As an exercise in futility (a Coen-brothers-appreciation primer if ever there was one), let’s imagine what might have happened had “A Serious Man” been made by gentiles, or, Hashem forbid, by Arabs.
Under those circumstances, it might be called the most anti-Semitic film of the year.
Hashem, by the way, is the name that characters in “A Serious Man” say instead of God, because they are serious Jews. They are funny too, the film suggests, but only because they’re so serious. As in not laughing with, laughing at.
Not that religious sincerity ever was the Coens’ first priority. It has been reported that Ethan wrote a philosophy thesis at Princeton in which he described belief in God as “the height of stupidity.” Later, he and Joel wrote “Blood Simple” and “Barton Fink” and “Fargo” and “The Big Lebowski” and “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and all the rest. Earlier, they endured suburban dullness and spiritual desperation in mid-’60s Minnesota–or so “A Serious Man,” set there, suggests. It’s the story of a schlemiel who hopes to be a mensch, but only suffers for his efforts. Is the suffering his own fault? His family’s? His neighbors’? Hashem’s?
No, it’s the Coen brothers’. They’re pitiless. They’re like children torturing a small animal. For an audience. Of unpleasant Jews.
Timidly put-upon middle-class assimilate Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a professor of physics, lately has begun to observe the allegorical implications of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Larry seems to have become derailed from his tenure track. His wife (Sari Lennick) plans to leave him for a sanctimonious goon (Fred Melamed). His daughter (Jessica McManus) is stealing his cash to save up for a nose job. His son (Aaron Wolf) just wants to get high and watch “F-Troop” or listen to Jefferson Airplane in Hebrew school. And his mopey, unemployed, cyst-afflicted gambler brother (Richard Kind) lives on the couch and monopolizes the bathroom. Also, Larry has been fielding increasingly irritated calls from a collections officer of the Columbia Record Club.
It goes on like this. Eventually, the stoned nude-sunbather next door (Amy Landecker) asks, “Do you take advantage of the new freedoms?” Larry doesn’t really know what to say.
Mostly he hoists his eyebrows, yanks down the corners of his mouth and diminishes his voice with a grating quaver. He does turn for guidance to a series of three rabbis, each less helpful and more monstrous than the last. The middle rabbi tells Larry a (brilliantly edited, Jimi Hendrix-enhanced) tale of a Jewish dentist who discovered a coded Hebrew message engraved inside a goy patient’s teeth. But the tale leaves Larry unfulfilled and well within his rights to reply, “It sounds like you don’t know anything. Why even tell me the story?” Once the delight of an expectation-defying punchline has abated, the same might be said to the filmmakers by their audience.
What seems to matter most is the suffering, and the spectacle. “A Serious Man” makes room for characters both sebaceous and phlegmatic. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is as skillful as always, but the way the camera looks at these people is like leering and also like staring them down.
It’s illuminating to have “A Serious Man” in theaters at the same time as “Where the Wild Things Are,” whose own menagerie of hairy, enormous, personal-space-invading grotesques derives from Maurice Sendak’s child’s-eye view of his old-world Jewish relatives. That view could be glaring at times, but would not now be so familiar to so many of us were it not also so fundamentally humane.
The Coens’ gargoyles, on the other hand, are universally loathsome. Not just ugly, they all tend to be morally or at the very least temperamentally repellent too. (Well, to me, anyway. But I know that at least one reliably smart and perceptive person thinks otherwise.) It’s fair to say they seem rather less likely than Sendak’s and Spike Jonze’s Wild Things to cement parent-child bonds and inspire several generations worth of proprietary affection. Not that the Coens even care about that.
What do they care about? What had they hoped to extract from this particular plot of personal history? Maybe they did intend a satirically affectionate commemoration, or even a Voltairean denunciation of faith-based optimism, but in any case what they’ve made seems more like some sort of long-deferred, highly disciplined tantrum.
So, phew, it’s a good thing they’re not gentiles or Arabs.
More on these topics:
Coen brothers, Ethan Coen, Jews, Joel Coen, Michael Stuhlbarg, Minnesota
Steve G says:
You have this 100% wrong. The Jews portrayed in the film are just regular folks doing regular things. For instance, contrast everything they do with the hostile blonde neighbor. They are merely being civilized humans in 1967.
The Coens did pick on the Richard Kind character Brother Arthur a lot, but that's what you do to your brother (and they should know).
Hopefully, most of the people reading this have seen the picture already. It's the Book of Job as told by a couple of wise-asses. When God decides to get you, it's like nothing you've seen and there is no way to halt The Almighty. That is why the end of the picture is just right.
Meanwhile, I'm going to look more closely at people's teeth....
Jonathan Kiefer says:
Oh come on!
I mean, maybe 98%, tops.
I do realize that it's a variously interpretable tale. For one thing, the blond neighbor's hostility has at least two faces; in one brief and amusing and unexpected instance, it seems downright neighborly.
As for Job, well, that is the easy inference (even if the movie's prologue seems to want to steer us somewhere else). But on that front, allow me to quote David Denby in the New Yorker: "One model for the tale is obvious: acting on his wager with Satan, God drives Job to despair. Yet Job, risking his life, questions his tormentor, and Larry does not. The Coens created him that way; they explicitly celebrate 'simplicity' and resignation. But a schlep and a weeper is a hero impossible to stay interested in."
Steve G says:
DO NOT READ THIS. THIS IS MORE THAN JUST SPOILERS! (really, I'm not kidding)
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Okay, I've had a couple of days to think this over and I think I have the answers (at least most of them).
