Читать книгу The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers - Mark T. Conard - Страница 7

Mark T. Conard

Since arriving on the cinematic scene in 1984 with Blood Simple, Joel and Ethan Coen have amassed an impressive body of work that has garnered them critical acclaim and a devoted following. Their highly original works include both comedies and dramas and cover various genres (neo-noir, the romantic comedy, the western, the gangster film). However, most, if not all, of the Coens’ films defy exact categorization, and they always bear the brothers’ unmistakable stamp. From the Irish gangster morality play Miller's Crossing (1990) to the film blanc Fargo (1996), from the neo-noir comedy The Big Lebowski (1998) to the Odyssean O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), the Coens never fail to have something interesting to say and always say it in a unique and entertaining fashion.

As I've already hinted, much of the Coens’ work can be characterized as neo-noir, whatever other styles or genres the brothers are working in. For those unfamiliar with the term, “film noir” refers to a body of Hollywood films from the 1940s and 1950s that share certain visual features, such as stark contrasts between light and shadow and oblique camera angles meant to disorient the viewer, as well as particular themes, such as alienation, pessimism, and moral ambiguity. Classic noirs include The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944), and Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947). Any film coming after the classic period that displays these themes and has a similar feeling to it we refer to as “neo-noir.” Later films, such as Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), Body Heat (Lawrence Kasdan, 1981), and L.A. Confidential (Curtis Hanson, 1997), fall into this category, as do many of the Coens’ films. Blood Simple is a quite self-conscious neo-noir, for example, and The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) is clearly an homage to classic noir. As we'll see later, many or most of the brothers’ other movies can likewise be identified as noirs.

This work investigates the philosophical themes and underpinnings of the films of these master filmmakers and uses the movies as a vehicle for exploring and explicating traditional philosophical ideas. It comprises sixteen essays from scholars in both philosophy and film and media studies. The essays are written in nontechnical language and require no knowledge of philosophy or media theory to appreciate or understand.

Part 1 of the volume, “The Coen Brand of Comedy and Tragedy,” begins with Richard Gilmore's “Raising Arizona as an American Comedy,” in which he argues that the aspirations for improvement of the outlaw protagonist of the film, Hi McDunnough, are quintessentially American in nature. Next, in “The Human Comedy Perpetuates Itself: Nihilism and Comedy in Coen Neo-Noir,” Thomas S. Hibbs claims that the threat of nihilism, often prominent in classic noir, becomes a working assumption in much of neo-noir, revealing the various quests of the noir protagonist to be pointless, absurd, and thus comic and that the most representative examples of this turn to the comedic in noir are the films of the Coen brothers. In “Philosophies of Comedy in O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Douglas McFarland claims that the film's comic underpinnings can best be understood through concepts of the mechanical, the contradictory, and the absurd articulated in Henri Bergson's Laughter and Søren Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Richard Gilmore discusses the hubris and fatal flaws of Llewelyn Moss as he confronts his fate in the form of the killer Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men: The Coens’ Tragic Western.” Last, in “Deceit, Desire, and Dark Comedy: Postmodern Dead Ends in Blood Simple,” Alan Woolfolk argues that the Coens’ first film has many of the classic noir conventions and themes but is at the same time thoroughly postmodern insofar as it frustrates the characters’ attempts to make sense out of their lives and to communicate with one another.

Part 2, “Ethics: Shame, Justice, and Virtue,” opens with “‘And It's Such a Beautiful Day!’ Shame and Fargo,” by Rebecca Hanrahan and David Stearns, in which they claim that the film can be read as a meditation on shame, insofar as the primary characters are repeatedly presented with the chance to look at themselves through the eyes of others. Shai Biderman and William J. Devlin, in “Justice, Power, and Love: The Political Philosophy of Intolerable Cruelty,” argue that the Coens’ tale of love, marriage, betrayal, and divorce can explain much about competing theories of justice within political philosophy. “Ethics, Heart, and Violence in Miller's Crossing,” by Bradley L. Herling, avers that the brothers’ period noir is set in a gangster world run by an ethics of power that is enforced by violence but in which the primary characters at times display “heart,” or attachment to one another based on positive emotions and sympathy. Matthew K. Douglass and Jerry L. Walls, in “‘Takin’ ’er Easy for All Us Sinners’: Laziness as a Virtue in The Big Lebowski,” examine the life philosophy of über-slacker Jeffrey Lebowski, a.k.a. “the Dude,” and find that, especially in contrast to the hedonism, nihilism, and rugged individualism manifested in the other characters, the Dude's laziness is indeed a virtue. Last, Douglas McFarland, in “No Country for Old Men as Moral Philosophy,” discusses the ethical landscape of the Coens’ adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel set in a bleak and violent region of west Texas.

Part 3, “Postmodernity, Interpretation, and the Construction of History,” begins with my chapter “Heidegger and the Problem of Interpretation in Barton Fink.” In it I claim that the things and events in the life of the screen-writing protagonist lose their sense and meaning because he lives the “life of the mind” as an isolated Cartesian subject cut off from practical engagement with the world. Next, in “The Past Is Now: History and The Hudsucker Proxy,” Paul Coughlin discusses how the Coens in their meditations on the past don't simply allude to or recreate history; rather, they cinematically investigate how history as a narrative is constructed and question the ideologies underpinning that narrative. Last, Jerold J. Abrams, in “‘A Homespun Murder Story’: Film Noir and the Problem of Modernity in Fargo,” argues that the Coen noir Fargo reveals the isolation and alienation of humanity within modernity and its social fragmentation and radical individuation.

Part 4, “Existentialism, Alienation, and Despair,” kicks off with “‘What Kind of Man Are You?’: The Coen Brothers and Existentialist Role Playing,” in which Richard Gaughran discusses the dilemma of existential self-creation—the problem of the need to create identities for ourselves coupled with the lack of any hope of success, given the lack of a human nature and values to guide us in that self-creation—which is at the heart of so much of the Coens’ work. Karen D. Hoffman, in “Being the Barber: Kierkegaardian Despair in The Man Who Wasn't There,” uses Kierkegaard's account of various types of despair to examine the life of Ed Crane, the barber protagonist of the brothers’ noir homage. Finally, in “Thinking beyond the Failed Community: Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn't There,” R. Barton Palmer discusses the alienation of the antiheroes of these two Coen films, which is a result of the failure of community that engenders in those protagonists a deep desire for connection to others. Palmer notes the influence of the great hard-boiled author James M. Cain and existentialists Sartre and Camus on these two fine Coen noirs.

Whether you're a longtime fan of the Coen brothers or have seen relatively few of their movies, we hope and trust that you'll find this volume engaging and insightful and that it will deepen and enrich your understanding and appreciation of the work of these master auteurs.