One of the few legitimate generalisations that can be made about Coen brothers movies is that they always end suspended in a limbo of irresolution. The satisfaction of a conventional or meaningful conclusion where conflicts are resolved and questions answered is perpetually withheld and narrative as well as interpretive resolution is denied, abandoning characters, and the viewer, to the darkness of uncertainty. A selective review of their movies’ endings serves to prove the point. The narrative of their first feature, Blood Simple, ends with Visser’s attempt to eliminate Ray and Abby as witnesses to his crimes and thus tie up loose ends. In an ironic reversal of fortune, however, Visser becomes Abby’s target and succumbs (apparently) as a result of her counterattack. Although the filmmakers have granted the viewer omniscient knowledge of what has transpired in this final scene, Abby is left guessing the identity of her assailant, thinking Visser is Marty seeking revenge. Furthermore, Visser’s actual moment of death, which would bring some natural closure to the story, is withheld and any gravity or finality his dying might have brought to a noir narrative that, generically speaking, ought to have a downbeat ending, evaporates when, in reply to Abby, who says, ‘I ain’t afraid of you, Marty,’ the wounded detective cracks wise, saying, ‘Well, ma’am, if I see him, I’ll sure give him the message.’ The potential for dramatic pathos in Visser’s death (which we never actually witness) is also short-circuited by the upbeat music (‘It’s the Same Old Song’) that immediately follows the final image, shot from Visser’s point of view, of a droplet of water falling into his eye. The unexpected humour and inappropriate music of this finale cue conflicting spectator responses, leaving the viewer disoriented and uncertain how to react.
In the final scene of the Coens’ second feature, Raising Arizona, appended as a kind of epilogue, Hi dreams of a better future in a land, where, as he says, ‘all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy and beloved’. But maybe, as Hi must admit, his dream of a better land is just an illusion, prompting him to ask the viewer: ‘And I don’t know, you tell me. This whole dream, was it wishful thinking? Was I just fleein’ reality, like I know I’m liable to do?’ The improbable silliness of his dream is made clear in Hi’s tentative conclusion: ‘If not Arizona, then a land not too far away … I dunno, maybe it was Utah.’
Continuing the pattern of open endings and postponed conclusions, the final scene of Miller’s Crossing is heavy with innuendo, but nothing is made certain. Tom’s final tip of the hat to Leo is an intentionally ambiguous gesture. We are left with the sense that the story, implicitly a love story of two men, is somehow not over. Barton Fink concludes with one of the Coens’ most confounding endings, questioning but never clarifying the distinction between reality and ‘the life of the mind’. Key iconic elements (Charlie’s box and the picture of the bathing beauty) are never assigned determinate meaning and left (intentionally) unexplained. By the end of Fargo numerous dead bodies have piled up, including those of Jerry Lundegaard’s wife and father-in-law, while Gaear has axe-murdered his partner-in-crime Carl and fed his mortal remains to the wood chipper. Brainard’s chief of police has solved the murder case, bringing closure to the plot, but still cannot fathom the purpose of the criminals’ horrific crimes. The final scene of Marge, a pregnant mother, and Norm, her supportive husband, safely tucked into their marriage bed, offers a picture of domestic bliss and promise for the future. But we are left with the sense that, in the darkness of the Coen universe, this unlikely ending is just another prank and only believable as a parody of the formulaic ‘Hollywood’ happy ending. Similarly, The Hudsucker Proxy appears to end happily with Norville’s continuing success and the resolution of his romantic conflict with Amy. But as the story makes abundantly clear, Norville is a winner only by the grace of chance and good fortune, his story and its ending pirated from Sturges, whose happy endings are always subverted by a mischievous ironic twist. Even the heroic Ulysses figure, Everett McGill of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, who overcomes all obstacles to win back his wife and family, is left at story’s end with one more task to perform to restore him officially as paterfamilias – retrieving Penny’s wedding ring (the genuine article, not one of Aunt Hurlene’s) from the bottom of a 9,000-hectare lake. The outcome of this final heroic labour is left entirely to the viewer’s imagination.
Fink’s Bathing Beauty
‘Are you in pictures?’
The epilogue that ends The Big Lebowski is given by the film’s cowboy narrator called the Stranger. Not a character in the story, the Stranger intrudes periodically into the narrative to comment on the Dude’s predicament. He is brought in again in the final scene to pronounce a few benedictory words, but the patent artificiality of his entrance into the diegesis (as he looks directly into the camera addressing the audience) illustrates the screenwriters’ self-conscious reluctance or inability to invent a plausible ending. As the Stranger tells it, in fact, the story doesn’t really end there. He alludes to the future and another little Lebowski on the way, invoking the great chain of being: ‘I guess that’s the way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations, westward the wagons across the sands of time until…’ Pausing self-consciously, he breaks off his speech: ‘Ah, I’m ramblin’ again. Well, I hope you folks enjoyed yourselves. Catch you later on down the trail.’
