“The Absurd is not
in man… nor in the world, but in their presence together. For the moment it is
the only bond uniting them.”
–Albert
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus
“That’s life. Whichever way you turn, fate
sticks out a foot to trip you”
–Al
Roberts, Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer,
1945)
Bunny Lebowski:
Ulli doesn’t care about anything. He’s a nihilist.
The Dude: Ah. Must
be exhausting
–
The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan
Coen, 1998)
Joel and Ethan Coen, the
double-brained, quadruple-handed creative entity behind some of the most boldly
original films to come out of the post-New-Hollywood generation, have created
and maintained a unique, unmistakable signature style, a willful blend of
darkness, humor, and sophistication. The sixteen movies the brothers have
written, directed, and produced to date mostly limit themselves to the confines
of two recognizable registers, film noir and comedy. Prior to the darkly
comedic unraveling of noir themes, characters, and motifs in such postmodern
works as Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction
(1994), the Coens were already making (self-)consciously comic use of noir
plots and stylistic techniques through their characteristic mix of irony,
poetry, and drama. Commentators, noting the pair’s cold, cynical treatment of
characters and their fiercely, hyperconsciously intertextual play on films
past, have sometimes described the Coens’ work as emptied out stylization or as
unnecessarily grim, pessimistic, and even amoral. Using Blood Simple
(1984), the filmmakers’ first feature effort, I will argue that far from
social, moral, and political apathy, what emerges in the films of the Coen
brothers is a consistent, if occasionally nihilistic, philosophy of human
experience. The directors’ work manages to repurpose and revitalize conventions
of past cultural forms in a way that is meaningful to the present moment.
Perhaps even more importantly, their films amount to a deeper investigation of
the human condition that is as serious and engaged as it is humorously macabre.
“The world is full of complainers. And the fact is, nothing
comes with a guarantee. Now I don’t care if you’re the pope of Rome, President
of the United States or Man of the Year; something can all go wrong. Now go on
ahead, you know, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help,
and watch him fly. Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone
pulls for everyone else... that’s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is
Texas, and down here you’re on your own.”
In a departure from classic noir,
the voiceover in the beginning doesn’t harken back to some guilt-laden past, to
some crime that can be only judged in relation to the present; instead, the
words that open Blood Simple seem to lead into the space where the
action is yet to take place.
The movie begins with the above
general philosophical statements, which lay down the rules for what is to come.
Viewers of noir have been conditioned to expect at least two things from the
voiceover narration: first, that the detective addressing them will be the
protagonist of the film, and second, that the information given by the narrator
is an important part of the mystery that will follow (Snee 218-19). In Blood
Simple, neither is a safe assumption. The film is told by the murderer and
ends with his death, a feat perhaps more audacious than the narration in Billy
Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) by a dead man who has been lying face
down in a pool all along. In Coens’ film, the voiceover is not a confession as
much as it becomes a confirmation of moral equanimity, “a laconicism of
complete failure” (Seesslen 60).
The second sequence, opening with a
back view of the protagonists looking through the car windshield towards a
nighttime highway illuminated by the glare of the headlights—a direct allusion
to Robert Siodmark’s classic noir The Killers (1946)—depicts Ray (played
by John Getz) driving Abby (Frances McDormand in her first screen role) to
Houston at night; she is fleeing her husband, Marty (Dan Hedaya), whom she
fears she will kill if she doesn’t leave. As early as the first minutes of the
film, a crisis has clearly already interrupted the mundane Texas life of the
characters. These opening moments, through the juxtaposition of the landscape
shots and the sequence in the car, make it clear though that the clash will not
be primarily between Abby and her husband, but also a clash between individuals
(any of the characters) and their environment. As the film’s first two words, “the
world” of Blood Simple is ruled by
misunderstanding, mischance, miscalculation and mistrust, an environment in
which the inability to communicate becomes a seemingly inalterable condition of
human experience. James Mottram writes, in The Coen Brothers: The Life of
the Mind, that “the film’s central theme is communication breakdown…. The
characters only ever see part of the whole picture. This is a world where
nothing is as it seems” (20-21). In such a setting, more reacting (or acted
upon) than acting, most Coen protagonists have become “walking embodiments of
that famed postmodern bumper sticker, ‘Shit Happens’” (Sconce 364).
