Although O Brother, Where Art Thou? was released in 2000, script development for the project had already begun in the mid-1990s. In fact, as early as 1987, the Coen brothers were envisioning a movie set in the Deep South that would complete what they called their ‘Hayseed Trilogy’ (which includes Blood Simple and Raising Arizona), but prohibitive production costs kept the project on hold. Set in Depression-era Mississippi, O Brother tells the story of three chain-gang convicts who escape to freedom and embark on a homeward odyssey in search of fortune and redemption. The central figure of this trio, Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), takes his name from the heroic protagonist of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, from which the Coens borrow freely to tell the story of a modern-day Ulysses and his crew, Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), who accompany the hero on his homeward journey. Along the way, they encounter an assortment of characters plucked not only from the pages of Homer’s poem but also from the history of the Deep South in 1930s America. All of these figures are targets for comic stereotyping, including a bank-robbing gangster (George ‘Baby Face’ Nelson, played by Michael Badalucco), the goodol’-boy governor of Mississippi (Pappy O’Daniel, played by Charles Durning) and a black blues guitarist (Tommy Johnson, played by Chris Thomas King), representing the three generic discourses framing the film narrative: crime comedy, period film and musical.
The Odyssey Homage
Although O Brother, Where Art Thou? has structural and thematic similarities to Homer’s Odyssey, the original premise for the screenplay was, according to Joel, the simple idea of convicts escaping from a chain gang in 1930s Mississippi. ‘Homer was an afterthought,’ Joel confides, telling an interviewer that halfway through the writing process, the brothers became aware of the similarity of their ‘road movie’ to the epic poem and from that point pirating from The Odyssey became a running joke, an intertextual dialogue with Homer that amused them during the writing of the screenplay (Mottram 2000: 159). Making light of their classical references, the Coens say, ‘Whenever it’s convenient, we trot out The Odyssey’ (Allen 2006: 136). Homer’s poem, a story of exile and return, recounts the homeward journey of Odysseus (called Ulysses in Roman mythology) after the end of the ten-year Trojan War. Although the mythic hero must endure long years of wandering, he is determined to see once more the shores of the isle of Ithaca. During his journey he encounters many dangers and is constantly beset with trials and tribulation (his Greek name, Odysseus, means ‘Son of Pain’), but ultimately Ulysses triumphs and reunites with wife and son, illustrating the Homeric themes of family unity and the affirmation of marriage. In O Brother, Where Art Thou? the episodic voyage of The Odyssey is recreated by Ulysses Everett McGill’s picaresque homeward wanderings and his quest for redemption.
A title card with a citation from The Odyssey introduces the film narrative, acknowledging O Brother’s debt to Homer:
O muse!
Sing in me, and through me tell the story
Of that man skilled in the ways of contending,
A wanderer, harried for years on end…
This, the first sentence of The Odyssey, introduces us to the hero of Homer’s epic and serves as a description of his contemporary counterpart, Ulysses Everett McGill. Both men are ‘skilled in the ways of contending’ or adept at the art of rhetorical persuasion, and both are ‘harried’ by agents of persecution and beset with ‘constant sorrow’. Like his Homeric namesake, Ulysses Everett embarks on an odyssey filled with trials and tribulation. His goal is to reclaim his bride, Penny (Holly Hunter), an allusion to Ulysses’ wife, Penelope. In The Odyssey Penelope waits in Ithaca for the return of her husband, surrounded by a gang of suitors, all hoping in the long absence of Ulysses to win Penelope’s hand in marriage. Like his mythic double, Everett must return to Ithaca (Mississippi) to reestablish himself as paterfamilias by winning back Penny from an aggressive suitor named Vernon T. Waldrip (Ray McKinnon), whose name does not derive from the ancient Greek epic but, as Joel reports, from the William Faulker novel The Wild Palms (Allen 2006: 180). As one of the more obscure literary references in O Brother, the name Waldrip may also allude to the contemporary fantasy writer Howard Waldrop, noted for his ‘alternate-history stories’, in particular for his 1989 novella A Dozen Tough Jobs, a retelling of the twelve labors of Hercules transposed to Depression-era Mississippi.
