Following the exceptional success of No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers made Burn After Reading (2008) and quickly thereafter released in 2009 a comparably modest, low-budget movie entitled A Serious Man. With a cast of little-known actors and a story written in a more personal, autobiographical vein, A Serious Man plays more like an independent film one would expect to see in a festival competition than a movie by filmmakers now considered by many to be amongst the preeminent auteurs of their time. In the words of film critic Todd McCarthy, ‘A Serious Man is the kind of picture you get to make after you’ve won an Oscar.’ Roger Moore echoes this thought, writing that A Serious Man is ‘exactly the sort of film [the Coens] release after some dazzling success’. Although these critics seem to have overlooked Burn After Reading, which despite its sizeable budget might also qualify as the kind of off-beat movie the Coens make after a big success like No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man does prove what the brothers have often said: that they can and will make any kind of film they like. The Coens have made it clear that they do not seek popular success and auteur celebrity, which they have nevertheless achieved, one might say, in spite of themselves.
The Coens are notoriously reluctant to speak of their personal lives to interviewers and carefully skirt anything even remotely autobiographical in their writing. In this regard, A Serious Man is an exception. Set in a suburb of Minneapolis in 1967, the film’s period-milieu and characters are based on recollections of their upbringing in St. Louis Park, a Minneapolis suburb and an ethnic enclave for American Jews in the 1960s. In 1967 Joel was thirteen, the age of bar mitzvah, suggesting that Danny’s storyline draws on personal experiences of the director. Danny’s obsessive pot smoking also has a basis in historical fact. In a moment of rare candor, the Coens have admitted that they smoked a lot of weed in the late 1960s, indulging in one of the ‘new freedoms’ introduced by the emerging hippie counterculture. The summer of 1967 was famously labelled ‘the Summer of Love’, and events of that summer initiated the dissemination of the hippie counterculture into the social mainstream, particularly through the rock music emerging in the West Coast scene, represented in the movie soundtrack by the Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix. In June 1967 Hendrix made his North American debut along with Janis Joplin, Santana and many others at the Monterey Pop Festival, the first major rock festival to be staged in the US. But the revolutionary spirit of 1960s counter-culture had yet to reach St. Louis Park, Minnesota, where among the Jewish families of the community the traditions of Judaism were still piously observed. Indeed, the rich heritage of the Jewish cultural tradition is the story’s most important cultural source and, like every other ethnicity represented in the movie, it is subjected to acerbic stereotyping. In addition to the film’s dybbuk prologue spoken entirely in Yiddish, the dialogue is peppered with Yiddish expressions, like gett (a divorce under Jewish law), agunah (a woman whose husband is unwilling to grant her a gett), tsuris (aggravating trouble), and naches (pride and joy, or more specifically, the pleasure parents receive from their children). Hashem (literally translated from Hebrew as ‘the name’), a term for God used in casual conversation when uttering His real name would not be permissible, comes up often and contributes to the mystery that the story insists we should simply accept.
A Serious Man chronicles two weeks in the life of Larry Gopnick (Michael Stuhlbarg), a Jewish physics professor up for tenure. Not knowing what the outcome will be, this is time of anxious uncertainty in Larry’s life, during which he teaches his students about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Gopnick’s middle-class suburban life seems at first quiet and secure, but suddenly it all starts to fall apart. For no apparent reason, his wife Judith (Sari Lennick) asks for a divorce so that she can marry Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed), a self-important friend of the Gopnicks. Larry’s home life is further complicated by his shiftless brother Arthur (Richard Kind) who is unmarried, unemployed and free-loading at Larry’s house. Larry’s children are annoyingly self-absorbed. His son Danny (Aaron Wolff), who is supposed to be studying Hebrew scripture in preparation for his bar mitzvah, instead smokes pot at every opportunity, listens to rock music during his Hebrew classes, and constantly whines about the poor TV reception that interrupts his favorite comedy show, F Troop. Larry’s daughter Sarah (Jessica McManus) complains about Uncle Arthur hogging the bathroom (spending a lot time attending to his cyst) and steals money from her father, which she is saving for a ‘nose job’ (a joke on Jewish self-loathing). At the university, a mysterious Korean student named Clive Park (David Kang) tries to bribe Larry for a better grade on his mid-term exam. When Larry accuses Clive of bribing, the student’s father threatens him with a defamation suit. Meanwhile, Larry’s department head informs him that an anonymous letter-writer is trying to sabotage his promotion. Judith and Sy add to Larry’s travail with the demand that he move out of his own home and take up residence (with his brother Arthur) at a sleazy motel, the Jolly Roger. Arthur, who likes to gamble, is subsequently arrested for sex solicitation, forcing Larry to hire another expensive lawyer, in addition to the one already handling his impending divorce. Then, in an event that should have worked in Larry’s favour, Sy is killed in a car accident and Larry, ironically, is asked to pay for his funeral expenses. Later, we are given to understand that Sy was the anonymous letter-writer subverting Larry’s bid for tenure. While all this is going on, Larry is busy trying to figure out ‘what it all means’ by visiting a series of rabbis, none of whom can offer any useful advice. To make a bad situation worse, a routine visit to the doctor reveals that Larry might have a serious illness (probably cancer; we never know for sure). At the end of the story, crushed by mounting debt, Larry appears to take the Korean’s bribe, changing the student’s grade from F to C-. As if in punishment for his moral transgression, a tornado blows into town threatening the life of his son who, as the film comes to its abrupt end, stands directly in the path of the whirlwind.
