Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order

By Elijah Siegler

Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, True Grit—Joel and Ethan Coen make movies. They make movies that matter. But do these movies matter for religion?

Coen is a masterful response to this question of religious significance that neither imposes alien orthodoxy nor consigns the Coens to religious insignificance. The Coen movies discussed each receive a chapter-length investigation of the specific film’s relation to the religious. Far more than just documenting religion in all Coen films—from blink-and you’ll-miss-them biblical references to gospel tunes framing the soundtrack—the volume, cumulatively, mounts a compelling case for the Coens’ consistent religious outlook with an original argument about precisely what constitutes religion. The volume reveals how Coen films emerge as morality tales, set in a mythological American landscape, that critique greed and self-interest. Coen heroes often confront apocalyptic and unredeemable evil, face human limitation and the banality of violence, and force audiences to wrestle with redemption and grace within the stark moral worlds portrayed on screen. This is religion on Coen terms.

Coen teaches its readers something new about religion, about film, and about the kind of world-making that each claims to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781481302845

Book preview

Introduction

Are the Coen Brothers Religious Filmmakers? Or How Simple Is Blood Simple?

ELIJAH SIEGLER

What do we want from the Coen brothers, anyway?

Think about what these two skinny, bearded guys from Minnesota, Joel (born in 1954) and Ethan (born in 1957), have given us. They write, direct, produce, and edit (under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes) movies. In a thirty-year period (1984–2014), they have given us sixteen films, all but one or two of them eminently watchable (and endlessly rewatchable), and many of them among the best American movies of all time. Their comedies are hilarious; their dramas, harrowing. Their films, hovering between cult status, highbrow artistic cachet, and mainstream success, are beautiful to look at, interesting to listen to, and engaging to think through.

So what more do we want from them anyway?

Answers. We want answers. What do their films mean? What’s their secret? And so we write books and post blogs and edit supercuts that analyze each of their films in manic detail.¹ There are books about what the Coens’ films can tell us about philosophy, about deconstruction and psychoanalysis, about violence. There are books in French and in Italian.

These treatises, whether academic or fannish or some combination thereof, continue, despite the fact that the Coen brothers have heaped more than their usual amount of disdain on critics and scholars. Some of this disdain has been direct, as when, in interviews, they admit to baiting film critics (see the chapter on Barton Fink), or in the introduction to their first published screenplay, Blood Simple, they wrote, Young writers just starting out and eager to make good should know that the world teems with critics—ugly, bitter people, fat and acned for the most part, often afflicted with gout, dropsy and diseases of the inner ear.²

But much of this disdain has been indirect. For example, their subsequent introductions have been written under various pseudonyms, most notably Roderick Jaynes, the name they attribute to their editing efforts, but who also has a persona as a crotchety old Brit and an anti-Semite to boot. Jaynes dismisses the films he has edited and the screenplays he has introduced in the same high-handed tone the Coens must have noticed some of their critics have used. Or take the introduction to the screenplay for O Brother, Where Art Thou? Here, they imitated the voice of the scholar. The two-page diatribe is attributed to "Carson’s Movie Abstract, a quarterly of movie synopses compiled for professionals in the humanities in which they only slightly exaggerate our ridiculously lofty pronouncements (All dread is, at bottom, dread of being squished").³

So it is with some trepidation that we present another scholarly, critical book on the films of the Coen brothers. The fact that this book looks at the religious aspects of their films presents even more difficulties. Are the Coen brothers religious filmmakers in the first place?

Artful Contempt or a Moral Order?

