O Coen Brothers, Where Art God? A Conversation Between Matt Zoller Seitz and Jeffrey Overstreet

Even Mattie Ross, for all of her
righteous anger, pays a heavy price for trying to fix the world by force. After
she is “disarmed,” she seems to realize that the greatest reward of
her adventure was not justice achieved by violence, but the mysterious bond that
formed between her and Cogburn, who strove so mightily to help her.

The Coens’ paint a picture of a world
botched beyond belief, and beyond humanity’s capacity to repair. But there is
something transcendent about what those characters who know love enjoy. They
touch something that operates in, through, and beyond the human sphere.

Hey, even Private Detective Visser in
Blood Simple has a sense of it. He’s
preoccupied with Russia, where “everyone pulls for everyone else.”
But in Texas… “you’re on your own.”  

Just drifting through, like the tumbling tumbleweeds

MZS: I want to dig into this a bit more, this sense that bedrock Judeo-Christian concepts inform the Coen brothers’ filmography. I think it’s self-evidently true to say this, like saying that David Cronenberg is fascinated by the fragility of flesh and its overlap with technology, or that Steven Spielberg has daddy issues. But at the same time, it’s an observation that conflicts with the popular perception of the Coens as being cold or disinterested moral relativists—or at the very least, film school pranksters, guys who are all about homage, and who don’t believe in anything, really.

They certainly do hold their cards pretty close to their vests in that regard. But maybe not as close as detractors might say?

They’re essentially comic storytellers, even when they’re making supposed dramas, but after watching their work for nearly thirty years, I’ve concluded that deep down, they’re among the most moral, even moralistic, filmmakers working in the Hollywood mainstream. Good and evil aren’t metaphorical to them, even though they take on overtly symbolic guises at times. There is a right way and a wrong way to live. They do judge the corrupt, the weak, the impulsive and the greedy in very unflattering terms. When the bad guys in The Ladykillers get foiled, they seem to be struck down—smitten as if by God himself, then dumped onto a garbage barge like, well, human garbage, I guess. And then there’s that line in the police car near the end of Fargo: “There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’t you know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well, I just don’t understand it.” 

What you say about surrendering to a higher power, or to the possibility of enlightenment or even “rapture,” as a Christian might put it, runs throughout Joel and Ethan Coen’s filmography—that sense that you have to let go, to surrender to cosmic forces rather than fight them, and let the universe sort itself out. That’s not to say that the outcome will necessarily favor Good, or even favor you personally—just that, as the films tell their stories, the universe has a way, and we don’t necessarily know what That Way is, and ultimately we’re all just drifting through, like the tumbling tumbleweeds in The Big Lebowski.

Do the Coens want to try to make sense of any of this? I don’t know . . . There are times when they seem as baffled as the rest of us. They certainly have a fondness for narrator characters who try to put everything in perspective and fail miserably and very amusingly. The narrator Moses—what a name!—in The Hudsucker Proxy, or Sam Elliott’s cowboy in Lebowski, kind of lose their places as they’re trying to put a frame around things. The Coens seem to get a kick out of tantalizing us with answers while laughing at the very idea that there could be answers. 

JO: Well . . . they sure don’t seem to think we’ll know answers on this side of Sheriff Bell’s dream. But there is something out there. There is somebody running the clock.

I’m uncomfortable with the term “moralists” when it comes to the Coens. Mere moralism isn’t enough. Moralism is just arithmetic: A fool plus his money are bound for hell. That’s not an accurate summation of their sensibility, because look at how the loving and the righteous and the innocent die miserably in their films. Exhibit A: Lana, from No Country. “Karma” is far too narrow a concept for the Coens.

Furthermore, there is too much
respect for mystery in these films
for the storytellers to be mere moralists.