The ancient bard tells us that Ulysses was known as a bold leader of cunning intelligence who always, even in direst straits, had a plan of action. Everett too, fancies himself a leader of men, although Pete may occasionally question his authority. If they find themselves ‘in a tight spot’ (a phrase Everett uses repeatedly), he always has a plan. The modern Ulysses also shares with his mythic forebear a mastery of deception. Homer calls his Ulysses ‘a cheat and dissembler’ and ‘a teller of deceitful tales’. The same can be said of Everett. At the outset of his story, Everett is in prison for misrepresenting himself as a lawyer (without a license); at the story’s conclusion he is contemplating becoming a phony dentist. Like Homer’s Ulysses, who upon his return to Ithaca disguises himself as an aged beggar, Everett wears a fake beard to cover his identity when he makes his return to Ithaca. As in The Odyssey, where Ulysses proves his real identity by passing a test of knowledge, Everett is tasked with recovering Penny’s lost wedding ring from the flooded valley before she will consent to his reinstatement as rightful husband and father. To facilitate the recording of ‘A Man of Constant Sorrow’, Everett misrepresents himself as a black man, using the name ‘Jordan Rivers’ (an undisguised reference to the biblical Jordan River, where Jesus was baptised, and through which Joshua led the enslaved Israelites to freedom). His ultimate deception, however, is enticing his jail mates to make a dangerous escape with the false promise of a non-existent fortune.
‘Damn, we’re in a tight spot!’
Homer’s Ulysses is stubbornly self-reliant, even defiant of the gods, but even he must petition the divine powers for assistance. Thus, at the end of The Odyssey the goddess Athena intervenes to save him from the wrath of the citizens of Ithaca seeking to avenge the deaths of their sons, Penelope’s suitors. In the Coens’ version, Everett fancies himself an enlightened rationalist who rejects religious beliefs as irrational superstition, as he attests in a pompous speech on the socio-cultural advantages of hydro-electric power that the newly flooded valley will yield:
Yessir, the South is gonna change. Everything’s gonna be put on electricity and run on a payin’ basis. Out with old spiritual mumbo-jumbo, the superstitions and the backward ways. We’re gonna see a brave new world where they run everyone a wire and hook us all up to the grid. Yessir, a veritable age of reason – like the one they had in France – and not a moment too soon…
As Everett’s voice trails off, a cow on a cottonhouse roof floats past – a miraculous vision challenging the logic of mortal rationality. When faced with death by hanging, however, he prays ardently for salvation: ‘I’m sorry I turned by back on you, Lord. I know I’ve been guilty of pride and sharp dealing.’ His confession of pride also harks back to the Homeric Ulysses, known for his vanity and the arrogance of hubris, offending the gods who then hinder his progress with many calamities. Everett’s somewhat less cosmic vanity manifests itself in his obsession with a hairstyle that requires copious amounts of a pomade branded ‘Dapper Dan’. In Homer’s Odyssey Penelope’s suitors are also said to have ‘hair sleek with oil’ to make themselves attractive to Penelope. Penny’s suitor, Vernon Waldrip, slicks his hair too, prompting a sniffing Everett to query, ‘Have you been using my hair treatment?’
Many of the other characters in O Brother have Homeric analogues: a blind handcar driver (Lee Weaver) foretells the fate of the wanderers, echoing the blind seer Tiresius; Big Dan Teague (John Goodman), the larcenous, one-eyed Bible salesman, reincarnates the monstrous Cyclops; and the singing woodland seductresses recall the mythic Sirens whose musical temptations threatened the lives of Ulysses and his sailors. O Brother begins and ends with appearances by the blind handcar driver who, like the oracle of Homer’s poem, foretells great fortune for the escapees, but cautions the travelers that they will endure a difficult and dangerous journey, ‘fraught with peril and pregnant with adventure’, predicting that the fortune they will find is not the one they seek. The handcar driver claims ‘I work for no man’ and ‘I have no name’, recalling Ulysses’ cunning trick of telling the Cyclops his name is ‘No-man’, a ploy that sets up the hero’s escape from the Cyclops’ lair. After stabbing the Cyclops in the eye with a burning spear, blinding him, Ulysses and his men make good their escape. When the wounded Cyclops shouts to his neighbors ‘No-man is killing me’, his plea for help is ignored, allowing Ulysses and his sailors to elude a terrible fate. In O Brother, one-eyed Big Dan, also a member of the Ku Klux Klan, is similarly dispatched. Revising the Homeric scenario, Everett hurls a sharp-pointed Confederate flagpole at Big Dan’s eye, which he snatches in mid-air, only to be struck down the next instant by a burning cross, symbol of the Klan’s racist hatred. During the ensuing confusion, Everett and his comrades escape another ‘tight spot’.
