Coen Brothers Research Articles

Stories, Frames, and Objects: Pulp Fiction as a Transitional Work

Abstract: This paper considers the bygone American independent film media landscape, of which Pulp Fiction (1994) was an essential part, and explores how the film has aged in light of the present media environment and the trajectory of Tarantino's career. I compare Pulp Fiction with the Coen brothers' Barton Fink (1991), another American independent film that preceded it by a few years. Then, I illustrate how Pulp Fiction synthesized classical and post-classical filmmaking styles and operated according to a visual minimalism that is one of the film's strengths. The primary outcome of revisiting Pulp Fiction as a product of both its time and its filmmaker's penchant for excavating material from older movies and stories is to conclude that the groundbreaking Pulp Fiction is, in many ways, a transitional work that often reduces its human characters to objects. I argue that later features from the filmmaker are more substantial in their human characters and a concern for social reality and consequences beyond the immediate frame.

Film review essay: Inside Llewyn Davis: Faltering steps in the incredible journey from adolescence to adulthood

ABSTRACT The paper discusses the Coen brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis as representing in microcosm the developmental trajectory from late adolescence towards adulthood for the title character. This entails negotiating the problems of unconscious guilt, failure to mourn and an awareness of time in order to effect a movement from masochistic melancholy and hidden grandiosity to being able to relinquish omnipotent phantasies, say au revoir to internal persecutors and achieve a degree of self-possession.

A Postmodern Twist to the Western Film Tradition in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs by The Coen Brothers

Although the Coen brothers had already made films related to the Western genre, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) is a different venture, since they wrote the script of this anthology movie comprising six stories themselves. Besides delving into some of the themes that they have dealt with in their filmography–mortality, ethics, violence, justice, etc.–they also provide the film with a number of postmodern twists that hint at an effort to work through some of the problems posed by the mythology of the American West. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs contains the use of intertextuality across various art forms, a parodic treatment, and the inclusion of unusual perspectives that are all typical of postmodern aesthetics and politics of representation.

The Whole Durn Human Comedy: Life According to the Coen Brothers

The Whole Durn Human Comedy: Life According to the Coen Brothers

Laws and Outlaws in Pastoral Comedy and Revenge Tragedy

The two genres of the title are not usually considered a pair. I argue that they share an important concern, namely, the clash between law and outlawry, city life and country life, abstraction and embodiment. The protagonists of both (often forced by the illegal actions of others) live outside the law and have to make their own laws. They often “take matters into their own hands.” Examples: paintings by Titian, Manet, Guercino, Marvell’s “The Garden,” Tasso’s Aminta, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and late plays, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the Coen brothers’ “True Grit,” and Jennifer Haley’s The Nether.

Prioritizing Narrative Structure in Large-Scale Film-Music Analysis: A Case Study of Dramatic Irony in Barton Fink

In this article, I introduce and outline a graphic technique for large-scale film-music analysis that utilizes the film’s narrative structure as a scaffold on which to conduct musical inquiry. This technique combines Seymour Chatman’s narrative theory with Gustav Freytag’s theory of dramatic structure into a temporal map called a Narrative/Dramatic Structure diagram (NDS diagram) upon which a film’s complete score can be viewed and explored. I analyze Carter Burwell’s complete score to the Coen brothers film Barton Fink (1991) as a case study and demonstrate its usage of large-scale dramatic irony that provides focus in an otherwise perplexing narrative.

The Vietnam War in Cormac McCarthy’sNo Country for Old Men

ABSTRACTCormac McCarthy’s ninth novel No Country for Old Men is at points a thriller, a shoot-em-up, a novel of violence, a novel of the Border Southwest, but at its heart, it is a novel of the Vietnam War. Set in 1980, the text is populated by veterans of the war in Vietnam, and even those not explicitly identified as such carry the Vietnam War in their person and psyche. Llewelyn Moss and Carson Wells are sniper and Special Forces, respectively, while Anton Chigurh is too trained to be anything but a special operator. All three return from war to participate in war—a war based on the narco-economy and the violence secondary to such. In the work, each of the three uses military-taught skills to survive or not as the author conjoins each veteran’s postwar life with his peri-war training. Subversively, McCarthy creates a fourth Vietnam War veteran though the character of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, a veteran of World War II. Bell’s psychological makeup, his guilt, his regret, his self-ostracization, is that of the Vietnam veteran. But, while McCarthy creates a novel of the Vietnam War, the Coen brothers’ film of the same title marginalizes the Vietnam War and cuts the theme from the film. The novel could not exist without the Vietnam War, but the film can, and does.

Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition by Helene Meyers (review)

Reviewed by: Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition by Helene Meyers Boaz Hagin Helene Meyers, Movie-Made Jews: An American Tradition. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021. 224 pp. 12 b&w images. Cloth $120. Paperback $34.95. 9781978821897, 9781978821880 How can we discuss Jewish identities in an era that calls for inclusion and diversity but also restricts debate in its polarized online echo chambers, sanitized trigger-free histories, and rigid identity politics that sometimes relegate Jewishness to privileged whiteness? In Movie-Made Jews, Helene Meyers constructs an undogmatic, usable tradition of American Jewish motion pictures that through her often-brilliant readings can become a pluralistic “resource for healing a community riven by religious and political fault lines” (7). Inspired by Laura Mulvey’s landmark feminist work from the 1970s that demonstrated how films reinforced subjectivities, Meyers argues that fiction and documentary films make and remake Jews. This happens through an array of diverse onscreen characters and filmmakers, including ultra-Orthodox Jews, secular Jews, cultural Jews, honorary Jews, the Jewishly literate, and gentiles misidentified as Jews (such as Garry Marshall, whose son grew up suffering from bar mitzvah envy, and Charlie Chaplin). Moreover, following Mulvey, Meyers explores the politics and pleasures of the gaze not only between characters within a film but also from behind the camera and in the audience. Writers, directors, producers, and actors discover and reassess varied ways of being Jewish while researching films, spending time with their subjects as they make documentaries, and meeting Jews and allies when shooting on location. Non-Jewish filmmakers take part in this work, and, in this book, there is no prohibition against the “Jewface” casting of gentile actors as Jewish characters. In addition, analyzing reviews, commentaries, and intertextual allusions, Meyers shows how different audiences decode the films, talk back to them, and ignore or position them as Jewish as well as feminist, queer, and in alliance or tension with other identities, such as Muslims and Blacks. There is meaning in the choice to screen a film at Jewish or other themed film festivals and in frameworks like schools and cultural and religious centers. Jews are made not only within films but also in the cultural work involved in the production and reception of motion pictures. The usable Jewish American tradition that Meyers constructs is one of thought-provoking debate and difficult questions. It acknowledges the important role of Al Jolson’s blackface in The Jazz Singer (1927) and figures like [End Page 259] Woody Allen who have been accused of deplorable acts. It creates a conversation that brings different perspectives into dialogue, and, at one point, amusingly stages a disagreement between the author and “the commonsense Jew” in her head who has a strong Brooklyn accent and thinks the author is “meshugge” (22). It is a tradition that invites us to re-view, re-hear, and re-think films more generously and expansively and find value in the work they do. Meyers is particularly eager to show us the cultural work performed by documentaries and lesser-known micro-budget productions; popular movies too easily dismissed as mere vulgar comedies, sentimental schmaltz, nostalgia, or guilty pleasures; films trapped in the double-bind of not being Jewish enough and being too Jewish; and the earnest work of supposedly privileged Hollywood insiders. The book offers novel insights into some significant earlier films including Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and The Pawnbroker (1964) but mostly focuses on works since the 1970s. Among others, the book discusses The Way We Were (1973) and Crossing Delancey (1988); Jewish works by Allen, the Coen Brothers, Barry Levinson, and Paul Mazursky; and limit cases in which the Jewishness of the protagonists is marginalized in the texts but not necessarily in their reception, like the Ruth Bader Ginsburg 2018 documentary RBG and Gus Van Sant’s Harvey Milk biopic Milk (2008). Movie-Made Jews does not argue that Jewish representations follow a single historical trajectory and especially not that they “progress” (13). Rather, it is organized in thematic chapters that discuss a selection of films chronologically. The first considers the possibility that antisemitism makes Jews and their allies. The next chapter provocatively suggests that the indirect and coded presence of...