This ironic or even nihilistic
stance, however, seems especially appropriate in the context of film noir, with
its inversion of traditional values and corresponding moral ambivalence,
feelings of alienation, paranoia, and cynicism, presence of sometimes
unexplainable crime and violence and disorientation of the viewer. The Coens investigate, subvert and
demythologize the generic tradition of the noir detective narrative. Their
specific contributions to 1980s neo-noir are the complexly intertwined themes
of the unpredictability of human experience and the failed communication that
renders impossible any meaningful connection with others. Noir’s narratives of
mischance, in which bourgeois characters are sucked into a criminal undertow,
are divided into two broad tendencies by Foster Hirsch in Detours and Lost
Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir: 1) in the first, characters crash into crime
scenes through mere happenstance, and the films which fall under this category
therefore posit a world in which misfortune can overtake anyone for no reason
at all; or 2) noir assaults characters who seem to either invite or deserve their
misfortune. While films of the classic noir tradition more commonly subscribe
to the second tendency, Coen movies (and postmodern noir in general), on the
other hand, more often reflects “the sheer, absurd randomness that has always
lurked at the heart of noir” (211-12). In “Deceit, Desire, and Dark Comedy:
Postmodern Dead Ends in Blood Simple,” Alan Woolfolk writes that
“individual purpose and social order are fictions that may dissolve at any
moment in the face of uncertainty to reveal… the dark humor of the postmodern
absurdity of life” (87). This tendency marks the broader cultural phenomenon
described by Jeffrey Sconce as “the shift from the modernist protagonist’s
search for meaning to the postmodern ensemble ‘fucked by fate’” (Sconce 363).
According to Georg Seesseln, the Coen
brothers create worlds full of (often contradictory) rules which nobody abides
by. “The fatal mistake” of the protagonists is that they think they are the
only ones who don’t stick to the rules. Under these circumstances, what emerges
is a “meta-rule of deception and coincidences” that always spells failure
(288). Each character tries to tell his own story but never quite pulls it off.
Most of the time others get in his way, and even when they don’t, he manages to
screw it up on his own, or his modest efforts are blighted by the arbitrariness
of fate. Accordingly, in Blood Simple there are no authority figures to
speak of, the law is entirely absent, and violent consequences are just as
often motivated by good intentions as ill thought. The meaninglessness that verges
on absurd in the Coens’ ridiculous pantomimes recalls Nietzsche’s characterization of nihilism, described as “a condition of
tension, as a disproportion between what we want to value (or need) and how the
world appears to operate” (Carr 25).
Even
love—or whatever fuels the romance in the film—is born seemingly by chance, out
of necessity, loneliness, and opportunity. The plot kicks off with the
inversion of the classic noir scenario—instead of the lovers trying to get rid
of the husband, it is the husband who seeks the death of the adulterers. This
reversal leads to a series of at least partially unforeseeable events which
appear to be completely out of control. The unfolding of narrative in Blood Simple becomes not only a negative
reflection of the original model, but also leads to “a chaotization of the
entire system” (Seesslen 58). It’s interesting to note that, as if governed by
the rules and expectations of classic noir, the hired killer ends up murdering
Marty. Each of the four protagonists of the film, character types which have
become staples of noir—the young, frustrated wife, the hot-blooded lover, the
spurned husband, and the shabby private detective—is deconstructed. Instead of
the melancholy heroes of film noir, we get four wicked, unsympathetic, but very
ordinary people, defined primarily by their differences from the sophisticated
schemers of the Double Indemnity (1944)
stripe.
