Joel and Ethan Coen: In Regard to Barton Fink

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

Writers come and go. We always need Indians. 

– Producer Ben Geisler in Barton Fink

The Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (1991) is the story of a New York writer who aspires to create a new, living theater about the ‘common man’ and who sees it as his job ‘to make a difference.’ The year is 1941, and on the back of the success of his first play, Fink (John Turturro) is lured into a Faustian bargain to go to Hollywood and write for the movies. On arriving in Los Angeles, he forms a friendship with his next-door neighbor and common man Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), and another writer, W. P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), whom Fink considers to be the ‘finest novelist’ of their generation. Fink, however, finds himself unable to make progress on the wrestling picture he’s supposed to be writing. Events turn from bad to bizarre: Mayhew’s secretary and lover, Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis), is revealed to have authored the great writer’s books; in attempting to help Fink, Audrey seduces him only to be later discovered dead in his hotel room; Charlie helps Barton dispose of Audrey’s body; amiable common man Charlie turns out to be a homicidal maniac who possibly murdered Audrey; and Charlie entrusts Barton with a box that may well contain Audrey’s head. In the end, Fink overcomes his writer’s block and is able to finish his wrestling picture, which turns out to echo his New York play. As Fink’s descent into hell is complete, the hotel where he is staying catches fire, and Charlie shoots the detectives who are investigating Audrey’s murder. Barton escapes the blaze as Charlie disappears back into his burning room. In the closing scenes, Barton enters another form of purgatory as the head of the studio refuses to release him from his contract thus retaining the rights to Barton’s writing. Finally, Barton finds himself on a sunny beach and becomes a part of the painting that throughout the movie has hung on the wall of his hotel room. 

Described by critic Richard Schickel as ‘gnomic, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, just plain weird’, Barton Fink was the first film to accomplish the hat-trick at the Cannes festival (best picture, best director and best actor). The following interview with the Coen Brothers took place in Cannes during May 1991:

‘Barton Fink’ takes as its theme the writer’s block suffered by a screenwriter. How did you come to write this kind of film?

JOEL COEN: It did not begin to take shape until we were halfway through the writing of Miller’s Crossing. It’s not really the case that we were suffering from writer’s block, but our working speed had slowed, and we were eager to get a certain distance from Miller’s Crossing. In order to escape from the problems that we were experiencing with that project, we began to think about a project with a different theme. That was Barton Fink, which had two origins. In the first place, we were thinking about putting John Turturro to work – we had known him well for a long time – and so we wanted to invent a character he could play And then there was the idea of a huge abandoned hotel. This idea came even before our decision to set the story in Hollywood.

ETHAN COEN: We wrote the screenplay very quickly, in three weeks, before returning to the script of Miller’s Crossing in order to finish it. This is one of the reasons why these two films were released rather close to one another. When we had finished shooting Miller’s Crossing, we had a script all ready to film.

Why did you set the action in 1941, which was a key era for Hollywood writers? Fitzgerald and Nathanael West had just died, Preston Sturges and John Huston, who had been screenwriters, had just begun careers in directing.

JC: We didn’t know that. In retrospect, we were enthusiastic about the idea that the world outside the hotel was finding itself on the eve of the apocalypse since, for America, 1941 was the beginning of the Second World War. That seemed to us to suit the story. The other reason – which was never truly realized in the film – was that we were thinking of a hotel where the lodgers were old people, the insane, the physically handicapped, because all the others had left for the war. The further the script was developed, the more this theme got left behind, but it had led us, in the beginning, to settle on that period.

EC: Another reason was the main character: a serious dramatist, honest, politically engaged, and rather naive. It seemed natural that he comes from Group Theater and the decade of the thirties.

JC: The character had somewhat the same background, in terms of being a writer, as Clifford Odets; only the resemblance ends there. Both writers wrote the same kind of plays with proletarian heroes, but their personalities were quite different. Odets was much more of an extrovert; in fact he was quite sociable even in Hollywood, and this is not the case with Barton Fink! Odets the man was moreover quite different from Odets the writer. There was a great deal of passion and innocence in him.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

Have you read the journal Odets wrote during the year 1940?

EC: John Turturro was the one who really read it. But you have to take account of the difference between the character and the man.

JC: Turturro was also interested by the style of the Group Theater plays. At the opening of the film, the voice that you hear off camera is that of Turturro, and, at the end, when he taps out a scene from his screenplay on the typewriter, it is meant to be in the Odets style.

The character of W. P. Mayhew is, in turn, directly inspired by Faulkner.

EC: Yes, the southern writer, an alcoholic. Certainly we chose John Mahoney for this role because of his resemblance to Faulkner, but also because we are very eager to work with him. And yet, that was only somewhere to start, and the parallel between the two is pretty superficial. As far as the details of the character are concerned, Mayhew is very different from Faulkner, whose experiences in Hollywood were not the same at all.

JC: Certainly Faulkner showed the same disdain for Hollywood that Mayhew does, but his alcoholism did not incapacitate him, and he continued to be a productive writer.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

Did you get the inspiration for Jack Lipnick, the producer, from Louis B. Mayer?

JC: Michael Lerner looks a little like Mayer, but Lipnick is really an amalgamation of several figures. The incident with the uniform, for example, comes from the life of Jack Warner, who arranged that an army commission be given him and demanded that the studio costume department make him a uniform. Lipnick also has his vulgar side, rather like Harry Cohn.

EC: What’s ironic about it is that this colonel’s uniform, one of the most surrealist elements in the film, is at the same time one of the few that’s drawn from Hollywood history.

One of the most characteristic qualities of your films and of ‘Barton Fink’ in particular is the fact that their structures are completely unpredictable. Do you put together your screenplays with this in mind?

JC: In this case, we had the shape of the narrative in mind from the very beginning. The structure was freer than usual and we were aware that, toward the middle, the story would take a radical turn. We wanted the beginning of the film to have a certain rhythm and to involve the viewer in a kind of journey. When Fink wakes up and discovers the corpse beside him, we wanted this to be a surprise, and yet not clash with everything that comes before.

