November 18, 2014 (Series 29:13) Joel and Ethan Coen, FARGO (1996, 98 minutes)

Fargo won 2 Academy Awards in 1997, Best Actress in a Leading Role, Frances McDormand, and Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen. Directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen Written by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen Produced by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen Music by Carter Burwell Cinematography by Roger Deakins Film Editing by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen Special Effects by Wilfred Caban, Dieter Sturm, and Yvonne Sturm William H. Macy ... Jerry Lundegaard Steve Buscemi ... Carl Showalter Peter Stormare ... Gaear Grimsrud Kristin Rudrüd ... Jean Lundegaard Harve Presnell ... Wade Gustafson Tony Denman ... Scotty Lundegaard Steve Reevis ... Shep Proudfoot Frances McDormand ... Marge Gunderson Cliff Rakerd ... Officer Olson José Feliciano ... Himself Bark Beetle ... Narrator Joel and Ethan Coen (director, writer, producer) (b. Joel Daniel Coen, November 29, 1954; Ethan Jesse Coen, September 21, 1957 in Minneapolis, Minnesota) won 4 Academy Awards: 1997 Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen for Fargo (1996), 2008 Best Motion Picture of the Year for No Country for Old Men (2007), which they shared with Scott Rudin; 2008 Best Achievement in Directing for No Country for Old Men (2007); and 2008 Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay for No Country for Old Men (2007). Joel has 23 producer credits, 23 writing credits, 19 director credits, and 14 editing credits. Ethan hhas 24 producer creddits, 27 writer credits, 19 director credits, and 14 editor credits. The two usually edit under the name “Roderick Jaynes.” Some of their films are 2013 Inside Llewyn Davis, 2010 True

Grit, 2009 A Serious Man, 2008 Burn After Reading, 2007 No Country for Old Men, 2004 The Ladykillers, 2003 Intolerable Cruelty, 2001 The Man Who Wasn't There, 2000 O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 1998 The Big Lebowski, 1996 Fargo, 1994 The Hudsucker Proxy, 1991 Barton Fink, 1990 Miller's Crossing, 1987 Raising Arizona, and 1984 Blood Simple. Roger Deakins (cinematographer) (b. May 24, 1949 in Torquay, Devon, England) has been the cinematographer for 75 films and television shows, including 2013 Prisoners, 2012 Skyfall, 2010 True Grit, 2010 The Company Men, 2009 A Serious Man, 2008 Revolutionary Road, 2008 The Reader, 2008 Doubt, 2007 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, 2007 In the Valley of Elah, 2007 No Country for Old Men, 2005 Jarhead, 2004 The Ladykillers, 2003 House of Sand and Fog, 2003 Intolerable Cruelty, 2001 A Beautiful Mind, 2001 The Man Who Wasn't

