The Whole Durn Human Comedy: Life According to the Coen Brothers

By Joseph McBride

The Coen Bros. have attracted a wide following and been rewarded with Oscars and other honors. Some of their films are cult favorites and box office hits, such as Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men. Yet the team of filmmaking brothers remains misunderstood in some circles. Ethan and Joel Coen deliberately unsettle conventional expectations and raise disturbing questions about human nature while mischievously mixing film genres and styles. Their films display shocking tonal shifts as they blend comedy and drama and, most controversially, comedy and violence. This potent mélange of themes and stylistic approaches makes the Coens’ films adventurous, unpredictable probes into contemporary social anxieties. As brilliant satirists, they are heirs to Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder. But they resist easy definition and raise the ire of some critics who like films to fit more comfortably into preexisting formats. Film historian and critic Joseph McBride — author of acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra, John Ford, and Steven Spielberg, along with critical studies of Orson Welles, Ernst Lubitsch, and Wilder — jousts with the Coens’ detractors while defining the filmmakers’ freshness and originality. The quirkily individualistic Coens are the kind of personal filmmakers the increasingly conglomerated American cinema rarely fosters anymore, and this critical study illuminates their artistic personalities and contributions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839983337

Book preview

Advance Praise for

The Whole Durn Human Comedy

"Joseph McBride, long one of our most respected film historians, adds to his estimable appraisals of the likes of Ford, Capra, Hawks, Welles, Lubitsch, and Spielberg with an incisive analysis (and often impassioned defense) of the often misunderstood works of the iconoclastic Coen Bros. — whom he sees as the heirs apparent to such icons as Preston Sturges, James M. Cain, and Jonathan Swift. Approaching their unique oeuvre with a warmth and understanding which extends even to the films he views as problematic, he concludes with a dead-on celebration of their masterpiece (in my view), The Ballad of Buster Scruggs."

— Joe Dante, director of Gremlins, Matinee, and Small Soldiers

"The Coen Brothers, serious artists who routinely test the limits of facetiousness, have long delighted, befuddled, and infuriated both critics and paying moviegoers, sometimes all at once. As narrative provocateurs, the Coens have so far been understandably reluctant to explain, much less justify, their peculiar aesthetic. Luckily for their fans, they have now found a proper champion (and explicator) in Joseph McBride, last seen dissecting the comedic ironies of Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder with his characteristic blend of scholarship, insight, and wit. The Whole Durn Human Comedy will certainly remind you of the many unique pleasures to be found in the Coen Bros.’ filmography, and might even introduce you to a few new ones you may not have appreciated on first viewing. And, if you keep running tallies of the good Coens and the bad Coens, as I do, you are likely to find that McBride forces you to rejigger both lists."

— Sam Hamm, screenwriter of Batman (1989), Monkeybone, and Homecoming

In a deceptively short book that punches well above its weight, Joseph McBride deploys his masterly gifts of observation, his deep knowledge of film craft and film history, and his genuine appreciation of well-made cinema in a stirring defense of the Coen Brothers’ inimitable body of work. Thorough, enlightening, precise, and convincing, this is the appreciative argument that all of us who are besotted by the Coens’ work have been waiting for.

— Shawn Levy, author of King of Comedy: The Life and Art of Jerry Lewis and The Castle on Sunset"

Joseph McBride, that exemplary critic and historian of the Golden Age of Hollywood, has now turned his attention to two of the most acclaimed and controversial figures of our current cinema, the Coen Brothers. But this lively, engaging volume is fully of a piece with McBride’s prior work while also extending it. As he situates the Coens within contemporary filmmaking, McBride also usefully links their rigorous attention to form with such dazzling filmmakers who have preceded them as Billy Wilder, John Ford, Steven Spielberg, and Orson Welles, all of them subjects of earlier McBride volumes, as well as with Stanley Kubrick and Preston Sturges. What McBride terms the ‘guarded idealism’ of the Coens, with the complex tension in their films between caricature and empathy and where bold tonal shifts place demands on viewer expectations, is at the center of this important, highly readable and compelling new study."

— Joe McElhaney, Hunter College/City University of New York, author of Luchino Visconti and the Fabric of Cinema

"A marvelous and unexpected critical study of the Coen brothers from one of the great historians of American cinema. In The Whole Durn Human Comedy, McBride sets himself the task of uncovering the humanist core in a body of films too often disparaged as aloof and ironic."

— Rob King, professor of Film and Media Studies, Columbia University

McBride from Wisconsin meets the Coens from Minnesota at high noon at the intersection of noir and black comedy, and the result is a supremely intelligent, passionate, riotous shoot-out in which the brothers’ films are deeply analyzed, the naysayers get their just deserts, and the good guys–and readers–win.