Now, I don’t think the answer is to
start trying to pin a religion on them. A
Serious Man makes it painfully clear that religion can become like Arthur Gopnick’s
book “The Mentaculus” … a labyrinth of laws and reasoning that ends
up making as much sense as the absurd, self-contradicting legal defense of Ed
Crane in The Man Who Wasn’t There.
Religion, while it binds communities and brings meaning through ritual, is
ultimately not enough. I’m not willing to brand the Coens as “covert
Christians.” And even if I did, the word “Christian” is about as
meaningful anymore as the word “conservative” or “Democrat”,
or the term “the American way.” It means a million things to a
million people. But they are definitely drawn to a
vision of the cosmos that resonates with my understanding of Christ’s
teachings. That is to say that “righteousness,” the ways of religion, and the
law-focused method of an “Old Testament” worldview, are ultimately insufficient.
We cannot earn our way to heaven by being good. We cannot save ourselves.

The Coens know that “all have
sinned,” and they know that “the wages of sin is death.” Everybody is likely to
die miserably in their movies, whether as a result of their own evil or someone
else’s.

But there is something out there,
some kind of offer of grace, and when we glimpse that, goodness happens
in us. We begin to love not for selfish reasons, but as a response, as a
reflection, as if we are instruments being tuned up by something greater than
ourselves.

No, I think that the clearest
summation of their worldview comes from Mattie in their True Grit remake: “You must pay for everything in this world,
one way and another. There is nothing free except the grace of God.”

The small and humble people of the world

JO: On a side note, while I don’t see
anything as simplistic as a “Christ figure” in the Coens’ films, I do
love the way some have speculated that “The Dude” himself is a
“holy fool” who acts as a sort of signpost toward Jesus. We see him
doing carpentry (badly). We see him “taking it easy for all us
sinners.” He walks around in a robe, and hangs out with all manner of
fools and crooks without an inclination toward judgment. He even bowls
alongside a “false Christ” (“The Jesus”). And what does he
drink at the grocery? Okay, I know, it’s a crazy stretch, probably a
coincidence, but I love the suggestion of “dual nature of Christ” in
the carton of half-and-half. (Cathleen Falsani has a whole book on this, by the
way: The Dude Abides: The Gospel According
to the Coen Brothers.)

The Coens love the fact that God uses
the small and humble people of the world to shame the greater. 

MZS: Well, I didn’t want to come at this head-on, because it seems very un-Coen-like, but you went there first: I take it you believe that the Coens believe in God?

JO: Accept the mystery.

Okay, more directly: I think they believe
in grace. I think that they’re likely to give the great mystery enough respect
that they won’t name him. They’d rather show than tell. Or, if you will — they
don’t believe in God, they believe in G-d. That’s my inclination.

But then again, many great artists
who profess to profound doubts, cynicism, agnosticism, have given us inspiring theological art. Listen to Woody Allen say he doesn’t believe in
right and wrong, or good and evil, or God. But then he tells stories about men
who, when they commit all manner of sins, are haunted, conflicted,
dissatisfied.

Perhaps the Coens’ films are another
case of the art knowing more than the artists. And that is what should matter
anyway. I don’t much care what the artist believes. I care to discern what the
art reveals.

Annie Dillard once wrote, “There
is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the
light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the
candle is out, who needs it? But the world without light is wasteland and
chaos, and a life without sacrifice is abomination.” I love that. Give me
the work and its mystery. Don’t ask me what the artist believes.

MZS: Then what do you think the work reveals, about God, about faith, about the possibility of a moral code that can help us make sense of things? I feel like the Coens are very culturally conservative beneath it all, and not anything close to the snickering secular humanists you might think they are, considering their reputation as pranksters. I felt like the Nihilists in The Big Lebowski were the Coens’ playful mockery of critics who’ve called them Nihilists—”Ja, we are nihilists, we believe in nothing!” they repeat, chasing the hero through his dreams with huge castrating scissors. The Coens aren’t nihilists. They believe in something. And yet they don’t spell that something out. It emerges organically while you’re watching their films, maybe because they’re not entirely sure what “it” is, either. They can see the contours but not the details, maybe? It’s tricky and very subjective, what they’re doing, and what we’re doing as we watch they’re doing. It’s like looking for shapes in clouds. You see what you want to see, and maybe you’re right to see it, or maybe if you were a couple of miles in the other direction you’d see something else entirely. 

