The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Mark T. Conard

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