Читать книгу The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers - Mark T. Conard - Страница 11

Douglas McFarland

It is said that upon a visit to Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Groucho Marx was taken to the mound of rubble that had been the site of Hitler's bunker. Groucho stepped out of his jeep and climbed to the top of what constituted Hitler's gravesite, where he unexpectedly proceeded to dance the Charleston. On one level, the gesture is meant to defy evil, to assert the celebration of dance over the horrors of Hitler's madness, to demonstrate the irrepressible energy of the human spirit. Groucho, in short, thumbs his nose at the Führer. But his act of irreverence is also the staging of a radical and scandalous incongruity. Comedy is, as Kierkegaard asserted, “wherever there is contradiction.”¹ In this case, the contradiction between a 1920s dance step and the perpetrator of the profound atrocity of twentieth-century Europe expresses the absurdity of the human condition. Groucho's gesture is ultimately as unsettling as it is liberating.

Within the overarching narrative framework of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) the Coen brothers have generated their own complex set of comic absurdities. Although it has been called the “least serious” of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, the film is, in fact, one of their most thoughtful. With its fast-paced picaresque style and collection of zany characters, the film has undoubtedly delighted a wide audience, but its serious themes and at times disturbing contradictions also challenge that delight. The film has been fruitfully explicated in terms of pastiche, dissonance, and “engaged reinvention,” but the film's serious comic underpinnings can best be understood through the overlapping concepts of the mechanical, the contradictory, and the absurd articulated by Henri Bergson and Kierkegaard. According to Bergson, we laugh when we see a human as a “set-up mechanism…a jointed puppet.”² For Kierkegaard, the comic represents the unmediated contradictions of the human condition, incongruities that defy resolution but generate laughter. It is a blend of these perspectives that we experience in O Brother, as zany cartoon figures dance like mechanical marionettes across a landscape of existential incongruities, at times oblivious to their ontological status and at others struggling to resist the rigidity of law and the inflexibility of social roles and personal obsessions.

The philosophical explication of comedy runs its own comic risks. From Aristophanes to Rabelais and Swift, the scholar has been the natural butt and easy target of comedy. The philosopher's rigid obsession with his or her system of thought, a “hobby horse,” as Sterne would put it, is potentially as laughable as Ulysses Everett McGill's (George Clooney) obsession with a particular brand of hair pomade. And no doubt, the Coen brothers would be amused by my own exegetical method. But my intention is not to impose an artificial intellectual category on what is visceral and alive but to provide a means to engage the social, ethical, and existential complexities of laughter in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Generic Incongruities

The title of the Coen brothers’ romp through Depression-era America comes from Preston Sturges's film Sullivan's Travels (1941). O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the title of the socially conscious film that Sullivan, after directing a series of successful musical comedies, now intends to make. He decides to move away from making films similar to Busby Berkeley's Gold Diggers of 1935, a celebration of sex, money, and dance, to ones similar to William Wellman's Wild Boys of the Road (1933), an indictment of social inequality, economic depravation, and railroad bulls. But after experiencing a transforming epiphany, Sullivan proclaims upon his return to Hollywood that there is as much, if not more, value in comedy as there is in working-class manifestos. On this “cock-eyed caravan” that we call life, laughter is a necessary tonic for its many trials and tribulations.

The Coen brothers’ film, therefore, immediately confronts its knowledgeable audience with a generic incongruity. Although the film bears the title of the gritty film Sullivan originally intended to make, and indeed it does chronicle the travails of those facing economic hardship, social injustice, and political corruption, it is also a madcap comedy, perhaps the very comedy Sullivan decided to make after returning to Hollywood. We are left with an indecorous hybrid: I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (Mervyn LeRoy, 1932) filmed as screwball comedy. Rather than therapeutic, the Coens would seem to have made a film that elicits a potentially jarring incongruity. This unresolved contradiction in generic perspective provides the ongoing comic dynamic of the film. What results is not a traditionally mixed generic form such as tragicomedy or pastoral epic but a self-consciously contradictory artifact.

The incongruity between comic high jinks and social commentary is addressed in an early self-referential scene. Three escapees from a chain gang, encumbered by the manacles that fasten them together, are struggling to climb aboard a boxcar of a moving train. Ulysses McGill, the apparent leader of the group, is first to pull himself up. But at the very moment of his triumph, as he pauses to ask if anyone of those already riding the train might be a smithy, the chain that binds him to his fellow fugitives tightens, and he is suddenly and unceremoniously yanked off the train. Satisfied that he is free and mobile, he forgets that he remains chained to his two companions and as a result takes a comic pratfall. To put it differently, he remembers that he needs a blacksmith's file to be unshackled, but he concurrently fails to remember that he is shackled.