EC: We were aware that we would be walking a very thin line here. We needed to surprise the viewer without disconnecting him from the story. In the way we presented the hotel, we hint that Fink’s arrival in Hollywood was not completely ‘normal’. But it is certain that the film is less tied to the conventions of some film genre, as, for example, Miller’s Crossing is, belonging as it does completely to the tradition of the gangster film.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

At what stage did you start thinking of the picture of the woman on the beach that figures in the last sequence?

JC: That came to us pretty soon after we began to ask ourselves what there would be in Barton Fink’s room. Our intention was that the room would have very little decoration, that the walls would be bare and that the windows would offer no view of any particular interest. In fact, we wanted the only opening on the exterior world to be this picture. It seemed important to us to create a feeling of isolation. Our strategy was to establish from the very beginning that the main character was experiencing a sense of dislocation.

EC: The picture of the beach was to give a vision of the feeling of consolation. I do not know exactly why we became fixed on this detail, but it was no doubt a punctuation mark that, in effect, did further the sense of oppression in the room. With the sequence where Fink crushes the mosquito, the film moves from social comedy into the realm of the fantastic.

JC: Some people have suggested that the whole second part of the film is nothing but a nightmare. But it was never our intention to, in any literal sense, depict some bad dream, and yet it is true that we were aiming for a logic of the irrational. We wanted the film’s atmosphere to reflect the psychological state of the protagonist.

EC: It is correct to say that we wanted the spectator to share the interior life of Barton Fink as well as his point of view. But there was no need to go too far. For example, it would have been incongruous for Barton Fink to wake up at the end of the film and for us to suggest thereby that he actually inhabited a reality greater than what is depicted in the film. In any case, it is always artificial to talk about ‘reality’ in regard to a fictional character. It was not our intention to give the impression that he was more ‘real’ than the story itself.

JC: There is another element that comes into play with this scene. No one knows what has killed Audrey Taylor. We did not want to exclude the possibility that it was Barton himself, even though he proclaims his innocence several times. It is one of the conventions of the classic crime film to lay out false trails as long as possible for the viewer. That said, our intention was to keep the ambiguity right to the end of the film. What is suggested, however, is that the crime was committed by Charlie, his next-door neighbor.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

From this point of view, the choice of John Goodman to play Charlie Meadows was inspired because he has usually been given more appealing roles and because the viewer sympathizes with him during the first scenes of the film.

EC: This role too was written for the comedian, and we were quite obviously aware of the warm and friendly image that he projects for the viewer and with which he feels at ease. We played on this expectation by reversing it. Even so, from the moment he appears, there is something menacing, disquieting about this character.

The fact that ‘Barton Fink’ uses working-class characters in his plays obliges him to be friendly to Meadows because if not he would show himself full of prejudice.

JC: That’s true enough in part, but Charlie also wins him over completely by his friendly greeting in the beginning.

EC: Charlie is, of course, equally aware of the role that Barton Fink intends for him to play, if in a somewhat perverse way.

While shooting this film, you weren’t sure if you would go to Cannes, and even less sure that Roman Polanski would be the head of the jury. It is ironic that it was up to him to pass judgment on a film where ‘The Tenant’ and ‘Cul-de-Sac’ meet ‘Repulsion’.

JC: Obviously, we have been influenced by his films, but at this time we were very hesitant to speak to him about it because we did not want to give the impression we were sucking up. The three films you mention are ones we’ve been quite taken by. Barton Fink does not belong to any genre, but it does belong to a series, certainly one that Roman Polanski originated.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

One thinks also of ‘The Shining’ and of the imaginative world of Kafka, of the black humor and Jewish culture of Central Europe.

JC: All this is true enough, except that The Shining belongs in a more global sense to the horror film genre. Several other critics have mentioned Kafka, and that surprises me since to tell the truth I have not read him since college when I devoured works like The Metamorphosis. Others
have mentioned The Castle and The Penal Colony, but I’ve never read them.

EC: After the insistence of journalists who wanted us to be inspired by The Castle, I find myself very interested in looking into it.

How did you divide up work on the screenplay?

EC: We handle this in a very informal and simple way We discuss each scene together in detail without ever dividing up the writing on any. I’m the one who then does the typing. As we have said, Barton Fink progressed very quickly as far as the writing was concerned, while Miller’s Crossing was slower and took more time, nearly nine months.

JC: Ordinarily, we spend four months on the first draft, and then show it to our friends, and afterward we devote two further months to the finishing touches.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

What is your explanation for the rapid writing of ‘Barton Fink’?

EC: Perhaps it was because of the feeling of relief that we got from it in the midst of the difficulties posed by Miller’s Crossing. In any case, it was very easy.

JC: It’s a strange thing but certain films appear almost entirely completed in your head. You know how they will be, visually speaking, and, without knowing exactly how they will end, you have some intuition about the kind of emotion that will be evident at the conclusion. Other scenarios, in contrast, are a little like journeys that develop in stages without your ever truly knowing where they are heading. With this film, we knew as a practical matter where Barton Fink would be at the end.

Moreover, right at the beginning we wrote Charlie’s final speech, the one where he explains himself and says that Barton Fink is only a tourist in that city. It makes things much easier when you know in advance where you’re taking your characters.

EC: We have to say we felt we knew these characters pretty well, maybe because we are very close to the two comedians, which made writing their roles very easy.

Now ‘Miller’s Crossing’ is a film where there are many characters and locations and where several plot lines intersect.

JC: It is true that Barton Fink has a much narrower scope. The narrative of Miller’s Crossing is so complicated because while writing it we had the tendency ourselves to lose our way in the story.

EC: Barton Fink is more the development of a concept than an intertwined story like Miller’s Crossing.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

How did the title come to mind?

JC: We knew we came up with it at the very beginning of our work on the screenplay, but we found we couldn’t remember the source. It seems it wound up being what it was by complete chance.

There is a great deal of humor in the film, from the moment when the wallpaper starts peeling off the wall until the pair of policemen arrive on the scene. In fact the combination of drama with comedy is perhaps more evident in ‘Barton Fink’ than in the films that preceded it.