The initial reviews of A Serious Man were mixed. Some critics loved it. In the Guardian Peter Bradshaw thought it was ‘sublimely funny… a superb and intelligent comedy.’ The Coen brothers, he writes, ‘always operate on a spectrum between broad, bright comedy and bitter darkness, and when their creations are pitched just the right distance between each, the resulting film is a marvel. So it is here.’ Ben Walters of Time Out commented that A Serious Man tells a story that is ‘sincerely engaged with the challenge of unjust suffering’, noting that what emerges from the protagonist’s struggles is ‘the sensibility the Coens have unobtrusively espoused throughout their work: reject worldly status, bear trials with humility, find joy in fellow-feeling’. Calling A Serious Man ‘a darkly funny, affectionate homage to their Jewish roots’, Ann Hornaday thinks the film succeeds ‘because it engages questions worth asking. What is integrity? What does it mean to be good?’ Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly considered A Serious Man ‘a landmark in the Coen canon’ primarily because it deals in an autobiographical mode with the Coens’ Jewish heritage. The movie is not perfect, thinks Gleiberman, who finds himself still ‘grappling with the powerfully offbeat ending’, but it is ‘cathartic to see the Coens finally show you a bit of who they are, or at least where they came from’.
Other critics had serious reservations. David Denby wrote: ‘As a piece of filmmaking craft, A Serious Man is fascinating; in every other way, it’s intolerable’, particularly in the way the Coens make their characters so ‘drably unappealing’. Peter Rainer of the Christian Science Monitor focused on the brothers’ penchant for stereotyping, writing that ‘the Coens stereotype this Jewish milieu to a fare-thee-well, and the stereotypes seem to function for them as a form of Yiddish Theater … Since the Coens have always been misanthropic,’ he writes, ‘it’s not enough to say that A Serious Man makes fun of Jews. The Coens make nasty fun of everybody. This is what they do.’ Although they poke fun at Jews and the Judaic tradition, they are still a part of it, thinks Rainer, making A Serious Man another contribution to ‘the ancient storehouse of Jewish black humour that takes off from the question, “What did I do wrong?”’. Dana Stevens of Slate Magazine proclaims A Serious Man ‘an exquisitely realized work’ in which ‘the filmmakers’ technical mastery of their craft, always impressive, has become absolute’. The degree of control the Coens exert over their audience’s aesthetic experience, however, ‘can feel almost claustrophobic’. Control issues aside, Stevens thinks the film is ‘a funny and nuanced exploration of chance, justice, and faith’. A. O. Scott of the New York Times couldn’t decide whether the Coens were making a case for atheism or looking at the world from a ‘divine’ point of view. Despite confusion and despair among some movie reviewers, A Serious Man made it onto the 2009 Top Ten lists of the American Film Institute and the National Board of Review, as well as receiving Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. There were many more awards and nominations too numerous to recount here, but it is worth noting that A Serious Man was chosen for Best Original Screenplay by both the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics.
Parable
The film narrative begins with a parable-like prologue spoken in Yiddish depicting an uncanny occurrence in an Eastern European shtetl in the late nineteenth century. On a cold winter night a married couple, Velvel and Dora, encounter a traveler who is strangely familiar. Velvel has invited the traveler into their home, where he is recognised as Reb Groshkover, a man who had supposedly died three years before. Velvel offers Groshkover hospitality, but Dora, who has certain knowledge of this man’s death, rudely declares him a dybbuk or evil spirit, uttering ‘God has cursed us.’ Groshkover graciously jokes to Velvel, ‘What a wife you have!’ But it takes only a few moments for Dora to decide on a plan of action. Calmly and deliberately, she plunges the ice pick she had been holding into Groshkover’s chest, whereupon the mortally wounded man excuses himself, saying, ‘I don’t feel at all well,’ and departs with the ice pick still lodged in his chest. Velvel cries out: ‘Dear wife. We are ruined. Tomorrow they will discover the body. All is lost!’ Dora replies: ‘Nonsense, Velvel. Blessed is the Lord. Good riddance to evil.’ A parable, perhaps, but one without resolution, for as it ends, we are left with an unanswerable question: Was Reb Groshkover a dybbuk or was he not? The only certainty this parabolic prologue suggests is that uncertainty will play a major role in the narrative that is about to unfold.
Reb Groshkover – a dybbuk?