The power of schism: Unconventional narrative structure in No Country for Old Men

Whilst screenwriting handbooks have popularized and disseminated practical approaches to writing the screenplay and, to a certain extent, demystified and perhaps even democratized the process of screenplay creation and development, they have also solidified a restrictive doxa which delegitimizes unconventional structural approaches and, in doing so, solidifies a homogenized story product which tends to replicate different variations of the same dominant ideology. In this article I argue for a change in focus within screenwriting theory and the development process, towards an understanding of the meaning produced by the conventional model and the meanings that can be produced by alternative models, and away from the replication of the conventional, through an analysis of a particularly unconventional structural schism in the Coen brothers’ .

РОМАН КОРМАКА МАККАРТИ «СТАРИКАМ ТУТ НЕ МЕСТО» И ЕГО ЭКРАНИЗАЦИЯ БРАТЬЯМИ КОЭН

In 2007, McCarthy's novel became the first experience of screen adaptation in the Coen brothers’ career, who had previously developed their own scripts only. They cut several key scenes of the novel. For example, those when each of the three main characters having their military background manifests himself as a Nietzsche’s Übermensch, ready to confrontate with others (the Coens made one of them be the protagonist, it's Sheriff Bell who does not accept the incomprehensible new world because of its total immorality). The person with healthy instincts, Bell had transformed by the Coens into a sort of a perfect knight, the new generation calculated killer Chigurh – in a total psycho, and his victim Moss – just in a man “who's been underestimated by others for so long that he's come to overestimate himself”. McCarthy's bitter irony grows out of his novel structure (mise en abyme) mostly. At the same time the Coens movie brilliance is based on their canticle of Absurd, when the crazy killer flips a coin with his victims.

„Chyba w ten sposób toczy się ta ludzka komedia przez całe pokolenia drogą na Zachód i przez pustynie”. Paraboliczność w kinie braci Coen

The Coen brothers stylized films, full of quotations and borrowings, are for many scholars the quintessence of a postmodern game with remnants, interpretive openness, and ambiguity. This fact does not incline to look in these films for the rules governing the world or human existence what is typical of parabolic thinking. The article is an attempt to demonstrate that the makers of the Oscar-winning Fargo (Fargo, 1996) often use in their work elements, tricks, or strategies typical of a traditional parabola, though their films may often be read as its contemporary invariants. Numerous Coens’ films bear the hallmarks of parabolic texts, even if in this case one cannot speak of a parabola as a genre. The messages they contain are never unambiguous and are not intended to educate. However, owing to their enigmatic nature, they encourage viewers to search for extra meanings.

Jürg Frey, String Quartet no. 4. Quatuor Bozzini. MaerzMusik live-stream, 25 March 2021

Jürg Frey is at the point where the premiere of his String Quartet no. 4 at the online edition of MaerzMusik this March had the feel of the release of the newest film from a cult director. For my generation, this has largely meant someone like Quentin Tarantino or the Coen Brothers: every two to four years a new movie with sameness (recurring actors) and differences (genre) comes out, and with it a new opportunity to spend an interval of time with something carefully crafted by a unique mind with one foot in the real world and one foot out of it. We dutifully check them out, interested not just in the ‘next big thing’ but also in the moment surrounding this bit of culture.

Ideology in Polish Translations of Anglo-American Literature

Ideology has always influenced translation, yet this fact became a topic of scholarly research only in the 1990s. The working of ideology in literary translations most often manifests itself as a conflict of value systems. From vast reservoir of foreign sources, the native axiology absorbs values that it needs to sustain its culture. It is not a coincidence that Anglo-American literature, propagating ideas of democracy and individual freedom, became popular in Poland in the first half of the nineteenth-century when Poland did not exist as a state. Only a century later, American literature was the most popular of all foreign literatures in pre-1939 Poland. World War II changed this situation, and the Soviet-controlled apparatchiks favored translations that were “politically correct.” Yet, because of their connections with earlier revolutionary movements, avant-garde Anglo-American writers were often published during the communist regime, for example Virginia Woolf, whose novels were standardized to appeal to the tastes of popular readers. After Poland regained independence in 1989, the national book market was privatized and commercialized, and avant-garde literature needed advertising to get noticed. Cormack McCarthy’s novels were translated into Polish on the wave of popularity of the Coen brothers movie based on No Country for Old Men. The two Polish translations of McCarthy’s novel try to sound like a typical hard-boiled realistic fiction. This is where the ideology of consumerism meets the ideology of communism: literature is a means to sustain – and control – a cultural monolith, where all differences are perceived as possible threats to social order.