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There, 2000 O Brother, Where Art Thou, 1998 The Big Lebowski, 1997 Kundun, 1996 Fargo, 1995 Dead Man Walking, 1994 The Shawshank Redemption, 1994 The Hudsucker Proxy, 1993 The Secret Garden, 1992 Thunderheart, 1991 Barton Fink, 1991 Homicide, 1990 Air America, 1988 Pascali's Island, 1987 White Mischief, 1986 Sid and Nancy, 1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1983 Another Time, Another Place, 1980 Van Morrison in Ireland (Documentary), 1980 Blue Suede Shoes (Documentary), 1977 Marquis de Sade's Justine, and 1975 Mothers Own (Documentary short). William H. Macy ... Jerry Lundegaard (b. William Hall Macy Jr., March 13, 1950 in Miami, Florida) has appeared in 132 films and television shows, among them 2011-2015 Shameless (TV Series, 55 episodes), 2014 Two-Bit Waltz, 2013 Trust Me, 2012 The Sessions, 2010 Dirty Girl, 1994-2009 ER (TV Series, 31 episodes), 2007 Wild Hogs, 2006 Everyone's Hero, 2006 Inland Empire, 2005 Thank You for Smoking, 2004 In Enemy Hands, 2003 Seabiscuit, 2003 The Cooler, 2001 Jurassic Park III, 2000 Panic, 1999 Magnolia, 1998 A Civil Action, 1997 Wag the Dog, 1997 Boogie Nights, 1997 Air Force One, 1996 Ghosts of Mississippi, 1996 Fargo, 1996 “Andersonville” (TV Movie), 1995 Mr. Holland's Opus, 1995 Murder in the First, 1994 Oleanna, 1994 The Client, 1994 Being Human, 1993 Searching for Bobby Fischer, 1990-1992 “Law & Order” (TV Series), 1991 Shadows and Fog, 1991 Homicide, 1987 House of Games, 1987 Radio Days, 1983 WarGames, and 1980 Somewhere in Time. Steve Buscemi ... Carl Showalter (b. Steven Vincent Buscemi, December 13, 1957 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York) appeared in 130 films and television shows, some of which are 2010-2014 Boardwalk Empire (TV Series, 56 episodes), 2014 The Cobbler, 2013 Grown Ups 2, 2013 The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, 2007-2013 “30 Rock” (TV Series, 6 episodes), 2012 On the Road, 2010 Grown Ups, 2009 Saint John of Las Vegas, 2006 Charlotte's Web, 2004-2006 “The Sopranos” (TV Series, 14 episodes), 2005 The Island, 2003 Coffee and Cigarettes, 2001 Monsters, Inc., 2001 Ghost World, 2000 Animal Factory, 1998 Armageddon, 1998 The Big Lebowski, 1997 Con Air, 1996 Escape from L.A., 1996 Kansas City, 1996 Trees Lounge, 1996 Fargo, 1995 Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, 1995 “Homicide: Life on the Street” (TV Series), 1994 Airheads, 1994 Pulp Fiction, 1994 The Hudsucker Proxy, 1993 Twenty Bucks, 1992 Reservoir Dogs, 1991 Billy Bathgate, 1991 Barton Fink, 1990 Miller's Crossing, 1990 King of New York, 1989 Mystery Train, 1987 Heart, 1986 No Picnic, and 1985 The Way It Is. He also has 13 film and TV series directing credits, and 10 producer credits. Peter Stormare ... Gaear Grimsrud (b. Peter Ingvar Storm, August 27, 1953 in Arbrå, Gävleborgs län, Sweden) has appeared in 150 films and television shows, among them 2015 Dark Summer, 2014 Bang Bang Baby, 2014 22 Jump Street, 2013 Heatstroke, 2013 The Zero Theorem, 2013 The Last Stand, 2012 Lockout, 2010 Henry's Crime, 2010 Undocumented, 2010 Corridor, 2009 “Entourage” (TV Series), 2009 The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, 2009 The Killing Room, 2008 Witless Protection, 2008 Orgies and the Meaning

of Life, 2006 One Night with You, 2005 The Brothers Grimm, 2002 Minority Report, 2002 Bad Company, 2000 Chocolat, 2000 Dancer in the Dark, 1998 Armageddon, 1998 Mercury Rising, 1998 The Big Lebowski, 1997 The Lost World: Jurassic Park, 1996 Fargo, and 1990 Awakenings. Frances McDormand ... Marge Gunderson (b. Frances Louise McDormand, June 23, 1957 in Chicago, Illinois) won the 1997 Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for Fargo (1996). She has appeared in 60 films and television shows, some of which are 2014 “Olive Kitteridge” (TV Mini-Series), 2012 Promised Land, 2012 Moonrise Kingdom, 2011 Transformers: Dark of the Moon, 2008 Burn After Reading, 2005 North Country, 2002 City by the Sea, 2002 Laurel Canyon, 2001 The Man Who Wasn't There, 2000 Almost Famous, 2000 Wonder Boys, 1998 Madeline, 1997 Paradise Road, 1996 Lone Star, 1996 Primal Fear, 1996 Fargo, 1995 Beyond Rangoon, 1994 Bleeding Hearts, 1993 Short Cuts, 1991 The Butcher's Wife, 1991 Barton Fink, 1990 Miller's Crossing, 1988 Mississippi Burning, 1987 Raising Arizona, 1985 “Hunter” (TV Series), and 1984 Blood Simple.

Joel & Ethan Coen, from The St James Film Directors Encyclopedia. Ed. Andrew Sarris. Visible Ink, NY, 1998. Entry by R. Barton Palmer Although Joel Coen had worked as an assistant film editor on commercial projects and had made valuable contacts within the industry (particularly director Sam Raimi), he and his brother Ethan decided to produce their first feature film independently, raising $750,000 to shoot their jointly written script for Blood Simple, a neo-noir thriller with a Dashiell Hammett title and a script full of homages to Jim Thompson. Though Joel received screen credit for direction, and Ethan for the script, this distinction is somewhat artificial both here and in their subsequent productions. Joel and Ethan cowrite their scripts and meticulously prepare storyboards in a collaborative effort unusual for the American cinema (the closest analogy perhaps comes from abroad with the British team of Powell and Pressburger). Blood Simple was hardly the first film the Coen brothers made together. Addicted to TV and movies at an early age, they spent a good deal of their childhood writing films and then shooting them on a Super-8 camera. Movie brats in the

