii, 22, 67, 75, 78, 98, 99, 101, 103–105, 106, 144, 145; gender in, 101, 103–107; literary

168

Index

sources, 74–75, 134; queer film, as, 103, 104, 107, 110; setting, x Isaac, Oscar, 146 Iser, Wolfgang, 68 Ives, George, 105 Jameson, Fredric, 5, 6, 7, 10, 33, 38, 70 Jarmusch, Jim, xi Joanou, Phil: State of Grace, 71 Johansson, Scarlett, 60 Johnson, Katie, 25 Jones, Tommy Lee, 140, 148 Joseph, Tiffany, 57–58 Kafka, Franz: The Trial, 134 Kang, David, 127 Kazecki, Jakub, 113–114 Keats, John: “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, 44 Kelly, Grace, 14 Khachaturian, Aram: Spartacus, 73 Khush, 100 Kind, Richard, 133 Kind Hearts and Coronets, 27, 140 King, Chris Thomas, 3 King, Geoff, xi, 5 Kitei, Lynne, 41 Klawans, Stuart, 108 Kreindler, Sarv, 146 Kristeva, Julia, 9, 67, 72 Kubrick, Stanley, 134; Eyes Wide Shut, 35; The Shining, 35, 71 Kuhn, T. J., 39 Kurosawa, Akira: Rashomon, 128–129, 137 The Ladykillers, x, xvi, xviii, 19, 19–20, 22, 34, 35, 128, 144; adaptation, as, xvi, 2, 17, 19, 25–28, 29, 30–31, 67; gender and, xvii, 112, 114, 121–123, 125; religion and, 28–29; setting of, x, 26, 27, 34 Landecker, Amy, 136 Lang, Fritz: Metropolis, 58 Lange, Pedro, 74–75 The Lavender Hill Mob, 27 Lee, Spike, xi Leigh, Jennifer Jason, 49, 67, 118 Leitch, Thomas, 9, 18

Lerner, Michael, 44 L’Espirit Nouveau, 11 Lethal Weapon, 22 literature, use of, 9, 17–18, 19, 70, 70–71, 78. See also adaptation The Living End, 100 Lom, Herbert, 27 Lost in La Mancha, 130 Lucas, George, 5 Lugosi, Bela, 134 Luhrmann, Baz: William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, 9, 23 Lynch, John Carroll, 113, 119 Ma, Tzi, 27 Macdonald, Kelly, 65 Mackendrick, Alexander, 19, 20, 26, 28, 34 Macy, William H., 119 Mahoney, John, 44 Malkovich, John, 97, 111, 145 The Man Who Wasn’t There, ix, x, xiii, xvi, 21, 22, 47, 52, 58, 59–63, 68, 69, 82, 135, 138, 144, 146; gender and, 113; queer film, as, 108–109; setting of, 12, 60 Mandell, Alan, 139 Marvel, Elizabeth, 107, 123, 145 masculinity, 2, 101, 110, 112, 113, 113–116, 118–125, 128. See also gender McCarthy, Cormac: No Country for Old Men, 2, 19, 65–66, 75 McConnell, Frank, 8 McCrea, Joel, 3, 89 McDormand, Frances, 41, 61, 108, 111, 113, 129, 145 McMurray, Sam, 40 McQuerrey, Katie, 146 Medunetsky, Konstantin, 11 Melamed, Fred, 135 Melville, Herman: Moby-Dick, 71–72 Metz, Walter, 73–74, 98–99, 99, 134 Miller’s Crossing, ix, x, 24, 71, 109, 117–118, 152, 153; adaptation, as, 22, 27, 70; gender and, xvii, 112, 114, 115–117, 118, 120, 125; genre and, 117; queer film, as, 109, 116, 120 Miramax, xi Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, 11

