Violence is the muse and the prime ingredient in the films of Coen brothers. The narrative of their films depicts a murky world where violence acts as an unleashed chaos overthrowing law and order restoring anarchy.
The setting of the films
The setting of their films prompts an uncanny feeling that lingers till the end of the films as they offer no clear resolution to the issues they deal within their films. For instance the mist in the opening sequence of Fargo accompanied by the bleak landscape throughout the film foreshadows the bloody account of blackmail, kidnapping, deceit and murder that shapes the narrative of the film, the vast stretches of desert in No Country for Old Men is a symbol of the phelgmatic world devoid of remorse questioning the meaning of man’s existence.
Coen brothers presents us an amoral world where none of their characters are purely heroes or villains, they blur the lines between protagonist and antagonist, all their characters are stuck between predestination and free will, entrapped in an inescapable maze.
The protagonists/antagonists of their films
The protagonists/antagonists of Coen brother’s films are quirky, morally grey men whose fatal flaw is their avarice leading to their downfall. Beginning from the protagonists such as the Broadway playwright Barton Fink(Barton Fink) who accepts a contract from Capitol Pictures in Hollywood to write film scripts for a thousand dollars per week and moves to LA, Jerry Lundegaard(Fargo), the executive sales manager of a car dealership owned by his father-in law, in his desperation to acquire fortune plots to have his wife kidnapped.
The Dude aka Jeffrey Lebowski who inspired Dudeism which is now a religion, philosophy or lifestyle in the gen-z era (The Big Lebowski), a slacker and an avid bowler who in his quest to seek compensation for his rug finds himself trapped in a mayhem, Llewelyn Moss(No Country for Old Men),a Vietnam War veteran and welder who after coming across the aftermath of a drug deal gone bad during hunting pronghorns in desert, finds a two million dollar briefcase and decides to keep it with him, which henceforth subjects him to insurmountable perils. It’s the desire for wealth that paves the way towards violence in the films of Coen brothers.
On the other hand the antagonists in the films of Coen brothers are depicted as the reincarnation of devil on earth. Starting from Charlie Meadows aka the Madman Mundt(Barton Fink), a serial killer whose modus operandi is beheading his victims, Carl and Gaer(Fargo), the two criminals who were hired to kidnap Lundegaard’s wife, the porn kingpin Jackie Treehorn and his thugs along with the German nihilists(The Big Lebowski) who threatens The Dude to deliver the ransom money for releasing the nymphomaniac wife Bunny of another person with the same name Jeffrey Lebowski and lastly the hitman Anton Chigurh(No Country for Old Men) who uses a common technique of flipping a coin to determine the fate of his victims. All these characters have redeemed themselves from the shackles of their guilt, they consider it as their duty to perform these violent deeds justifying it either to be their passion or a means to earn their living.
All the protagonists/ antagonists in the films of Coen brothers resort to violence in the end ironically to save themselves, the good never wins over evil in their films, their films mostly have an open ending that creates a sense of ambiguity leaving the audience discontent and with many unanswered questions. For instance in Barton Fink, the murderer of Audrey Taylor is never discovered and how she was murdered still remains a mystery.
The poetic cinematography of Coen Brothers steeped in symbolism
The cinematography of Coen Brothers is replete with poetry which is a defining factor of their narratives. Many of their films such as “The Big Lebowski”, “No Country for Old Men” begin with a narrator who is a detached observer alike Philip Larkin’s poetries. Their cinematography in certain sequences of their films is highly metaphorical, for an instance in “Barton Fink”, the depiction of rising sea waves crashing to the shore just after Barton Fink accepted the contract from Capitol Pictures acts as a symbol of his desire to acquire wealth.
The photograph of a woman sitting by the shore hung on the wall of Fink’s hotel in L.A. along with the photograph of his next door neighbour Charlie Meadows, a serial killer disguised as a salesman echoing of Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, helped him to overcome his writer’s block acting as his muse.
The sea throughout the film acts a metaphor of Fink’s libidinal desires and his lust for wealth. The film ends with the depiction of Fink wandering by the sea and coming across a woman who bears a sharp resemblance with the woman of the photograph on the wall at Fink’s hotel assuming the same pose from the picture. The treatment of sea as a symbol of sensuality, epiphany can be also found in the films of Federico Fellini and maybe Coen brothers in a way were inspired by his works like La Strada, La Dolce Vita, 8 and Half and Amarcord where sea is an indispensable element and a driving force behind all the characters of his films.
