The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers

Mark T. Conard

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780813125268
• eBook ISBN: 9780813138695
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

"Written for both fans of the Coen brothers and the philosophically curious, without the technical language . . . educational and entertaining." — Library Journal
 
Joel and Ethan Coen have made films that redefined the gangster movie, the screwball comedy, the fable, and the film noir, but no matter what genre they're playing with, they consistently focus on the struggles of complex characters to understand themselves and their places in the strange worlds they inhabit. To borrow a phrase from Barton Fink, all Coen films explore "the life of the mind" and show that the human condition can often be simultaneously comic and tragic, profound and absurd.
 
The essays in this book explore the challenging moral and philosophical terrain of the Coen repertoire. Several address how Coen films often share film noir's essential philosophical assumptions: power corrupts, evil is real, and human control of fate is an illusion. In Fargo, not even Minnesota's blankets of snow can hide Jerry Lundegaard's crimes or brighten his long, dark night of the soul. The tale of love, marriage, betrayal, and divorce in Intolerable Cruelty transcends the plight of the characters to illuminate competing theories of justice. Even in lighter fare, such as Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, the comedy emerges from characters' journeys to the brink of an amoral abyss. However, the Coens often knowingly and gleefully subvert conventions and occasionally offer symbolic rebirths and other hopeful outcomes. At the end of The Big Lebowski, for example, the Dude abides, his laziness has become a virtue, and the human comedy is perpetuating itself with the promised arrival of a newborn Lebowski.
 
The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers sheds new light on the work of these cinematic visionaries. From Blood Simple to No Country for Old Men, the Coens' characters look for answers—though in some cases, their quest for answers leads, at best, only to more questions.

Part 1

THE COEN BRAND
OF COMEDY AND TRAGEDY

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. That is an easier task for some than for others, and certainly there are some deep deceptions in the American mythos of self-creation, deceptions about the irrelevance of the conditions of one's birth, the role of social class, or money, or race. So, on the one hand, we have more freedom than most in history to make of ourselves what we will. On the other hand, that puts a considerable burden on each of us as individuals to come up with a unique self to be.

Part of the American mythos, part of the sense of what is especially unique about America, is captured in the idea of “American exceptionalism.” This idea is usually traced back to Tocqueville's Democracy in America (originally published in two volumes in French in 1835 and 1840), but it can be found even earlier in a famous sermon given by John Winthrop in 1630, in which he describes a future for America in which “wee will be seen as a citty upon a hill.”³ This expression of American exceptionalism, of a future America as “a city upon a hill,” is aspirational in at least two ways. It is aspirational in the sense that it is describing not only a hoped-for state of the country that can be achieved if we are true to certain principles but also what we should aspire to for our future country; it expresses a dream of what America could be. It is also aspirational in the sense that this hoped-for state, once achieved, will itself represent an aspirational goal to the rest of the world.

The idea that there is something special about America, something not just unique but also superior, the idea of America as an idea of some kind of better possibility, seems to pervade our thinking about ourselves, as well as the thinking of others about us, and it is, as most things are, both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is the way the idea of America's exceptionalism empowers us to pursue our own dreams of what we want to be. It is part of the American ideal that we are not necessarily limited by birth or class or race. On the other hand, the expectations of individual achievement are very high, and often we fail to measure up. It is not an incidental detail, I think, that the first image we see of Hi is of him thrown against a height measure, which, under the circumstances, indicates a certain failure to measure up to the high expectations of society.

Comedy

Raising Arizona is a comedy.⁴ I take it to be a comedy in at least two senses. First, it is a comedy because it is very funny. The second way that I see Raising Arizona as a comedy is in the classic sense of a comedy (which derives from Aristotle's definition of a comedy) as a narrative that begins in a bad place but, in its narrative unfolding, ends in a good place.⁵ This is why Dante's narrative of a descent into hell and subsequent journey through purgatory and paradise is called The Divine Comedy.⁶ It is not so much that it is a humorous work, although there are some very funny passages in it, but that it follows the classic trajectory of a comedy as described by Aristotle.

This claim, that Raising Arizona is a comedy in this classic sense, depends on an interpretation of the ending of the movie as being an affirmation of a better future for Hi and Ed. The ending of the movie seems to be ambiguous. Hi is having another one of his dreams (although all of his previous dreams in the movie have turned out to be connected with reality), and he is dreaming of a better and more fruitful future, but their actual situation seems to be worse: they are babyless, and Ed has pronounced, in her definitive way, their (Hi and Ed's) complete unsuitableness to each other and her determination to leave him. Whether they stay together or not remains undetermined by the narrative of the movie. To affirm the movie as having the form of a classic comedy means finding in this very ambiguity some kind of affirmation that transcends the early hopefulness and excitement of their original courtship and marriage.