Index Monroe, Marilyn, 98 Moore, Alan, 37 Moore, Julianne, 81, 101 Moss, Andrew, 35 Mulligan, Carey, 148 musicals, 2, 91–92 My Own Private Idaho, 100 Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita, 60 Nair, Mira, 18 Naremore, James, 8 Natoli, Joseph, xii Neale, Steve, 83 Nelson, Tim Blake, 101, 102 Neusner, Jacob, 138 New Line, xi Newman, Michael Z., xi Nichols, Mike: The Graduate, 129 No Country for Old Men, ix, x, xvii, 2, 19, 65–66, 67, 123, 140, 144, 148–149; Flannery O’Connor and, 75–78, 129, 134; noir, ix, xiii; novel, and, 2, 67, 75, 77–78; setting of, x, 12 noir, ix, xiii, 5, 43, 59, 68, 75, 114 Nolan, William, 109, 116 O Brother, Where Art Thou?, x, xii, xvi, xvii, xviii, 1–4, 13, 15, 24, 82, 94, 98, 99, 101, 106, 132, 144, 145; adaptation, as, 2, 82, 132; gender and, 112, 122; genre of, 82, 89–94, 101, 132; music in, 3, 90–92, 101; The Odyssey, and, 2–3, 90, 132; queer film, as, 101–103, 106, 107, 110; setting of, x, 93–94; Sullivan’s Travels, and, 3, 89–90, 92, 132; The Wizard of Oz and, 3, 132 O’Connor, Flannery: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, 2, 66, 75–78, 129, 134 Odets, Clifford, 44; Awake and Sing, 44; The Time is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets, 22 The Odyssey, 1, 2, 2–3, 24, 90 One Fine Day, 100 Orr, Stanley, 51, 61 Out of Sight, 100 Pakula, Alan J.: All the President’s Men, 98

169

Palmer, R. Barton, xiii, 22, 40–41, 58–59, 70, 71, 82, 114 Pappas, George S., 44 Park, Steve, 113, 127 Parker, Cecil, 27 Paris Is Burning, 100 parody, xii, xiii, 5, 26, 59, 63, 69 Passport to Pimlico, 27 pastiche, xi, 9, 54, 59, 69 Pentecost, Del, 1 Perkins, V.F., 140 Petersen, Wolfgang: Outbreak, 98–99 Phillips, Ethan, 148 Piaget, Jean, xiv, xv, 7, 9, 11, 34, 131, 143 Pierson, John, xi Pitt, Brad, 21, 97, 109, 145 Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, 74–75; “The Purloined Letter”, 74, 78, 134; “William Wilson”, 71 Poison, 100 Polanski, Roman: Repulsion, 71; The Tenant, 71 Polito, Jon, 109, 115 Portis, Charles: True Grit, 2, 123 postmodernism, xii–xiii, xvi, xvii, 5, 6, 10, 12, 24, 25, 33, 34, 37, 52, 54, 56, 59, 63, 72, 82, 137, 138, 145 Presnell, Harve, 119 Price, Dennis, 140 Prohibition, x Proust, Marcel, 6 Pryce, Jonathan, 37 Purdy, Jim, 3, 92–93, 94 queer cinema, 87–89, 100–101, 102, 108–109, 110 Rabinowitz, Peter, 68 Radner, Hilary, 113 Raising Arizona, x, xii, xvi, 34–35, 38–39, 40–41, 45–47, 51, 71–72, 112, 135, 144; gender and, 112, 114; literary sources, 71; marriage, family, and, 41–43; setting of, x Rasche, David, 145 Ray, Nicholas: Johnny Guitar, 53 reader-response theory, 68 Red Balloon, 53

170

Index

Redmon, Allen H., 75–76 Reed, Carol: The Third Man, 27 Reevis, Steve, 113 Reid, Tara, 81 Rich, B. Ruby, 100 Riffaterre, Michael, 7, 11 Ritter, Thelma, 14 Robbins, Tim, 50, 54, 118, 129 Robeson, Paul, 98 Robson, Eddie, 99 Rockwell, Norman, 41 Roffman, Peter, 3, 92–93, 94 Romney, Jonathan, 92 Rose, William, 26 Rosen, Elizabeth, xvi, 36–37, 40 Rowell, Erica, xii, 6, 23, 25, 27, 44, 50–51, 60, 70, 71–72, 114 R.S.V.P., 100 Rudrüd, Kristin, 56 Russell, Carolyn, xii Russian Formalism, 13 Russom, Leon, 123 Sands, Stark, 150 Schatz, Thomas, 3, 8, 84, 91, 92 schizophrenia, 35 Scorsese, Martin: Goodfellas, 71 Scott, A. O., 19, 90 Sedgwick, Eve, 109 Seitz, John, 49 Sellers, Peter, 19, 27 A Serious Man, x, xvii, 22, 82, 127, 131, 136, 138–139, 146, 152, 153; allusions in, 133–134; constructivism and, xviii, 133–137, 140–142, 146; indeterminacy of, xv, 128–130, 140; rabbinic tradition and, 138–140, 142; setting of, x sexuality, xv, xvii, 100–101, 103, 105–106, 107, 108–110, 111, 116, 135, 145 Shakespeare, xvi, 18, 23, 24, 44 Shalhoub, Tony, 61 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 71 Shine, 15 Shklovsky, Viktor, 12 Shmulenson, Yelena, 140 Sickels, Robert C., x, 82 Silver, Joel, 22 Silverman, Kaja, 53 Simmons, J. K., 27, 121, 145