The wide-eyed, exaggerated, and even goofy look on McGill's face, as well as the automated movement of his body as it is jerked down and pulled across the floor of the boxcar suggests Bergson's notion that we laugh when we see “something mechanical encrusted on the living.”³ The comic buffoon is one who has become a “lifeless automaton.” Bergson's phenomenological understanding of comedy is an outgrowth of the contrast he makes between habit and recollection in Matter and Memory. He describes rote learning as a habitual type of memory: “Like every habitual bodily exercise, it is stored up in a mechanism which is set in motion as a whole by an initial impulse, in a closed system of automatic movements.”⁴ The comic figure is one given over to the “easy automatism of acquired habits.”⁵ This renders him a “jointed puppet…a set up mechanism,” and the “more exactly these two images, that of a person and that of a machine, fit into one another, the more striking is the comic effect.”⁶

In this context, it is important to note the twofold subtext that informs Bergson's explication of laughter. Written at the turn of the twentieth century, his treatment reflects his perception of a dehumanized culture, one in which the individual is increasingly enveloped in modern mechanization. This phenomenon was addressed as early as Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and as late as Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times (1936). The regulation of labor, aptly depicted by Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (Fred Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1923), and the bureaucratic configuration of mass society, addressed in King Vidor's The Crowd (1928), render man an automaton, not simply oppressed by a machine but transformed into one. Bergson's comic figure, manipulated from the outside as if it were a toy puppet and viewed as a depersonalized caricature, mirrors modern man caught up in social conformity, repetitive labor, and psychological habit.

This troubling side of Bergson's vision is accompanied by the prefigurement of an empowering one. Although Bergson wrote Laughter prior to the technological innovations of live-action animation, his understanding of the mechanized puppet looks forward to the cartoon figure. But the inherent sense of victimization in Bergson's characterization of the comic is replaced in animation by a sense of omnipotence. The flexibility and plasticity, termed “plamaticness” by Sergei Eisenstein, of this animated figure suggests an almost redemptive quality.⁷ Its rubbery nature gives it the power to come back to life. As Steven Dillon puts it, “Cartoonism gives the impression of infinite repeatability. Cartoons tend to be serial, not singular. The cartoon world is cornucopian, overflowing, not empty.”⁸ This explains why an audience is not threatened by cartoon violence. Toons bounce back, immune from the physical violence perpetrated against them.

Both victimization and empowerment inform the opening scene on the train in O Brother. As I point out above, the freedom and autonomy that McGill believes he has attained once having pulled himself up onto the moving train is quickly proven to be not simply ephemeral but self-deceiving. McGill is a mere toy, not necessarily in the hands of modernity, but of the Mississippi state penal system. The chains, which bind the three prisoners together, are controlled by an external force, a puppet master who in this scene doesn't simply limit their movement but controls it as well. Although the sense of unease, of the innate cruelty of a certain form of comedy, at this particular moment remains enveloped in a comic pratfall, it nevertheless runs throughout the film with varying degrees of emphasis.

What I have referred to as cartoon empowerment enters the scene in a much more subtle manner and through a self-reflexive device. Once McGill has climbed on board and pulls himself up, he peers into the recess of the car and perceives a group of men huddled together. It is from this group that he seeks a smithy. The scene sets up certain expectations in the audience. It is of a type that moviegoers would have seen before in films ranging from the aforementioned Wild Boys of the Road to Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory (1976) and Clint Eastwood's The Gauntlet (1977), as well as countless other “road” pictures. The audience anticipates that McGill will discover a marginalized group of men and women, perhaps even sentimentalized as in a Frank Capra film, who will welcome McGill with the camaraderie of the road, or a group who will throw him off the train, hardened by their failures and unwilling to share with others what they have acquired for themselves.