In Jewish folklore the dybbuk is a malicious spirit believed to be the displaced soul of a dead person, which may have escaped from gehenna (hell) or could have been stolen by Satan on its way to olam ha-ba (the World to Come). The term dybbuk derives from the Hebrew word meaning ‘attachment’. The dybbuk attaches itself to a living person, inhabiting the living body like a demon or ghost. The Coens have dismissed the notion that the dybbuk story has any meaningful connection to Larry Gopnick’s tale of woe, describing it with self-deprecating irony as just an odd amusement, ‘like the cartoons they used to show in movie theaters, before the main feature’ (DVD Extra). Understood as a surrealist retelling of Jewish folklore, however, the darkly comic visitation by Reb Groschkover has notable affinities with the parabolic writings of Franz Kafka, the Jewish-Czech writer whose name has become synonymous with all things absurd and paradoxical. Over the years, Kafka and the ‘Kafkaesque’ have often been associated with Coen brothers movies and for good reasons. Not only here in A Serious Man but in their previous films, especially Barton Fink and The Man Who Wasn’t There, the Coens have created a kind of cinematic equivalent to that strange blend of nightmare absurdity and theatrical farce that goes by the name of Kafkaesque. The Kafka connection is not purely speculative; the Coens often refer to scenes in their movies as Kafkaesque, citing the surrealist dream sequence titled ‘Gutterballs’ in The Big Lebowski as a ‘Kafka break’ (DVD Interview). ‘Usually,’ says Joel, ‘if we haven’t done it by page 70 [of a screenplay in progress], we arbitrarily throw in a “Kafka break”.’ In The Big Lebowski the Kafka break interrupts the narrative flow with a dream interlude featuring the Dude in a Busby Berkeley-style dance number, set to the music of the 1960s pop hit, ‘Just Dropped In’. Without warning, this break detours from the plot and shifts the viewer from 1990 LA to a dream space filled with the Dude’s subconscious fantasies and fears. Such sudden shifts from the real to the unreal are common occurrences in Kafka’s stories, where waking and dreaming are often indistinguishable and interchangeable. In A Serious Man the Coens make frequent use of Kafka’s technique to blur the distinction between fantasy and reality. It is particularly evident in the movie’s three dream sequences, introduced in the narrative without cinematic cues signaling the transition from reality to dream. The viewer’s assumption of reality is thus contradicted when the scene is abruptly revealed as a dream. This process of presupposition and reversal is characteristic of Kafka’s writings, especially The Trial (1914), where the reader’s assumptions are constantly subverted and the narrative frequently interrupted by the intrusion of uncanny, dreamlike digressions.
Written as a parable, the dybbuk story also adopts a narrative form preferred by Kafka, well known for his parabolic anecdotes. One of these parables, entitled ‘Little Fabel’ (‘Kleine Fabel’), tells the story of a little mouse whose world grows ever more confining. ‘At first it was so wide it scared me,’ laments the mouse. ‘I ran on and was happy to see walls in the distance to my right and left, but now these long walls approach each other with such speed that I am already in the last room, and there in the corner sits a trap, into which I am running. – “You only have to change your direction,” said the cat, as it ate the mouse’ (Kafka 1976: 368; my translation). No children’s tale this. If read as allegory, its philosophical implications are dire. Kafka seems to be saying that freedom is an ideal state all humans strive to achieve. But too much freedom is frightening; we need boundaries and limits. More quickly than we realise, these boundaries become a prison (‘the last room’ with its trap), to which there is only one alternative: being eaten by the cat, which as a symbol can be construed many ways, but in the terms of the story, must at the very least signify death.
What does this little fable teach us? That all our striving for freedom is fatally doomed? That in truth we cannot abide the very freedom we idealise? Whatever meaning we might attribute to the fable, we can at least assume that Kafka takes a dim view of humanity’s fate. The parable’s lesson remains uncertain. Another well-known Kafka parable, entitled ‘Give It Up!’ (‘Gibs auf!’), poses questions much like those asked by Larry Gopnick. Like ‘Little Fable’, this short vignette narrates with urgent brevity man’s search for guidance and direction. On his way to the train station, the anonymous first-person narrator compares his watch with a tower clock and discovers that it is much later than he thought. This discovery frightens him so that he forgets the way to the station. Fortunately, a policeman (Schutzmann) is nearby whom the lost narrator can ask for directions: ‘I ran to him and asked him breathlessly to show me the way. He giggled and said: “You want me to tell you the way?” “Give it up!” he said, and turned away from me with a grand gesture, like people who want to be alone with their laughter’ (1976: 410–411, my translation). Taken as allegory, there are several ways to interpret the parable’s symbolism, especially the significance of the policeman, who might represent the Law or Justice in some abstract sense, but also the Law of the father or the patriarchal social order. The ‘Schutzmann’ (literally translatable as ‘protector’) could be construed as God, the Holy Father, or the Judaic Hashem. Whatever this protector might signify, he refuses to answer and turns away from the lost man. The protector cannot show him ‘the way’ or the path he should follow to enlightenment or salvation.