I interpret the title of the movie, Raising Arizona, to indicate the most fundamental theme of the movie, namely, the aspirational theme of self-improvement that is so central to the American identity. The basic trope is the idea of height, so I take Hi's name to be a kind of spatial metaphor of his aspirations. What constitutes growth, what constitutes the necessary change in condition, from a worse to a better condition (so that the movie can fulfill the form of a comedy), will be a change in one's aspirations. At the beginning of the movie, I take Hi's aspirations to be relatively uncomplicated. What he wanted to be was also what he was, an outlaw. The outlaw is a kind of American aspiration, an American ideal. The outlaw is just an extreme form of the American ideal of the frontiersman, the adventurer, the one who braves the wilderness and does so because of the excess of wildness still in him or her. The classic American movie genre of the western is filled with figures that straddle the line between law and lawlessness, so that the good westerner is just barely across the line on the side of the law and the only one wild enough to go after the bad westerner, the one who has slipped to the far side of the law and into a lawless wildness. The connection with the American movie genre of the western is made explicit with some allusions to westerns in Raising Arizona, as, for example, the location of the film in the Southwest, the long-coat dusters worn by Gale (John Goodman) and Evelle (William Forsythe) when they rob the bank, and the showdown between Hi and Leonard Smalls (Randall “Tex” Cobb).

The problem of creating an identity for oneself can be framed in terms of the relationship between universals (or generals) and particulars. That is, to be something is to participate in some form of a universal: one is a lawyer or a teacher or a fifth grader or an American. But to participate too much in a universal, to identify oneself too deeply with a general idea, is to lack any particular identity at all.⁷ On the other hand, to be too idiosyncratically particular is, in a way, also to lack an identity; it is to have no continuous identity at all. We construct our identities, therefore, out of a combination of some kind of general or universal idea inflected by our own particular characteristics. In part, our particularity is constituted by just the particular array of general ideas that we participate in, so one way to develop one's identity is in choosing which combination of general ideas in which to participate. So, one is a midwesterner or a teacher, someone who drives a Ford or likes baseball, and so on—our identity being, more or less, just the complete list of these general descriptions. A way to improve one's identity is to improve somehow on the complex array of universals that we participate in, making them all more harmonious or more beautiful or maybe just more complex.

Of course, many of the universals in which we participate we do not have a choice about, or not much of a choice. We do not choose (for the most part) our gender, whether we will be born rich or poor, in the Northeast or the Southwest. It seems clear that we make some choices, and it will be in those choices that such identity as we can make we do make.

Hi, at the beginning of Raising Arizona, has what seems to be a fairly simple identity structure. He seems to identify himself as an outlaw. He blames President Reagan (or his advisers) for his outlaw ways, but that really seems to be more a function of his outlaw ways than a real explanation of them. (When he really wants a job he seems to have no trouble getting one. When he wants a newspaper, he prefers to steal it than to pay the thirty-five cents, and that seems to be a matter of preference and principle rather than need.) The life of an outlaw is a kind of “primitive,” pre-Christian, precapitalist kind of existence. It is lived in the present moment much more than toward any particular future. It is cyclical, like the seasons. There is the excitement of doing the crime, and then the over-structured time of being in jail, then back to the crime and back to jail. As Hi says, “Now I don't know how you come down on the incarceration question, whether it's for rehabilitation or revenge. But I was beginning to think that revenge is the only argument that makes any sense.” We hear this voice-over as we watch Hi commit another crime after just seeing him being let out of jail. Furthermore, we see that he has pretty much botched this crime by accidentally locking himself out of his car, and the signs (we hear a police siren in the distance) indicate that he will soon be back in the slammer, and so his perspective pretty much mirrors his reality vis à vis the incarceration question.

In a sense, however, these simple primitive cycles and his relatively simple identity structure are already, for Hi, on their way to being things of the past, and they become that in, as it were, the blink of an eye. Heidegger speaks of how the possibility of a new encounter, a new way of encountering the world, will occur to us in the blink of an eye (an Augenblick in Heidegger's German).⁸ The French philosopher Alain Badiou talks about a similar phenomenon as an “event.”⁹ An “event” is something that happens that does not quite fit into our established system of knowledge, and so it will appear to us as something unaccountable, something that we cannot quite get our minds around even as we recognize the great importance of the encounter. Badiou identifies four realms, four general categories, of events: politics, science, art, and love.¹⁰ If we consider the final category, then, an event in love will be an encounter with another person that, as it were, opens up possibilities to us that we had never understood were possibilities; it creates a disturbance for us that we do not quite know how to quell. We will always be tempted, in the presence of an event, to turn away from the event, to pretend it did not happen, because the event is always experienced as being beyond us, beyond what we have the capabilities for. Ethics, for Badiou, is about having the courage to be true to, to be faithful to, the event.

The Event

I consider the flash of light when Ed first takes Hi's mug shot at the beginning of the movie to signal, as well, the occurrence of an event. What is the event? If Hi's identity is constituted according to the general idea of the outlaw, Ed's identity seems to be constituted primarily in terms of the law. Her cold-sounding, apparently indifferent, and oft repeated “Turn to the right!” is a kind of pure expression of the law. In that flash of a light, however, a mutual recognition seems to occur. Hi and Ed see in each other the possibility of another narrative, another way of being that would supplement and reconstitute their present ways, and in ways that neither quite understands, but for which both feel an attraction a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part - 1: The Coen Brand of Comedy and Tragedy
• Part - 2: Ethics: Shame, Justice, and Virtue
• Part - 3: Postmodernity, Interpretation, and the Construction of History
• Part - 4: Existentialism, Alienation, and Despair
• List of Contributors
• Index