The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Mark T. Conard

his feelings of tenderness for his wife in terms of his fear of losing her and suggests that Hi and Ed may yet discover such tenderness for each other and that they “should sleep on it” before they do anything rash like breaking up their marriage. I take it that they do sleep on it and that Hi's final dream is a dream of the tenderness made manifest in the world, specifically in Utah, the state above Arizona.

      The Uberty of Liberty

      There is some question about whether America really is exceptional and about the value of thinking about ourselves as exceptional. If there is something exceptional about us, it seems to me that it would have to do with the way we think of ourselves as being free, as having a right to our own opinions, as being both free to develop ourselves into the selves we want to be and responsible for what we become. It is quite true that, as a cynic might insist, many in America do not really have much freedom to develop themselves into anything other than what they were born to, that the idea that we are “free” in America, that this is a “free country,” is a myth and a harmful one at that. Without denying that, I still want to say that there is a freedom that is not just granted, but in some sense honored, in America, and that is the freedom to dream.

      “Uberty” is a somewhat archaic word for fruitfulness, for something that generates growth and abundance. The freedom merely to dream is, in one sense, no real freedom at all, but in another sense, in this philosophical sense in which any authentic choice must begin in something like a dream, then the freedom to dream is the only kind of real liberty that there is. Ultimate happiness may depend less on how much money we accumulate and more on having a sense that our life is our own life, that we have lived a life in which we have made some choices and lived according to the consequences of those choices. To accept responsibility for the consequences of our choices and actions is what makes us fully human, and it is what makes us tender. If there is any truth in that, then the stuff of comedy, the material to make the ends of our lives better than the beginnings, may be as accessible as our dreams. The most important thing, then, is to keep dreaming, and that is precisely what Hi is doing at the end of Raising Arizona, making it, in my estimation, a comedy not only because it is funny but also because it holds out the possibility, in the classic sense, that we can make our end better than our beginning. We can laugh in welcoming, like Plato's philosophers, the new recruits to the realm of tenderness for each other. As Walter says in The Big Lebowski, “If you will it, Dude, it is no dream.”

      Notes

      Epigraphs: Peter Körte and Georg Seesslen, eds., Joel & Ethan Coen (New York: Proscenium Publishers, 2001), 172; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode with Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 99.

      1. See the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings song list for the album Darling Corey and Goofing Off Suite by Pete Seeger (1993), catalogue #40018 at www.folkways.si.edu.

      2. See the poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time, or, A Full-Time Interest,” in Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose & Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995), 251.

      3. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), available as part of the Hanover Historical Texts Project, which is part of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Available at http://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html, 47.

      4. In the original VHS format the title had a colon followed by the phrase “An Unbelievable Comedy.”

      5. Aristotle, Poetics I, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).

      6. Dante's own title was (in translation): “Begins the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine in Birth, Not in Custom.” “The Divine” was added later. A translation of Dante's letter to Can Grande can be found at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod.cangrande.english.html.

      7. This is what Jean Paul Sartre calls “mauvais foi” (bad faith).

      8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 328.

      9. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2002), 67–69.

      10. Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (New York: Continuum, 2004), 52.

      11. Georg Seesslen, “Looking for a Trail in Coen County,” in Joel & Ethan Coen, ed. Körte and Seesslen, 230, 277.

      12. Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), bk. VII, 516e–518c.

      13. Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 10.

      14. Ibid., 25.

      15. Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Mentor Books, 1964), 28.

      16. R. Barton Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2004), 129.

      17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), sec. 5. That section begins, “In ages of crude, primordial cultures, man thought he could come to know a second real world in dreams: this is the origin of all metaphysics.”

      18. Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1978). Schwartz borrowed and adapted the line from an epigraph to W. B. Yeats's volume of poems, Responsibilities (1914). I am indebted to the anonymous reviewer of this manuscript for this citation.

      19. William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 251.

      20. Andrew Pulver's original essay from the Guardian, entitled “Pictures That Do the Talking,” is from 2001 and is reprinted in The Coen Brothers: Interviews, ed. William Rodney Allen (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006), 158.

      21. Pulver, quoted in Allen, Coen Brothers, 157.

      THE HUMAN COMEDY

      PERPETUATES ITSELF

       Nihilism and Comedy in Coen Neo-Noir

       Thomas S. Hibbs

      BUNNY LEBOWSKI: Ulli doesn't care about anything. He's a nihilist.

      THE DUDE: Ah. Must be exhausting.

      —The Big Lebowski (1998)

      From their inaugural film, Blood Simple (1984), through the film blanc Fargo (1996), to The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), the Coen brothers have exhibited a preoccupation with the themes, characters, and stylistic techniques of film noir. By the time they made Blood Simple in 1984, neo-noir was already established as a recognized category of film.¹ Prior to Quentin Tarantino's darkly comedic unraveling of noir motifs in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), the Coens were already making consciously comic use of noir plots and stylistic techniques. Lacking Tarantino's penchant for hyperactive and culturally claustrophobic allusions to pop culture, the Coens focus, instead, on traditional noir character types and intricate plots whose complexity is bizarre.

      Because it is so often characterized by self-conscious deployment of the techniques of classic noir, neo-noir evinces a strong inclination toward pastiche and the satiric. This makes comic themes more at home in the world of neo-noir than they were in the founding era of noir. Classic noir avoids overt moral lessons and leaves little room for well-adjusted, happy, virtuous types of Americans. The world of classic noir proffers a “disturbing vision…that qualifies all hope and suggests a potentially fatal vulnerability” against which no one is adequately protected.² Classic noir has deeply democratic