These parables are reviewed here to illustrate the problem of meaning in Kafka’s fiction, where humanity’s most urgent questions are raised again and again, but always remain unanswered. Commentators speak of the terror of ambiguity in Kafka’s writings, a strategy he uses relentlessly to unsettle the reader searching for determinate meaning or message in his words. Kafka’s terrible ambiguity is intended to create precisely the opposite of meaning and moral. In his storyworld certainty becomes an impossibility and truth (or God) is inaccessible. Perhaps the epitome of Kafka’s parabolic technique is found in the sketch entitled ‘Before the Law’ (‘Vor dem Gesetz’), summarised here in abridged translation:
Before the Law stands a gatekeeper. A man from the country comes to this gatekeeper and asks to be admitted. The gatekeeper tells him that it is possible to enter, but not now. The man from the country looks through the gate to the interior; the gatekeeper dares him to enter, admonishing him that there are many gatekeepers after him, each more powerful than the one before. The man from the country hesitates and waits. He waits for days and years, persistently asking for admission to the Law. After many years of waiting the man grows old, his eyes grow dim, but he sees a radiance streaming from the gateway to the Law. With his dying breath he asks: ‘Everyone strives to reach the Law. How does it happen that in all this time no one but me has requested entry?’ The gatekeeper replies: ‘No one else could gain admittance here because this gate was intended solely for you. And now I’m going to shut it.’ (1976: 148–149, my translation).
Like the figure of the Schutzmann in ‘Give It Up!’ here the Law could convey any number of allegorical meanings: Justice, Truth, God. Like the Everyman narrator of ‘Give It Up!’ the man from the country is barred entry, only to discover in the end that there is no single Law for all men, only an individual law for each, which the man from the country, discouraged by the gatekeeper, fails to seek. The parable ‘Before the Law’ is interpolated in Kafka’s novel The Trial and is often interpreted as an allegorical fable of the protagonist’s predicament. Josef K. is a serious man. He seeks knowledge of the Court and the justification for his trial, which he pursues through the absurdly labyrinthine bureaucracy of a secret and inaccessible judicial system he tries hopelessly to understand. By the end of his story, Josef K. has achieved no understanding of the Court and its inexplicable workings. He ‘dies like a dog’, executed by agents of the Law for undisclosed reasons. If Kafka’s parable conveys any lesson, it is the inability of the human mind to comprehend truth, which, as Kafka demonstrates, cannot be communicated in ordinary rational terms and can only be made comprehensible when illustrated in parable form.
The relevance of ‘Before the Law’ for A Serious Man resides in both authors’ preoccupation with the elusiveness of truth, the meaninglessness of life, and the absurdity of the human condition in a godless world. Like Kafka’s countryman, Larry Gopnick seeks transcendent knowledge. He demands answers to questions that cannot be answered. He wants to know what Hashem has to say. Thus, like Kafka’s seeker who continuously asks the gatekeeper the same questions, Larry consults with the leaders of his religious order, three rabbis, the first of whom tells Larry a parable about the parking lot. Confused and anxious about Judith, Larry seeks the council of Rabbi Scott (Simon Helberg), a junior rabbi, who suggests that Larry has simply lost sight of Hashem and that he must remember how ‘to see Hashem’ in the world around him. To illustrate, the rabbi asks Larry to contemplate the parking lot outside his office window: ‘Not much to see,’ Rabbi Scott admits, ‘but if you imagine yourself a visitor, somebody who isn’t familiar with these … autos and such … somebody still with a capacity for wonder… Someone with a fresh … perspective.’
Not satisfied with Rabbi Scott’s lame parable, Larry next approaches Rabbi Nachtner (George Wyner), whose Germanic name connotes a darkness obscuring the light of truth. Larry’s unanswered question has now become, ‘What does it all mean? What is Hashem trying to tell me?’ In answer, Rabbi Nachtner relates the parable of Dr. Sussman and the goy’s teeth (musically scored with the strident staccato of Hendrix’s ‘Machine Gun’). Sussman, a Jewish dentist, discovers tiny incised Hebrew lettering on a patient’s teeth. Knowing some Hebrew, Sussman deciphers the lettering, which reads: ‘Help me. Save me.’ This has never happened to Sussman. It is a singular event, a mystery. Thinking this is a sign from God, Sussman becomes obsessed with decoding the riddle, consulting the Zohar and the Cabala. But he cannot unravel the mystery. When Sussman finally seeks out Rabbi Nachtner, asking if this is a sign from Hashem, the rabbi can offer little help. As he explains it to Larry: ‘The teeth, we don’t know. A sign from Hashem, don’t know. Helping others, couldn’t hurt.’ To this, Larry can only respond: ‘It sounds like you don’t know anything! Why even tell me the story?’ Oblivious to the triviality of his parable, Nachtner continues: ‘These questions that are bothering you, Larry, maybe they’re like a toothache. We feel them for a while, then they go away.’ ‘I don’t want it to just go away!’ says Larry, exasperated. ‘I want an answer!’ ‘We all want the answer,’ Nachtner replies calmly, ‘but Hashem doesn’t owe us the answer, Larry. Hashem doesn’t owe us anything. The obligation runs the other way.’ Still not satisfied, Larry finally asks, ‘Why does he make us feel the questions if he’s not going to give us any answers?’ Nachtner replies simply: ‘He hasn’t told me.’