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Spielberg tradition, Ethan and Joel desired commercial success but were determined to retain control over what they produced. Hence their initial desire to make an independent film rather than continue working in an industry where Joel was already beginning to be established. A hit with many on the art film/independent circuit but also a commercial success in art houses and cable release, Blood Simple was the perfect choice to achieve this aim. Here was a film that succeeded because of its individual, even quircky vision. Using the film noir conventions popular with American audiences for half a century, the Coens offer a clear narrative, solidly two-dimensional characters, and the requisite amount of riveting violent spectacle (including one scene that pictures a dying man buried alive and another featuring close-ups of a white-gloved hand suddenly impaled by a knife. Blood Simple, however, is by no means an ordinary thriller. The plot turns expertly and unexpectedly on a number of dramatic ironies (no character knows what the spectator does and even the spectator is sometimes taken by surprise). Unlike hardboiled narratives à la Raymond Chandler, the narrative delights in its Aristotelian neatness, in its depiction of experiences that make perfect sense, climaxing in a poetic justice that the main character and narrator, a venal private detective, finds humorous even as it destroys him. Thematically, the Coens offer a compelling analysis of mauvaise foi in the Sartrean vein as they develop characters doomed by bad intentions or a failure to trust and communicate (an existentialist theme that results perhaps from the fact that Ethan majored in philosophy at Princeton). Blood Simple’s most notable feature, however, is an expressive stylization of both sound and image that creates an experiential correlative for the viewer of the characters’ confusion and disorientation. These effects are achieved by a Wellesian repertoire of tricks (wide-angle lenses, tracking set-ups, unusual framings, an artfully selected score of popular music, etc.). The film genre naturalizes the stylization to some degree, but Blood Simple exudes a riotous self-consciousness, a delight in the creation of an exciting cinema that offers moments of pure visceral or visual pleasure. Though some critics thought Blood Simple a kind of pointless film-school exercise, audiences were impressed—as were the major studios who competed for releasing rights to the brothers’ next project. The Coens’ subsequent films have all been made with substantial commercial backing, but these films continue to be independent in the sense that none fits into the routine categories of contemporary Hollywood production. In fact, the art cinema tradition of the seventies has been kept alive by the Coens and the few other mavericks (e.g. Quentin Tarantino) who have emerged to prominence. The least successful of these films—Miller’s Crossing—is the most traditional. A “realistic” drama (though the scenes of violence are highly stylized) with a well-developed plot line, this saga of Prohibition-era mobsters, like Scorsese’s Goodfellas (released the year before), aims to debunk the

romantic tradition of the gangster film most tellingly exemplified by The Godfather (1972). The central character, a “good guy” high up in the organization, confusingly seems more a victim of his poor circumstances than a force to be reckoned with. The plot is otherwise dependent upon unbelievable characters and unlikely twists and turns. Some elements of parody are present, but are not well integrated into the film’s

structure, indicating that the Coens were uncertain about how to proceed, whether to make a gangster film or send up the conventions of the genre. The other films share a different representational regime, a magical realism that does not demand versimilitude or logical closure, but has the virtue—for the Coens-of permitting more stylization, more moments of pure cinema.

Raising Arizona and The Hudsucker Proxy offer postmodern versions of the traditional Hollywood madcap comedy; in both films, a series of zany adventures climax in romantic happiness for the male and female leads. Raising Arizona concerns the ultimately unsuccessful attempt of a zany and childless couple to kidnap a baby; The Hudsucker Proxy sends up, in mock Capra-corn style, he triumph of the virtuous, if obtuse, hero over the evil system that attempts to use him for its own purposes. Barton Fink, in contrast, is a darker story, heavily indebted to German Expressionism (an influence to be noted as well in the elaborately artificial sets and unnaturalistic acting of The Hudsucker Proxy). The film’s main character is a thirties stereotype, a left-wing Jewish playwright committed to representing the miseries of what he calls “the common man.” Hired away from Broadway by a Hollywood studio, he embarks unwittingly on a penitential journey that lays bare the forces of the id both in the apparently common man he meets (a salesman who is actually a serial killer) and in himself (abandoning his writing responsibility, he finds himself at film’s end at the beach with the beautiful woman whose picture he first saw in a calendar). All three of these films abound in bravura stylizations. A man dives out of a skyscraper window and the camera traces the stages of his fall (Hudsucker); a baby’s meanderings across the floor are captured by a camera literally at floor level (an elaborate mirror shot in Arizona); wallpaper peels off a hotel room wall revealing something warm and gooey like human flesh underneath (Barton Fink); exaggerated sounds—a mosquito’s flight, a noisy bed, a whirling fan—perfectly express the main character’s self-absorption and anxiety (Barton Fink again). With Fargo, their 1996 release, the Coen brothers return to the crime drama. Set primarily in Minnesota, the film follows an immensely likable and very pregnant sheriff (played by Frances McDormand, Joel Coen’s wife) as she pursues a couple of dimwitted and cold-blooded kidnappers. A macabre thriller veined with moments of comedy, Fargo features the