For Visser (Emmet Walsh) the filmmakers fuse
together and complicate the writing of Cain and Hammett. The latter’s private
detective, Richard Martin notes in Mean Streets and Raging Bulls: The Legacy
of Film Noir in Contemporary American Cinema, unlike Chandler’s Marlowe,
was already a flawed figure given to excessive use of force, sexual temptation,
and alcoholic self-indulgence. In placing the character type in the
sociopolitical context of mid-eighties America, the Coens produce a wholly
reprehensible investigative figure (“Gimme a call whenever you want to cut my
head off,” the detective tells Marty, “I can always crawl around without it”).
In this sense, the “errant knight” private investigator of the forties, having
already evolved into the ineffective loner of the seventies, has been usurped
in Blood Simple by the sociopath of the eighties, “a figure who stems
from rather than ventures into the noir underworld” (Martin 106).
The lovers similarly challenge the
conventions of classic noir. Rather than a huckster, Ray is a remarkably dim
but likeable oaf, while Abby becomes a sort of “counter-fatale, who never seems
to understand or to connect with the rules of the noir game her infidelity has
hurled her into” (Hirsch 222). Early in the film, Abby tells Ray that her
psychiatrist says she is as normal as anyone can be. The statement is quite
true, and bolstered by McDormand’s freckles and corn-fed appearance. The woman
is neither the villainous seductress who lures men into deep, deadly trouble in
classic noirs like Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1946), nor the victimized woman of neo-noirs Klute (1971) or Chinatown
(1974). Martin points out how the escalation of neo-noir productions from the
eighties until the mid-nineties was accompanied by a gradual erosion of the
fetishistic fantasy of the femme fatale and the revelation of a greater degree
of irrational masculine violence (92-96). In Blood Simple,
significantly, it is not the pair of adulterers that spins a web of duplicity,
double-crossing, and deceit. The shift of emphasis away from the typical femme
fatale scenario pushes the blame for all of the death and destruction on the
men of the story—it is the partnership between Marty and Visser which, gone
bad, explodes into violence. Abby is the only character who remains, in Joel
Coen’s words, “relatively innocent throughout” (qtd. in Rowell 19).
The protagonists of Blood Simple,
in tune with the characteristic idiotically criminal and criminally idiotic
universe of the Coen brothers, are awash in a kind of general ineptitude in all
things illicit. First, Visser leaves both the incriminating doctored photograph
of the two sleeping lovers and a lighter which bears his initials at the scene
of the crime. Marty, much to Ray’s later surprise, is not even dead. Ray, his
second would-be killer is similarly unable to finish him off and finally buries
him alive. Thinking he is covering up for a murder Abby committed, he tries to
clean up Marty’s blood with a satin jacket that merely spreads it around. Later,
Abby visits Marty’s office, and, seeing the blood on the floor, connects it to
her husband’s report of a good deal of missing money from the safe, concluding
that Ray killed Marty for the money. Through a Cainian tangle of illegitimate
motives and ironic disconnections, Visser ultimately finds himself trying to do
exactly what Marty had commissioned in the first place, but the job proves
beyond him.
Throughout all of these actions, the
viewer always knows more than the characters about who’s murdering whom and
why, which allows the development of a certain ironic distance from the black
comedy of errors unfolding onscreen. Each character sees every other character
in the film as a possible murderer, while the actual murders are carried out in
complete ignorance of the victim/killer relationship. As Georg Seesslen points
out, the characters actually know less about themselves, those around them, and
about their relationships with each new step and turn of the plot (52). In a
dynamic the Coens will repeat in subsequent neo-noirs Miller’s Crossing
(1990), Barton Fink (1991), and—to some extent—Fargo (1996), Blood
Simple is in essence about individuals forever misinterpreting each other’s
actions, a motif characteristic of noir in general, here taken to excessive
extremes. The absurdity of the situations recalls Thomas Nagel’s idea of “the
collision between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the
perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as
arbitrary, or open to doubt” (157). He continues, “reference to our small size
and short lifespan and to the fact that all of mankind will eventually perish
without a trace are metaphors for the backward step which permits us to regard
ourselves from without and to find that particular form of our lives curious
and slightly surprising” (Nagel 163). The response, according to Nagel, is
neither anger, resentment, nor escape, but an ironic acceptance of the
absurdity that “is one of the most human things about us” (165). As Joel
Feinberg points out, “irony is on balance an appreciative attitude. One
appreciates the perceived incongruity much as one does in humor, where the
sudden unexpected perception of incongruity produces laughter” (277). In Blood
Simple, the irony and humor emerge partly out of the disconnect between
characters’ and viewers’ experience, the former never letting on that there
might be even anything remotely preposterous about (what Foster Hirsch calls)
the “melodrama of mischance” they’re enmeshed in (211-250).