The religious elder Larry wants most to consult is the aged and reclusive Rabbi Marshak (Alan Mandel). Everybody tells Larry he should see Marshak. But the ancient sage remains inaccessible, despite Larry’s attempts to gain entry to his inner sanctum, closely guarded by Marshak’s secretary. Larry pleads with her, saying ‘This is not a frivolous request. This is serious – I’m … I’m a serious man. I need help. I need Marshak.’ She only stares back inscrutably. Finally, she goes to the door behind her, opens it, and shuffles into a dim inner office filled with arcana, Judaic and otherwise. Larry cranes to see into the room, but the weak light prevents a good view. All he can see is a man, old and bent, sitting motionless behind a bare desk. Larry waits. After murmuring with Marshak, she returns and shuts the door. ‘The rabbi is busy,’ she says curtly. ‘He didn’t look busy!’ contradicts Larry. ‘He’s thinking,’ she replies. If this scene does not already strike us as Kafkaesque, indeed, as a winking parody of the Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’, the Coens plant an unmistakable clue in the published screenplay, where Marshak’s secretary is described as the rabbi’s ‘elderly East European gatekeeper’ (Coen & Coen 2009: 120).
Paradox
What the Coen brothers appear to present in A Serious Man is the illustration of a paradox. By common definition, a paradox is a thought or idea that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense, and yet perhaps true. The fundamental paradox of the Coens’ fable resides in its invitation to confront serious ideas without taking any of them seriously, shaping their parable-like story as an incongruous mixture of science, philosophy, religion and comedy. A Serious Man poses serious questions: What is the purpose of suffering? Why do the righteous suffer and the evil prosper? If God exists, why does He permit such injustices? How do we understand God’s mysterious will? The immediate paradox confronting Larry Gopnick arises from his misunderstanding of what it means to be ‘a serious man’. Larry has tried hard to be righteous, obeying the laws of his religious faith and trying to do right by his family and community. But despite his apparent righteousness, he is beset with troubles and seeks answers, trying to understand what God is saying to him. Larry’s problem stems from his belief that life, the human experience, can be explained rationally, as in a mathematical proof, when in truth what little knowledge of the world we have is based on, as Larry’s student Clive says, ‘mere surmise’.
The film’s introductory epigraph, ‘Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you,’ is a commentary on the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy attributed to the eleventh-century rabbi Rashi. The biblical passage glossed is Deuteronomy 18:13: ‘You must be blameless before the Lord your God.’ Interestingly, this citation follows a passage condemning interpreters of signs: ‘Let no one be found among you who sacrifices his son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or casts spells, or who is a medium or spiritualist or who consults the dead. Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord’ (Deuteronomy 18: 10–12). Thus, in the eyes of the Jewish God Hashem, Larry, who uses the mathematical signs and formulas of quantum physics to divine scientific truth, is an abomination. Even more so his brother Arthur, who is writing a ‘Mentaculus’, a ‘probability map of the universe’ written out in complex and cryptic mathematical equations – a calculus for the workings of the universe. As such, it is an attempt to comprehend the cosmos using the signs and symbols of math and physics, an attempt to explain ‘what it all means’. Arthur, a gambler, discovers a lucrative practical application for his map, which makes him, if nothing else, unbeatable at poker. That Sy Abelman is an interpreter of signs is made clear when he instructs Larry ‘these are signs and tokens’, after giving the cuckolded husband a token bottle of wine as a peace offering.
After his sudden death, Sy Abelman is hailed as a serious man. At his funeral Rabbi Nachtner describes Sy not only as a serious man, but possibly a holy man, a tzadik, perhaps even a lamid vavnik. According to kabbalistic teachings, at any given time in history there are thirty-six righteous people called lamid vavniks (lamed = 30, vav = 6) on whom the fate of world depends. According to the Cabala, if even one of them perishes, God would destroy the whole world. Anyone could be a lamid vavnik. Their identity is unknown. The holy ones themselves, known as menschen in Yiddish, are not aware of their divine status. We cannot be certain that anyone we meet is not a lamid vavnik, therefore everyone should be treated as though they are one of the thirty-six. Calling Sy Abelman a holy man turns out to be a misnomer, however, when we learn during Danny’s bar mitzvah ceremony that Sy was most likely the person writing damning letters to Larry’s tenure committee. For reasons unknown (but probably having to do with Judith), Sy wanted to undermine Larry’s professional success. It is possible that Sy Abelman is a dybbuk, embodying the return of an ancient ancestral curse, perhaps beginning with Velvel and Dora. Rabbi Nachtner hints at such a possibility in his eulogy for Sy, where he doubts if such a ‘serious man’ could simply disappear and repeats three times during his speech: ‘Sy Abelman returns.’ If Sy is a serious man, he is serious in all the wrong ways. Perhaps Larry is the lamed vavnik, for he too claims to be a serious man. Or maybe not. Maybe Larry is cursed, or just a schmuck for trying to understand his world through the narrowing lens of science and mathematics. Maybe he should ‘accept the mystery’ as the Korean student’s father suggests. The joke, of course, is that all these characters take life too seriously, trying by different but equally serious means to decipher the meaning of life – and they are made to suffer for it.