McGill, however, faces neither friend nor foe. A collection of forgotten men with hollow looks simply stare back at him. Their faces express little more than indifference toward the new passenger. It is a disturbing commentary on the effects of the Great Depression. More importantly, the scene is constructed within a theatrical framework. McGill stands up on the floor of the car as if he were on a fully lit stage, while those already occupying the car sit back in the darkness as if they were themselves an audience for McGill's antics. The scene calls to mind the moment in Sullivan's Travels when the prisoners are marched into a church to enjoy a cartoon. Although this set piece from Sturges's film is used later in O Brother in an overt manner, it is here on the train that it raises serious issues concerning the comic nature of the scene. The prisoners in Sullivan's Travels watch a Walt Disney cartoon in which Pluto is shown at his most elastic. In one sequence he becomes attached to flypaper and chases his own body around in a frustrated circle before flopping on the ground. In another he is wrapped up in a window shade and then spat back out. The prisoners laugh uproariously at Pluto's mishaps, but Sturges does not seem interested in exploring why they laugh. One senses, however, that the laughter is therapeutic not because they are able to divert their victimization onto another entity but because violence itself has been relegated into the plastic world of animation, a medium in which elasticity and repeatability diffuse its threat to their bodies. Pluto is always restored to his original configuration.

The therapeutic empowerment of animation is conspicuous in its absence in the scene in the Coen brothers’ film. Unease is generated not simply through the evocation of Bergson's automaton but in the inability of these men to respond to the animated caricature before them. It suggests that their apparent indifference to McGill's pratfall is symptomatic of their despair. The film viewer recognizes the elasticity of McGill and the lack of a real threat to his body when he falls off the train. The audience within the film, however, seems deadened to the possibility of laughter and hardened to the salutatory effect of cartoons.

One more aspect of the scene needs to be addressed. In his explanation of what constitutes the comic in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments,” Kierkegaard asserts, “If the reason for people's hustle-bustle is a possibility of avoiding danger, the busyness is not comic; but if, for example, it is on a ship that is sinking, there is something comic in all this running around, because the contradiction is that despite all this movement they are not moving away from the site of their downfall.”⁹ Men scurrying about hopelessly trying to save themselves would not on the surface seem funny, other than in a sadistic way. But for Kierkegaard it represents the contradiction that is intrinsic to comedy and to life. This is expressed in Kierkegaard's joke as the contradiction between freedom and necessity, between our infinite aspirations and the finite realities that confront those aspirations.¹⁰ The crew on the ship, striving to keep itself afloat and yet helpless in its attempt, illustrates the contradiction between our need to take action and the ultimate meaninglessness of that action. It is the existential conundrum of the human condition.

The three convicts attempting to climb aboard the moving train fall neatly into Kierkegaard's comic scenario. They struggle for release and freedom but are bound to one another and in a sense bound to the earth. They reflect our innate belief in the need for action and the ultimate meaninglessness of action. Such a scene generates despair if one focuses on the frustration, but a comic understanding focuses on the absurdity of the moment. The utopian fantasy sung over the opening credits, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” expresses the human need to imagine the possibility of redemption, and its lyrics hover over the attempted escape. The incongruity between the fanciful dream of a place where “bulldogs all have rubber teeth” and the frustrated cartoon characters of the film is precisely what Kierkegaard understood as comic. Perhaps Wylie Sypher best describes the dynamic at work in the scene: “Essentially our enjoyment of physical mishap or deformity springs from our surprise and delight that man's actions are often absurd, his energies often misdirected.”¹¹ In O Brother, Where Art Thou? a host of characters are seeking freedom. That their attempts are more often than not cast as “absurd” and “misdirected” does not diminish their sincerity and expressiveness.

The opening set piece of O Brother depicting McGill and his cohorts failing in their attempt to board the train that would take them to freedom is a multifaceted comic staging and previews the complex and overlapping subtleties of the comic gestures that inform the film.

Challenging Postmodern Aesthetics

Although the climax of O Brother occurs with the Tennessee Valley Authority flooding the McGill ancestral “homeland,” the picaresque set of adventures turns toward its conclusion at the Klan rally that McGill and his fellow escapees have infiltrated in order to rescue Tommy (Chris Thomas King), the African American blues musician they had met and befriended earlier in the film. But more importantly, through its rich collection of allusions to other texts, the scene provides its audience with the most striking and most unsettling set of comic incongruities in the film. These incongruities not only satirize the hooded Klansmen but also challenge the audience to move beyond the aesthetic pleasure of the film's postmodern wit. What has been called the “engaged reinvention” of popular mythologies that the Coen brothers demonstrate in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) here takes on the form of a set of radical and disturbing contradictions.¹²

Allusions to The Odyssey, Busby Berkeley, Leni Riefenstahl, the Three Stooges, Robert Johnson, and The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) all appear in the episode. Although these references play off one another in both obvious and subtle ways, the scene is grounded in a particular moment in American history: the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the South in the 1930s. This is, of course, a particularly dark episode in the history of the republic and one that taken in isolation would generate some combination of outrage and guilt in the typically liberal audiences that the films of the Coen brothers might attract. The rich array of allusions, in short, cannot be separated from a historical context that elicits moral condemnation.

