The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Mark T. Conard

it is about rehabilitation or just revenge. As we watch him being arrested yet again, he comments that he has begun to believe that revenge is the only possibility that makes any sense.

      His marriage to Ed seems to have a salutary effect, at least until Ed is diagnosed as barren. Hi comments that her “insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.” Seeing the announcement of the birth of the Arizona quints, born to the wealthy Nathan Arizona and his wife, Ed suggests that they kidnap one of the boys since the Arizona family has more than it can handle. Hi scales a ladder, enters the boys’ bedroom, and takes Nathan Jr. In a surprise twist, Hi is the one who cannot live with the thought of their deed. His conscience exacts revenge in a dream where he is pursued by the “lone biker of the apocalypse,” a vengeful giant of a man sporting a tattoo: “Mama Didn't Love Me.” The tattoo is a whimsical statement of the core theme of the film, that familial love is the essence of human life. The crimes that Hi and Ed commit are but a perverse pursuit of properly human goods, one in which there is a twisted acknowledgment of the primacy of familial bonds.

      The few noir elements in the film are subordinate to a larger narrative, a story of fidelity and the hope for fertility. Hi and Ed eventually come to their senses and return the baby. Relieved of their burden of conscience, Hi has another dream, which may, he concedes, have been just wishful thinking, a dream of the future in which Nathan Jr. is happy and successful and Hi and Ed gather around a dinner table with their numerous offspring. What the Coen brothers hint at in a number of their noir films they explicitly embrace in Raising Arizona: the resilience of human nature's basic instincts, not the instincts for lust and domination of others, but those for love, affection, and procreation, instincts that steer human beings toward a happy ending, in spite of the damage done and the detours caused by their calculative misjudgments.

      Notes

      1. For a nice discussion of neo-noir and a division of it into modernist and postmodernist stages, see Andrew Spicer, Film Noir (Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 2002), 130–74. Also indispensable is Foster Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir (New York: Limelight, 1999).

      2. J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989), 218.

      3. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 10.

      4. Jean-Pierre Chartier, “Les Américains aussi font des films ‘noirs,’” Revue du cinéma 2 (1946): 67.

      5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), bk. 1, “European Nihilism,” no. 2, 9.

      6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1968), 129.

      7. Nietzsche, Will to Power, no. 22, 17.

      8. Ibid.

      9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), no. 257, 201.

      10. For further discussion of the relation between Nietzsche, nihilism, and noir, see Mark T. Conard, “Nietzsche and the Meaning and Definition of Noir,” in The Philosophy of Film Noir, ed. Mark T. Conard (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 2006), 7–22.

      11. See David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

      12. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1966), no. 131, 64.

      13. James Mottram, The Coen Brothers: The Life of the Mind (Dulles, Va.: Brassey's, 2000).

      14. Ibid., 124.

      15. Laura Miller, “The Banality of Virtue,” Salon.com, http://archive.salon.com/09/reviews/farg01.html.

      16. I have discussed Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994), nihilism, and comedy in great detail in Shows about Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from “The Exorcist” to “Seinfeld” (Dallas: Spence, 1999). On the banality of evil, see Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963; rev. and enlarged ed., 1965; reprint, Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Classics, 1994).

      17. Spicer, Film Noir, 149; James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1998), 214–15.

      18. Hirsch, Detours and Lost Highways, 245.

      PHILOSOPHIES OF COMEDY IN

      O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?

       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