JC: That’s fair enough. The film is really neither a comedy nor a drama. Miller’s Crossing is much more of a drama, and Raising Arizona is much more of a comedy.

EC: It seems that we are pretty much incapable of writing a film that, in one way or another, is not contaminated by comic elements.

JC: That’s funny because at the start I was imagining Miller’s Crossing, while Barton Fink seems to me to be more of a dark comedy.

EC: As opposed to what takes place in regard to Miller’s Crossing, here we tormented the main character in order to create some comic effects.

Jon Polito plays a role similar to the one he plays in ‘Miller’s Crossing’. In both films, he winds up humiliated.

EC: Except that in Barton Fink the character is mistreated for twenty years. In the end, he gets used to it.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

The first image of Hollywood that appears is unconventional for this kind of film: a rock on the beach.

EC: It’s funny that you should mention that because we actually filmed other shots that would have made for a more conventional transition, but we decided in the end not to use them. All we needed was a rock on the beach that anticipated the film’s end.

This is the second production on which you have worked with your art director, Dennis Gassner.

JC: We shot for at least three weeks in the hotel where half the action of the film takes place. We wanted an art deco stylization and a place that was falling in ruin after having seen better days. It was also necessary that the hotel be organically linked to the film. Our intention, moreover, was that the hotel function as an exteriorization of the character played by John Goodman. The sweat drips off his forehead like the paper peels off the walls. At the end, when Goodman says that he is a prisoner of his own mental state, that this is like some kind of hell, it was necessary for the hotel to have already suggested something infernal.

EC: We used a lot of greens and yellows to suggest an aura of putrefaction.

JC: Ethan always talked about the hotel as a ghost ship floating adrift, where you notice signs of the presence of other passengers, without ever laying eyes on any. The only indication of them is the shoes in the corridor. You can imagine it peopled by failed commercial travelers, with pathetic sex lives, who cry alone in their rooms.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

You take a look at the Hollywood of fifty years ago, but in a different way you find yourselves confronted by the same problems. Do artists always meet up with Philistines like Lipnick?

JC: We would have to say yes, probably. But in fact Barton Fink is quite far from our own experience. Our professional life in Hollywood has been especially easy, and this is no doubt extraordinary and unfair. It is in no way a comment about us. We financed Blood Simple, our first film, ourselves, and Circle Films in Washington produced the three next ones. Each time, we made them the offer of a screenplay that they liked and then they agreed on the budget. We have no rejected screenplays in our desk drawers. There are plenty of projects that we started but then didn’t finish writing for one reason or another, either because there were artistic problems we couldn’t resolve or because the cost of producing them would have been prohibitive.

Were any of these aborted projects particularly dear to you?

JC: No, because right away you get drawn into another film, and it becomes your sole preoccupation. We would have liked to produce one or two short subjects that we wrote, but it is very difficult to get them made in America because there’s no market.

Why did you use Roger Deakins on this project?

JC: Our usual director of photography, Barry Sonnenfeld, wasn’t available, and since we had seen Deakins’s work and liked it, we asked him to work with us. He seemed right for the film.

EC: We especially like the night scenes and interior sequences in Stormy Monday. We also screened Sid and Nancy and Pascali’s Island.

Did you make storyboards, as you had for your other films?

EC: Yes, we did detailed ones, but of course there were a lot of changes once we got on the set. However, we went there with a detailed plan for each shot. This was a film much easier to shoot than Miller’s Crossing, and the budget ran about a third less, just like the shooting schedule: eight weeks instead of twelve.

Miller’s Crossing (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

Did you shoot any sequences you didn’t use in the final cut?

JC: In the case of Miller’s Crossing, there were whole sequences we shot that did not find a place in the film. This was not the case with Barton Fink; we used just about everything. I do remember, however, that we did some shots about life in Hollywood studios, but didn’t decide to keep them; they were too conventional.

Compared to your preceding films, which feature bravura sequences like the night-time shoot-out in ‘Miller’s Crossing’, ‘Barton Fink’ has a much more restrained style.

JC: We weren’t conscious of that. Probably Miller’s Crossing had so many dialogue scenes that at a certain stage we intended to give the spectator some interesting visual effects. The genre also encourages large-scale action scenes. But in the case of Barton Fink this kind of thing did not seem appropriate to us. Stylistic tours-de-force would have ruptured the film’s equilibrium.

The writer victimized by Hollywood is a part of the legend of the cinema.

EC: Right, it’s almost a cliche. Furthermore, we gave the two writers in the film the dignity that victims are accorded, something they maybe didn’t deserve because Barton Fink is probably not a great artist and Mayhew is no longer able to write.

Do you feel close to any of your contemporaries in the American film industry?

JC: There’s no lack of films that we like, but we don’t see connections between them and our work. The American film industry is doing quite well these days; a number of directors are succeeding in using the screen to express their ideas. In effect, two kinds of films are being produced these days in the United States: the products churned out by the large production companies, which are most often repetitive although there are exceptions, and the films that certain independent directors manage to make.

Miller’s Crossing (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

Your films contrast sharply with the greater part of the Hollywood films of today. For example, you begin all your films in the middle of a scene without any kind of establishing shot, as in ‘Miller’s Crossing’.

JC: At the beginning of Miller’s Crossing, we had two setups: the first was of a drinking glass with ice cubes, then a closeup of Polito. We did not intend to show right away who was holding the glass. You see someone walk off with the glass, you hear the tinkling of the ice cubes, but the character is not visible in the shot. Then you see Polito, you listen to his monologue, and the ice cubes are always part of the scene, but they escape view. Then you see Albert Finney, but you still do not know who is holding the glass, and finally, you get to Gabriel Byrne in the background. All that was set up and laid out in the storyboards.

EC: We intended to create an aura of mystery around the character who was going to become the hero in the film.

JC: Polito is important in this scene because he’s the one who provides the background information as he begins to tell the story.

EC: We held back Gabriel’s entrance into the conversation. He is the last one to talk, five minutes after the beginning of the film.

How do you explain the relative commercial failure of ‘Miller’s Crossing’ despite the good reception it got from critics worldwide?