The sequence of the hotel in flames and the appearance of Mundt through the flames killing the detectives (who came to investigate the murder of Audrey Taylor, the secretary and mistress of Fink’s ideal novelist W.P. Mayhew, who was found mysteriously dead on Barton Fink’s bed at the morning followed by the night they had sexual intercourse) with a shotgun is a perfect representation of hell whereas Charlie aka Mundt’s utterance, “They say I’m a madman, Bart, but I’m not mad at anyone…most guys I feel sorry for…it tears me up inside to think about what they’re going through, how trapped try are…So I try and help them out”, depicts how he considers himself as a harbinger of justice, an authoritarian figure like Satan. In the addition to that the visual of rising sea waves superimposed by the visual of Barton Fink wearing a hat on his entry into Hotel Earle at L.A. might be an attempt of Coen Brothers to pay a tribute to the famous artwork named “Decalcomania” of René Magritte, a Belgian surrealist artist whose imagery has highly influenced pop and minimalist art in twenteith century films.
In Fargo, the utterance of the local police officer Marge Gunderson after she finally arrests one of the miscreants Gaer at the end of the film- “There’s more to life than a little money, Ya know. Don’t Ya know that? And Here You Are, and It’s A Beautiful Day“, felt like a monologue from a Shakespearean play where Marge explains captured Gaer that all the riches he killed for really doesn’t count since he sacrificed his humanity for it. Marge initially couldn’t fathom the existence of brutality in a world that appears so beautiful but eventually comprehends that the beauty and the beast coexist together in this world.
The “Gutterballs” dream sequence in The Big Lebowski when the Dude is knocked down unconcious by the goons of Jackie Treehorn and is transported to a surreal world where he helps Maude Lebowski (the daughter of the other Jeffrey Lebowski) bowl while she’s dressed in Roman battle gear and is himself drifting above Los Angeles with a bowling ball launching it down the lane under a line of women, looking up into their skirts accompanied by the Bob Marley’s ,”The Man in Me” along with the appearance nihilists who threaten Dude for ransom wearing red bodysuits chasing with scissors so that they can cut off his Johnson(penis) is highly Freudian.
The unravelling of this dream infers that Maude represents the women in Gutterballs but The Dude’s desire for comfortableness with the reality of female genitalia remains inaccessible due to the fear of castration that comes with the confrontation of a woman’s lack of phallus. Thus, The Dude requires the fetishizing of bowling in order to access Maude and her symbolic meaning. The Coen Brothers brilliantly delves deep into the pysche of The Dude exuding his repressed desires through this dream sequence which also serves as a perfect example of mise-en-scène.
Sheriff Bell’s narration of his dream in No Country for Old Men unfurls his perspective of violence. The first dream in which Bell loses the money, his father entrusts to him subtly refers to his guilt arising from his inability to restore law and order as well as peace in Texas. Bell took the responsibility to ensure the safety of Llewelyn but he failed. The second dream represents Bell’s past when he rides on horseback with his father on a snowy night, who leads the way with a torch.
The torch is a symbol of guiding light through darkness, light of morality which seems to fade away in the current world. As postmodernism and nihilism takes over the culture Bell, the representative of the titular old men in the film is doubtful as to whether the values regarding the good and evil paradigm will be carried into the future.
Alike T.S. Eliot who represented a fragmented world and society as an aftermath of the First World War in one of his most celebrated poems “The Waste Land”, The world Coen Brothers represents is shattered, their characters are mostly victims of the American Dream for whom resorting to violence brings catharsis.
Their films emphasize on the disillusionment and depravity that encompassed the American society after the Vietnam War. They devise their characters with a distorted pysche hovering over the binaries of good and evil, their fates enigmatic and obscure. The world in the films of Coen Brothers is like a modern day Waste Land where life is messy and chaotic and violence is inevitable.
The narrative of their films highlight the futile attempts to terminate violence and offers no steady solution on how to resolve this violence- “Ninety percent of the time it takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people can’t be governed at all. Or if could I never heard of it“.
This utterance by Sheriff Bell is suggestive of the fact that maybe we can minimalize violence prevalent in our society if we try hard but unfortunately we can never uproot violence from the face of the earth. Violence is an inherent part of our lives and we have to live with as long as we are a part of this world since peace doesn’t count without the existence of violence.
Srilekha Mitra