As film critic Mike D’Angelo wrote, in a retrospective essay of their entire filmography, For many years, the Coens were dismissed as soulless mimics who looked upon all of their characters with contempt—a cardinal sin in some circles.⁴ Said circles include some of America’s best-regarded film writers: J. Hoberman remarks on how the Coens perfected artful contempt.⁵ And R. Barton Palmer reveals how Pauline Kael shows a special dislike for the Coens, believing their films are all flash and no substance. Such productions, morally speaking, are even worse than infantilizing entertainment.⁶

Or to put it more colloquially, the Coens are another example of boys with their toys:⁷ directors, gifted with talent and technique, who use their gifts to snigger behind the camera as they cast their cold gaze on their actor-puppets. (This epithet might be applied to directors as different as Paul Verhoeven and Quentin Tarantino.) One firsthand observer of the Coens’ filmmaking technique makes the interesting point that this feeling of coldness in their films is brought about by their constant use of wide-angle camera lenses.⁸

Other critics, on the other hand, have been convinced that the Coens are moralists who take a biblical view of good and evil. Jason C. Bivins, a contributor to this volume, summarizes the view of those critics, finding their focus ultimately unimaginative and unhelpful.

Critic Tasha Robinson focuses on the ostensibly retributive worldview Coen films reveal, in which emissaries of stern morality throw the arbitrary and empty worlds of their lost characters off balance (and in so doing create a kind of moral clarity, even if morality ultimately comes with no reward).⁹ Robinson follows a standard critical path in seeking to locate religion in the films, and focuses consequently on the tropes of crime and punishment often reflexively adduced to the texts of the Hebrew Bible. She suggests that they are merciless and that their films show wrongdoing as basically irredeemable (the heels in Coen movies can be charismatic, even sympathetic, but we still know them as morally objectionable). But one wonders: do the Coens depict violence and calamity in order to illustrate the bindingness of a particular morality, or to underscore how luckless and lawless is the world of chance announced by Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men? Jeffrey Overstreet and Matt Zoller Seitz obsess about whether or not the Coens believe in God. Overstreet suggests that the filmmakers are clearly engaged with questions that appear religious (morality and meaning being the default categories, one supposes) but take the via negativa, suggesting that in the absence of divine materiality we can only walk humbly through an unpredictable life.¹⁰ Like Robinson, these critics focus on the recurrence of moral complexity in Coen canon, which together castigate not just the overtly evil but also those who seek too vigorously to make reality submit to their will. It is only, they find, in those who engage in a kind of kenosis (Delmar in O Brother, Where Art Thou?) that we see anything like acceptance.¹¹

The journalist Cathleen Falsani makes the most strenuous case for the Coens-as-moralists argument when she argues that there is a moral order to the worlds the Coens create.¹² Her book turns the Coen filmography into fodder for a kind of liberal Protestant study group. It ends with group study questions and something called the 14 Coenmandments, lessons presumably derived from their films, including 6. Take chances. Don’t be paralyzed by doubt or fear and 10. No one knows the quality of a person’s heart except for God.¹³

So are the brothers sincere moralists or postmodern contempt artists? This question has bedeviled the brothers since their first film, 1984’s Blood Simple, and that stripped-down film provides a perfect entry point to that question and to their work in general.

Blood Simple

Blood Simple was the Coens’ calling-card movie (a low-budget, self-financed, easy-to-shoot first film that demonstrates a director’s abilities in order to garner studio support for their next film).¹⁴

The choice of setting and story then has less to do with religious or moral values, or lack thereof, but financial and logistic constraints. As the Coens put it:

To tell you the truth we were thinking what kind of thing we could do on a low budget. We knew we were going to be raising the money ourselves and that there wouldn’t be much money. The sort of claustrophobic, heavily plotted murder melodrama seemed tailor-made for something you might be able to do successfully on a small budget, in real practical terms.¹⁵

The success of this film (playing at many film festivals, garnering great reviews) led not to the Coens directing blockbuster summer films but to the opportunity for creative independence rare for those working within the Hollywood studio system¹⁶—their next two films were the broad comedy Raising Arizona and the period gangster film Miller’s Crossing.

But Blood Simple anticipates themes and motifs from other movies, most notably their most celebrated film, No Country for Old Men. The famous opening narration—But what I know about is Texas, and down here you’re on your own—plays over a montage of desolate Texan landscape, reminiscent of the opening montage of No Country. The formal visual qualities of Blood Simple, understated yet highly thought out, also echo No Country. Film critic Christopher Orr is struck by Blood Simple’s interplay of light and darkness, and in particular the inversion by which the former suggests danger and the latter relative safety.¹⁷ Later in this volume, M. Gail Hamner rigorously analyzes that same quality in No Country.