EC: It is always difficult to speculate about this kind of problem. Perhaps the story is too difficult to follow.

JC: After all the whole plot of The Big Sleep was very difficult to understand! It’s very difficult to analyze failure at the box office, but in any event we were certainly surprised by it.

– ‘Interview with Joel and Ethan Coen’. (From Positif, September 1991). By Michel Ciment and  Hubert Niogret. Translation by R. Barton Palmer.

    

The Coen Brothers: Westerns and Greek Tragedies

No Country For Old Men (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

“[‘No Country for Old Men’] is a reiteration of the old myth that Death stalks the land. That is why West Texas has that desert look, the scorched air, and the heat that leaves brave men listless.”

– David Thomson, Have You Seen...? 

No Country's setting is a classic neo-noir milieu of malevolence and amorality. Moss, like many other Coen heroes before him, is driven by money and vanity, but he lacks the ability to assess the chances against him. The Coens' noir flicks Blood Simple and Fargo are situated outside of the traditional metropolitan atmosphere. They do it again in No Country, but this time they take a more serious approach to the Western themes of civilization vs. the wild, the rule of the gun vs. the rule of law, the morality of violence, and American individualism. 

Moss only comes upon the money when a narrowly missed shot wounds a deer, and he climbs down from his high vantage point to put it to rest. This act of sympathy on the part of the hunter puts his fate in action. Moss returns to the murder site with water to assist a badly injured man, nearly sacrificing his life in the process, as a result of the same impulse. Sheriff Bell's reminiscences of the early days of Texas and clashes between lawmen and outlaws are voice-over narrations performed by Jones in his gravelly Texas accent. He is presented with a heinous deed that he cannot comprehend. The ideals that have shaped Bell and Moss no longer appear to apply. 

Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem epitomises the new west. He kills without remorse and pursues Moss with zeal. He kills with a cattle-slaughtering airgun. The cowboy and the ranch have been replaced by industrial meat production. Chigurh believes that death is unavoidable and that every choice and action leads to it. He is only functioning as Death's tool, not being responsible for his deeds. In this new western terrain, compassion and honour have no place; it's just the hunter and the prey. 

McCarthy's grim picture of reality is well captured by the Coens. McCarthy's neo-Western debunks the romantic vision of the west that the classic Western promotes, omitting the brutality and racism involved in the genocide of aboriginal peoples, westward expansion, and the Manifest Destiny mentality. With some of their greatest filmmaking—exquisitely planned scenes, an incredible eye for the peculiarities of human behaviour, and the ability to cast precisely the right actors—the Coens bring the book vividly to life. 

No Country for Old Men is set in 1980, and returns to the territory of the Coens' first film, Blood Simple (1983), with the windy desolation of the Lone Star state externalising the mindset of a country that is "hard on people" – especially those who go against Reaganite self-sufficiency without thinking things through. 

If Ray (John Getz) of Blood Simple gets caught up in a web of deception and killing when he decides to tidy up a murder scene for which he falsely believes his sweetheart is to blame, Moss puts his head on the block via an ill-advised act of charity. "You're on your own down here," says the opening narration in Blood Simple. 

The Coen brothers have always referenced and parodied previous films and literature, but this is their first direct adaptation. It's easy to understand why they were drawn to Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, an extravagant found-cash period piece with a heritage that echoes William Faulkner and James M. Cain's grim pulp dramas. 

McCarthy's story is well-suited to the Coen brothers' upheaval of genre, and the film stays remarkably true to the novel's source material, condensing its dark humour and meditations on the depth of evil into a concise vision of grim fate and a relentless sense of the darkness released by criminal money.

In the following extract Richard Gilmore discusses the Coen Brothers western No Country for Old Men, and its relation to Greek tragedy.

The stories that the Coen brothers are interested in telling all seem to be very American stories. Their approach of choice is the genre of film. Their favorite film genre is very American, a genre the French call film noir, but No Country for Old Men is of another classic American genre, the western. Genre is an interesting way to try to say something about something because, as Jacques Derrida has made explicit, the “law of the law of genre” is that every new member of a genre set will deviate from and violate the apparent established principles of that genre. This is how Derrida describes the “law of the law of genre”: “It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set.” This description of each new member of a genre set sounds to me a lot like what it means to be a (new) member of the set of Americans. Just as each new Coen film that has genre elements adds to and transforms the genre it participates in, so too, each new American adds to and transforms what it means to be an American.

No Country for Old Men, then, is and is not a classic western. It takes place in the West and its main protagonists are what you might call westerners. On the other hand, the plot revolves around a drug deal that has gone bad; it involves four-wheel-drive vehicles, semiautomatic weapons, and executives in high-rise buildings, none of which would seem to belong in a western. There is a beautiful moment when Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his sidekick, Deputy Wendell, are riding along, following a trail, and Deputy Wendell remarks on the tracks they are following in a way that recalls for me a moment in John Ford’s great classic (and revisionist) western, The Searchers (1956), when Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) are following some tracks that will be similarly fateful for everyone involved. It is an interesting connection (I won’t claim it is a reference) because in The Searchers, Ethan says, “We’ll find ’em. Just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth”—and they do. They find ’em, sure enough; but in an odd, somewhat inexplicable twist, there is no final confrontation between Ethan and Scar (Henry Brandon), the hated Comanche chief he has been seeking for seven years. Instead, it is Martin who kills Scar, and he appears to have done it while Scar was asleep in his tepee. Sheriff Bell is pretty dogged for a while, but he will give up the search altogether before he finds his adversary, Anton Chigurh.

Anton Chigurh might as well be Melville’s Moby Dick for all of the human compassion, or even human motivation, that can be found in him. It makes as little sense to speak of him as evil as it does to say that raw nature, a blizzard or a flood, is evil. He has principles, the equivalent in a man to the laws of nature. Given his principles, he does not act irrationally or from passion; he is more of an inexorable force. He is not a rampaging killer on the loose; he has been summoned by a human will, a human desire, to achieve a desired end. He appears only because he was summoned. The recognizable and clear evil lies with the one (or those, since there may be others involved; the film is not explicit on this point) who summoned him. He was summoned because of greed, lust for power, an indifference to the suffering of others, and personal gratification. He who summoned him will learn, too late, that, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, he has summoned a power that he cannot control, that it was pure hubris to think that he could control it.