The episodes of The Odyssey chronicling the encounters with the Sirens and the goddess Circe, who bewitches Ulysses’ men and turns some of them into swine, are combined in O Brother in the Soggy Bottom Boys’ seduction by three nymph-like singers washing clothes by the river. Attracted by their unearthly song, the boys join the woodland nymphs who seduce them with corn liquor and feminine charms. Awakening from his alcohol-induced stupor, Delmar notices that Pete is missing and believes he has been turned into a toad by the river singers, who actually just turned Pete in to the sinister chain-gang boss Sheriff Cooley (Daniel von Bargen), who doggedly pursues the three escapees throughout their homeward odyssey. Cooley’s counterpart in The Odyssey would be Poseidon, the god of the sea, who swears vengeance on Ulysses for harming his son Polyphemus, the Cyclops, and persecutes the heroic sailor and his crew relentlessly with stormy seas. When Cooley finally captures the Soggy Bottom Boys, he tells them: ‘You have eluded fate – and eluded me – for the last time,’ thus identifying himself as a mythic agent of destiny. The Sheriff’s malice is thwarted, ironically, by a flood tide, the very element that Poseidon rules.
Despite the Coens’ cavalier treatment of Homer, O Brother’s retelling of The Odyssey is more than a haphazard collection of mythological clichés. Indeed, some of Homer’s most fundamental themes are in evidence, if only to be parodied, as a comparison of the two endings illustrates. Upon his return to Ithaca, Ulysses proves his true identity by detailing to Penelope how he built their marriage bed. By so testing and proving his identity, she authorises Ulysses to reclaim his status as family patriarch and restore his honour and aristocratic position. By acknowledging him as paterfamilias, Penelope renews the bonds of marriage and family and restores the social order upset by his absence, bringing narrative closure to the epic. The same cannot be said of O Brother, which avoids both narrative and thematic resolution. At the movie’s conclusion, Everett has failed to retrieve Penny’s wedding ring from the flood, proffering instead a ring belonging to Aunt Hurlene. Insisting that only her own wedding ring will do, she tasks poor Everett with fishing it from the 9,000-hectare lake created by the flood, to which Everett can only retort: ‘That is one hell of a heroic task.’ Suspended in marital limbo, Everett’s patriarchal status is still in doubt as the story ends.
Sullivan’s Travels
While Homer’s Odyssey lends O Brother its episodic structure and furnishes an archive of recognizable tropes, the movie’s most essential sources are found in the cinematic tradition. In its wide-ranging dialogue with the history of cinema, O Brother glosses numerous filmic precursors such as Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke (1967), a chain-gang story featuring Boss Godfrey, a cruel lawman in mirrored sunglasses, reflected in O Brother as Boss Cooley, the relentless sheriff who, accompanied by a slobbering blood hound, pursues the escaped fugitives like Satan himself. His connection with the Devil is reinforced by the blues musician Tommy, who describes the Devil who bargained with him for his soul at the crossroads as a white man, ‘white as you folks, with mirrors for eyes and a big hollow voice and always travels with a mean old hound’. Another cinematic point of reference is Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958), the story of two prisoners escaped from a chain gang, one white (Tony Curtis) and one black (Sidney Poitier), shackled together and forced to transcend racial differences and cooperate for survival. The latter allusion is cross-referenced in a remark by Everett encouraging Pete to overcome his ‘hopeless negativism’: ‘Consider the lilies of the goddamn field.’ The Lilies of the Field (Ralph Nelson, 1963) starred Poitier, playing a character named Homer Smith, a role for which Poitier was awarded the first Academy Award given to an African-American actor. Critiques of racism and an unjust penal system unify these antecedents, hinting at an underlying polemic in O Brother.
The caricature of George ‘Baby Face’ Nelson adds another facet to the Coen pastiche, suggesting a broader parody of the gangster genre. Baby Face’s trademark line, ‘I’m on top of the world!’ mimics the famous last words of Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) in Raoul Walsh’s gangster-noir White Heat (1949): ‘Made it, Ma. Top of the world!’ which Cody shouts out defiantly moments before he dies in a fiery inferno. Both Cody and Baby Face are ‘defiant ones’ who taunt the police arrogantly, defying capture and celebrating their superiority over the law, linking them with Homer’s Ulysses and Everett as men guilty of hubris. Nelson’s hatred for cows, which he shoots on sight with malicious delight (‘I hate cows worse than coppers’) parodies the sailors in Homer’s Odyssey who slaughter Apollo’s golden cattle. When, after an exciting bank robbery in the town of Itta Bena, a morose Baby Face parts ways with Everett and crew and wanders aimlessly into the dark night, we hear echoes of the melodramatic final scene of Mervyn LeRoy’s classic gangster movie I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), in which the protagonist, an escaped con played by Paul Muni, drifts off into night, doomed to run endlessly from the law.