Blood Simple is the first of their many films to borrow plot, theme, and language from the hardboiled detective genre. The title phrase is taken from Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest, where the term describes the panic and fear that visit a killer in the wake of a murder.¹⁸ The plot, though, does not borrow from Hammett (Miller’s Crossing does enough of that) as much as from James M. Cain. According to R. Barton Palmer, "Blood Simple offers a penetrating reading of Cain, dramatizing how the relentless and transgressive pursuit of self-interest, because it poisons human relations, inevitably proves suicidal."¹⁹

A film that can be read as a critique of self-interest might certainly be called a dense morality play.²⁰ Its structure recalls Greek tragedy, where the overflow of passion unleashes the furies.

Yet despite (or because) of its moral concerns, Blood Simple has been consistently criticized for being meaningless. Film historian Michael Z. Newman writes that the Coens refer to nothing much outside themselves and take interest in form as form rather than as vehicle for deeper meaning.²¹ In an essay subtitled "Postmodern Dead Ends in Blood Simple, Alan Woolfolk calls the film deeply and resolutely postmodern in that it lacks any significant intimation, however futile and self-destructive, to the corruption and profane ordinariness of late modernity that was present in classic film noir at its best."²²

At least Woolfolk appreciated the film, if only for its humor. English professor Larry E. Grimes does not. In a chapter identified as theological criticism, he compares Psycho and Blood Simple, writing, Although Hitchcock and Coen both attend directly to bodies dead and corruptible, they do not gaze on them with the same stare, nor do they tell the tale of death and dying using the same narrative strategy. This is so because they see life from different theological angles.²³ Grimes will approve of the theological angle of one of cinema’s great masters over that of the first-time directors. In comparing the traditional Christian vision of Psycho with the post-Christian, postmodern Blood Simple, he finds the latter’s central narrative problem is the disparity between event and discourse, which means there is no communal meaning, no community of meaning. In other words, words such as myth, truth, and saga are as dead as Julian Marty and the fish on his desk.²⁴

Indeed, Grimes’ own religious convictions seem to be offended when two traditional Christian symbols—light and fish—are transmuted into a missing cigarette lighter buried under a pile of rotting fish, offering no sign of redemption or hope.²⁵

My own reading of Blood Simple is that it is far from Grimes’ stylish but clichéd postmodernism, but rather keeps to a deliberately minimalist style to make its larger point. Its ostensible protagonists, Abby and Ray, have little personality or motivation. Its villains, Julian Marty and Loren Visser, have personality in spades but no real backstory. No character allows for audience identification, and few Coen characters have since.

The dominant mood in this film is a feeling of stuckness: the four main characters are all trapped, enclosed, as stuck as the four dead fish left to rot on a desk. Their actions are repetitive (echoed by the repeated song on the soundtrack The Same Old Song) and futile, whether they are leaving town, cleaning up blood, chatting up women, or crawling along the highway.

The characters may be stuck in futility, but the movie is not. It contains rich themes linked visually and verbally. Some of the most notable include the idea of hell, which seems to be located in the film’s main setting, a rundown bar with its mosquito traps and ceiling fans and incinerator out back. This impression is confirmed when the bar’s owner, Julian Marty, tells his bartender that he’s not going home, he will stay right here in hell. (As Barton Fink also implies, for the Coens, hell is not other people but being alone with oneself.) Continuing the demonic motif, when Visser, in his VW Bug, agrees to commit the double murder, we see a fly landing on him, a standard representation of evil that will reoccur in their next film. (In the next chapter, Mazur notices the same detail in Raising Arizona.)

There are also several more explicit religious references (as usual in Coen films, these lean toward the apocalyptic). These references are mostly concentrated in the words of a preacher heard on the car radio as Ray is driving in the dark. The preacher references John 6:18 (And the sea arose by reason of a great wind that blew), states that the antichrist is alive today, and mentions the Jupiter effect, a prediction made by astronomers and pseudoscientists of a planetary catastrophe to occur in 1982. One would be remiss in ignoring the religious reference involving a key plot device: the photographs of Ray and Abby sleeping, doctored to look like they have been murdered; the faked wounds look suspiciously like stigmata.