Singer, Bryan: The Usual Suspects, 60, 61 Singer, Marc, 84 Slobin, Mark, 150 Smith, Kevin, xi Soderbergh, Steven, xi, 22 South, the, x, xii, 3, 26 Spacey, Kevin, 61 spectator, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 2, 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13–15, 18, 25, 27, 31, 33–34, 36, 43, 45, 46–47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 62, 66, 71, 74, 83, 87, 89, 94, 124, 127–128, 129, 132–133, 134, 136, 137, 139–140, 141, 143, 146, 147–150, 151. See also audience Stam, Robert, xvi, 9, 17–18 Stanley, Ralph, 3 Stefon, Matt, 39, 40 Steinfeld, Hailee, 123 Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 71 Stewart, Jimmy, 14 Stiller, Ben, 100 Stone, Oliver: Born on the Fourth of July, 85; JFK, 99 Stop Making Sense, xi Stormare, Peter, 113, 119, 152 Stranger Than Paradise, xi studio films, xi, xiii Stuhlbarg, Michael, xviii, 127, 146, 152 Sturges, Preston, 24, 58; Christmas in July, 54; Sullivan’s Travels, 2, 3, 89–90, 92, 132 Sutherland, Donald, 98–99 Swain, Marshall W., 44 Swinton, Tilda, 107 Swoon, 100 Tarantino, Quentin, 4, 67, 100 Terminator, 113 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 113 Thackeray, William Makepeace: Vanity Fair, 18 Thompson, Kirsten Moana, 41 Thompson, Kristin, xvi, 13, 132, 143 Thornton, Billy Bob, 21, 52, 61, 74, 108, 135, 148 Todisco, Mario, 117 Tongues United, 100 translation, 10–11, 20–21, 22, 23, 26

Index Travers, Peter, 90 Travis, Stacey, 106 True Grit, ix, 21, 22, 67, 128, 144, 145, 145–146; adaptation, as, 2, 123; gender and, xvii, 2, 112, 114, 123–125 Turturro, John, 33, 50, 69, 109, 116, 118, 135, 148 Tyree, J.M., 134 Valli, Alida, 28 Vonnegut, Kurt, 37; Galapagos, 37 Wager, Jans, 113 Waisman, Sergio, 20, 21 Walsh, M. Emmet, 115 Wayans, Marlon, 27, 121 Welles, Orson, 28; Citizen Kane, 137 West, Nathanael: Day of the Locust, 71

171

Williams, Robin, 37 Willis, Bruce, 37 Wilson, Trey, 41 The Wizard of Oz, 3, 132 Wolff, Aaron, 133 Wood, Michael, 8 Wright, Will, 8 Wyatt, David, xviii Wyler, Williams: The Best Years of Our Lives, 85 Wyner, George, 139 You Only Live Once, 15 Young Soul Rebels, 100 Zemeckis, Robert: Back to the Future, 82 Zeta-Jones, Catherine, 21, 74, 103

About the Author

Allen H. Redmon coordinates and teaches classes leading to the interdisciplinary film studies minor at Texas A&M University Central Texas. He has published articles in Journal of Popular Film, Literature/Film Quarterly, Bright Lights Film Journal, Journal of Religion and Film, Studies in French Cinema, and Journal of American Culture.

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