That evil man is of little interest to either Cormac McCarthy, the author of the novel, No Country for Old Men, or to Joel and Ethan Coen, the makers of the movie. What is of interest to McCarthy and the Coens is rather what happens when a good, but flawed, man encounters this force of nature in human guise. In this sense, No Country for Old Men recapitulates the patterns of ancient Greek tragedy. As in ancient Greek tragedy, a good but flawed man will become enmeshed in events that will prove to be his ruin. It will be what is good in him as much as what is flawed that will engage him in these events, and his ruin will be complete. Oedipus is a kind of paradigm of the way the ancient tragedies begin and end. It is because Oedipus is so smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate that he ascends to the throne of Thebes and rules as a good and noble king. It is also because Oedipus is so smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate that he is able to complete the mysterious task sent him by the Oracle of Delphi and to find the murderer of the previous king of Thebes, King Laius.

Unfortunately, as it will turn out, it is Oedipus himself who killed the previous king, as predicted by the same Oracle of Delphi long ago. He has also married his mother and fathered his children/siblings. As a consequence, Oedipus’s wife/mother commits suicide, he blinds and exiles himself, his incest-produced children will fight and be responsible for each others’ deaths. Llewelyn Moss is similarly smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate. His intelligence and competence lead him to the “last man standing” (as Moss puts it to the man he finds dying in a truck, saying, “there must’ve been one”) and to the money. His compassion compels him to return to the site of the drug deal gone bad to bring water to the dying man who asked for it. It is not at all clear whether or not Chigurh or the Mexicans would have ever picked up the transponder signals if he had not gone back, but it is certainly clear that once they have found Moss and his truck at the scene, they will be on his trail wherever he goes. A fate similar to Oedipus’s disastrous ruin awaits Llewelyn Moss: both he and his young wife will be brutally murdered; all that he has will be lost.

Power, Hubris, and the Fatal Flaw

Anton Chigurh is a monster, in the sense that Emerson uses the word in his essay “The American Scholar,” that is, in association with “monitory” and “admonition,” drawing on its Latin derivation meaning a warning or an omen.The ancient Greek tragedies were meant to serve that same function, that is, warning about especially human temptations that would lead to disaster. Tragedy was considered a source of wisdom as well as of entertainment, and the primary wisdom that the ancient Greek tragedies taught was also written on the wall at the famous and perhaps most holy of Greek temples, the Oracle of Delphi: “Avoid hubris.” Hubris is a difficult word to recover from the Greek, but it means something like arrogant ignorance, thinking that you are better or more powerful than you really are. The Greek gods hated hubris, and one of their primary occupations as gods was punishing humans for their hubris.

Hubris was such a problem for the Greeks not because they valued timidity or even humility but because they loved power, and they loved powerful, proud people. As Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics, “The man is thought to be proud who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them.” The Greek ideal was to manifest all of your true power, and to be very powerful, without overstepping your own limits, without presuming to have more power than you really have. This is a very difficult ideal to achieve because one does not know what one is capable of until one tries to do things beyond what one has done before. And yet, the Greeks (Aristotle, for one) assumed that one could know what one is capable of and thereby avoid the calamities of hubris. The above quotation from Aristotle concludes, “for he who does so beyond his deserts is a fool, but no virtuous man is foolish or silly.” This Greek ideal, this wisdom, is, too, exhorted upon the wall at Delphi: “Know thyself.” Llewelyn Moss is a man of considerable resources, but his powers have been lying more or less dormant. He has innate powers of intelligence and determination as well as some acquired abilities learned while serving in Vietnam. Virtually all of these powers are banked, the way one banks a fire, because there is no way to exercise them in his day-to-day life. He has a good job as a welder that does not require all of either his intelligence or determination. He has a lovely young wife and a comfortable trailer home but no obvious way of improving his situation beyond this level of comfort. In many ways he seems to be happy and successful, but it is a difficult thing to have powers that you have no opportunities to use. Doing pretty well in America has never been the happiest of options if there is some chance that you could be doing better. Of course, that possibility of doing better becomes real for Llewelyn when he comes upon the briefcase full of cash. He barely seems to hesitate before he decides to go for it.

A key element of Greek tragedy is the idea of the protagonist’s hamartia, the fatal flaw. Hamartia is a term derived from archery and literally means “off the mark,” signifying that one’s aim has been slightly off. The protagonist of a classic Greek tragedy must be essentially a good person, a person whose intentions are good but who does not really or fully know himself or herself, and this lack of self-knowledge is mixed with a bit of hubris, which puts off one’s aim. This is quite literally suggested of Llewelyn at the beginning of the movie when he is hunting for antelope and ends up shooting one in the hindquarters. In a sense, the entire movie is prefigured in this scene. It is a scene that shows Llewelyn to be highly competent, an expert at hunting: the way he uses his boot for a barrel rest, the way he adjusts the sight for the distance of the shot, his patience in taking the shot, his picking up his shell after he takes the shot are all signs of his expertise. All are signs of his knowledge, his ability, his power, but the scene also shows his ultimate hubris, literally and figuratively. Instead of killing the antelope, he only wounds it, the worst possible outcome for a responsible hunter. He is clearly frustrated and annoyed with himself, and he heads out after the wounded antelope to try to finish what he has started.

It is a long shot that he thinks he can make. It is not a shot that he will make, but he is just good enough to actually hit the antelope at the distance of almost a mile. All of the elements of the movie are here, Llewelyn’s talents as well as his misjudgments, as well as certain implacable facts of nature; distance, heat, the movement of the antelope are the facts of nature that will undo his best intentions. His aim is good but not quite good enough, and the worst possible consequences eventuate because he was willing to try the difficult shot. His experience is a Greek tragedy in miniature.

– No Country for Old Men. The Coens’ Tragic Western by Richard Gilmore in The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Edited by Mark T. Conard.