If critics and scholars call Blood Simple postmodern and see it as empty and meaningless, that says more about them than it does about the film. Grimes and Woolfolk are typical of critics who use the word postmodern not to describe any particular style, philosophy, or historical moment, but as a catch-all phrase to identify everything that is wrong with uncertainty in the world. The accusations of postmodernism have continued with each film the Coens have made. Blood Simple is the Coens’ calling-card film in more ways than one.

Dull Debates about Sincerity

For years the debate was whether the Coens had any serious background or interest in religion at all. Certainly it was there in their movies—but was religion just one more element in their ironic postmodern mix of genre, American folklore, and popular culture? Religiously minded viewers could have been reading too much into it. David Haglund argues that the suspicion that even if there were religion in their movies, it might not be meant to be taken seriously, extends to a general skepticism about their intentions.

A lot of moviegoers, and a good number of critics, are, in some sense, skeptical of the Coens, dubious of their intentions. No one says that they are bad at what they do, or that their best work is behind them—given their obvious skill and their recent run of movies (almost universally acknowledged to be as good as anything they’ve done), it would be ridiculous to say so. But even in positive reviews, a note of doubt often creeps in. Are the Coens just fooling around? Are they mocking their characters? Are they mocking us?²⁶

I am skeptical of this line of questioning. It implies that if the Coen brothers are religious they must be sincere. If their intentions are doubtful, or if they employ irony or mockery, then they must not be really religious. Many in religious studies will recognize the Protestant bias in this syllogism. The Protestant influence on modern ideas about religion has made sincerity and good intentions defining features of good religiosity. Scholars of religion do their best work when their analysis reaches beyond sincere beliefs to include arguments, performances, tricks, lies, or games. In any case, with their fourteenth and fifteenth films, one year apart, the Coens tipped their hand. Religion appeared to be everywhere in these two films. A Serious Man was both their most religious film and their most autobiographical. (They grew up in a semiobservant Jewish home. Their mother’s orthodox upbringing led her to send her sons to Hebrew school five days a week after school from second grade on.²⁷) A Serious Man did not just mine Judaism for cultural comedy (Yiddishisms, stereotypes) as Woody Allen does, but, as Gabriel Levy argues in this volume, the Coens engage with rabbinic traditions of hermeneutics, ethics, and folklore.

A year later, the Coens offered us True Grit, a remake of a John Wayne Western. Critics found it light and accessible, positively un-Coen like and the fact that the film was their biggest box office hit (perhaps in part due to its featuring Hollywood stars Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon) seemed to confirm its flimsy status. But several other critics (notably Stanley Fish and Armond White), perhaps more attuned to religious matters, noticed how central the Calvinist idea of God’s grace featured in the movie’s dialogue, soundtrack, and visual grammar. (This is only partially true: as Michael J. Altman points out in these pages, True Grit is best seen as a post-Protestant film.)

After viewing these two films, it became possible—even necessary—to read back to the beginning of the Coens’ filmography and see that their films were seriously religious all along. Or in the words of critic Mike D’Angelo, Each picture, regardless of personal opinion, fits snugly into a long-term argument that can finally, after all the dull debates about their sincerity or their derisive lack thereof, be clearly perceived.²⁸

Did we really miss the fact that Raising Arizona has a dozen or more biblical allusions, that the hero of Miller’s Crossing is addressed as Jesus almost thirty times, that The Hudsucker Proxy wears its Buddhist influences on its sleeve?

If we had to guess, we might attribute this prominent use of conventional religious themes to Ethan more than to Joel. Ethan has a degree in philosophy from Princeton (Joel studied film at New York University) and writes plays, short stories, and poems on the side. These writings regularly play with religious tropes. His short story The Old Country in his 1998 collection Gates of Eden has a Hebrew school setting, perhaps anticipating A Serious Man. His first book of poems, The Drunken Driver Has the Right of Way, has as its centerpiece a collection of religiously scatological limericks. In his first poem of his second collection, The Day the World Ends, Ethan Coen writes that We sheep (the title of the poem) will chew on until Apocalypse. And of the three short one-act plays that make up his 2008 theatre piece, Almost an Evening, one takes place in hell and the other is a debate between the Gods of the Old Testament and of the New.