The link between violence and farce
as forms of failure will become the basis of the Coens’ particular brand of
dark comedy in subsequent films (Palmer 24-25). As Schuy R. Weishhar notes in
“The Mundane and the Catastrophic in the Films of Joel and Ethan Coen,” “those
scenes of ridiculously but brutally barbaric violence, those in which Coen
brothers characters are reduced to bumbling idiots, cartoonish caricatures of
themselves—those scenes that are now regarded as ‘classic Coen brothers’
moments—such scenes are also deadly serious” (121-22). The depiction of
characters trapped in a labyrinth at the mercy of a hostile fate can transform
the tone of the action from the gravely tragic to the absurdly comic with
startling ease. The humor erupts even when—or is it especially when—it seems
the most inappropriate. “With the Coens, the very worst does happen, but even
so it can be shown to have its funny side; black humor finds its source in the
wreckage that can result from human imperfection” (Palmer 25).
Hitchcock’s influence, his interest
in the macabre and black humor, in mixing suspense with near-slapstick, is
particularly apparent in Blood Simple’s prolonged burying sequence.
First Ray tries and fails to muster the will to run Marty over in his car, then
unsuccessfully attempts to kill the man with a shovel and finally, shockingly,
decides to bury him alive in an open field on the side of the highway. The tone
oscillates between drama and the grimmest kind of humor, ending with an image
(Ray stomping on the grave that contains a screaming man, slowly suffocating to
death) straight out of a B-horror movie. There is no dialogue or music in this
twenty minute long sequence, only Ray’s grunting, sighing, labored breathing
and Marty’s groaned attempts to threaten his abductor. This creates the feeling
of time mercilessly stretching out, as though we are to understand that the
awfulness of the act is surpassed only by the awfulness of the non-act—and here
we might remember that Ethan Coen was once a philosophy student, but more on
that later.
The
stylization in the film, although often flamboyant, serves to create a mood of
unfamiliarity and mystery that complements the main themes of the narrative. In
its disruptive moments—as when the camera makes threatening movements that do
not seem to be required by the action—the Coens’ technique reminds us of the
random instability of the character’s universe, and of noir in general. The use
of sound throughout the film throws us—and the characters—into an even deeper
confusion. For instance, when Marty calls Visser from a phone booth on a busy
road, he has to shout to make himself heard over the roar of the passing cars,
but even then we can’t always make out exactly what he’s saying. On the other
end, Visser speaks in little more than a whisper, but both we and Marty
understand him perfectly. The fact that the voices overlap prevents us from
telling ourselves that we are visually in one place and acoustically in
another. We are everywhere and nowhere, and the process of communication of
which this scene is only an example, is in itself entirely irrational and
creates only further uncertainty.