The most serious problem the Coens wrestle with is the question of religious faith in a world where access to truth, justice and God has become difficult or impossible. To illustrate this theological dilemma, they model their narrative on the ancient story of Job in the Hebrew Bible, which teaches that God has absolute power over His creation and that man should not question His dominion, but simply submit to His will. The parallels between Job and Larry Gopnick are clearly intended. Job is a righteous man cursed and forsaken by his God who allows Satan to test Job’s faith, robbing him of his health and wealth and destroying his family in an attempt to force Job to renounce the Almighty. Great calamities are visited upon Job. His livestock is stolen and his servants put to the sword; his great herds of sheep are destroyed by the ‘fire of God’; his sons and daughters are killed by a ‘mighty wind’ that sweeps in from the desert. Hearing the report of his children’s deaths, Job strips off his clothes, falls to the ground, and worships his God saying, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked will I depart. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised’ (Job 1:20).
Despite his great suffering, Job does not curse his God, but he does protest his plight and pleads for an explanation. To comfort him in his tribulation, three friends visit Job offering opinions about his curse. The first, Eliphaz, tells Job: ‘Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty’ (5:17). The second, Bildad, assures Job that if he is pure and upright, the Almighty will restore him to his rightful place. The third, Zophar, admonishes Job to remember that no one can fathom the mysteries of God or chart the limit of the Almighty. Job replies to all three, ‘Who does not know all these things?’ ‘I am innocent,’ insists Job, ‘but God denies me justice’ (34:5).
Job wants an answer to the question, Why me? And he will not be satisfied until God speaks to him directly. Finally, God speaks, commanding Job: ‘Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me’ (40:7), then unleashing a tirade on His grandeur and dominion over all things under heaven. Nothing on earth is His equal: ‘He looks down on all that are haughty and He is king over all that are proud’ (31:34). Job can only say to Him: ‘I am unworthy – how can I reply to you?’ Job does, however, repent, saying ‘Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know’ (42:3). Satisfied with Job’s contrition and as reward for his unshakable faith, God restores him to his rightful place and blesses his life. ‘After this, Job lived a hundred and forty years [and] he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation. And so he died, old and full of years’ (42:16–17).
The relevance of Job’s torment for Larry’s tale of suffering is self-evident. Both men seek answers from God for their misfortune. Both pose the same question: Why me? But the Coens borrow more than the basic premise of the scriptural story. Transposing Job to Middle America in the 1960s, A Serious Man references its biblical source in many particulars, often citing them for humorous effect. As Job is cursed with a skin disease that plagues him with ‘loathsome sores’ from head to foot, so Uncle Arthur suffers a boil on his neck, referred to in clinical terms as a ‘sebaceous cyst’.
Like Job, Larry’s trials are many, and all the more humorous for being mostly serious. Just as Job loses everything precious, home and family, Larry loses his wife (to a deceitful hypocrite), his home (when he meekly agrees to move with his brother to the Jolly Roger) and his wealth (when Judith empties their joint bank account). Like Job, Larry is beset with trials and tribulation. A student offers him a bribe for a better grade, then after refusing the money, the student’s father threatens an absurd defamation suit. An unknown antagonist writes denigrating letters to subvert his tenure bid. His bigoted next-door neighbour, Mr. Brandt, is encroaching on his property. He is plagued by a Columbia Records Club rep trying to collect for records his son has secretly ordered in his name. Distraught over his impending divorce, Larry complains to his friend Mimi Nudell: ‘It was a bolt from the blue! What does that mean? Everything that I thought was one way turns out to be another!’ She advises Larry to see the rabbi. The three friends who visit Job are mirrored in the three rabbis from whom Larry seeks advice. Two of them offer useless parables. The third, Rabbi Marshak, is as inaccessible as the Old Testament Hashem. In the Book of Job God does finally speak to Job, commanding him to ‘brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.’ This commandment is explained in simpler terms by Rabbi Nachtner when he tells Larry: ‘We all want the answer. But Hashem doesn’t owe us the answer. Hashem doesn’t owe us anything. The obligation runs the other way.’
The Coens also sneak in some less obvious biblical references, such as Larry’s voyeuristic encounter with Mrs. Samsky, his sexy next-door neighbour. Climbing onto his roof to adjust the TV antenna so that Danny can watch F Troop, Larry observes Mrs. Samsky sunbathing in the nude. Later, he visits her and shares her marijuana joint. A subsequent dream sequence depicts Larry enjoying sexual intercourse with her. As a seductive temptress, Mrs. Samsky could be a warning to heed the Book of Job in matters concerning infidelity: ‘If my heart has been enticed by a woman, or if I have lurked at my neighbour’s door, then may my wife grind another man’s grain, and may other men sleep with her’ (31:9). Judith’s coupling with Sy Abelman may somehow be a punishment for Larry’s erotic dream of Mrs. Samsky. Larry’s rooftop peeping also references the biblical story told in the Second Book of Samuel (11), depicting the temptation of King David who, gazing from the roof of his palace, sees a woman bathing. She is Bathsheba. In awe of her great beauty, the king decides he must have her, even though she is married to one of his generals. To eliminate his rival, David sends the general into battle where he dies, freeing his widow to marry the king. But perhaps most important parallel between Larry and his biblical counterpart is that, like Job, Larry does not renounce his God. When Arthur breaks down and curses the Almighty, lamenting his impoverished life (‘Look at everything Hashem has given you! And what do I get? I get fucking shit!’), Larry simply says, ‘It’s not fair to blame Hashem.’ In spite of all that has happened to him, Larry does not lose his faith in God.