Religion and Film

But what does it even mean to say that a film is religious? This is an especially pressing question at a moment where many have noted the invented quality of religion itself. Religion and film is a growing subfield in the academic study of religion, with new books published and more classes offered each year. Of course there are many ways to approach the subject of religion and film, and which approach one takes depends on how one defines the relationship between religion and film; in other words, the and.

Three common definitions might be (1) religion in film (religious content in film), (2) religion is film (the metaphysics and theology of film style) and (3) film as religion (cinematic experience, fandoms, film reception).²⁹ However one defines this relationship, the Coens have been responsible for some of the most religious films in recent memory.

Simply looking for the presence of religion (limiting oneself to the first definition), one will find many obviously religious scenes in some of their films. Most of their films contain references to the Bible, whether direct quotations or indirect allusions. At least three of their movies feature soundtracks filled with religious music (O Brother, Ladykillers, True Grit). Even movies with little explicit religion might include subtle visual clues (in Inside Llewyn Davis, the Upper West Side apartment of a married Jewish couple is decorated with a variety of menorahs) or character background (in Burn after Reading, the secondary character Ted Treffon was a Greek Orthodox priest for fourteen years). And of course with A Serious Man the Coens made the most Jewish American movie in recent history—complete with a dybbuk (a Jewish ghost), gets (Jewish divorces), rabbis, and a bar mitzvah. That film, along with Miller’s Crossing, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country for Old Men, and others, begs to be explored using the second relationship between religion and film: finding metaphysical and theological themes deeply embedded in the film.

Moving on to film as religion, the Coens are responsible for the biggest cult movie of the past quarter century. The Big Lebowski has inherited the mantle of The Rocky Horror Picture Show as the preeminent film in which screenings involve ritualized audience participation. Lebowski is also one of the few films to spawn a new religion—Dudeism. (The Matrix and Star Wars are other films to have done so.)

Readers will find all three types of relationship analyzed in this volume, but not in explicit ways. Indeed, there is no common definition of religion in these essays. But there are common themes in how the contributors talk about religion, the most prominent of which are American mythology and morality.

American Mythology

Most of the contributors to this volume teach and study American religious history. These scholars are uniquely qualified to make a contribution to Coen studies because the Coens’ subject is, more than anything else, the mythological landscape of America. Mythology is one of the basic units of analysis in religious studies, generally defined as an authoritative story taking place in a time and place not our own but imparting a truth to the culture that created it.

Unlike any other American filmmaker to whom they might be compared (Wes Anderson to Woody Allen, Steven Soderbergh to Martin Scorsese), the Coens have never shot a film outside the country (with two notable exceptions: a five-minute short for the anthology film Paris Je T’aime was shot in the Paris Metro—but even here, the protagonist is an American tourist, played by Coen regular Steve Buscemi—and a few scenes of No Country take place just over the US border in Mexico). Instead, their films take place in ten states, plus DC, and each film feels emplaced, localized. No Coen film uses, say, Toronto or Vancouver to stand in for a generic US city. Even Miller’s Crossing, their one film that never refers to any specific location, by virtue of the city it was made in (New Orleans), has a real sense of geographical particularity.

The Coens’ movies are not only set in particular American places but in particular American years. Some are set in the generic present but the vast majority are set in very specific times: fall 1941 (Barton Fink), New Year’s Eve 1958 (The Hudsucker Proxy), the winter of 1987 (Fargo). A significant number of their films are set at the beginning of decades, which are often seen retrospectively as transitional periods in American history, spaces in between the major eras. These include Inside Llewyn Davis, set in 1961; No Country for Old Men, set in 1980; and The Big Lebowski, set in 1991.