The Coens have repeatedly stated their preference for literary antecedents as sources for their intertextual constructs. O Brother is an exception to this rule, mainly due to the brothers’ special affection for Sturges, whose comedy Sullivan’s Travels they cite as the main inspiration for their chain-gang epic. Despite openly professing their fondness for Sturges’ classic comedies, the Coens approach the question of his influence with cagey reserve. ‘There are things in [O Brother] that are very reminiscent of Sullivan’s Travels,’ admits Joel. ‘But, I would say “reminiscent of” instead of “rip-off”’ (Allen 2006: 136). To tell the tale of Ulysses Everett McGill, O Brother, Where Art Thou? borrows its narrative premise, the idea of convicts escaping from a chain gang in 1930s Mississippi, from Sullivan’s Travels, where the protagonist, Hollywood director John ‘Sully’ Sullivan, otherwise known for directing silly comedies, proposes to make a film with ‘social importance’ entitled ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ Tired of directing vacuous comedies with titles like ‘Hey, Hey, in the Hay Loft’ and ‘Ants in Their Pants’, Sully decides he wants to make a serious social problem film about the poverty and suffering caused by the Great Depression, hoping, as he says to his skeptical studio bosses, ‘to realise the potentiality of film as the sociological and artistic medium that it is’. To research his subject, of which the wealthy and spoiled movie director knows nothing, Sully sets out, in his words, ‘to know trouble’, going on the road as a hobo to live among the poor and homeless and experience their hardships first-hand. At the end of his travels, he indeed finds enlightenment, but not the enlightenment he had expected. After experiencing the existential plight of the disenfranchised, he decides against making the ‘serious’ movie, realising that his audiences, who must endure an otherwise harsh and impoverished existence, benefit more from the diversions of comedic entertainment than from the sobering lessons of social realism. ‘There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh,’ he tells the studio execs. ‘Didn’t you know, that’s all some people have?’ To emphasise his artistic credo, Sturges dedicates Sullivan’s Travels ‘to the memory of those who made us laugh; the motley mountebanks, the clowns, the buffoons, in all times and in all nations’. This is, in essence, the artistic ethos the Coens have always espoused, expressed by Joel in blunt terms: ‘If somebody goes out to make a movie that isn’t designed primarily to entertain people, then I don’t know what the fuck they’re doing’ (Allen 2006: 11).
Direct allusions to Sullivan’s Travels abound in O Brother, some of them obvious in any comparison of the two movies, others quite obscure, such as the title of one of Sullivan’s popular comedies, ‘Ants in Their Pants’, which was one of the actual working titles for Sturges’ Christmas in July (1940). One of the more striking references to Sullivan’s Travels occurs in the scene where Cousin Hogwallop’s adolescent son engineers a daring rescue of Everett and the boys from the clutches of Sheriff Cooley, piloting a getaway car through the hellish flames of a burning barn and yelling ‘Come on, boys! I’m gonna run OFF!’ This incident tropes director Sullivan’s comical attempts to elude the caravan of caretakers sent by the movie studio to protect their star director on his vagabond odyssey. In one of his attempts to ditch the studio’s babysitters, Sully hitches a wild ride in a jalopy driven by a thirteen-year-old boy who claims he is studying to be a ‘whippet tank driver’.
Another direct borrowing from Sullivan’s Travels targets a crucial scene in which Sully’s chain gang attends a screening of a Walt Disney cartoon as guests of an African-American church congregation. As they watch the silly antics of Pluto on screen, Sullivan looks around at the viewers – an integrated group of blacks and whites, quite uncommon in that era – and has an epiphany, suddenly realising the therapeutic power of comedy to lift, if only momentarily, the burden of hard reality and to bring segregated groups into harmonious unity. In O Brother, Everett and Delmar also go to the movie theatre to see a comedy. They are joined at the showing by a gang of convicts, among them Pete, who Delmar had been convinced was now a toad, and who warns his friends, ‘Do not seek the treasure!’ The movie they are watching is the 1933 comedy Myrt and Marge, a reference to film history that also affords the Coens an opportunity to flaunt their knowledge of radio history. The movie Myrt and Marge is an adaptation of the popular radio program created by Myrtle Vail, based on anecdotes from her career in vaudeville. Among Vail’s supporting cast were the Three Stooges. ‘Myrt’ is also the name Everett chooses to bestow on a non-existent member of the Soggy Bottom Boys to deceive the blind recording engineer at WEZY Radio and collect extra pay for their recording of ‘A Man of Constant Sorrow’. Although Everett and Delmar do not experience Sully’s revelatory insight about the healing power of comedy, the popular success of their record proves that music, like comedy, has the power to unify, transcending racial and cultural barriers and uniting people in the spirit of democratic freedom. This is borne out at the town gathering where the Soggy Bottom Boys perform ‘A Man of Constant Sorrow’ to the roaring approval of all, except the racist demagogue Homer Stokes, who is run out of the meeting on a rail.