Carter Burwell’s Contribution to “the Coen touch”

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.

Миф об Одиссее в кинематографе: политические и смысловые аллюзии (на материале фильма братьев Коэнов «О где же ты, брат?»)

Миф об Одиссее в кинематографе: политические и смысловые аллюзии (на материале фильма братьев Коэнов «О где же ты, брат?»)

American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film by Peter Lurie

Reviewed by: American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film by Peter Lurie David Holloway Peter Lurie. American Obscurantism: History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film. Oxford UP, 2018. x + 221 pp. In American Obscurantism, Peter Lurie explores “an ongoing and pervasive—but also forceful—strategy of obliquity and indirection” (1) in racially “whitened” (24) accounts of American history—a tradition, he contends, marked by “notable evasions and codings around the facts of racial conflict and its concurrent presence-as-absence in American cultural history” (7). Canonical American texts, Lurie argues, wrestle with the “unsymbolizable dimension” (6) of traumatic racial conflict in acts of representation that yield, at best, “spectral” (17) forms of historical knowledge. This way of knowing the past reveals an “American propensity for visual thinking about social reality” [End Page 786] (2) that is “obscurantist” because of the blindness of its looking and the unintelligibility of the histories it tells. Lurie illustrates this claim with a series of penetrating close readings of texts in which traumatic events—notably around slavery in the South, and Manifest Destiny in the West—that are half glimpsed or poetically implied are then re-repressed or re-encoded, sometimes in highly self-aware ways, in the formal arrangements and thematic foci of canonical literature and film. In the broadest sense, this is not a new argument. Questions about the accessibility and transparency (or otherwise) of history, the occlusion of power, and the presence-as-absence—through their representation in culture—of marginal or subaltern identities, have shaped orthodox approaches to the humanities since at least the theoretical turn of the later twentieth century. Lurie’s work, however, significantly extends this received critical context, not least in its identification of a distinctive, and specifically racialized (white) tradition in US cultural history, a finding that broadens the discussion beyond the localized function of specific genres or representational modes. The Gothic, for example, long seen as a genre in which violent American histories are precariously un/repressed, figures in Lurie’s exegesis, but only as one cultural mode among others to which he ascribes a common evasiveness or indirection. Just as significant is the methodology American Obscurantism brings to bear on the tradition it describes. Lurie fuses key strains of poststructuralist critical theory (Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, and Paul de Man feature prominently in the early stages of the book) with aspects of trauma and affect theory. This approach informs not only his textual analysis but also his sustained interrogation of new historicist methodologies—ways of looking critically, he suggests, that misguidedly equate representation of historical events with the actuality of events themselves, in a “conceit of knowing” (19) that renders critical practice complicit in the obscuring of other historical experience. Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket and Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno”—positioned here as self-consciously ambiguous investigations of the obscurantism he describes—Lurie jumps forward to William Faulkner’s Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! He then moves to a historicist strain in Faulkner criticism that he suggests has failed to reflect adequately both the non-identity of Southern history with the excessive, dreamlike literariness of Faulkner’s language, and the potent evocation of otherness (and thus the potential for aesthetic negation) embedded within this formal excess. Lurie then jumps forward again, with successive chapters on two classics of late twentieth-century auteur [End Page 787] cinema, Stanley Kubrick’s horror The Shining, and the Coen brothers’ postmodern Gothic Fargo. If these leaps across historical time may appear obtrusive or glib to some readers, it is important to note that they are entirely consistent—formally, as it were—with Lurie’s repudiation of new historicism, helping embed his skepticism about received historicist practice within the structural organization of the book itself, in the commonalities he finds at play in texts written and filmed a century and a half apart. The commonalities themselves are convincing, too, as Lurie traces thematic affinities between Faulkner’s themes of racialized haunting, hidden secrets, and paternal sin and Kubrick’s re-treading of similar ground. The famous scene in The Shining, for example...

