In and Along the Mississippi

Abstract

In O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Mystery Train the Coen brothers and Jim Jarmusch choose the state of Mississippi and the city of Memphis, Tennessee as the settings of their heroes' peregrinations. Music permeates Joel Coen's and Jim Jarmusch's cinematic spaces, so much that it influences their narrative and stylistic perspectives and structures their works. The aim of this paper is to examine how the Coen brothers' and Jarmusch's choice of the musical field as a territory for their reconstructions of the South enables them to collate distinct artistic domains and genres in their representations of border incidents between stories, legends and history.