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Coen brothers’ trademark cinematic flair (though the landscape mutes this somewhat) and intelligent narrative focus. The Coens appear to have abandoned for good the stylized realism and Aristotelian narrative that made Blood Simple such a success. But in an era that has witnessed the commercial success of cartoonish anti-naturalism (Dick Tracy, the Batman films), their concern with striking visual and aural effects may provide the basis for a long career, though difficult films like Barton Fink despite critical acclaim, will never gain a wide audience. The Big Lebowski. J.M. Tyree & Ben Walters. BFI Palgrave Macmillan. London, 2007. The Coen picture A delight in unexpected collage has always been deeply embedded in the Coens’ films….This penchant for absurd juxtaposition applies not just to aspects of individual movies, but to the Coens’ entire career. Formally speaking, theirs is an unusual varied oeuvre for film-makers of such critical stature, with works ranging across periods, locations, styles and genres from 1940s Hollywood to contemporary Texas, quasi-realism to the brink of the surreal, screwball comedy to gangland politics. They do like crime stories of one kind or another. Consistencies can also be found in their idiosyncratic approach to character, dialogue and certain considerations of technique, such as the predilection for wide-angle lenses and other recurring pet motifs identified by William Preston Robertson. But ‘the Coen picture’ is a considerably harder beast to taxonomies than, say, ‘the Hitchcock picture’ or ‘the Sirk picture’. You never know what’s around the corner. The Coen modus operandi of serial homage bears comparison with that of Billy Wilder. As Richard Schickel notes, Wilder would speak of his ‘Lubitsch film’, his ‘Hitchcock film’ and so forth, of trying something ‘in a manner he admired’. Wilder, with his chameleon-like adaptability and his style of many styles, was clearly a Coen precursor…. …These mortals may be fools, but they actually love each other. This makes them—and arguably the Coens—very different from the characters in and film-makers of the typical camp postmodern mode, which generally ends in cynicism and showy surface-effects rather than affirming life and ultimately choosing real feelings. If there is a larger claim to be made about the importance of the Coens as film-makers, it involves the dimension of their films, of which The Big Lebowski is probably the finest example. All of the characteristic postmodern tricks are on display—the subversive mockery of narrative, the method of inhabiting a genre to expose its artificiality, the satirical thrust of its allusions to the classics, its disbelief in the old structures, tropes and systems—but they are not the ultimate purpose of the film. Irony, that slipperiest of all terms is not

discarded by the Coens; if anything it is being amped up. But what might be called ‘ironic effects’—verbal irony, dramatic irony and intertextual irony that brings in other works of art in

order to tease them—are not the only effects that the Coens achieve. If there might be new horizons to be glimpsed beyond the postmodern, in which neither the old ‘naively’ realistic narratives, the experimental modernist techniques nor the postmodern recycling jobs reign supreme, the Coens seem like important precursors. Paul Coughlin: “Joel and Ethan Coen” (Senses of Cinema 26, May 2003 The Coens are clever directors who know too much about movies and too little about real life. —Emanuel Levy, Cinema of Outsiders The adolescent experiences of the young Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, forced indoors by frigid Minnesota winters, provides a remarkably crystalline metaphor for their later film work. It is easy to imagine the brothers

peering out their living-room window to witness the very particular and precise ethnographic detail which would find careful representation in their best received film, Fargo (1996), then turning to their television-set to observe a Frank Capra comedy or Preston Sturges farce and discovering moments, characters, narratives and themes which would find illustration in their most mannered and artificial work, The Hudsucker Proxy (1993). The Coens have been drawn to two seemingly irresolvable modes of expression: ethnographic regionalism and artificial fabrication. It is between these two extremes that the remainder of their films can be mapped. Many of the films of the Coen brothers are specific to particular regions and communities—Blood Simple (1983) owes much of its character to its Texas setting, Raising Arizona (1987) paints a very particular picture of the inhabitants of the American South-West, The Big Lebowski (1998) gains much of its absurdist comedy from its depiction of the very absurd Los Angeles community and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) relies on the meticulous recreation of Depression-era Mississippi. Yet, the Coen brothers are just as assured in depicting artificial worlds with antecedents in popular culture. Miller’s Crossing (1990), which spins a vast intrigue in an unnamed town, secures much of its conception from Dashiell Hammett’s novels, The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) owes its physical and thematic construction more to the universe of film noir than its Californian location, and The Hudsucker Proxy is a patchwork assembly of Capra settings, Sturges characters and Screwball Comedy tropes. Barton Fink (1991) might be described as occupying a midpoint position in such an analytical survey of Joel and Ethan Coen’s films. Barton Fink is set in the ‘real’ world of Hollywood—an exquisite conception of an authentic