Whether implied or explicit, the ending of every Coen brothers story functions as an epilogue, an afterthought delaying finality, postponing closure, promising continuation. This unwillingness to allow closure is reinforced in their films by the continual postponement of death, a recurring motif played out in numerous scenarios where the dead are denied their final repose. Sometimes, as with Julian Marty in Blood Simple, this entails a return from the dead prolonged by recurrence as he comes back from death not only at the moment of his burial but again in Abby’s dreams. Other times, as with The Big Lebowski’s Donny Kerabatsos, the deceased is denied the simple dignity and finality of a proper interment, in Donny’s case, when Walter clumsily releases the ashes of his cremated remains into the wind only to have them blown back into the Dude’s exasperated face.
A correlated motif is seen in the disposal of dead bodies, so problematic in No Country for Old Men, where, in a seemingly gratuitous short scene, Sheriff Bell stops a flat-bed truck loaded with the corpses from the desert drug deal gone wrong, asking the driver, ‘You look at your load lately? That’s a damn outrage.’ The tarp covering the body bags piled in the truck bed has come untied, exposing the dead bodies to open public view. Bell’s anger is obviously driven by his respect for the dead, whose lifeless, helpless bodies, denied the common decency of burial, become the butt of a macabre joke in a scene probably intended to add a whiff of black humour. Significantly, this scene transitions via lap dissolve (an editing technique seldom seen in the Coens’ films, but traditionally used to establish a symbolic connection between shots) to the image of Moss lying in a hospital bed, eyes shut and motionless, giving the momentary appearance of death – promptly dispelled when his death-like repose is disturbed by Carson Wells, holding flowers, as if visiting a grave. Interestingly, at the close of No Country for Old Men, a story which, told conventionally, would have to end with Chigurh’s death in a violent car crash, the indestructible antagonist escapes and limps away, his improbable survival defeating any sense of justice, poetic or otherwise, that might bring closure to the narrative. Moreover, the story’s narrator, Sheriff Bell, refuses to let his story come to rest, appending a dream epilogue which itself refuses to provide any conclusions about the meaning of Bell’s vision in relation to his father, leaving the narrator (and his audience) in the dark and inhospitable wilderness described so vividly in his dream.
The Man Who Wasn’t There strains to achieve closure with the execution of Ed Crane, but the finality of his physical death in the electric chair, which we witness onscreen as a glaring illumination that consumes and obliterates his image, is mitigated by his transcendent vision of a reunion with Doris in some place ‘beyond earth and sky’. Furthermore, the final scenes of Ed on death row provide hints that, as the narrator of his story, Ed may not have been entirely reliable and thus, that we cannot be certain that the confessional ‘true story’ he is writing (for a magazine called ‘True Story’) is anything more than a condemned man’s fantasy, a possibility strongly suggested by an unexplained visit by a flying saucer on the eve of his execution. Despite its attempts to mislead and forestall conclusions, however, the ending of The Man Who Wasn’t There comes closer to drawing discernable conclusions than any previous Coen movie, if only to endorse the fatalistic worldview of classic noir fiction and film under the influence of existentialism. In this sense, The Man Who Wasn’t There marks a turning point in the Coens’ artistic development, signaling the filmmakers’ willingness to wrestle with issues of profound human importance, always latent in their films, but seldom treated explicitly unless with dark, obfuscating irony. In R. Barton Palmer’s reading of the film, the Coens’ extensive allusiveness, particularly their substantial borrowings from Cain’s fiction, amounts to more than a skillful imitation of the writer’s style and fictional universe. Instead, the Coens rework Cain’s central themes to extend and restructure the precursor-texts as, in Palmer’s words, ‘a new sincere version of film noir in which Cain’s explorations of lust and its discontents yield a meaning that is perhaps closer to the “truth” of film noir, with its deeply ironic representation of the uncertainty of human life’ (2004: 65). Compared to their inaugural film noir, Blood Simple, where the basic elements of Cain’s fiction served as a framework for playful innovations in noir aesthetics, The Man Who Wasn’t There emerges as a more mature work that engages seriously with Cain’s unspoken philosophical preoccupations, in particular, the pulp fictionist’s proto-existentialist worldview and the relationship of Cain’s writings to the philosophical fiction of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.
After their detour into light comedy between the years 2003 and 2006, during which the Coens released Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers, the brothers returned to weightier themes in No Country for Old Men where, to preserve the philosophical integrity of McCarthy’s novel just as they had honoured the existentialism of Cain’s fiction, the Coens were willing to address, if not answer, troubling questions about the nature of human experience – chance versus free will and the certainty of belief versus the loss of faith – with unaccustomed sobriety.