“What is most certain is uncertainty
itself,” Barton Palmer writes in Joel and Ethan Coen, “the fact that
‘something can always go wrong,” as the narrator wryly observes…. Like the
bewildered and rightly paranoid [noir] protagonist… the characters in Blood
Simple find themselves trapped in an unfathomable universe of deadly
violence” (17). The crisis the protagonists find themselves in demands actions
and decisions, which Coen characters almost always make without foreseeing the
consequences and which they engage in without much reflection—as do Abby and
Ray, but also Hi and Ed in Raising Arizona (1987), Jerry in Fargo,
and Chad and Linda in Burn After Reading (2008). Conversely, the
characters who reflect on their actions get lost in their ruminations (Tom in Miller’s
Crossing, the title character of Barton Fink, Larry in A Serious
Man [2009]), and sometimes (as in The Big Lebowski [1998], O
Brother Where Art Thou? [2000], and The Man Who Wasn’t There [2001])
the brothers’ protagonists seem to alternate between the two tendencies. The
result is always that the initial crisis spins out, centrifugally expanding
into a series of misadventures and misfortunes that become correlates to it.
The relentless pursuit of
self-interest motors all of these plots, but intention has very little to do
with outcome. No matter how well conceived, characters’ plans are derailed by
mischance and often fatal bad luck, running afoul of the unforeseen, “as if to
say the universe has no inherent order, at least none that humans are capable
of predicting” (Madison 15).
It is not an exaggeration to say
that nearly every major action in Blood Simple is determined by
unchecked passions—not just erotic impulse, but raw motives of fear, greed,
revenge, and anger that cause individuals to go “simple.” Ironically, the
proverbial last man standing is the woman whose weakness and dissatisfaction
set the story into motion. She survives less as a result of her intelligence
and sangfroid—though she displays both—than of random good fortune. In the
final scenes, Abby kills her would-be assailant while under the impression he
is someone else, the irony of her misunderstanding prompting a bitter laugh as
the dying man recognizes the absurdity of the situation. In many ways, the
film’s ending is the sum total of its deceptions and misconnections, evidence
of the gap between intention and effect and of the irrelevance of initial
motives.
“In the end, there is little to
choose, morally speaking, between violence coolly calculated and violence that
is the accidental result of ghoulish farce, that is, between Ray’s gruesome
silencing of Marty (in order to save Abby), and Visser’s shooting of Ray (where
self-preservation is the motive). The film’s rough justice spares only Abby,
who has “no innocent blood on her hands” (Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen 24).
The resolution is deeply ironic, a proof of the propositions about human life
the detective had advanced at the film’s beginning.
The Coens’ resurrection and
renovation of classic Hollywood genres reflects the postmodern sensibility, or,
as Georg Seesslen puts it, what happens in a Coen movie is similar to the
musical technique of sampling (238). This recycling and reworking of noir
motifs, the manipulation of images and a persistent attention to technique are
readily acknowledged by the filmmakers. “It’s the Same Old Song” features on Blood Simple’s soundtrack and is
repeated self-referentially over the closing credits, underscoring the
directors’ knowing re-appropriation of past forms and cultural material. As an
exercise in transgeneric filmmaking, and in its references and allusions to
classic noir, its self-reflexivity and the use of obvious symbolism, Blood
Simple reflects what Frederic Jameson, in Postmodernism, or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism,
calls the “well-nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche” and
the exclusion of genuine “historicity” (64-71).
In a formulation reminiscent of
Jameson’s original presentation of pastiche as lacking “parody’s ulterior
motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter… blank parody, a
statue with blind eyeballs” (65), Elliot Stein’s 1984 review in Film Comment
accused the Coen brothers’ self-conscious bravura stylization of producing a
“callous banality” that has been cobbled together from “Prof. Lawrence Kasdan’s
Film Noir 101 course,” the story’s emptiness dressed up with “vacant
virtuosity” and pointless visual excess (cited in Palmer, Joel and Ethan
Coen 28-29). While many critics have railed against the current generation
of independent filmmakers, complaining these directors are “all flash and no
substance,” there are an abundance of arguments against such easy dismissal of
the Coens’ films as pointless deconstructions or hybridizations of familiar
generic categories.