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world of pure make-believe, “a society where myth has blurred with reality.” Blood Simple Ironically, it has been these twin aspects of Joel and Ethan Coen’s work—particularised communities and artificial constructions—which has provided the most potent ammunition for critics. The Coens’ detailed reconstruction of identifiable communities, with all their quirks and eccentricities, has led many critics to accuse them of adopting a lofty superiority to their characters. Yet, when they construct a world with no resemblance to reality they are charged with avoiding moral or ethical expression. Nearly 20 years since they made their debut with the independently financed Blood Simple, the Coen brothers remain in critical limbo—considered to be neither serious artists nor commercial achievers. Joel and Ethan Coen were born in Minnesota to academic parents. The brothers were raised in a typical middle-American, middle-class Jewish household. Their childhood was largely unremarkable and aside from the production of a few super-8 home movies, a future in filmmaking seemed unlikely (Ethan’s book of short stories entitled Gates Of Eden contains pseudo-biographical, though ‘fictional’, narratives of the Coens’ upbringing). Joel proceeded to New York University where, in lieu of anything better, he enrolled in a film course. Ethan, on the other hand, ventured to Princeton; choosing Philosophy as his major, he composed a thesis on Wittgenstein. Joel’s film school experience would assist him in landing a number of editing jobs on small budget films, providing him with exposure to film production practices. With this grounding the brothers were motivated to make their own film. With the help of investors from the local Minnesota business community the Coens set about making their first feature length film—Blood Simple. The Hudsucker Proxy Joel and Ethan wrote, directed and produced the film, a working regime they have maintained thus far in their career. They also edit most of their movies using the single pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. Though nominally Joel directs and Ethan produces, their duties are said to be shared. Whilst working with the Coens on The Hudsucker Proxy, Paul Newman claimed he had “never had two directors…[and]…never worked with two guys who had equal creative authority who didn’t squabble.” That the Coen brothers don’t ‘squabble’ reflects the total control they maintain over their vision from script to screen. Anecdotal reports suggest that actors who skip words (even seemingly insignificant dialogue) in line readings are politely requested to repeat the exercise with complete accuracy. The films of the Coen brothers are also rigorously story-boarded, ensuring the visual conception is affirmed and preserved by the many other

creative talents—cinematographers, actors, editors—involved in the production of their films. What becomes apparent in the brothers’ approach to movie-making is a desire to control their films completely. Despite working across a vast array of generic categories and utilising different thematic approaches it is possible to discern many recurrent motifs and continuing interests in their films. Joel and Ethan Coen’s striking ability to compose brilliant dialogue for their characters is perhaps the most distinguished aspect of their work. The dominant critical approach taken with regard to Fargo focused on the attention paid to capturing the

specific dialect of the Minnesota community. Peter Körte argues that the attention given to maintaining an authentic language-scheme is less a simple affectation or cute device and more an “expression of a very specific experience and mentality,” supporting the notion that the Coens’ ethnographic project is legitimate. In their postmodern films, such

as The Hudsucker Proxy and Barton Fink, ethnocentric detail is rejected and replaced by allusions to popular culture. This ties in with the Coen brothers’ rampant application of pre-existing source material in new and ironic ways. It is this element, common in many of their films, which lends weight to the charge that their films are empty of new ideas or moral positions. Todd McCarthy argues, with respect to The Hudsucker Proxy, that “rehashes of old movies, no matter how inspired, are almost by definition synthetic, and the fact is that nearly all the characters are constructs rather than human beings with who the viewer can connect.” Yet, when the Coens construct ‘human beings’ they are often accused of adopting a mocking tone to them. Devin McKinney suggests Fargo is “a fatuous piece of nonsense, a tall cool drink of witless condescension” and Emanuel Levy claims that the Coens “have always treated their characters with contempt, ruthlessly manipulating and loathing their foolishness.” The fascination with language, the application of postmodern techniques, attention to regionalism and charges of arrogant superiority are the most common themes upon which the work of the Coen brothers is appraised. Blood Simple Joel and Ethan Coen have worked within the realms of various genres, adopting appropriate methods of realisation to reflect these representational frameworks. The dialogue in their films is a prominent factor in the organisation and maintenance of these generic constructions and in the fulfilment of specific stylistic strategies. The Hudsucker Proxy‘s synthetic visual design is mirrored by its stylised dialogue, the criminal milieu of Miller’s Crossing is characterised by memorably rich gangster jargon, while Fargo‘s attention to visual realism operates concurrently with the application of an appropriate regional dialect. Barry