Larry discovers Mrs. Samsky.
Not content with Job as their sole biblical source, the Coen brothers also make allusions to the story of Cain and Abel. Like the Book of Job, the story of Cain and Abel is about trying to understand and communicate with God. The story centres on the conflict that arises when both brothers make offerings to God, who then chooses to favour Abel’s offering rather than Cain’s, even though Cain, the older and more respectable brother, makes his offering first while Abel is simply copying his brother’s genuine act of devotion. Presumably, Cain’s attempt to reach the Almighty is more sincere than his brother’s, but God refuses to acknowledge this. To Cain’s mind, this is a clear case of divine injustice. How could God make such an irrational choice, going against what seems to Cain the most basic moral logic? The story teaches essentially the same lesson as Job. Although they may seem incomprehensible or paradoxical, the actions of the Almighty do not have to be explained or justified. In A Serious Man the reference to Cain and Abel is signaled by Sy’s surname, Abelman, and by Judith’s choice of Sy Abelman, a self-important fool, over Larry, her devoted husband. Like God’s decision to favor Abel instead of Cain, Judith’s decision seems irrational and absurdly unjust. And, as in the Bible story, where Cain kills his brother Abel, the Coens insinuate that Larry, in the role of Cain, is responsible for Sy Abelman’s death in a car crash. As Larry is seen driving to work, parallel editing shows Sy on the way to his golf club. The parallel editing creates a sense of parallel existences or interconnected paths. Thus, by means of subtle editing, intercutting Sy’s fatal car accident with Larry’s fender bender, it is ambiguously suggested that these events are somehow connected. Although the car crashes are separated in space, temporally, they happen simultaneously, inviting us to assume, momentarily, that Larry has crashed into Sy. Unsure of the meaning or outcome of the events just witnessed, we are left in uncertainty, until later, when Larry comes home and learns from Judith that Sy is dead. Because both car crashes happen at the same moment, Larry asks his rabbi: ‘Is Hashem trying to tell me that Sy Abelman is me? Or that we are all one, or something?’
The Uncertainty Principle
Early in the filmstory Larry Gopnick is shown standing in front of a college classroom busily writing out an elaborate set of equations. Larry turns to his students and explains excitedly: ‘So, okay. So. So if that’s that, then we can do this, right? Is that right? Isn’t that right? And that’s Schrödinger’s paradox, right? Is the cat dead or is the cat not dead?’ Larry’s math may explain it all clearly, but his words, a stream of questions without answers, reveal nothing but uncertainty about the meaning of the proof. It is probable that the students also leave the classroom in uncertainty. This assumption is confirmed in the following scene in Larry’s faculty office, where he meets with Clive who protests his failing grade on the mid-term exam, saying that it is ‘unjust’. ‘I understand the physics,’ pleads the student. ‘I understand the dead cat.’ Larry argues that the physics cannot be understood without the math (the reason Clive failed the test). ‘The math tells how it really works,’ Larry insists. ‘The stories I give you in class are just illustrative; they’re like fables, to help give you a picture. I mean – even I don’t understand the dead cat.’ Apparently, Clive refuses to acknowledge the rules of scientific analysis, which in this case would require advanced knowledge of mathematical formulas and linear equations. Not satisfied, Clive pleads for a ‘secret test’, hoping for a better score. When Larry again refuses, Clive leaves, muttering ‘very troubling, very troubling…’.
As Larry subsequently discovers, the student has planted a bribe on his desk, forcing Larry to summon Clive to his office again to tell him he thinks he has left something behind. Clive counters with disingenuous denial: ‘I didn’t leave anything. I’m not missing anything. I know where everything is.’ Larry holds up an envelope filled with money: ‘This is here, isn’t it? This is not nothing, this is something. You know what it is!’ Larry cautions: ‘Actions have consequences. And we both know about your actions.’ Clive responds: ‘No sir. I know about my actions.’ Larry presses: ‘I can interpret, Clive. I know what you meant me to understand.’ Clive deflects with what sounds like ‘Meer sir my sir’, an utterance Larry at first does not understand, forcing Clive to repeat, with careful enunciation: ‘Mere surmise, sir. Very uncertain.’ Even language is used against itself to defeat certainty.
The theoretical paradox Larry is teaching his students is a thought experiment devised by German physicist Erwin Schrödinger, widely considered the father of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger’s cat experiment poses the theoretical question: When does a quantum system stop existing as a superposition of two states and become one or the other? To illustrate, Schrödinger proposed a hypothetical scenario in which a cat is caged in a box with a flask set to emit a lethal poison and an internal Geiger counter. If the Geiger counter detects any radiation in the box, the poison is released, killing the cat. After a certain time, the cat may or may not be killed, but until the box is opened and the cat observed, it remains uncertain whether the cat is alive or dead. Thus, the cat is presumed alive/dead, in a mixed state or ‘superposition’, which is the nature of all quantum systems. Although Larry can explain this to his students in mathematical terms, he admits that it proposes a paradox he doesn’t fully understand in non-mathematical terms.
