Carter Burwell’s Contribution to “the Coen touch”

Abstract

Composer Carter Burwell started his career in cinema on the Coen Brothers’ first film Blood Simple (1984) and made the soundtracks of all their films so far, except Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). A journalist went so far as to call him “the third Coen brother” (Greiving, NPR, 2016), which in fact reflects both the professional and the spiritual connections that have developed throughout the last thirty-six years between the three men. Sorting the Coens’ films into three categories based on the nature of their soundtracks - scored, musical and hybrid films - this paper proposes to emphasize Burwell’s contribution to the Coens’ cinematic world. It will dwell specifically on what Roger Ebert, among others, called “the Coen touch”, a mix of dark humor and irony, sometimes resulting from a counterpoint created by contrasting the music and other features (image, dialogue), sometimes resulting from a sparse yet meaningful soundtrack.