The Coen Brothers: Fargo, Crime and Realism

Fargo (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

‘Based on actual events’ the Coen Brothers’ Fargo tells the story of indebted Minneapolis car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) who hires two lowlifes Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife Jean (Kristin Rudrüd) and ransom her for money from his rich father-in-law Wade (Harve Presnell). The scheme unravels when one of the kidnappers kills a state trooper during a routine traffic stop. As Carl and Gaear leave more bodies in their wake, the pregnant local police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) begins to investigate. 

From its opening shot – in which a car trundles down a harsh, snowy road – to its bleak conclusion, the film transforms its dull, Upper Midwestern landscape into the setting for a narrative that explores the soul of modern America. The Coens take a standard film noir plot and transform it into epic drama, forming out of the grim events a portrait of the pursuit of the American Dream and its consequences. 

The films of the Coen brothers are often noted for their highly self-conscious relation to preceding film forms. In Fargo the screenplay resolutely undermines the traditional police procedural, most notably with the creation of the main female police investigator. Fargo deliberately turns against film convention in favour of a naturalism that gives its characters identifiable, clearly grounded lives. There’s a richness in the portrayal of the characters that fills the movie with closely observed, realistic details instead of clichés. This extends to the portrayal of the ineptitude of Carl and Jerry – the would-be ‘masterminds’ of Fargo’s kidnap plot. As Ethan Coen explains:

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 true nightmare of Fargo is that many of the characters have unthinkingly bought into the promise of "the American Dream," yet they appear incapable of reconciling those impossible visions of optimism with the persistent problems that plague their lives – often caused by their own lack of self-awareness. Jerry Lundegaard is the living embodiment of this ubiquitous emotional crisis; yet, we get glimpses of it even in the most insignificant characters, such as the cashier at the restaurant, whose forced grin and artificially happy demeanour threaten to burst wide open at any time. 

Only Marge and her husband, Norm (John Carroll Lynch), seemed to be completely happy in their lives. They are not adhering to a preset model of "family life" derived from television, as the Lundegaards so ineptly do; rather, their lifestyle is less formulaic, less preset. As a stay-at-home spouse, Norm finds fulfilment in his job – despite the kitschy nature of his wildlife paintings – and eventually achieves professional renown; while Marge maintains a mostly optimistic outlook on life despite the daily horrors of police work. Thus, the couple may look forward to the arrival of their kid in "only two more months" with true hope and optimism, as well as to the pleasure it will bring.

Marge's worldview has been described as naive by some commentators due to her inability to comprehend the presence of evil. She is, however, more intricate than that. “There is... with Frances a really honest style, a very open presentation of her character,” Joel Coen remarked. Marge is prevented from becoming a caricature of herself by this.” Others regard Marge as the film's moral core, implying that it is her morality that endows her with the capacity to empathise, as well as the capacity for shame - a quality noticeably missing in the majority of the film's characters. 

In the interview which follows, initially published in 1996, Joel and Ethan Cohen discuss the writing and filming of Fargo, its precise characterizations, acting performances and the visual style that emphasizes the spiritual landscape of the bleak Midwestern setting:

Did some news item inspire ‘Fargo’, as the press kit suggests, or is that another false trail that you two have laid?

JOEL COEN: In its general structure, the film is based on a real event, but the details of the story and the characters are fictional. We were not interested in making a documentary film, and we did no research about the nature of the murders or the events connected to them. But in warning viewers that we had found our inspiration from a real story, we were preparing them to not view the film like an ordinary thriller.

Did this kidnapping of a wife organized by her husband create a good deal of sensation in 1987?

ETHAN COEN: It didn’t. In fact, its surprising how many things of this land get very little publicity. We heard about it from a friend who lived very close to where the story unfolded in Minnesota, which also happens to be where we are from.

Why did you call the film ‘Fargo’ when the important action of the film is set in Brainerd, which is in Minnesota, and not ‘Fargo’?

JC: Fargo seemed a more evocative title than ‘Brainerd’ – that’s the only reason.

EC: It was just that we liked the sound of the word – there’s no hidden meaning.

JC: There was, to be sure, a kind of western connection with Wells Fargo, but that was not part of our intention, and it’s too bad that some people should have thought so.

Here you returned somewhat to the territory of your first films, ‘Blood Simple’ and ‘Raising Arizona’.

JC: There are some similarities, but also some important differences. These three films are all small-scale productions, their main themes relate to criminality, to kidnapping, and they are also very specific in their reference to geographical locale. Furthermore, Frances McDormand plays a role in Fargo and Blood Simple. But we have always thought that Blood Simple belongs to the tradition of flamboyant melodrama, as given expression in the novels of James M. Cain, along with some influence from the horror film. In Fargo, we tried out a very different stylistic approach, introducing the subject in a quite dry fashion. Our intention was also that the camera should tell the story like an observer. The structure of the film also follows from the origin of the story in an actual event: we allowed ourselves more digressions and detours. Each incident did not necessarily have to be connected to the plot. We also allowed ourselves to withhold the appearance of the heroine, Marge Gunderson, until the middle of the film.

EC: This is also a way of signifying to the viewer that he was not watching a genre film, that we were not going to satisfy expectations of this kind. In this way too, the film differs from Blood Simple.

What is it that drew you to the subject?

JC: There were two or three things about the actual events that interested us. In the first place, the story takes place in a time and place with which we were familiar and could explore. And then again it features a kidnapping, a subject that has always fascinated us. In fact, we had a screenplay that was quite different from Fargo that we would have been very happy to shoot. Finally, this subject offered us the chance to shoot a crime film with characters quite different from genre stereotypes.

EC: It’s probably not a subject we would have worked with had it not been connected to this particular context. When we begin writing, we need to imagine in a quite specific way the world where the story unfolds. The difference is that until this point these universes were purely fictional, while in the case of Fargo there was an air of authenticity we had to communicate. Since we come from the area, that helped us take into account the particular character of the place.

A ‘dialogue coach’ is listed in the credits. Is that a gag?