It is this historical grounding that undermines a postmodern reading of the episode. The assemblage of popular mythologies, pop culture references, and classical allusions does not, in this case, constitute what Fredric Jameson and others term “pastiche.” Unlike parody and satire, pastiche, according to Jameson, is “the cannibalization of all styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion[,]” and thus constitutes a “neutral practice,” an artistic and cultural form that has been emptied of any ethical perspective and “amputated of satiric impulse.”¹³ The postmodern pleasure of pastiche is the pleasure of recognizing references, so that engaging a text becomes a game of identification. Moreover, through this consumption of cultural signs, there emerges in the audience a sense of belonging to an “exclusive community,” one detached from both traditional socioeconomic classifications and conventional ethical codes.¹⁴ Membership in this sophisticated coterie group, which many in the audience of a Coen brothers film might expect, is sabotaged, I think intentionally, by the context of a Klan lynching of an African American. There is quite simply no possibility of avoiding the historical setting of the episode and the ethical response that that setting demands. Although the scene in question does expose the audience to a heterogeneous grouping of aesthetic styles and allusions, these do not occupy a neutral space devoid of normative values and of what Jameson refers to in this context as “real history.”¹⁵

The most obvious consequence of this grounding is that the engaged and directed point of view of satire replaces the neutrality of postmodern wit. The scene opens with McGill and his two fellow travelers looking down from under cover at a Klan ceremony, which they soon learn is a lynching. The members of the Klan are marching in synchronized patterns that immediately call to mind a Busby Berkeley set piece. The Klansmen are, therefore, being mocked as silly men, in silly outfits, and in silly dance formations. Like Satan's band of devils in Paradise Lost who are compared to a swarm of insects, the self-importance of the Klansmen is deflated through a visual simile. The satire is reinforced through a Homeric parallel. The charlatan Bible salesman (John Goodman) who has robbed and beaten McGill and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) now shows up at the rally. His role as the uncultured and violent Cyclops of The Odyssey mocks the office of Grand Cyclops of the Klan.

The set of allusions taken together suggests, however, something more sophisticated than satire, something that relies on irreconcilable comic incongruities within that set of allusions. Perhaps the most outrageous and resonant reference in the set piece is to The Wizard of Oz. The rescue of Tommy from the hands of the Klan visually evokes the rescue of Dorothy from the Wicked Witch of the West. The three escapees take the parts of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. The Klan becomes the army of the Wicked Witch. This creates a jarring incongruity, one that is intensified by the contextualization of the allusion outside its original historical setting. Although The Wizard of Oz was made in the final years of the Depression and is in some sense a typical thirties “road” picture, its presence in the film will resonate with most of the audience in the context of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. For many years before the advent of home video technology, the film was annually shown on television and became an anticipated event, an almost ritualized staging in the living rooms of American families. An allusion to the film generates not simply a memory but nostalgia for “a privileged lost object of desire.”¹⁶ In an impish and insidious manner, the Coens have uprooted this warm memory and relocated it to a 1930s Klan rally and execution.

The effect of the allusion on the audience is threefold. First, there is the pleasure in simply identifying the allusion, the sense of belonging to the sophisticated coterie group I mention above. Secondly, there is the pleasure in witnessing a childhood fantasy defeat evil. It is the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion who rescue Tommy from the clutches of the Klan and flatten its Cyclops. The innocence of a childhood fantasy proves stronger than racism. But thirdly, the allusion creates a disturbing and ironic incongruity: that between the dark recess of Mississippi in the 1930s and the living rooms of postwar baby boomers and their children.

Kierkegaard is instructive in understanding the effect if not the purpose of this irony. He asserts in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript that “irony is the confinium [boundary] between the aesthetic and the ethical.”¹⁷ The relationship between these two stages and the role that irony plays in the advancement from the former to the latter is treated extensively by Kierkegaard in Either/Or. In part I, a young man argues for the aesthetic point of view in a series of heterogeneous papers on topics as diverse as music, drama, crop rotation, and eroticism. In discussing these subjects, he asserts that one must distance oneself from commitment to any one particular form of artistic expression or to one exclusive human relationship. The aesthete is dimly aware of the existential contradictions of life, but he would avoid them by continually seeking out new experiences, preoccupying himself with the surfaces of life, and generally playing “shuttlecock with all existence.”¹⁸ “Everything in life,” says the aesthete, “is regarded as a wager. The more consistently a person knows how to sustain his arbitrariness, the more amusing the combinations become.”¹⁹ The aesthete must constantly be changing his orientation to the world.