The Soggy Bottom Boys record ‘A Man of Constant Sorrow’.
A Political Undercurrent
The Coens have said, ‘In our minds’ [O Brother] was presumably the movie [Sullivan] would have made if he’d had the chance. The important movie. The one that takes on the big, important themes’ (Allen 2006: 136). As self-contradictory as ever, they also say that O Brother ‘pretends to be a big important movie, but the grandiosity is obviously a joke. It’s a comedy’ (Allen 2006: 129). When asked about a political subtext, Joel replied that ‘the political undercurrent of the movie functions primarily for dramatic purposes’, depicting the politics of O Brother as ‘frankly pretty primitive’ (Allen 2006: 130). Indeed, pitting movie cut-out villains like Sheriff Cooley and cultural stereotypes like KKK Grand Wizard Homer Stokes against a singing trio of clownish but loveable folk heroes, O Brother does not ask to be taken seriously as social commentary. The result is a movie that appears to lack the crucial distinguishing attribute of Sturges’ comedies – a sharp satirical edge that cuts to the core of important socio-political issues.
For all its emphasis on ‘the sunny side’, Sullivan’s Travels also offers an at times starkly realistic picture of abject poverty and hardship, and although the comedic tone is dominant, parts of the movie (shot in faux-documentary style) still manage to portray the reality of human degradation and social malaise experienced by millions of Americans in the Depression years. Despite mounting what Paul Coughlin has described as a ‘technically precise and culturally astute recreation of America’s Deep South in the 1930s’ (2009: 197), the Coens deny having done any background research on the period and insist that their movie is not ‘about’ the actual history and politics of the 1930s. Instead, the Coens describe their storyworld as ‘an imagined world where all those things intersect – real people and made-up people’ (Allen 2006: 130). Rather than striving for historical authenticity, the Coens implicitly endorse the postmodern view of history as inexorably mediated by its textual remains, always only a post facto reconstruction fashioned from surviving cultural documents. The parodic pastiche giving shape to O Brother reminds us of our postmodern condition, implying that, in the words of Linda Hutcheon, ‘there is no directly and naturally accessible past “real” for us today: we can only know – and construct – the past through its traces, its representations’ (1997: 39).
The search for authenticity and the processes of authentification are central themes in all three of O Brother’s principle intertexts. Homer’s Ulysses returns home a stranger and must authenticate his identity to reclaim his wife and family. The same is more or less true of Ulysses Everett. Sullivan is similarly required to prove his identity to be freed from the chain gang. A related undercurrent is suggested in both O Brother and Sullivan’s Travels in their implied criticism of Hollywood’s willingness to exploit socio-political realities to produce motion-picture profits and artistic prestige. Such was certainly the case in Sturges’ day when, after flooding theatres with escapist comedies during the Depression years, Hollywood studios began to veer away from entertainment genres to produce more ‘serious’ movies which, as one of Sullivan’s studio bosses cynically comments, ‘stink with messages’. As Sullivan’s Travels makes clear, the pampered movie director’s sudden interest in poverty amounts to little more than a shallow appeal to a new industry fashion. Recalling Barton Fink’s dream of establishing a theatre ‘for the common man’, the Coens join Sturges in satirising aloof artists and intellectuals whose pretentious solidarity with the lower classes merits nothing so much as comedic lampooning.
Oblivious to the message of Sturges’ movie – that ‘message films stink’ – critics sought a deeper meaning or message in O Brother, only to find, as did Alexander Walker, that the film ‘says everything about the Coens’ love of old movie genres and pretty well nothing about anything else’. R. Barton Palmer, who elsewhere champions Coen brothers movies as ‘exceptions to the general regime of pastiche in genre filmmaking’ (2004: 60), takes back his assessment, viewing O Brother as the Coens’ ‘least serious movie’: ‘witty and sophisticated, but, true to Sullivan’s theory of a filmmaking dedicated to uncomplicated emotional uplift, it avoids serious questions of any kind’ (2004: 133). The Coens’ contention that O Brother’s political undercurrent serves only dramatic purposes confuses the issue even more. Nevertheless, Erica Rowell describes O Brother as ‘biting social drama’ and ‘a satirical investigation into America’s past’ that explores the political and spiritual bedrock of the nation (2007: 244). Given these differing perceptions, how are we to understand O Brother, Where Art Thou? Is it merely a postmodern prank on American history? Or is there a hidden polemic in their sepia-toned re-visioning of the past?