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Sonnenfield—the director of photography on Raising Arizona—suggests that the script has greatest priority to the Coens, arguing that words and structure are more important than any visual concerns. Language operates as a cue to the themes and characters in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. That they construct dialogue of wonderful inarticulacy, such as the Dude’s (Jeff Bridges) scrambled speeches in The Big Lebowski and Carl’s (Steve Buscemi) consistent malapropism in Fargo, is not merely a joke at the expense of their characters but rather the critical interrogation of communication breakdown. The premise of Blood Simple evolves upon the protagonists’ inability to communicate effectively, their private discourses breeding distrust and confusion that ultimately leads to the tragic consequences at the film’s conclusion. James Mottram observes that the “four main protagonists, although existing in a unified physical world, inhabit a separate mental and emotional space that causes repeated misinterpretations.” With Fargo and The Big Lebowski the Coens have extended this philosophy of miscommunication to an ailment of society in which inarticulacy is an observable symptom. Raising Arizona The language styles pursued by the characters in these films frequently betray repressed or unconscious desires that expose the value systems of modern cultures. Jeff Evans detects the irony inherent in the dialogue of Raising Arizona as stemming in part from a gulf that exists between the florid, loquacious and poetic speech of the characters and their sparse, homely and modest physical reality. H.I. (Nicolas Cage) at one point, describes his and Ed’s (Holly Hunter) motor-home existence in the middle of the barren plains of the Arizona desert as “the salad days”. Raising Arizona is to some extent about a desire to improve one’s position; H.I., a confirmed recidivist, wants to marry, work, build a home and start a family. He is after the American dream of prosperity, and in dialogue he has found a way to fabricate a chimera of success, having failed to achieve it in a material sense. The moral of the film will finally suggest that this material success is a charade, and that true happiness and prosperity comes from the modest pursuit of doing the right thing. This emphasis on the absence of meaning in language is an earnest critique of aspects of America’s culture; of the views and values, prejudices and hegemonies in these societies. The dialogue in the films of the Coen brothers offers insight into dominant ideologies, endeavoring to examine how language works to maintain certain standards and beliefs. As “regional independents”, Joel and Ethan Coen have spread their film wings right across the extensive lands of the United States. Blood Simple and Raising Arizona document the South-West, Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski are each set in Los Angeles and Fargo is perhaps the most prominent film ever to

capture the specific culture of Minnesota. The Coens have acquired a reputation for a certain kind of ethnographic expression through the critical exploration of particular cultures. Mottram maintains that these film locations are never arbitrarily chosen but rather the settings “speak on behalf of the characters; ironically, people who, more often than not, are inextricably linked to their homeland”, noting that the “heat of Texas in Blood Simple is symbolic of the moral inferno that the

characters find themselves in.” The use of Texas as a setting for Blood Simple coincides with the style and concerns of the film’s chief inspiration, James M. Cain. Joyce Carol Oates proposes the moral environment of Cain’s novels is such that: …one understands how barren, how stripped and bizarre this Western landscape has become. It is as if the world extends no farther than the radius of one’s desire…To be successful, such narrowly-conceived art must blot

out what landscape it cannot cover; hence the blurred surrealistic backgrounds of the successful Cain novels. With Blood Simple Joel and Ethan Coen use Texas to develop a similarly surreal environment, of flat, featureless plains, endless highways and stifling heat. The Man Who Wasn’t There The Coens’ most recent film, The Man Who Wasn’t There, returns to James Cain as a touchstone, reinventing his fiction through the subversion of its generic and literary conventions. The Man Who Wasn’t There is set in traditional Cain country—a Californian town named Santa Rosa. But the Coens are less interested here in representing an authentic Californian community and more concerned with manufacturing a stylised film noir cosmos swathed in existentialist apathy and passivity. Miller’s Crossing is also set in an intensely rhetorical world, every setting seems overly precise and affected, not so much a step back in time, more like a return to familiar representations from the past. Ethan Coen declared that in Miller’s Crossing “the city’s an anonymous one, the typical ‘corrupted town’ of Hammett novels.” Fargo, on the other hand seems to carry with it a documentary authenticity. The film’s prologue—which attests to the veracity of the depicted events—may be a red herring, but it does acknowledge the film’s agenda—the maintenance of a coherent system of realism. The peculiar snow-capped setting and the equally exotic Scandinavian-inflected dialogue reinforces the particularly provincial nature of the representation. Whereas Minnesota is integral to the design and conception of Fargo, Los Angeles is fundamental to The Big Lebowski. Josh Levine argues that the Coens populated The Big Lebowski with types who could not exist anywhere else but “in the sunny land of complete informalness and surreal juxtapositions.” The wandering-intrigue narrative of The Big Lebowski is perfectly suited to experiencing the widely diverse

