The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Mark T. Conard

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.

Part 1

      RAISING ARIZONA AS AN AMERICAN COMEDY

       Richard Gilmore

      We grew up in America, and we tell American stories in American settings within American frames of reference.

      —Ethan Coen

      Our American literature and spiritual history are…in the optative mood.

      —Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist”

      Raising Arizona (1987) begins with what sounds like the slamming of some prison doors. It is, to be sure, an ominous sound, and proleptic in at least two ways. First, it anticipates the sound that our protagonist is about to hear within minutes of our first meeting him, and second, it anticipates one of the major themes of the movie, which is, in the words of Ethan Coen, “family life versus being an outlaw.” That is, presumably, to the outlaw, family life can seem like some prison doors swung shut. Immediately following the sound of the slamming prison doors there is banjo music and an image of what we learn is a police height measure for photographing suspected criminals. A young man (Nicolas Cage) is thrown into the point of view of the camera so that we can take his measure against the height chart. In a voice-over we hear, “My name is H. I. McDunnough. Call me Hi.” I understand Hi's name (constructed from his first two initials) to suggest a spatial metaphor, a description of his ambitions, which are, I want to say, very American ambitions. The banjo music in the background is Pete Seeger's “Goofing Off Suite,” which, like America itself, is a fascinating medley of American folk music, motifs from high European classical music (Bach and Beethoven), Russian folk music, and even yodeling.¹

      Hi is the central protagonist of the film and provides the voice-over narrative that accompanies the regular narrative of the film. Although Hi is the main protagonist, it is Ed (Holly Hunter), short for Edwina, who engages the action of the plot of the movie with her strong sense of what she wants and what constitutes natural justice, as did Antigone (except in this case the natural justice takes the form of stealing a live baby from a family that, it could be argued, has too many, rather than burying one's dead brother against the laws of the state).

      Goofing off pretty much describes the sense one gets of what the Coens are doing in the opening sequence of the movie. There is one disjunctive discontinuity after another, each one constituting a kind of slapstick joke, and yet each one reverberates with a deeper truth. There is the overall structural discontinuity between Hi's voice-over narrative and what we see him doing. Hi sounds, in the voice-over, like he speaks from a place of detached, even philosophical, wisdom, but what we actually see him doing shows him to be a not very bright repeat offender, a petty criminal with an enthusiasm for robbing convenience stores. That disjunction is funny. His enthusiasm for robbing convenience stores is funny in itself, as is his evident incompetence at it, which is why he goes to jail so often. He seems to accept jail time as just part of life, and it is a significant part of his life. That he uses his time between crimes, that is, his time being booked for the crimes he has committed, to woo Ed, who is a police officer and the photographer for his mug shots, is funny and ridiculous. Their marriage, “starter home,” “salad days,” infertility, despair, and kidnapping scheme are all a little ridiculous, and yet, even though they are presented as basically funny, there is a sort of underlying truth to all of it. America does have a fascination or love affair with the image of the outlaw, so choosing to be an outlaw is not really that crazy. And it is hard starting a family in this modern world, even if, or especially if, you are an outlaw by trade. And starter homes sometimes are little mobile homes in the desert. And sometimes, in spite of your best efforts, nature does not cooperate; infertility is a fact of life.

      When Hi says, for example, “I tried to stand up and fly straight, but it wasn't easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House…. I dunno, they say he is a decent man, so…maybe his advisers are confused,” it is such a mishmash of deep political wisdom, weird, folksy compassion, and just raw, self-serving excuse that it is hard to find one's way with it. It is funny and true and crazy all at the same time. It also has a vaguely socialist ring to it, and of course Pete Seeger, the creator of the “Goofing Off Suite” we are hearing in the background, was a famous socialist and defender of the people, which further suggests some deeper political message behind the craziness. This, one might say, quoting the American poet Robert Frost, is “play for mortal stakes.”²

      The Optative Mood and America

      We, in America, are weaned on the milk of aspiration. This is what I understand Emerson to mean when he describes our spiritual history as being in the “optative mood.” “Optative,” from the Latin optio, meaning “free choice,” is Emerson's slightly archaic word for the American sense of being free to determine one's own life, to be whomever one wants to be. The great advantage of this spiritual history is the energy and the inventiveness it calls forth in American people. The downside of this ethos is how demanding and difficult it is on a person. There is very high expectation that everyone will be an “individual” and that a person will have high aspirations, but not much direction is given to us about what aspirations to have or how to achieve them, except that one should aspire to work hard. So much is expected of us to be something original and so little is given to us about how to do that that the problem of who we are to be can drive us a little crazy. We do not inherit an identity so much as find ourselves tasked with (to use a Coen expression from Fargo [1996]) creating an identity.