Douglas McFarland contends that although it appears to confirm the accusation that postmodern pastiche engages in nothing more than a neutral game of allusionism, O Brother shows how even a silly comedy can address social history in progressive ways. In particular, McFarland examines the ‘ironic incongruities’ built into the film’s pastiche and explores how such incongruities convey an ethical challenge to the political complacency of postmodern audiences (2009: 50). The workings of these ironic incongruities are fully exemplified, McFarland argues, in the episode staging a Ku Klux Klan rally at which the Soggy Bottom Boys’ accompanist, Tommy Johnson, is about to be hanged for the crime of being black. As the hooded brethren of the Klan assemble, they are greeted by the racist harangue of their ‘Imperial Wizard’: ‘Brothers! We are foregathered here to preserve our hallowed culture and heritage! From intrusions, inclusions and dilutions! Of colour! Of creed! Of our ol’ time religion!’ The viewer with any knowledge of the Ku Klux Klan and the racist atrocities committed by its members in the 1920s and 1930s is forced to confront the enormity of this historical moment. ‘There is quite simply,’ writes McFarland, ‘no possibility of avoiding the historical setting of the episode and the ethical response that that setting demands’ (2009: 48). Even though the sequence is rife with jokey allusions to Homer, Busby Berkeley and The Wizard of Oz (1939), it restores to memory a particularly dark moment in American history when society was still poisoned by intractable racist hatred.
Despite the dense and comical cluster of allusions on display, this scene cannot be separated from a time and place in American history that demands moral condemnation. This creates a strange kind of incongruity, where film history intersects with political history. Marching in formations reminiscent of Busby Berkeley as well as Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1936), the Klan members are made to look ridiculous as they perform a silly ritualised dance, choreographed to evoke an imagistic fusion of Hollywood escapism and fascist fanaticism in the 1930s. More than one critic has noted O Brother’s similarity to The Wizard of Oz, comparing Everett’s odyssey with Pete and Delmar to the story of Dorothy’s journey home to Kansas accompanied by three nitwit companions. Specifically, the KKK rally parodies the ‘March of the Winkies’ in The Wizard of Oz, where guards parade in military style outside the wicked witch’s castle. Sounding the depths of O Brother’s political undercurrent, Rowell reminds us that E. Y. Harburg, who wrote the lyrics and much of the dialogue for The Wizard of Oz, had artfully woven politics into that movie’s musical texture. According to Harburg, The Wizard of Oz was conceived as a tribute to US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘sunny’ leadership in dark and troubled times (Rowell 2007: 261). FDR’s state-funded socialist agenda for economic recovery included the Tennessee Valley Authority, alluded to in O Brother by the flooded valley that proves to be the salvation of Ulysses Everett McGill and company.
The satiric edge of the KKK scene is sharpened with the revelation that the ‘Wizard’ is none other than Homer Stokes, the would-be governor who campaigns with a midget representing the ‘little people’ he promises to serve faithfully. Promising reform to help ‘the little man’ but secretly leader of the KKK, Stokes has a historical model in Huey Long, Louisiana governor and senator nicknamed ‘Kingfish’, who initially promoted a reformist agenda supporting workers’ rights, but eventually succumbed to the evils of political corruption. His campaign slogan, ‘Sweep them out of office’, is echoed by Homer Stokes’ vow to ‘sweep this state clean’. Stokes’ political opponent, Pappy O’Daniel, takes his name from the corrupt Southern politician of the Depression era, W. Lee ‘Pappy’ O’Daniel, a Texas governor known for his racist politics who posed as a hillbilly during election campaigns to increase his appeal to ‘the common man’. Like the Pappy O’Daniel of O Brother, the real-life Texas politician also had a radio show and sang with groups such as the Hillbillies and the Light Crust Doughboys. Despite intervening to pardon the Soggy Bottom Boys, however, Pappy is hardly better than Stokes, a cynical shill for wealthy power-brokers, more interested in promoting his brand of flour and prolonging his incumbency than in representing the interests of his constituents. As a composite figure parodying Southern politicians, Pappy is also reminiscent of Jimmie Davis, Louisiana’s ‘Singing Governor’ who, like Pappy, campaigned with the song ‘You Are My Sunshine’.