As the endings of their stories show, the Coens do not like conclusions – not just the structural closure of narrative, but also any conclusive statements of their films’ intentions or ‘message’. Generally, the brothers punish characters who make assumptions and presume to draw from them meaningful conclusions. Often we have the sense that the Coens are punishing their viewers, too, for making assumptions about the meaning and purpose of their films, teasing their audiences with erudite cultural references that promise deeper significance, but only lead us in circles where we had hoped to plot a linear course terminating somewhere in the vicinity of certainty. Indeed, the rule of uncertainty, in art and in life, could be the Coens’ greatest theme, the only meagre and insufficient truth they are able to voice. They explore the theme of uncertainty obsessively, in all of their works, but nowhere is it more ruthlessly travestied than in A Serious Man. Although the film pokes fun at ‘serious men’ like Larry Gopnick, whose efforts to ascertain meaning and truth by calculation amount to grand folly, behind its irony and black humour the film engages deeply with issues of religious faith and the values of family and community life. As one commentator has suggested, A Serious Man is perhaps the Coen brothers’ ‘urtext, a distillation of the themes, preoccupations, and flaws that have animated the best and the worst films of their career’ (Hornaday 2009). What might constitute the flaws in their work is uncertain, but certainly A Serious Man anthologises the Coen brothers’ central philosophical preoccupations, above all, the elusiveness of meaning, the inaccessibility of truth and the resulting uncertainty which strands us in a multitude of competing and conflicting interpretations of what constitutes knowledge. In A Serious Man, the ‘seriousness’ of science, religion and all forms of human truth-seeking is played for laughs and the viewer is commended with mock piety to ‘accept the mystery’ and simply bear witness to the absurd comedy of human existence, without asking ‘what it all means’.
If the endings of their films are consistently inconclusive, a symptom of their refusal to assign determinate meaning or purpose to their creations, the question becomes: What, if any, are the ‘ends’ or aims of the Coen brothers as film auteurs? In one sense, their refusal to make conclusive statements of meaning can be understood as a function of what R. Barton Palmer has called a ‘postmodern authorial absence’ (2004: 51), a vacancy opened by postmodernism’s deconstruction of the auteur as a unified and unique voice striving for self-expression and authenticity. This struggle was perhaps necessary in the old Hollywood studio system where the film director had to fight for creative autonomy within a repressive industrial structure. But in the postmodern/post-studio era that struggle and the belief in the author as the originator of a uniquely personal vision has been abandoned. The auteur and his text are now to be conceived as plural. The artistic creator is no longer held responsible for the meaning of his creations. One of most essential lessons of Bakhtin’s dialogism is that language, ‘the word’, is ‘inter-individual’. Relations to others and their dialogical responses (communicated via the word) are constitutive of all individual identity. Thus, the boundaries defining self-identity become fluid, more permeable. In the work of postmodern art, individual effort yields to collaboration and the sense of authority once demanded of the artistic text gives way to the play of intertextual dialogism. Taken in this Bakhtinian sense, the name ‘Coen brothers’ designates something less, but, paradoxically, also something more than the term auteur is generally thought to mean. We sense in their films the presence of a guiding intelligence and sensibility, but the exact intentions of the imagination that shapes their stories and characters remain elusive, difficult to track through the multiplicities of allusion, quotation and borrowing that converge in their intricate and expansive intertexts.
One alternative to the traditional understanding of authorship, suggested by Thomas Elsaesser, is to redefine the fiction of the ‘auteur’ as ‘the name for the pleasure that seems to have no substitute in the sobered-up deconstruction of the authorless voice of ideology’ (1981: 11). If ‘pleasure’ is indeed what remains of the postmodern auteur, how do we designate the pleasure we derive from the Coen brothers? For some it might be the intellectual pleasure they discover in the richness of the Coens’ densely allusive and ingeniously orchestrated intertextual constructs. Others might find a different pleasure in the visceral effects of grotesque and excessive violence or in the exuberant and innovative visual style of their films. One can take pleasure, as do the writers themselves, in the stylish wit of their dialogue or their artful rendering of regional dialects. Pleasure can be found in the sensual/intellectual enjoyment afforded by their artfully designed and executed music soundtracks, exemplified by the carefully chosen and extensive compilation of songs scoring O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Big Lebowski and, most recently, Inside Llewyn Davis, where music sets the mood, dramatic or comic, in nearly every scene. Whether it be the intellectual delight of identifying the seemingly infinite varieties of literary, cinematic and cultural references embedded in their movies or the carnivalesque pleasures of low humour that hold intellect in touch with body, the pleasures of their films are innumerable and more than adequate compensation for the stubborn refusal of meaning and finality. Perhaps there is enjoyment in that as well – the delight caused by the uncertainty that unsettles meaning, but also rewards those tired of the formulas of conventional storytelling and willing to explore the pleasurable ambiguity that informs and enlivens the films of the Coen brothers.