The real irony is that Larry doesn’t see the theory’s application to his own life, in which he, like the cat, finds himself in a ‘mixture of states’. He has a home and family, but is simultaneously exiled to the Jolly Roger; he is married but facing divorce; he is a professor, but in limbo awaiting the tenure vote. Recently pronounced in good health by his physician, Larry suddenly faces the possibility of having a terminal illness. When his story reaches its abrupt ending, it is suggested that he is in a very real sense suspended between life and death. Other family members are also in mixed states. His son Danny stands on the brink of adulthood, about to become a member of the faith community, but he is still a child, getting high in the school bathroom, sneaking into his Hebrew teacher’s office after hours to attempt retrieval of his confiscated transistor radio. Like his father, Danny is in limbo at story’s end, his fate yet to be determined by the course of a tornado’s funnel cloud that looms over him. Brother Arthur is, one might say, in a permanent ‘superposition’, existing both in the ‘normal’ world of straight heterosexuals and in the closeted world of the Minnesota.
Another, related theory of quantum physics Larry teaches his students is the Uncertainty Principle. Advanced by Werner Heisenberg, another founding father of quantum physics, the Uncertainty Principle posits a fundamental indeterminacy in the measurement of sub-atomic particles caused by scientific observation, a theory Larry has written out in a convoluted mass of complex equations covering the entire chalk board. As he finishes, he turns to his students and announces: ‘The Uncertainty Principle. It proves we can’t ever really know what’s going on. So it shouldn’t bother you, not being able to figure anything out’ – hardly what one would expect a physicist to conclude from an extensive mathematical proof. Part of the irony here is that Heisenberg’s proof is still widely regarded as valid, despite the fact that his theory has been disproved. As later physicists have shown, the loss in precise measurement caused by observation is less than predicted by Heisenberg’s theory. Nevertheless, his mathematical calculations are, paradoxically, still considered valid. There is, of course, also the comic irony of the advice Larry gives his students: ‘So it shouldn’t bother you, not being able to figure anything out.’ But being unable to figure anything out is precisely what has been bothering Larry, whose life has been turned upside-down. As he repeatedly complains, ‘Everything I thought was one way turns out to be another.’ When the classroom clears, Sy Abelman has ‘returned’ to question Larry’s explication of Heisenberg. ‘If I’ve got it wrong,’ asks Larry, ‘what do I do?’ Sy answers: ‘So simple, Larry. See Marshak.’ Larry insists he has tried to see the rabbi, but could not gain admittance, whereupon, in a Kafkaesque moment, Sy suddenly slams Larry’s head violently against the chalk board, shouting ‘See Marshak! I seriously fucked your wife! That’s what’s going on! See Marshak!’
Of course, Larry does not see Marshak, the only one who might tell him ‘what it all means’. Like Kafka’s ‘man from the country’, Larry is denied access to ‘the Law’. Barred from truth and unable to obtain justice, his predicament recalls Josef K., the tormented protagonist of Kafka’s The Trial who is arrested one morning without having committed a crime and dies without knowing his transgression. Analogously, Larry is condemned to Job-like trials for reasons that are never made clear. The miraculous reconciliation with the Almighty that ends the story of Job is not reprised in A Serious Man where, in the film’s final scene, Larry’s future well-being and that of his family are left in grave doubt. Larry decides to change the Korean student’s grade, weighing his moral transgression against the practical necessity of paying his rapidly mounting debts. Apparently, Hashem, the vindictive God of the Hebrew Bible, disapproves of Larry’s breach of ethics and, recalling the ‘whirlwind’ that sweeps away the lives of Job’s children, the Almighty sends a tornado toward Danny’s schul. At the same moment, Larry receives a call from his doctor asking him to come in right away to discuss the results of his recent X-rays, inviting us to assume that Larry is afflicted with a serious illness. As ominous storm clouds gather over Danny’s school, the movie ends and we are left in darkness, not knowing what terrible fate is in store for father and son. We are simply asked to ‘accept the mystery’. In the end, nothing is certain and questions about the future go unanswered.
A ‘whirlwind’ approaches Danny’s schul.
The moral of Larry’s fable appears to be: What we think is true often turns out to be lies, and vice-versa. And telling an untruth, or a fable, like Schrödinger’s dead/undead cat, is often the best and sometimes the only way to illustrate a paradoxical truth. These themes are articulated in the lyrics of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody to Love’, the first song on the movie soundtrack and the last, returning at the end in the mouth of Rabbi Marshak, who reiterates them in his bar mitzvah confirmation interview with Danny: ‘When the truth is found … to be lies,’ queries the rabbi, ‘then what?’ Marshak’s answer (‘Be a good boy’) could hardly be less enlightening. This is the holy man Larry hoped would give him true insight, the only man capable of answering his question: ‘What does it all mean?’ But the rabbi’s simple question is important: When the truth is found to be lies, what then? As the screen goes blank and the end credits begin to roll, ‘Need Somebody to Love’ begins to play and Grace Slick answers the rabbi’s question: ‘You better find somebody to love.’