At the same time that the brothers
engage noir themes, motifs, and tone, they also engage a certain version of the
real, their stories and characters exemplifying important trends within
American culture. Blood Simple stands as a challenge to the indictment
of all texts of the postmodern era as lacking a connection with the
contemporary, or simply purveying an aggressive flattening of the past. The
Coens’ films are undoubtedly postmodern, “yet engage in a dialogue with genre
and with classic studio films that does not slight the political and the
cultural” (Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen 60). Thus, far from a general
apathy, their films make very direct statements about American society and
politics, “even if these can’t be classified as unambivalent ‘messages’”
(Seesslen 248).
Blood Simple features a drama rooted in central features of the American
character: independence and self-determination. In a decade in which mainstream
American filmmaking saw a return to older values and a new Horatio Algerism
that emphasized hard work, endurance, and resolution, re-enacting the
foundational African myth of self-fashioning, the Coens’ characters’ schemes of
self-improvement invariably came to nothing, and “Visser’s twisted commentary
on American ideals [was] like a slap in the face to the patriotism of fear that
reigned in 1984…. With the country locked in a potentially apocalyptic arms
race with Russia, the first voice [of the film] casually praises socialism and
casts a shadow on American individualism” (Rowell 7). The fact that this
commentary, a crude philosophy of individualism, is delivered by the most
immoral and unappetizing figure in the movie gives the film a thoroughly
political bent. One critic went as far as to call the movie, “among other
things, a radically anti-American film” (Seesslen 62). In the ruthless
burlesque of the self-made man, Blood Simple advances beyond the
inauthenticity of Jameson’s “blank parody” (65); it offers a return, as Palmer
notes, “albeit in a more cynical vein and in a more marginalized area of the
industry, to the questioning of cultural certainties that gave so much
intellectual force and enduring value to the principal films of the Hollywood
Renaissance” (39). Offering a similar argument, Richard Martin sees the
independently produced neo-noirs of the eighties as a revival of the
neo-modernist neo-noir projects of filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Robert
Altman, Arthur Penn, and Francis Ford Coppola, although “with a greater…
postmodernist… emphasis now placed on self-referentiality, playfulness and
‘entertainment’” (105).
However, the Coens’ linking of
sources and references to film history as well as contemporary movements in
society doesn’t always fully succeed; contradictions remain, and this is why
their films have on occasion been described as empty—or worse, as some critics
have been led “into a familiar chain of indictment reaching back through
critiques of cynicism, irony, postmodernist, secular humanism and cultural
relativism, all the way to the grand architect of modern disaffection
Nietzsche…” (Sconce 350). In a 1998 editorial for the Los Angeles Times,
film critic Kenneth Turan bemoaned what he described as an onslaught of
“pointlessly and simplistically grim films.” In the same week, Manohla Dargis,
writing for LA Weekly, coined the phrase “the new nihilism,” concluding
that “we are being inundated with a cinema of hate,… a cinema that encourages
our sadism, our scorn, and, worst of all, our total disinterest toward the
world, other human beings, and just maybe ourselves.”
While never making direct reference
to the Coens, these articles concern a certain style of postmodernist
filmmaking to which the brothers undoubtedly belong, one that manifests a
predilection for irony, black humor, fatalism, relativism, and, yes, even
nihilism. Add to this the Coens’ cynicism and, perhaps even misanthropy in
creating characters which are undoubtedly mentally underpowered and morally
challenged, and it is understandable why so many commentators might confuse
this cultivated illusion of blank disengagement with actual moral and political
apathy. But we must remember that, as Jeffrey Sconce notes in “Irony, Nihilism,
and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” no form of irony is truly disengaged from
its material: “Behind the veneer of studied detachment, cultivated disaffection
and ironic posturing, many of these films are extremely politicized and even
rather moralistic” (352). What we get in Coen brothers films is not apathy, but
a consistent philosophy of human experience, indeed a clearly—if not always
clear-cut—moral outlook on the world.