There’s an aspect to their work that reminds me of going to Sunday school as a kid, and I don’t mean that as a knock, not at all. It also reminds me of hearing my grandfather tell stories about his childhood by way of moral instruction. They’re illuminating the universe, or at least exploring it. But they’re not going about it in a didactic way. There’s something fundamentally humble about them, as visually and structurally and generically flamboyant as they sometimes are. I feel like they’re figuring things out, too—figuring themselves out, figuring the world out, and laughing at themselves, and the rest of us, for thinking there’s An Answer to anything.

JO: I get why it reminds you of Sunday School,
but I never get the sense that they’re lecturing. I get the sense that they’re
holding up a mirror to all of humanity, themselves included, and showing us
what a hilarious and pathetic mess we all — Coens included — make of things. I
think Barton Fink has self-critique
built into it — they’re making intellectual movies, but they know that even
ambitious art like that can only go so far. Their constant nods to Sullivan’s Travels, especially in Hudsucker and O Brother, tell us that they know that there is redemption in a
certain kind of self-effacing laughter. I suspect they see themselves as Larry Gopniks…
exasperated by the insanity in the people around them, but then capable of
perpetuating that same destruction with their own judgmentalism and compromise.

What many people perceive as
condescension, as “sneering at their characters” … I disagree with
that characterization. I tend to see that as a sign of their humility, maybe
even compassion, and above all… affection. We are deeply moved when Tom Reagan
shows mercy to Bernie in Miller’s
Crossing. We feel that something has died when he becomes the figure of
wrath later. Visceral responses like that are what we need in order to remember
what is really at stake in this world. And I love their films for triggering
those responses, and making me look for signs of beauty and grace in this
world. As Dylan sings – and I can’t wait to see them visit Dylan’s scene in
their next film! — “It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there.”

Chuck Jones clearly loved his Looney Toons characters. He loved their language, their exaggerated features, their cleverness, their vanity, their folly. But he loved those characters. And his depictions of human folly in the circus of those cartoons was a form of insightful humility, about all of us ridiculous human beings. So I think the Coens’ work disturbs audiences because it reminds us that, contrary to so many Hollywood messages, “being good” isn’t the answer. Being good is good, but—as Bill Murray says in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom—it isn’t enough to fix things. Their movies “ring true” when they remind us that there is a “wrath that’s about to set down,” as Rooster Cogburn says. If that wasn’t true, it wouldn’t strike such a resonant chord in audiences. The Lone Biker of the Apocalypse in Raising Arizona is coming, and there’s something elemental and true about him. We ourselves have unleashed him, as H.I. declares. In No Country, we’re warned that we “can’t stop what’s comin’.” There is a moral code, yes, and we violate it in countless ways. We’re screwed.

But their work doesn’t stop there. It engages and encourages us by leaving us with moments that transcend all of that doom, all of that destruction. Their suggestion of the possibility of grace is not so much a sermon proclamation as a desperate hope.

And it wouldn’t move us so deeply if the anticipation of grace weren’t built into us somehow. It moves us because, on some level, we know it’s true.

Jeffrey Overstreet is the author of a “memoir of dangerous moviegoing” called Through a Screen Darkly, and a four-volume series of fantasy novels called The Auralia Thread, which includes Auralia’s Colors, Cyndere’s Midnight, Raven’s Ladder, and The Ale Boy’s Feast. Jeffrey is a contributing editor for Seattle Pacific University’s Response magazine, and he writes about art, faith, and culture for Image, Filmwell, and his own website, LookingCloser.org.