The specificity of time (and place) in the Coens’ films does not mean the brothers are aiming for documentary realism, as they themselves state, Setting a story in the past is a way of further fictionalizing it. It’s not about reminiscence, because our movies are about a past that we have never experienced. It’s more about imagination.³⁰

I would argue that setting a story in the past is more than an act of the Coens’ personal imaginations (although they have perhaps the most fertile imaginations in the movie business), but also an act of tapping into the collective national imagination—which is another way of saying American mythology. The Coens eschew triumphalist myth set in eras of the past considered glorious—we have not seen (and probably never will see) a Coen movie about brave American soldiers in the midst of war, or plucky businessmen in the Great Depression. The heroes in Coen brothers films are not masters of their time, but subject to larger forces beyond their control. Something’s coming, as Sheriff Bell says in No Country for Old Men, referring to the brutal border drug wars of the 1980s, but also a free-floating American apocalypse.

Coen protagonists are placed in mythic times betwixt and between, on the verge of something new they cannot understand, control, or even escape, whether that be the incipient UFO craze in small town California, the sexual revolution that has not quite hit suburban Minnesota, the New Deal’s modernization of the Deep South, Pearl Harbor, or the arrival of Bob Dylan on the New York folk scene. These unstoppable forces that these (male) protagonists face speak to a larger issue: the Coens’ movies consistently critique masculinity.

The Moral Hero

In voiceover, Barton Fink reads a line from the script he is writing, If you were a man, a real man. . . . Ulysses Everett McGill wants to be a bona fide paterfamilias—even as his estranged wife argues he is not. What kind of man are you? is a line repeated several times in The Man Who Wasn’t There; the first line of True Grit is Is that the man? and of course in The Big Lebowski, the Dude gets asked, What makes a man? In Inside Llewyn Davis, the title character reads the words What are you doing? scrawled on the wall of the bathroom stall at a Fred Harvey rest stop, and the same line is spoken by a cop a minute or so later.

These are big questions, but they are not offered up in big, sincere, Oscar-bait monologues; rather, they are woven into daily life, in a glimpse of graffiti, muted voiceovers, lickety-split dialogue. But they do suggest one of the Coens’ persistent themes is undercutting the mythology of the American male-as-hero.

Heroes come in many varieties, from the Homeric to the Campbellian. It would be possible to argue that the Coen brothers’ protagonists fit either bill, and these arguments have in fact been made. Vaughan Roberts maps classical traits of the hero onto characters in three Coen films (but not O Brother!).³¹ And David Cremean argues that No Country’s Sheriff Bell, by the end of the film, has become a changed man and, as in the final stage of Campbell’s hero-quest, is bearing a message back to the rest of the world.³²

This sounds nice enough, but a survey of their entire filmography will tell us that the true heroes of the Coens’ films are neither the Homeric hero made on the battlefield nor Joseph Campbell’s universal redeemer. Not too many of the hero’s thousand faces appear in their films.³³ Rather, their true heroes are those who know their own limitations and who have the moral imagination to see others’ capacity for self-delusion and vanity. Most people, according to the Coens, are motivated by greed and self-interest to perform evil acts. If they fail in their schemes, it is usually because of their stupidity and lack of self-knowledge. This basic bleak situation is best seen in some of the Coen brothers’ most used narrative devices: the botched kidnapping plot and the suitcase full of money. But the Coens’ moral critique extends beyond individual behavior to social institutions. The business satire The Hudsucker Proxy is quite obviously about the evils of corporate capitalism, but the amorality of the American business ethic is also probed in films such as The Man Who Wasn’t There, Raising Arizona, and The Big Lebowski.

In the Coens’ moral universe, there is something worse than quotidian greed and hypocrisy. The Coens clearly take seriously the existence of apocalyptic and unredeemable evil that leaves destruction and spiritual desolation in its wake. This evil is often personified in the Coens’ films as an unstoppable violent killer. Javier Bardem’s Oscar-winning performance as Anton Chigurh is the most notable example, but this figure dates back to Randall Tex Cobb as Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona.