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and divergent community of Los Angeles, a culture equally receptive to doped-out slackers, right-wing militants, German nihilists, Malibu pornographers and a pederast named Jesus (John Turturro). Barton Fink is also set in Los Angeles but its specific placement in the more particularised culture of Hollywood allows for a more fantastic conception. Joel and Ethan Coen’s interpretation of Hollywood in Barton Fink is less a denotative representation and more a symbolic interpretation. The Coens place the eponymous hero Barton (John Turturro) in a living hell when he sells his creative soul to a motion picture studio. Barton Fink contains a stimulating mix of accepted history, anecdotal and apocryphal elements and pure fiction. A similar methodology is adopted for O Brother, Where Art Thou? which offers a technically precise and culturally astute recreation of 1930s deep-south America but frames the narrative using Homer’s No Country for Old Men. The mixture of historical detail with an archetypal fiction narrative is a postmodern paradigm. Yet, neither of these films come close to The Hudsucker Proxy for re-imagining the past. With The Hudsucker Proxy the Coens eschew all resemblance to reality to produce a remarkably artificial world that owes almost all of its inspiration to old movies. Blood Simple The films of Joel and Ethan Coen are not merely constructed from the pieces of other films and references are not drawn solely from the domain of cinema history. The Coens seek to work with well known source material, extracting the essence of an author’s approach and re-deploying this style within a different and original environment. With Blood Simple the Coens endeavor to re-contextualise the basic elements of the James Cain novel. Blood Simple owes a notable debt to the style of James Cain, but also to film noir, neo-noir, the tenets of independent film in the 1980s, the crime genre and the eccentricities of Texas culture. The Coen brothers’ films negotiate the issue of fidelity by furnishing adaptations that reject a linear relationship to one model or source text. Miller’s Crossing is based loosely on two Dashiell Hammett novels, The Glass Key and Red Harvest, and it also engages in a more general sense with Hammett’s style and themes. The Big Lebowski is perhaps more ambitious as the Coens, influenced by Raymond Chandler, fashion a story around the world of a doped out loser and social-league ten-pin bowling. With The Man Who Wasn’t There, Joel and Ethan Coen return to James M. Cain. But once again the relationship to their inspiration remains paradoxical. The Man Who Wasn’t There is concerned with transgressing many of film noir‘s most important conventions, summarily problematising its connection to James Cain, a chief

inspiration for the entire noir movement. The Coens have chosen to exclude all emotion from their protagonist, the monotone Ed (Billy Bob Thornton), to make him as dispassionate and detached as possible, prompting Graham Fuller to categorise the film “anti-noir”. Without the crucial elements of passion, desire and sexuality, The Man Who Wasn’t

There undermines the very genre that frames it. Barton Fink is less a subversion of generic conventions and more an ironic reexamination of history. It is both a critique of the Hollywood system then and now, and a reworking of the myth of the leftist artist in the 1930s. It seems, with Barton Fink, the Coens secure great enjoyment in debunking the typical celebration of the common man by exposing the egotistical motives that trump

altruistic intention. The Coens subvert the myth of the suffering playwright with their depiction of Barton Fink as a pompous and self-absorbed author who is out of touch with the very people he claims to write for, and about. The Coen brothers have sought to rework and reevaluate the past by engaging with history in a hyper-critical way. The self-conscious manner of the Coen brothers’ films always foregrounds both history’s and fiction’s textuality. The Hudsucker Proxy In the films of the Coen brothers the process of story-telling is often laid open to exposition and demonstration. Barton Fink is a Hollywood film set in Hollywood, the hub of American story-telling. The Hudsucker Proxy is a defiantly referential film that overtly exposes its textual design; the film’s narrator, an initial indication of the text’s narrativity, stops the film midstream and directly addresses the audience. O Brother, Where Art Thou? foregrounds the narrative framework of its trajectory in the opening credits when the brothers cite No Country for Old Men as the film’s basis. With Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother, Where Art Thou? the Coen brothers are highly self-conscious in the manner of their storytelling. Their narrative tools, particularly in The Hudsucker Proxy, are often deftly self-reflexive. To insist on exposing the devices of construction immediately cues the viewer to the construction of all texts. Linda Hutcheon identifies a mode of “metacinema” in which the formation process of subjectivity and narrativity has become a staple. And it would appear that the Coen brothers’ films befit such a classification. Their use of distancing narrational modes such as voice-over exposition in Raising Arizona and The Man Who Wasn’t There, the direct address prologue in Blood Simple and The Big Lebowski, and the rigid application of generic convention in Miller’s Crossing are all elements which foreground the construction processes involved.

