The Subtlety of the Coen Brothers

I've been on a bit of a Coen Brothers kick since watching A Serious Man a few weeks ago. I've never flat-out disliked a film of theirs, although The Man Who Wasn't There and Intolerable Cruelty would not rank among my favorites based on a single viewing apiece. A Serious Man, though, hit me very hard, and I may wind up ranking it as their best film. It is clearly a movie made for re-watching, and not made to yield all its secrets on superficial acquaintance. Predictably, a number of critics dismissed it on that ground -- the movie was "odd" or "off-putting" or "peculiar." (Those word choices could also all be code-speak, disturbingly, for the intense Jewishness of the movie.) I do not feel that I am in any position to provide a thorough "reading" of the movie, but I would like to make a contribution on one small point that I have not seen anyone else take up.

Part of what A Serious Man is "about" is the role of chance in the universe and to what extent "God" controls that chance. Does he simply create the game and then roll the dice, in the manner of J. Henry Waugh ("Jahweh") in Robert Coover's novel The Universal Baseball Association? Certainly there appears to be a malevolent pattern in the events that befall the film's protagonist, Larry Gopnik, but maybe he is just on a bad roll? The film considers the issue in depth, just as Larry Gopnik himself does, but offers no resolution because none is really possible. God is not that scrutable.

Amidst the re-creation of late Sixties suburban Minnesota, there is a detail that may appear to be a throwaway gag -- Gopnik's son Danny keeps complaining that their home's TV aerial needs to be adjusted because he is having difficulty getting a clear picture for his favorite show, F Troop. But since the F Troop reference is repeated several times, and since the film's poster features Gopnik on the roof with the aerial, one may reasonably suspect that there is something more going on.

 

Since I was born in 1958 and am therefore close to the fictional Danny Gopnik's age, I too watched a good deal of F Troop as a kid, and am still able to recall the lyrics to the theme song, which, as was not uncommon with TV theme lyrics in those days (The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres), set up the "situation" of the show. Here is the first stanza, with my bolding:

The end of the Civil War was near
When quite accidentally,
A hero who sneezed abruptly seized
Retreat and reversed it to victory.

Pure chance in action: Ken Berry's Captain Wilton Parmenter becomes a hero "quite accidentally" because an innocuous sneeze is taken as a signal by his troops, who fortuitously reverse their direction and "seize" victory. The credit sequence is full of accidents (including an errant cannon shot that brings down the fort's look-out tower):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVwFADi4Y38

So the chain of events that brings F Troop into being is a perfect illustration of the same randomness -- or what looks like randomness -- that brings Larry Gopnik low. Gopnik appears to have done nothing so bad as to deserve his calamities, and the hapless Parmenter certainly did not earn his heroic status through any exercise of military skill, but there you have it: that is the world we live in. The repeated references to F Troop in A Serious Man, however, are far from accidents, because in relation to their own films, the Coen Brothers really are Gods.