This morally bleak universe is leavened by the Coens’ take on goodness. The hero list would include Miller’s Crossing’s Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), the Dude (Jeff Bridges), Fargo’s Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand, who won an Oscar for this role), and No Country for Old Men’s Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). These last two have the most in common: both plain-spoken law officers surrounded by evil and violence who embrace the true morality of domesticity and everyday life (Marge, seven months pregnant, buys worms for her husband’s ice-fishing expedition. Ed talks with his wife about their horses).

The Big Lebowski’s Dude’s morality stands out all the more as he faces off against pornographers, nihilists, snobs, frauds, and warmongers. His drunk, stoned, and unemployed status is a kind of saintliness. Indeed, if the narrator (Sam Elliot) of The Big Leb-owski is to be trusted, the Dude’s sloth has a redemptive function for the rest of us, as he is takin’ ’er easy for us sinners.

In Miller’s Crossing, Tom Reagan must make the right decision, despite the fact that it forces him to turn his back on his boss, his girlfriend, and his way of life. Yet, when he does, the society at large returns to normal. One scholar calls the film an elaborate philosophic allegory depicting first and foremost the protagonist’s ascent to self-knowledge and his almost simultaneous discovery of natural right and justice.³⁴ Lest one think these are the musings of academics reading too much into a simple gangster yarn (or into the Coens’ entire filmography), note Miller’s Crossing’s first line of dialogue, It’s a question of ethics.

Outline of This Book

The following chapters present the films in mostly chronological order (with two exceptions—in my judgment Burn after Reading fits well with the Coens’ middle films, whereas The Man Who Wasn’t There anticipates the latter knotty metaphysical films such as A Serious Man and True Grit). Each chapter gets its own film, and each film its own chapter (again with two exceptions: Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers do fine with sharing a chapter). The chapters often refer to other reviews and essays about the film, as well as make comparisons with other Coen films. Most importantly, they each develop a standalone argument about the film and its relation to the religious, which itself receives a different take in each chapter.

This volume proudly presents serious essays about Coen films that have not received due scholarly consideration, either because such films are seen as peripheral to their work (Intolerable Cruelty), failures (The Hudsucker Proxy), or simply relatively new (Inside Llewyn Davis).

The volume is organized into three parts, spliced with two intermissions. Act One deals with the Coens’ earliest films, which the critical consensus had not yet labeled as religious. Thus the essays here creatively read the films as religious, though each essay defines religion differently. Eric Mazur’s definition as it applies to Raising Arizona is a morality tale that critiques the amorality of 1980s America. Kerry Mitchell is working in the long tradition of reading films theologically. His christological take on Miller’s Crossing makes viewing this film even more rewarding. S. Brent Plate and I use Peter Berger’s sociological definition of religion as a world-making enterprise to explore the physical spaces in Barton Fink. Scholar of Buddhism and fan of Frank Capra Ellen Posman sees, in The Hudsucker Proxy, a conflict between religion as Capra’s community-minded Catholicism versus as 1950s-style individualism (including the 1950s fad for Eastern religions).

For the first intermission, Richard Amesbury looks at the Coens’ pivotal film Fargo as a restatement of the guiding introductory question, namely whether the Coens are moralists or ironists, and provides an original answer to that question which will have some application to the Coens’ other films.

Act Two takes on the rich middle-period Coen films, some of their most complicated and allusive. The four essays here use film analysis to critique American mythologies. Erica Andrus looks at two different types of fans of The Big Lebowski, both of whom might be considered religious, and both sacralize a type of ironic authenticity. While some writers are content to take O Brother, Where Art Thou? at face value and see it as a folksy updating of Homer’s Odyssey, and others see it as a celebration of the multiracial heritage of American popular music, Chad Seales argues the film elides some uncomfortable truths about race and religion in American society.

Given double duty, David Feltmate takes on the Coens’ two most unambiguous comedies, Intolerable Cruelty and The Lady-killers, analyzing them both through the lens of the neoliberal sacralization of capitalism, yet asking why the one film’s happy ending involves keeping the money, while the other’s means giving it away. Finbarr Curtis begins his essay on Burn after Reading with the astute observation that Americans believe