The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Mark T. Conard

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