ОТ ПЕПЛУМОВ ДО НОВЫХ РЕЛИГИЙ: ЭТИКА СТОИКОВ И ЭПИКУРЕЙЦЕВ В ПОПУЛЯРНОЙ КУЛЬТУРЕ

The article analyzes the legacy of philosophical thought of Stoic and Epicurean Hellenistic schools in contemporary popular culture, in particular, in American cinema and two hyper-real religions: Jedaism and Dudeism. The aim of the research is to update the concepts of ancient thinkers in the context of popular culture. The study demonstrates that the theories of the Stoics and Epicureans still play a significant role in the life of modern society, offering variants of life philosophy, which is clearly embodied in the use of their ideas in a number of popular feature films. Moreover, the article also proves that Jedaism and Dudeism, new religious movements that arose on the basis of the “Star Wars” epic movie by J. Lucas’ and “The Big Lebowski” made by the Coen brothers, are directly related to the philosophy of these Hellenistic schools, since Jedaism is largely based on the teachings of the Stoics, and Dudeism is based on the Epicurean ones.

ІТАЛІЯ: АРБІТРАМ ТУТ НЕ МІСЦЕ?

The title of my presentation, besides being a play on the title of the Coen brothers film, makes it clear that Italy is not exactly the most hospitable environment when it comes to the popularity of arbitration. It is true that statistical data, when available, concern essentially institutional arbitration (the empirical data are not really updated. The only comprehensive survey of ADR in Italy concerns 2016; in that year the total number of arbitration procedures carried out by private and public institutions was 708 (784 in 2015) and can be considered misleading, at least to a certain degree, since nothing is officially known of the phenomenon of ad hoc arbitration, which, apparently, is very popular but escapes survey. In any event, my purpose here is to sketch out some of the reasons why arbitration is still an elitist method for resolving disputes, in general – as we will see – commercial disputes.

Democracy, Freedom and Laughter: Hegelian Comedy in the Coens’ Hail, Caesar!

ABSTRACTIn his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel reasons that comedy responds to the fact that democratic ideals become a subject for a joke when enacted: progressive values such as free speech enable regressive quarrels and political liberties that ought to empower individuals can engender indolence and self-seeking profit. In such a situation, comedy performs a complicated function, accentuating the shortcomings of democratic society, while maintaining democratic ideals as something to be aspired to unsullied by the trivial citizens that provide the basis for comedic plots. The Coen brothers’ film Hail, Caesar! (2016) can serve as an illustration of Hegel’s speculative account. Set in the early 1950s, the film imagines studio fixer Eddie Mannix undergoing a crisis of faith in the Hollywood studio system, which is paralleled by the studio’s cheesy film production of a Roman centurion’s conversion to Christianity, and contrasted with the unwavering faith of a group of Marxist screenwriters working to bring capitalism down from within. Despite the setting, the conceptual context for the film is current—the studio system with all its flaws becomes metonymic for democratic capitalist institutions. In a Hegelian way, the film’s humor expresses the very inability to change a broken system, but still locates meaning in democracy’s ability to laugh at itself. When discussed together, Hegel and the Coens’ film suggest that democratic ideals both sustain and rise above farcical attempts at their realization.

Fargo: Seeing the significance of style in television poetics?

This article explores the adaptation of the original film to television and how a strain of art or independent cinema contributed to the development of the first series of Fargo (2014–present). By making this comparison, the transition to television of the storyworld established by the Coen brothers raises questions about who is talking in the TV drama – the Coens or makers of the series. At the same time, Fargo can be more easily explained and understood as a strategy by writers, directors and producers that further complicate ideas to do with Noah Hawley, as its showrunner and the show’s single-author status. In Fargo, fidelity to the Coen brothers as a testament to the memory of the original film is set against questions about the reliability of storytelling using complex imagery. By alternating between different levels of narration signified by its stylistic tonal qualities, Fargo succeeds in producing multiple meanings, representations and effects that call attention to textual pleasures in the complex television series.