EC: No, not at all. Most of the actors come from this part of the country, and they did not need coaching, but Frances McDormand, Bill Macy, and Harve Presnell had to have some training so their accents would blend with the others. This was partly how the characters were developed, and it also contributed to the air of authenticity.

JC: The people there speak is a very economical fashion, which is almost monosyllabic. This seems as exotic to other Americans as it does to you Europeans! In fact, the Scandinavian influence on the culture of that area, the rhythm of the sentences, the accent, all of this is not familiar at all to the rest of America. The story could have just as well taken place on the moon! New Yorkers have a general conception of Midwesterners, but they know nothing about these cultural ‘pockets,’ these microsocieties with their idiosyncrasies and peculiarities.

EC: When we were small, we were not really conscious of this Scandinavian heritage that so strongly affects this part of the country simply because we had no points for comparison. When we got to New York City, we were astonished not to find any Gustafsons or Sondergaards. Certainly, all the exoticism comes from this Nordic character, with its polite and reserved manner. There’s something almost Japanese in this refusal to register even the least emotion, in this resistance to saying no. One of the sources of comedy in the story comes from the opposition between this constant avoidance of all confrontation and the murders gradually piling up.

JC: We didn’t need to do any research since this manner of speech, these expressions, these sentence cadences were familiar to us. Our parents had always lived in this part of the country, and that means we returned there regularly and were familiar with the culture. After all, it’s this culture that shaped us. Because we had not lived there for some time, we had the feeling of being separated in part from the environment where we had grown up.

The episode between Marge and her old high-school friend is a digression from the central narrative, which is fairly compressed.

EC: Someone mentioned to us that in this scene, Frances acts in the very restrained manner of an Oriental, while her Japanese friend is talkative and irrational in the American style. It was certainly our intention while writing this sequence that it should be a digression.

JC: We wanted to provide another point of view on Frances’s character, one that had nothing to do with the police investigation. This is also what happens in the scenes with her husband.

EC: Our intention was to demonstrate that this story is more closely connected to real life than to fiction, and we felt free to create a scene that had no links to the plot.

‘The Hudsucker Proxy’ is no doubt your most stylized film. This one, in contrast, is probably your least.

JC: We wanted to take a new approach to style in this film, to make something radically different from our previous films. And it is true that we were pressured in this direction because the preceding film was the most ‘theatrical’ of them all. But curiously, working from actual events, we came to yet another form of stylization, in the largest sense of that term. The end result was then not as different as we imagined it would be!

A little like Kubrick did with ‘Dr. Strangelove’, you begin with a somewhat documentary presentation, then little by little, with icy humor, everything comes unglued and turns in the direction of the absurd.

EC: That resulted in part from the nature of the story. There is a plan that is established at the beginning and which in the end changes as the characters lose control of it.

JC: That’s an effect implicit in the form of the story. When a character, in the first scene, tells you how things are going to go, we know very well that the unfolding of the story will go in a quite different direction. Others have also made reference to Kubrick, and I see the connection. His approach to the material is very formal, but then progresses regularly from the prosaic to the baroque.

How did you succeed in never falling into caricature, a danger because of the kind of story you work with?

JC: I suppose intuition plays some role with regard to our choice of style, and, even more, it depends a great deal on the actors and their ability to know when they might be going too far. For example, Frances’s way of presenting her character is very sincere, very direct. That prevents Marge from becoming a parody of herself. Frances was very conscious of the dangers posed by excessiveness because of the quirk she used of dragging out the end of every sentence.

EC: We worked constantly on the set making adjustments with the actors. They’d give us a fairly wide range of behaviors for their characters, and we never stopped discussing that while shooting proceeded.

JC: We worked a good deal on ‘feeling.’ It’s hard to say in words why Marge, in the film, is not a caricature, but a real person with three dimensions.

EC: What’s certain about this is that when we were writing the screenplay and the actors were interpreting their roles, none of us thought of the story as a comedy.

JC: And that certainly helped, at the same time, to create comic effects and make the characters plausible. The comedy would not have worked if the film had been shot as a comedy, instead of sincerely and directly.

The relationship between Marge and her husband is also quite strange.

JC: We were intrigued from the moment we started casting by the notion of very simple interplay between them and by the impassive expression of John Caroll Lynch, which seemed to suit the tone of the film perfectly.

EC: He is the perfect incarnation of the undemonstrative personality of people from that region. The relations between husband and wife are based on what is not said, and yet they succeed nevertheless in communicating in some sense.

The end seems to be a parody of the classic Hollywood happy ending with the husband and wife on their bed symbolizing the return to order and to the natural.

JC: It is true that this is a return to order, but we did not have the intention of finishing up with a scene that’s a parody. There was an article in the New York Times in which the writer asked why the people in Minnesota did not like the film’s end, even though everything turned out for the best, as they are fond of believing there!

The only point at issue in the ending has to do with money. But isn’t money the film’s principal subject?

JC: All the characters in the film are obsessed with money.

EC: At the same time, we did not want to be too specific, for example, concerning the debt Jerry owes. It was enough to understand that this character had trapped himself by getting involved in some deal that had turned out badly. Moreover, during the entire film, Jerry is a pathetic loser who never stops improvising solutions in order to escape from the impasses he finds himself blocked by. He never stops trying everything, never stops bursting with activity. That almost makes him admirable!

JC: What we found interesting from the beginning in the character played by William Macy is his absolute incapacity, for even one minute, to project himself into the future so that he might evaluate the consequences of the decisions he has made. There is something fascinating about his total inability to gain any perspective. He’s one of those people who build a pyramid but never think for a minute about it crumbling.

Did writing the screenplay take a lot of time?

EC: We had begun it before shooting The Hudsucker Proxy; afterward we went back to it, so it is pretty hard for us to estimate the time it all took. But two years had passed. What is certain is that the writing was easy and relatively quick, especially in comparison with our other screenplays, such as the one for Miller’s Crossing.

Was it determined from the beginning that the wife, once kidnapped, would no longer be a physical presence?