Part II of Either/Or consists of two letters written to the young man by a judge who represents the so-called ethical point of view. He challenges the self-styled aesthete not necessarily to adopt a specific ethical perspective but to act in the world, to overcome his indifference. “It is not,” he explains, “a matter of choosing between willing good or willing evil as of choosing to will.”²⁰ The aesthete should, in short, cease to be the “plaything for the play of his arbitrariness.”²¹ The task of the ethicist is to make the young man confront the comic contradictions of the human condition, the ironic incongruities between the body and the soul, the finite and the infinite, the necessary and the free, which inform the human condition.

Jameson's understanding of the postmodern world and the individual enmeshed within its plethora of signs is uncanny in its similarity to Kierkegaard's understanding of the young aesthete and his need for new and changing experiences. Jameson asserts, “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods…at ever greater rates of turnover.”²² It is precisely this consumer of aesthetic commodities whom the Coen brothers confront in their staging of the Klan rally. They do it by fashioning a disturbing comic contradiction that defies the consumptive pleasures of their audience. The filmmakers’ role is that of the judge in Either/Or who demands that the young, sophisticated aesthete confront the ironies of the human condition. Unlike The Hudsucker Proxy, whose comic perspective interrogates socioeconomic conditions of a specific era, the ironic incongruities of O Brother act against its own audience. The Coens are mischievous boys; in this instance, their mischief challenges the complacencies of the postmodernist aesthetic.

Comic Endings

The audience is informed of parallels between O Brother and The Odyssey in the opening credits, when the invocation from Homer's poem appears on the screen: “O Muse, sing in me and through me…that man…a wanderer, harried for years on end.”²³ This is an invitation for the audience to search out specific references to the poem as the film progresses. And indeed, we do recognize versions of the Cyclops, the Sirens, the suitors, and others in the film. But the most significant borrowing from The Odyssey is an overarching narrative framework. The structural pattern of Homer's poem is one of loss and recovery, of wandering and return. The narrative begins with Odysseus hidden away on Kalypso's island and is set in motion with his decision to return to Ithaca. The tale reaches its conclusion with the recognition of the hero and the reordering of home and kingdom. The episodes of the poem are contained within an overarching narrative design that seeks and achieves closure. To the extent that the narrative reaches its conclusion with the reunification of the family unit and the reaffirmation of marriage, we might also say that its pattern is comic.

The Coen brothers’ version of The Odyssey shares this narrative pattern. The film begins with the hero's escape not from an exotic island but from a chain gang. It goes on to chronicle the “adventures” of our Odysseus as he makes his way back to home and family. Although he has told his cohorts that treasure awaits them, his real goal is to prevent his wife from remarrying and to restore his position as the true paterfamilias. Within this narrative structure we encounter others who are also seeking redemptive resolutions. When he learns that the wife of Pete's (John Turturro) cousin has run off, McGill suggests that she might have been looking for answers. And when Delmar sees the mesmerizing procession of initiates moving ceremoniously to the baptismal waters, he impulsively hurls himself into the river, insisting that he too be redeemed. And in something of an inversion of Delmar's passionate gesture, Tommy seeks out the Devil to acquire another form of redemption: the gift of music.

Unlike The Odyssey, however, the conclusion of O Brother is subverted. In the final scene of the film, McGill presents his Penelope (Holly Hunter) with the ring that he believes will reunite him with his wife and finally bring him the “repose” he has been seeking. But Penny refuses to acknowledge the symbolic value of the object and tells him that this particular ring, because it is not the original ring, lacks the magical charm that will restore their marriage. The ring, like her husband, is not bona fide. The family marches off across the screen with Penny in the lead and the aspiring paterfamilias tagging along behind. The comic resolution that the audience awaits and expects is undermined by the ironic representation of an uxorious Odysseus and of a family whose reordering remains in suspense.