Good Ol’timey Music
Given the filmstory’s setting in 1930s Mississippi, the mixture of Delta blues, gospel and early country music (colloquially, ‘old-timey music’) that comprises the soundtrack of O Brother is historically accurate or authentic. Both Coen brothers are longtime fans of country music, so it is not surprising that during the preparation of the screenplay they report that the music ‘began to take over the script’ (Robson 2007: 236). Music producer T Bone Burnett, who had compiled the eclectic collage of songs for The Big Lebowski soundtrack, returned to help select music for O Brother that would support the narrative, underscoring thematic elements and giving the film what Joel calls the ‘tone and the flavour’ (ibid.). On the whole, one has the impression that the soundtrack was compiled with every attempt to preserve the integrity and authenticity of this early country musical tradition. All the music chosen for the film is rooted in the southern regions in the 1920s and 1930s, and all the songs are incorporated as diegetic sound, sourced in the fictional storyworld, creating the generic impression of a musical.
Wherever possible, vocal and instrumental music is performed on-screen by an allstar line-up of musicians including veteran artists like country legend Ralph Stanley and the Grammy Award-winning Cox Family, as well as younger talents like Alison Krauss and Union Station. Some vocals had to be lip-synched, notably, George Clooney’s lead vocal on ‘A Man of Constant Sorrow’, which is sung by Dan Tyminski, a member of Union Station. Several actors performed the music unassisted, including Tim Blake Nelson, who sang the lead vocal for the Soggy Bottom Boys’ rendition of Jimmy Rogers’ ‘In the Jailhouse Now’ and Chris Thomas King, who renders the Skip James tune ‘Hard Time Killing Floor Blues’. The gravediggers who sing ‘You’ve Got to Walk That Lonesome Valley’ are not professional actors but members of a vocal group called the Fairfield Four. ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’ is sung by the Whites (end title version by the Cox Family) and ‘I’ll Fly Away’ is performed by the Kossoy Sisters. The sirens’ lullaby, ‘Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby’, is voiced by country singers Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch (who also has a cameo in the film), while ‘Angel Band’, first recorded by the Stanley Brothers in 1955, was rerecorded for O Brother by the Peasall Sisters. Some of the tracks are remixes of archival recordings and new performances. Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss, for instance, recorded new vocal tracks that were dubbed into archival recordings of ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ (written by Harry McClintock, 1928). The same is true of ‘You Are My Sunshine’ (written by Jimmie Davis), for which an archival version is refreshed with the voice of Alan O’Bryant.
Roger Ebert views the Coens’ imaginative reconstruction of 1930s Mississippi as a reminder of ‘a freaky, forgotten, haunted side of American culture’. This supposedly forgotten period of US history is linked in O Brother to the image of the railroad, originally a symbol of Manifest Destiny, but in the early twentieth century increasingly associated with the widespread poverty and homelessness of the Great Depression and a new underclass of rail-riding hobos. This phenomenon is reflected musically in the hobo chantey ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’, which plays during the opening credits as accompaniment to the convict trio’s escape from the chain gang. At a narrative level, the song’s lyrics extend an invitation to the odyssey upon which Everett and crew are about to embark: ‘I’m headed for a land that’s far away,’ an itinerant’s paradise where ‘all the cops have wooden legs, and the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft-boiled eggs’ – a fantasised candy land that proffers the illusion of escape from the harsh reality of train-hopping vagabonds who often had to dodge railroad police and guard dogs and endure painful starvation.
Also emblematic for this historical period are the chain gangs that built the railways, the image of which is introduced in the movie’s opening scene, accompanied by ‘Po’ Lazarus’, a convict work song depicting a crafty fugitive (like Everett) wanted dead or alive. As a work song sung by chain gang prisoners, ‘Po’ Lazarus’ also reiterates the central theme of O Brother, Where Art Thou?: artistic entertainment (music, movies) provides some relief from life’s unpleasant realities. It is worth noting that the sound used for this scene in O Brother is an actual field recording of a chain gang from the Mississippi State Prison made by music historian Alan Lomax and thus a historical document of actual prison life. The documentary quality of this scene is enhanced visually by de-saturating the colour to a near-monochromic level, lending it a heightened air of realism reminiscent of Sullivan’s Travels and its mixture of comedy with documentary-style images of privation, particularly in its depiction of Sully’s sojourn in a prison camp. As both films suggest, the prison camps of the Depression created a new form of social tyranny used to prolong the outlawed practices of slavery. Along these lines, O Brother’s references to the ‘Parchman Farm’ allude to a Mississippi prison of the 1930s infamous for its cruel treatment of the inmates, mostly blacks. Built by racist governor James K. Vardaman, the Parchman Farm was a ‘correctional institution’ with an ideological agenda aimed at conditioning black prisoners to be subservient to the dominant white culture, while also supplying cheap labour for business and industry.