Nietzsche’s
view of a world in which everything is continually changing and nothing is
stable and enduring seems uncannily close to the universe created by Joel and
Ethan Coen. Nihilism involves the dissolution of standards of judgment; for the
nihilist, there is no longer any basis for distinguishing truth from falsity,
good from evil, noble from base action, or higher from lower ways of life
(Hibbs 139). “Truths are illusions which
we have forgotten are illusions,” Nietzsche writes in an influential early
essay (“On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” 84); consequently, every concept
of being—from the self to God—is a fiction. One of Nietzsche’s most famous and
most provocative statements is that “God is dead.” The claim of Western
religion that there is some permanent and unchanging otherworldly realm or
substance thus becomes untenable, and with it so do Western metaphysical
systems, the source of or foundation for our understanding of human existence,
our morality, and our hope for the future, among other things. “All moral codes
are seen to be merely conventional and, hence, optional” (Hibbs 139). The death
of God—the loss of permanence, of a transcendent source of value and meaning,
and the resulting disorientation and nihilism—leads to existentialism,
characterized by Robert Porfirio as “and outlook which begins with a
disoriented individual facing a confused world that he cannot accept” (81).
Mark
T. Conrad argues that film noir is a type of America response to, or
recognition of, this seismic shift in our understanding of the world, a view
that explains the pessimism, alienation and disorientation, and the threat of
nihilism and meaninglessness that many critics have noted. For Americans,
Conrad continues, the belief in what Nietzsche called God, in the sense, order,
and meaning of life, is encapsulated in the idealistic faith in “progress and
the indomitable American spirit” (19-20). Film noir’s “bleak vision of contemporary
life,” it has been argued, “offers the obverse of the American Dream” (Palmer, Hollywood’s Dark Cinema 6) or, as David
A. Cook put it, noir “held up a dark mirror to postwar America and reflected
its moral anarchy” (cited in Snee 215). The thread running through the design
of film noir is “the sense of meaningless per se, not that life just happens to be going wrong for the time
being and in one particular respect” (Sanders 93, emphasis in original). This
description seems almost tailor-made for the Coen brothers’ films, but do
meaninglessness and chance always spell hopelessness? Indeed, thematically,
their movies frequently focus on crisis moments that seem to betray a kind of
cynicism about human life that can be aligned to nihilism, but therein are also
the comedy and the social critique, in the contradiction between the infinite
ambitions of the characters and the existential finitude that threatens them.
The
Coens are not passive nihilists, pessimists, representatives of “the decline
and recession of the power of the spirit” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power 17). Like Nietzsche’s, their nihilism is
“ambiguous”; if, in one sense, it is the “unwelcome guest,” it is also an
opportunity, clearing a path for “increased power of the spirit” (Nietzsche, The Will to Power 17). Active nihilists,
according to Hibbs, see the decline of traditional moral and religious systems
as “an occasion for the thoroughgoing destruction of desiccated ways of life
and the creation of a new order of values” (139-40). Irony, in the way the
Coens employ it, might ultimately be the key to this intervention, not a
passive retreat from involvement. This is not to say the Coens’ universe and,
with its intricate ballet of clashing motives and violent movement, is not a
place where characters’ lives are still cynically displaced by the often cruel
contrivances of chance, but that the embrace of this meaninglessness might
ultimately provide the ultimate form of meaning, in the end allowing the few
wearied and worn survivors of fate to pull together and imagine a different way
of life. The filmmakers are not disengaging from belief, politics, and
commitment; they are strategically disengaging form a certain terrain of
belief, politics, and commitment. Even when they reach the point of nihilism,
we should remember that nihilism itself is not so much a belief in nothing as a refusal to believe in
someone else’s something. “Nihilists!
Fuck me,” Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) exclaims in The Big Lebowski. “I mean,” he continues, “say what you want about
the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.” I mean, say
what you want about the darkness or self-consciousness of the Coen brothers’
vision, but at least it’s an ethos.
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As long as the movie is great its worth it.
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