Once again, Kierkegaard's distinction between the aesthetic and ethical points of view is instructive in understanding this apparently unresolved comic conclusion. In Either/Or, the young aesthete rejects marriage and asserts that eroticism should not be expressed in the context of a commitment to “everlasting love.” He sees marriage as something “everlasting,” not in the sense that it is immortal but in that it entraps one in temporal longevity. In other words, the resolution of the tension between the desire to transcend time and the reality that one necessarily lives within time is attained in the immediacy of the moment. And so the aesthete argues that “poetic infinity…can well be limited to one hour as to a month.”²⁴ It needs to be stressed that this represents something more than a desire for instant gratification. It is the attempt to resolve through the immediacy of an aesthetic experience the fundamental contradiction of life: we necessarily live within time but can concurrently imagine ourselves outside time.

The ethicist responds that marriage is a means to “bind” time in a way that acknowledges longevity and mutability. The aesthete's “poetic infinity” is a fool's paradise, a vain attempt to gain release from the finite and material. Promiscuity, which the aesthete practices, is merely a form of consumption, a strategy to avoid the disturbing incongruities of life. These incongruities, however, are acknowledged in marriage: “The married man solves the great riddle, to live in eternity and yet to hear the cabinet clock strike in such a way that its striking does not shorten but lengthens his eternity…a contradiction.”²⁵ Marriage is comic, not because it brings closure but because it acknowledges contradiction. Marriage “binds” time but simultaneously acknowledges the vicissitudes of time.

At the conclusion to O Brother, McGill has not reached the state of “repose” that he had imagined would await him. As I pointed out earlier, in the final scene the family literally is in motion, passing across the screen in a direction unknown to the audience. McGill is still pleading with his wife to accept the ring, but we suspect that he will never be truly bona fide in her eyes. But although marriage has not restored the paradise McGill thought he had lost, it does provide a context for his journey, which he lacked on the road. The irony that confronts the audience at the end of O Brother is that the marriage, although in some sense restorative, is nevertheless mired in the commonplace quirks of human character. Perhaps the Coen brothers have not reached the heights of existential contradiction, but they have provided an ending to their narrative that acknowledges the incongruity between our very real aspirations and our equally real limitations. It is surely not coincidental that the reconstituted family walks past a billboard announcing the introduction of electrical power to the Tennessee Valley and offering the implicit promise of a technological utopia. Electrical power may very well provide air-conditioning, but it does not end racism, purge us of crooked pols, eliminate difficult marriages, or resolve contradictions. Upon his return to Ithaca, McGill discovers no “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” where “the sun shines every day…and the barns are full of hay.” He encounters instead the inescapable comic ironies of life.

Comic Absurdities

I began with Groucho. Let me conclude with Joel and Ethan. In an interview in 1996, the brothers explained their understanding of comedy: “But it seems to us that comedy is a part of life. Look at the recent example of the people who tried to blow up the World Trade Center. They rented a panel truck to use for the explosion and then, after committing the crime, went back to the rental agency to get back the money they left on deposit. The absurdity of this kind of behavior is terribly funny in itself.”²⁶ The whims of personality, the odd relationship between mind and body, the ludicrous conjunction of the transcendent and the ordinary, the disturbing incongruities of evil and innocence, the comic ironies of good intentions and awkward missteps are some of the contradictions that inform the human condition and are aptly represented in O Brother, Where Art Thou? How fitting that the title of the film should be posed as a question and not an answer.

Notes

1. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments,” ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 523.

2. Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (1956; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), 80.

3. Ibid., 84.

4. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 80.

5. Bergson, “Laughter,” 72.

6. Ibid., 80.

7. Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, trans. Alan Upchurch (London: Methuen, 1988), 23, quoted in Steven Dillon, The Solaris Effect: Art and Artifice in Contemporary American Film (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2006), 123.

8. Dillon, Solaris Effect, 125.

9. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 555.

10. Thomas C. Oden, introduction to The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004), 12–13.

11. Wylie Sypher, “The Meanings of Comedy,” appendix to Comedy, ed. Sypher, 209.

12. For “engaged reinvention,” see R. Barton Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2004), 158.

13. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1992), 17–18.

14. For “exclusive community,” see Jonathan Raban, Soft City (London: Collins Harvill, 1974), 129.

15. Jameson, Postmodernism, 20.

16. Ibid., 19.

17. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 501–2.

18. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, in The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 57.

19. Ibid., 61.

20. Ibid., 75.

21. Ibid., 81.

22. Jameson, Postmodernism, 4.

23. The quotation at the beginning of the film is from Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 1. The Coens introduce only one minor rewording, changing Fitzgerald's “Sing in me, Muse, and through me” to “O Muse, sing in me and through me.”

24. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 60.

25. Ibid., 70.

26. Joel Coen, interview by Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret for Positif: Revue périodique du cinéma (Paris), September 1991, translated in Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen, 192.