The sense of disenfranchisement that afflicted the Depression years is revived in ‘Hard Time Killing Floor Blues’, the lyrics of which stress the plight of the homeless: ‘Times is harder than ever before, and the people are driftin’ from door to door. Can’t find no heaven.’ Sung by Tommy Johnson, this early blues classic sets the mood for the escaped convicts’ campfire meditations on the uses of the wealth Everett’s buried treasure will yield. When asked what he will do with his share, Delmar expresses his desire to buy back his family’s farm and ancestral home, saying ‘Hell, you ain’t no kinda man if you ain’t got land.’ Besides adding a Sturges-like touch of historical reality, ‘Hard Time Killing Floor Blues’ frames a scene that modestly restores to memory the hardship of capital foreclosure widely experienced during the Depression era – a hardship humorously highlighted by Cousin Hogwallop, whose farm lurches on the verge of bank repossession, driving him to betray his next of kin. The Tommy Johnson character is of course based on Robert Johnson, early blues singer and guitarist who, according to legend, traded his soul to the Devil for musical genius. Inspired by his role in O Brother, Chris Thomas King, a professional musician, not an actor, wrote an album based on Tommy Johnson’s character entitled The Legend of Tommy Johnson, Act I: Genesis 1900s–1990s, which chronicles the rise of blues music through the twentieth century.
The social tensions caused by racial integration in the old South are roundly satirised in Ku Klux Klan episode. In this historical context, the Soggy Bottom Boys constitute a socially progressive grouping. Like the subculture of chain gangs, which were often racially integrated, the musicians’ subculture is inclusive, making no distinction between black and white, creating a racial ‘blindness’ that becomes the premise for repeated sight gags, for instance, when the Boys misrepresent themselves as black men to the blind music producer at WEZY Radio who records ‘A Man of Constant Sorrow’. The recording session and its terms of payment satirise another historical inequity. In the early days of the music record industry producers would pay artists an insignificant fee and sell their recordings for huge profits. One of the best-known instances dates back to 1927 when the Carter Family played for the ‘Bristol Sessions’, receiving the modest sum of $50.00 per song. Nicknamed ‘The First Family of Country Music’, the Carters’ landmark early recordings of such songs as ‘Wabash Cannonball’ and ‘Keep on the Sunny Side’ not only exerted a profound influence on country, bluegrass and gospel music but subsequently earned huge profits for the music producers.
The gospel song ‘The Good Old Way (As I Went Down to the River to Pray)’ accompanying the river-side baptism of wandering Christians (whom Delmar calls ‘a gopher village’) introduces another ideological agenda subjected to parodic scrutiny. Besides washing away the sins of Delmar and Pete, the religious symbolism of water as purifying agent anticipates the biblical flood at the end of the story that saves the convicts and, ironically, allows Everett to be ‘born again’. Everett sees that ‘everybody’s lookin’ for answers’ but he objects to the ‘good old way’ of finding them promised by orthodox religion, refusing to join his comrades in what he considers the ‘ridiculous superstition’ of baptism. When, after the flood saves them, Delmar and Pete call their salvation ‘a miracle’, Everett complains: ‘It just never fails; once again you two hayseeds are showin’ how much you want for intellect. There’s a perfectly scientific explanation for what just happened.’ After they pick up the hitch-hiking Tommy Johnson, who says he is going to meet the Devil and sell his soul, Everett exclaims: ‘Well ain’t it a small world, spiritually speakin’! Pete and Delmar just been baptised and saved! I guess I’m the only one here who remains unaffiliated!’ This may be as close as the Coens come to disclosing their own theological position – ‘unaffiliated’, skeptical of all religious doctrine and generally mistrustful of any systematic claims to meaning and truth.
The original soundtrack for the movie was an unexpected winner of Album of the Year at the 2002 Grammy Awards, and since its initial meteoric rise to the top of the US Billboard chart it has sold millions of copies. It has been said that the O Brother soundtrack sparked a widespread revival of interest in old-time country music and blue grass, musical idioms of the 1930s that had almost passed into obscurity. This is a hallmark of the Coens’ filmmaking: rediscovering neglected aspects of American cultural history. The sincere presentation of folk music in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, apparently without the irony infusing the rest of the movie, implies that its soundtrack, if nothing else, is a piece of authentic culture worthy of being saved from the oblivion of neglect.