"Must Be Exhausting": Nihilism, Irony and Comedy in Coen Neo-Noir

“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.

Dark Streets, Dangerous Women and Knights in Dirty Armor: Frank Miller’s “Sin City” and the Conventions of Noir

“The air cools. The sounds change. The suits and brief-cases scurry to their fortresses and bolt their doors and balance their checkbooks and ignore the screams and try not to think about who really owns Sin City.”

                                                                                                                                            —Sin City Volume I: The Hard Goodbye

Sin City, its creator has said, is not a place but a state of mind (Booker 161). Eager to do comic books about crime, “about tough guys in mean cities,” in 1991 artist Frank Miller created the first story of the Sin City series, initially released in thirteen parts in Dark Horse Presents (Harvey 259). The story was retitled The Hard Goodbye, released as a graphic novel and followed by five more “yarns,” sordid tales of urban violence set in a climate of complete moral corruption. Influenced by Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, Jim Thompson and “long nights of living alone in Manhattan and discovering the black-and-white movies,” Miller’s illustrations drew their inspiration from outside the traditional confines of the comic book subculture (MacDonald 42, Gabillet 104). Sin City featured gritty black-and-white stylized graphics, over-the-top, hard-case crime retro dialogue, hardcore ultraviolence; it became an exercise in the celebration of film noir culture, one that is particularly extreme, violent and brutal, even by the genre’s standards. Steeped in darkness both physical and psychological, the style, characters, setting, themes, and tone of the graphic novel series, particularly the first four volumes (The Hard Goodbye, A Dame to Kill For, The Big Fat Kill and That Yellow Bastard) are undeniably indebted to film noir.  At the same time, Sin City self-consciously draws attention to the conventions of noir either by reducing or amplifying them, effectively critiquing its own narrative forms while remaining entirely within the rules of the genre.