The Films of Joel and Ethan Coen

Recently looking back on The Big Lebowski I encountered Graham Daesler's essay about that movie, which also takes up the matter of the Coen brothers' broader body of work. Over its course Daesler waxes poetic about his subject, which makes for an entertaining read--and if, as tends to be the case when writers wax poetic, he seems to me to give those of whom he writes more credit than is really due them, he is not without insight, or alertness to the limitations of, the movies and filmmakers he writes about, remarking in particular the Coen Brothers' misanthropy. The charge can seem easy given that misanthropy pretty much characterizes their whole generation of "indie" moviemakers, but it certainly seems not just warranted here, but fundamental to their choices of characters, and what they do with, or rather, to, them, with an evident sense of superiority and sense of self-satisfaction (presenting a parade of "dimwits, yokels, rubes, phonies . . . only to wreak havoc on their lives" in a manner Daesler compares to "kids collecting ants so they could incinerate them with a magnifying glass") in narratives in which meaning is pointedly elusive.

All that seems exemplified by the Coen brothers' 1991 film Barton Fink. That movie, "built around a protagonist who learns nothing and gains nothing, replete with red herring clues and meaningless symbolism" on the way to an ending Daesler describes as enigmatic, is "[t]he closest that Hollywood has ever come to making a Dadaist movie." I might add that it is particularly hard to escape the politics implicit in the Coen brothers' postmodernism in that movie--those of the hard right, all too evident in their deeply unpleasant caricature of a left-wing intellectual in the eponymous "learns nothing and gains nothing" protagonist.

Naturally this was very appealing to the critical community--but less so to me, which, I suppose, is how Big Lebowski, incoherent as that movie also is and mean-spirited as it can also be, made a sufficient impression on me that I had something to say about it all these decades later.