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The films of the Coen brothers display an acute awareness of history and its inscription in the texts of the past and the present. Joel and Ethan Coen do not employ pastiche to resolve a dearth of ideas, they actively examine the texts they draw from as a means to building a bridge to the past. The Coens deny the usual mythical constructions, they do not invest in traditional frameworks of representation, rather they interrogate those frameworks to examine and expose how they construct meaning. With this process the films of the Coen brothers are diligent in their investigation of history and its ideologies. Carolyn Russell argues that: the Coens make films that are highly self-conscious of their relationship to preexisting film forms. Their movies rely upon a base of knowledge, cultural and film historical, that is presumed to be shared between themselves and their viewers. Barton Fink This assertion highlights the very important manner by which postmodern representations call upon the reader/viewer to complete the text. The role of memory, reception and intertextuality are crucial to the design in the Coen brothers’ films. By engaging the texts of the past the directors are able to challenge and critique history through the agency of parody, irony and self-reflexivity. This confrontation with history’s textual construction enables an exploration and interpretation of ideologies of the past. Despite all the criticism of their work—their films are merely about other films, their work smugly proposes the emptiness at the core of art, they hide behind style to avoid moral and ethical issues—the Coen brothers nevertheless set up a connection to history through their pithy investigation into the texts that represent the past. With their keen approach to historical periods and texts of bygone eras, and their reliance on irony and parody, the Coen brothers not only engage with history but they question and challenge the ideologies by which it is constructed. When the Coen brothers draw on their vast intertextual web of references in order to inform their films, as is the case in The Hudsucker Proxy, they are often accused of elitism; of alienating their audience by servicing only their own penchant for in-jokes and obscure allusions. Yet, when they set their films in more realistic and genuine settings, as in Fargo, the brothers are then criticised for mocking their characters. Fargo endured a barrage of criticism suggesting that the film’s portrayal of the

Mid-West region’s people was condescending and exploitative. Talk-radio audiences in Minnesota complained that the film ridiculed them and their culture, and McKinney suggested that not only was the dialogue inaccurate in its representation of the true regional dialect but the application of it by the Coens served merely to diminish the characters rather than particularise them.

It is true that many of the characters in their films are foolish or ridiculous but often this is indicative of their disposition. Ethan Coen declared in an interview the objective of representing Carl and Jerry (William H. Macy)—the nefarious ‘masterminds’ of Fargo‘s abduction plan—as so inept: One of the reasons for making them simple-

minded was our desire to go against the Hollywood cliché of the bad guy as a super-professional who controls everything he does. In fact, in most cases criminals belong to the strata of society least equipped to face life, and that’s the reason they’re caught so often. In this sense too, our movie is closer to life than the conventions of cinema and genre movies. The aspects of Fargo that undermine and rally against film convention and focus on characteristics more attuned to reality give it a naturalistic identity. Emphasising a character’s ineptitude is inextricably linked to an expression of reality and need not be evident of a specific agenda to ridicule a community or a society. Joel and Ethan Coen are often censured for failing to commit to moral or ethical positions and chastised for constructing worlds of artificiality. But the truth is, manifest in Levy’s pointed condemnation (located at the beginning of this essay), the Coens are victims of a critical establishment which considers visual documentation—film and television—to be unworthy conveyers of the past. The Coen brothers do know too much about film, they know enough to recognise the conceits of its processes and to detect the values that such systems are designed to support. And they know enough to subvert and criticise these systems in order to construct a valid and important engagement with the past, encapsulating very effective and substantial moral and ethical explorations. The Coen brothers’ wonderful ear for dialogue, rigid attention to regional re-constructions, inventive approach to the past, in addition to their professional skill and adroit technique has resulted in some of the most enjoyable (and critically worthy) contemporary films.

ONLY TWO MORE IN THE FALL 2014 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS Nov 25 Erik Skjoldbjaerg, INSOMNIA, 1997

Dec 2 Mike Nichols, CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR, 2007

Coen—FARGO—9

SPRING 2015 PRELIMINARY SCREENING SCHEDULE

Jan 27 Charlie Chaplin, The Gold Rush, 1925 Feb 3 Howard Hawks, Bringing Up Baby, 1938

Feb 10 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, ‘I Know Where I’m Going,’ 1945 Feb 17 Carol Reed, Odd Man Out, 1947

Feb 24 Budd Boetticher, Seven Men from Now, 1956 March 3 Roger Vadim, Barbarella, 1968 Mar 10 Bob Fosse, All That Jazz, 1979 Mar 24 George Miller, Mad Max, 1979

Mar 31 Karel Reisz, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1981 Apr 7 Gregory Nava, El Norte, 1983

Apr 14 Bryan Singer, The Usual Suspects, 1995 Apr 21 Bela Tarr, Werkmeister Harmonies, 2000

Apr 28 Sylvain Chomet, The Triplets of Belleville, 2003 May 5 Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men, 2007

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The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the State University of New York at Buffalo And the Dipson Amherst Theatre

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