The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Mark T. Conard

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.

       NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

       The Coens’ Tragic Western

       Richard Gilmore

      The point is there aint no point.

      —Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

      Coen Irony

      No Country for Old Men (2007) is, one might say, one more step in Joel and Ethan Coen's cinematic effort to say something about this country and about being a member, a citizen of this country, the United States of America. No Country for Old Men feels like a very different kind of movie from every other Coen brothers film. It is more serious, or it is serious in a different way from their other movies. It is not unusual for the Coens to take on dark themes in their movies, but previous to No Country for Old Men there was always a level of what I will call meta-irony. That is, there was a level of detachment, a sense that their movies were meant to be taken as just stories, that you should not take them too seriously. To be offended by Fargo (1996) because it seems to be making fun of midwesterners is to take it too seriously. Irony, however, is a tricky business. People are suspicious of the ironic because those who are ironic never quite mean what they say. The ironic, for their part, are more or less invulnerable to attack, since to take them seriously is to miss the point, and not to take them seriously precludes an attack. With No Country for Old Men, the Coens have given up their ironic detachment and made a much more straightforward movie. Certainly, there is irony within the movie, but the movie itself lacks the sheen of ironic detachment that is a part of a movie like Fargo.

      One reason for this change may be the fact that this is the first movie that they have made based on a novel. It is not irrelevant to the tone of the movie that that novel was written by Cormac McCarthy. That the Coens chose this novel by this writer, however, also reflects an evolution in their cinematic and storytelling concerns. It is a sign of their willingness to give up some of their ironic detachment, to give up a posture of invulnerability, in order to say something more straightforward about their perceptions of how the world is. This, it seems to me, is a step into philosophy.

      The previous Coen brothers movie that has the most in common with No Country for Old Men is, in fact, Fargo. In Fargo there is an older, wiser police chief, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and her less experienced or savvy deputy, Lou (Bruce Bohne), just as there is in No Country for Old Men. In both movies, a local police officer is confronted with some grisly murders committed by men who are not from his or her town. In both movies, greed lies behind the plots. Both movies feature as a central character a cold-blooded killer who does not seem quite human and whom the police officer seeks to apprehend. No Country for Old Men, therefore, is not completely new territory for the Coens, but no one in Fargo has much of a sense of irony, although the movie itself is ironic, whereas Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), for example, certainly does have a sense of irony although the movie No Country for Old Men does not feel ironic at all.

      A great moment of Bell-ian irony is when he is reading a story from the newspaper to his deputy, Wendell (Garret Dillahunt), about a couple in California who were taking in older people as tenants, then killing them for their Social Security checks and burying the bodies in the backyard. After Bell reads aloud from the paper, “Neighbors were alerted when a man ran from the premises wearing only a dog collar,” Bell comments sardonically, “You can't make up such a thing as that. I dare you to even try.” Bell continues, appreciating the full irony of the story, “But that's what it took, you'll notice. Get someone's attention. Diggin graves in the back yard didn't bring any.” When Wendell fights back a smile, Bell says, “That's all right. I laugh myself sometimes.” There is a bittersweetness in that confession that shows the deep humanity that may be part of the ironist's position. His comment, “I laugh myself sometimes,” links, for me, this nonironic movie with all of the Coen brothers’ ironic movies, movies in which horrors (a Ku Klux Klan rally, a hooded kidnapped woman trying to run blindly from her killer kidnappers, the chopping off of a woman's toe, for example) are treated as things to be laughed at. There is a sadness to their funniest movies, and humor in their grimmest.

      To Kill a Bird

      O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) is another Coen brothers movie that is referenced in No Country for Old Men. The reference is indirect, as it originates in McCarthy's novel, but it nevertheless works on another level within the Coens’ oeuvre. There is a sequence in No Country for Old Men in which we see Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) driving at night. He comes to a bridge and there is a hawk, a bird