Detractors have dismissed the Coen brothers as intellectual hedonists interested only in the cheap thrills of violence or the shallow pleasure of self-gratification the filmmakers seem to take in the meticulous craftsmanship of their films – no need for the deeper satisfactions that ‘meaningful’ content can supply. But perhaps there is yet another way to understand the pleasures of their films. Rather than hedonists, the Coens are perhaps more rightly considered filmic epicureans. As the Greek philosopher Epicurus taught, pleasure is the proper goal of a good life. But for Epicurus, pleasure is not defined as the decadence of mindless hedonism – the intoxication, gluttony and overindulgence commonly associated with epicureans. Instead, for the ancient philosopher pleasure is understood as the absence of physical discomfort and emotional distress. The good or ‘blessed’ life is attained by moderation and by making choices that ensure freedom from pain and anxiety and create a constant state of tranquility. Morgan Rempel has suggested that Jeffrey ‘the Dude’ Lebowski has adopted an epicurean lifestyle, observing that the Dude has achieved supreme contentment by renouncing the unsettling desire for the material satisfactions of wealth, power and social prestige, devoting himself instead to a life of uncomplicated pursuits – bowling, smoking weed, listening to ‘the Creedence’ and generally just ‘takin’ it easy for the rest of us sinners’. Applied to the rest of the Coens’ film work, the Dude’s epicurean philosophy of life prescribes a cessation of the discomfiting desire to find meaning and finality in their films. Not just in The Big Lebowski, but in all Coen brothers movies we are asked, in accordance with the motto of A Serious Man, ‘to receive with simplicity’ everything they have written.
The Coen brothers’ epicurean aesthetic has a relevant parallel in the existentialist conception of art. As Albert Camus explains in The Myth of Sisyphus, authentic art must refuse to invest its world with false purpose. This refusal is the consequence of adopting an ‘absurd attitude’ which compels an acceptance of life’s meaninglessness. The art of the absurd, insists Camus, ‘must remain aware of its gratuitousness’ (1991: 102). At the moment a work of art sacrifices itself to illusions and arouses hope, it ceases to be gratuitous. The absurd artist, writes Camus, ‘will not yield to the temptation of adding to what is described a deeper meaning that it knows to be illegitimate’ (1991: 97). In this liberation from hermeneutic necessity, both artist and audience are freed to explore the absurdity of existence, which does not of any necessity lead to nihilism and the tyranny of uncertainty, but rather to the abandonment of the struggle for meaning and purpose and a renewed and unencumbered enjoyment of the concrete aesthetic pleasures a work of art can provide. Camus calls for ‘an art in which the concrete signifies nothing more than itself. It cannot be the end, the meaning, and the consolation of a life’ (1991: 97). This is, essentially, what the Coen brothers have always said about their films: ‘We want to talk about [our] movies, but the movies speak for themselves’ (Allen 2006: 66). In other words, we should not expect the filmmakers to answer the question that plagues Larry Gopnick in A Serious Man, who continually asks, ‘What does it all mean?’ As Rabbi Nachtner explains to Larry, ‘God doesn’t owe us an answer. The obligation runs the other way.’ This rule applies to the Coens as well. They don’t owe us an answer to the meaning of their films. We are answerable to their texts. Our response is our own responsibility.
The absence of meaning postulated by existentialist philosophers compels the discovery of the absurd, but as Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, ‘One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual on happiness’ (1991: 122). Even the mythic figure of Sisyphus, condemned to eternal, meaningless labour, must be imagined as happy. All that remains after the discovery of the absurd is laughter. This is the joyful wisdom that infuses the Coens’ entire body of work, given expression in the aesthetic credo espoused by the movie director John L. Sullivan in Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels. After experiencing first-hand the harsh and impoverished reality facing his audiences outside the movie theatre, the fictional filmmaker is forced to conclude that his silly, lightweight comedies, the value of which he had doubted, serve the viewer something more valuable, and necessary, than the serious ‘message movie’ he believed he should make. His experiences have taught him that for many of his movie patrons, the laughter his comedies provide is the only comfort available in an otherwise indifferent, intractable and ultimately tragic world. Entertainment, and nothing more, is what the filmmaker owes his audience, and that, we can finally say to a certainty, is what Joel and Ethan Coen have consistently, abundantly and artfully delivered in their films.