— Patrick McGilligan, biographer of Alfred Hitchcock, Mel Brooks, and Woody Allen

This is an outstanding study that provides fresh insight into the work of the Coen Brothers, questioning the standard view of them as cold and cynical, instead arguing for a fresh perspective that appreciates their playful cinematic virtuosity and their humane response to the conundrum of human experience.

— Robert Shail, Leeds Beckett University

I doubt if there are filmmakers more compulsively referential and slier than the Coen Brothers, and this celebration of their films by Joseph McBride gleefully zeroes in on the roots and ironies of their work with the precision of a dive-bombing hawk.

— Jeffrey Sweet, author of Something Wonderful Right Away and The Value of Names

Joseph McBride, whose studies of pantheon directors (Welles, Ford, Capra, and Spielberg among them) have set a dazzling standard, does it again with his latest: a shrewd, entertaining, and lucid look at those mavericks of contemporary cinema, the Coen Brothers. Notoriously unwilling to examine/explain/pontificate on their own work, the Coens are fortunate to have in McBride an analyst both astute and affectionate, one who writes with elegance, intelligence, and humor in an attempt to answer his own central question: ‘O Brothers, Who Art Thou?’

— Julie Kirgo, film historian, screenwriter, and journalist

The Coens have rarely been given their critical due. In his affectionate, sharply observed new study, Joseph McBride questions lazy assumptions about the brothers from Minneapolis. Neither are they heartless cynics and nor do they blend elements from different genres in random, scattergun fashion. They may love the grotesque but that doesn’t make them intolerably cruel. McBride sees them as following in the footsteps of old Hollywood masters like Preston Sturges and John Ford. They’re classical storytellers who also use postmodern irony. This perceptive, closely focused monograph reminds us of their incomparable wit and visual ingenuity but emphasizes their humanism just as much.

— Geoffrey Macnab, journalist for the Independent, author of books on Ingmar Bergman and the British film industry

In a very detailed, well-researched thesis, Joseph McBride draws you into the Coen Brothers’ world. It’s like he’s gotten inside their heads—or at least their creative process. His facts, figures and knowledge will spark serious debate about the Brothers’ legacy.

— Dwight Brown, film critic, DwightBrownInk.com and NNPA News Wire Syndication

Thanks to Joseph McBride’s brilliant, luminescent analysis, I am liberated from three decades of befuddlement about what the Coen Brothers are up to, or why I should appreciate them. O brother, this is the book on the Coens we’ve all been waiting for.

— Gerald Peary, film historian, critic, and documentary filmmaker

The Whole Durn Human Comedy

The Stranger (Sam Elliott) as the sardonic Coen Bros. surrogate welcoming us into the world of The Big Lebowski (1998) (frame enlargement). (Gramercy/PolyGram/Working Title/Photofest.)

The Whole Durn Human Comedy

Life According to the Coen Brothers

Joseph McBride

Also by Joseph McBride

What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career

Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination of President Kennedy

Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge

Frankly: Unmasking Frank Capra

How Did Lubitsch Do It?

Two Cheers for Hollywood: Joseph McBride on Movies

The Broken Places: A Memoir

Hawks on Hawks

Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit

Steven Spielberg: A Biography

Writing in Pictures: Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless

Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success

Searching for John Ford

The Book of Movie Lists: An Offbeat, Provocative Collection of the Best and Worst of Everything in Movies

High and Inside: An A-to-Z Guide to the Language of Baseball

Orson Welles

Filmmakers on Filmmaking: The American Film Institute Seminars on Motion Pictures and Television, Vols. I and II (editor)

Orson Welles: Actor and Director

Kirk Douglas

John Ford (with Michael Wilmington)

Focus on Howard Hawks (editor)

Persistence of Vision: A Collection of Film Criticism (editor)

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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Copyright © Joseph McBride 2017, 2022

Parts of this book were first published, in somewhat different form, as the essay

O Brothers, Who Art Thou?: Some Notes on the Coen Bros., in

Joseph McBride’s book collection Two Cheers for Hollywood: Joseph McBride on Movies,

Berkeley, California: Hightower Press, 2017. The chapter on

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is entirely new for this volume.

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McBride, Joseph, 1947- author.

Title: The whole durn human comedy : life according to the

Coen Brothers / Joseph McBride.

Description: London ; New York, NY : Anthem Press, 2022. |

Includes bibliographical references, filmography, and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021062588 | ISBN