JC: Yes, absolutely. And at a certain point in the story, it was also evident to us that she would cease to be a person for those who had kidnapped her. Moreover, it was no longer the actress Kristin Rudrud who played her, but a double with a hood over her head. In this case, we had no interest in the victim. It did not seem that at any point the husband himself was worried about what might happen to her. And Carl, one of the kidnappers, didn’t even know her name.

Did you pick Steve Buscemi for this part before you had settled on Peter Stormare to play the other bad guy?

EC: In fact, we wrote the parts for these two comedians. And it was the same for Marge, played by Frances McDormand. Peter is an old friend, and he seemed an interesting choice for the role. Of course, his character is an outsider in the milieu where he finds himself, but at the same time he has an ethnic connection to it.

How do you work with your music director Carter Burwell?

JC: He has worked with us since our first project. Usually, he screens the film all the way through, then he plays a little bit of what he has in mind for us on the synthesizer so that he can give us some idea of what direction he’d like to go in. Before planning the orchestration, he plays parts of it for us on the piano, and we think about the connections these might have with certain sequences of the film. Then he goes on to the next step.

EC: In the case of this film, the main theme is based on a popular Scandinavian melody that Carter found for us.

JC: This is often how we work with him. For Miller’s Crossing, the music came from an Irish folk tune that he used as the basis for his orchestration, adding bits he wrote himself. For Raising Arizona, he used a popular American tune that Holly Hunter sings part of. On the other hand, for Blood Simple and Barton Fink, the music is all his own composition; it wasn’t inspired by anything else. For The Hudsucker Proxy, it was different yet again, a mix of an original composition by Carter and bits and pieces of Khachaturian.

EC: After he completes the orchestration, we go along with him to the sound recording studio. For our last two productions, he directed the orchestra himself. While the film is projected, we are still able to make last-minute changes. All told, the collaboration with him does not last more than two or three months.

How long did the editing take?

JC: About twelve weeks. That was a pretty short time for us because usually we take more, depending on whether we start editing while we’re still shooting.

Did the principal photography pose any problems for you?

JC: It was easier for us in this case than with our other films. We talked it over a great deal with Roger Deakins because we wanted to shoot a good many exterior long shots. From the very beginning, we determined to use nothing but shots where the camera does not move.

EC: Afterward we decided that this purist attitude was pretty stupid.

JC: And so we decided then to move the camera sometimes, but in such a way that the viewer would not notice it. We didn’t want to make the camera movement dramatic like we’d done in the past because we did not want to emphasize the action, make it seem either too dramatic or
irrational.

EC: Roger Deakins worked on this production with a camera operator although, in the past, he was most often his own camera operator, including the two films he had made for us. This time he did not take charge of everything because he was often busy with the camera. On Fargo, we had problems with the weather because we needed snow, but the winter when we shot the film was particularly mild and dry. We had to work in Minneapolis with artificial snow. Then, because the snow didn’t always work out, we had to travel in the end to North Dakota to shoot the large-scale exteriors. There we found exactly what we were looking for: a sky with a very low ceiling, no direct sunlight, no line marking the horizon, only a neutral and diffuse light.

JC: The landscapes we used were really dramatic and oppressive. There were no mountains or trees, only desolate flatlands extending into the distance. That’s what we wanted to put on the screen.

Do you spend a lot of time looking through the camera?

JC: For the first film we made with Roger Deakins, Barton Fink, we were constantly looking through the viewfinder. For Hudsucker Proxy, less. And even less in the case of Fargo. This was no doubt a reflection of the material in each case and of the visual effects we were looking for, but it also resulted from our developing collaboration with the director of photography. When we work regularly with someone, we rather quickly develop a sort of telepathic language. I also think that Roger likes to work with people like us who take an active interest in problems of lighting, rather than with directors who depend entirely on him.

There’s a contradiction between what it says in the press kit, which credits you with the editing, and the film credits that name a certain Roderick Jaynes.

JC: Whenever we edit the film ourselves, we use the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. We prefer a hands-on approach rather than sitting next to someone and telling them when to cut. We think that’s easier. In any case, there are two of us in the editing room. As for everything else, we work together, and we never have the feeling of isolation that other people sometimes have. On Barton Fink and Blood Simple, we were also our own editor. On the other projects, we have used an editor, but we were always there, of course, whenever we could be. But if we called upon Tom Noble or Michael Miller in these other cases, it was because the editing, for reasons of scheduling, had to start while we were shooting.

Your films are set in New Orleans [sic], in New York, in Hollywood, in the West, or the Midwest. It seems you are interested in exploring American geography.

JC: We would like to shoot somewhere else, but, bizarrely, the subjects we come up with are always set in America. That’s what seems to attract us.

EC: It’s always necessary, or so it seems, that the universe in which our stories take place has some kind of connection, however distant, with us. In the case of Fargo, the connection was obviously even closer.

JC: We have a need to know a subject intimately or, at least, feel some emotional connection to it. At the same time, we are not interested unless there is something exotic about it. For example, we know Minnesota very well, but not the people who inhabit Fargo or their way of life. On the other hand, in the case of Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing, the exoticism came from the story’s being set in a distant time.

What are your connections with the characters in ‘Fargo’, who for the most part seem somewhat retarded?

JC: We have affection for them all and perhaps particularly for those who are plain and simple.

EC: 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.
 

JC: We are often asked how we manage injecting comedy into the material. But it seems to us that comedy is part of life. Look at the recent example of the people who tried to blow up the World Trade Center. They rented a panel truck to use for the explosion and then, after committing the crime, went back to the rental agency to get back the money they left on deposit. The absurdity of this kind of behavior is terribly funny in itself.

What projects are you working on?

EC: At this point we’re working on two screenplays but don’t know which one we’ll finish first or which one will get financing first.

JC: One is also about a kidnapping, but of a very different sort. [This is a reference to The Ladykillers project, released in 2004]. The other is a kind of film noir about a barber from northern California, at the end of the 1940s. [This is the project that became The Man Who Wasn’t There.]

– From Closer to Life Than the Conventions of Cinema by Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret (Positif, 1996). Revised version in The Coen Brothers: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers) Ed. William Rodney Allen. (University Press of Mississippi, 2006).