First, a joke: Why Schrodinger's cat matters...did you notice that the accidents occur at the same moment, leaving Abelman dead and Gopnick alive? Gopnick teaches a lesson about uncertainty using Schrodinger's cat as an illustration of the uncertainty principle. Schrodinger and Einstein agreed that the cat was either dead or alive without an observer (a pivotal argument in this concept -Google it, you'll see). The joke is that even though Gopnick teaches this, he doesn't realize that what happens to the cat happened to him and Abelman.
Don't get it? Try this:
The Shetl Wife presents the entire argument in the movie. Even though her husband presents his evidence based on actual experiences with the man, his wife considers her evidence, everyone who knows the guy says he's dead and then does the correct thing---puts the ice pick in him. Lesson: despite what the superficial evidence tells you, there is a basic more instinctive truth that must be adhered to.
So how does this all end up with the beginning of the (very excellent) Jefferson Airplane song at the beginning? Let's jump ahead, the big payoff comes when the Third Rabbi Marshak gets the lyric wrong. It's 'when all the JOY within you dies' not 'when all the HOPE within you dies'. The reason Marshak is always 'busy' is because he has lost hope. As you work your way up the tales of the rabbis, The wise men have fewer and fewer explanations. The wisest of all, Marshak, after a lifetime of contemplating events, has given up all hope. He has no explanation for the Holocaust, no explanation for the unforeseen events which afflict us. In other words, for jews, the rational man produces not faith in God, but total despair.
Which brings us to the true autobiographical part of the movie. The Coen brothers, growing up in the Sixties have come to the conclusion that, like many others, the true successors to their parents generation would emulate the instinctive, more existential (I hate that word) survival tactics of their ancestors.
Confronted with an unyielding world, those who perceive the deeper, more mystical truths will prevail. (Which is why Uncle Arthur's crackpot scribbling pay off in huge winnings in the poker game (and get him into trouble). So who else has this deeper vision? The shtel wife and the real hero (and probably Coen Brothers stand-up) the Bar Mitzvah boy Danny. When he hears about Uncle Arthur's winnings, he cheers because unlike Larry, his father, he understands everything that Uncle Arthur has written and through his pot smoking has achieved the same level of knowledge.
So Danny is the hero? Yes. he is. I'll give you two pieces of evidence. 1) Stoned and in a trance, he can barely stand in front of the torah to deliver his haftorah. Then suddenly, everything clicks and he barrels right through it, flawlessly (not an easy thing to do...take my word for it).
Then finally, at the end, when the final huge disasters are facing the family, Danny sees the funnel cloud looming up before him and decides that he will confront fate courageously and therefore Fagle is never going to get the 20 bucks back. Just like the Shetl Wife, he looks past the surface evidence and acts.
Danny and Arthur have confronted the same puzzle. Arthur is hobbled by his generation's experiences and suffers constantly from the despair (the cyst, etc) that broke Marshak. Arthur laboriously works out the truth and passes the vision on the Danny, who doesn't have the baggage and can break free to a new existence for the Jews.
'How can you say that?' I hear you cry. Well, for one thing, look at the calendar on the wall. It is not only the beginning of the 'Aquarian Age' spinning young minds off into space, but the bar mitzvah takes place near the end of May of 1967.
Unmentioned by the Coens, but quite apparent from the seriousness of the finale, the threat of annihilation is facing the Jews. Israel is surrounded by Arab armies who have pledged to murder every Jew in israel.. Their response, like Danny's, is to confront the whirlwind heading for them and go out and win the Six Day War, starting on June 5, 1967. They put the ice pick right through the heart of the monster.
The Coens, spinning out their own experiences and impressions are saying that the hard-won organized and very rational (suburban) life won by their parents will not address the problems faced by the Jews survival in the U.S. and Israel. It will take a generation more in touch with a more primal perception of the world combined with a call to action.
So what about the blonde neighbor? He is a hunter, a transgressor and as Larry sees in his dreams an animalistic anti-semite. Is this new to the Jews? Nope. Does Larry confront him? Nope. So what of the many reviews that said the blonde neighbor sides with Larry and confronts the Korean father confronting Larry. It totally disagree. All that scene proves is that the guy is a total animal who will attack anything different and the only reason he picks on the Korean guy is that he has a novel target (other than Larry, his usual target). I say "no redeeming characteristics'. (The blonde neighbor is also perhaps a mashup of both Ishmael and Esau, I'll leave that to you to comment on).
Marshak's office: None of the complex, exotic intellectual furniture and objects have helped Marshak. None of ht e traditional Jewish learning has solved the mysteries of his life. The simplified message of the Jefferson Airplane cuts through, but even then he hears it wrong. that is why he knows he must pass the lesson onto Danny, who can see the problem and act on it.
Danny knows where to look for the solutions: Getting high and viewing the world through that glass, receiving messages from the LSD saints on the radio, making sure that TV reception is good, because F Troop is sending vital knowledge.
The message from the Coens?
1) It is important to have a different understanding if the Jewish people are to survive. The old structures may not be adequate to answer today's questions.
2) It is a new age. The lessons of the Holocaust must be absorbed but not dwelt upon to exclusion of the future.
3) As the Coens might say, "Being surrounded by hostile goyim doesn't mean you have to go out hunting with them..or even agree with them."
4) Mrs Samsky and Sy Abelman has the same attraction for both Larry and his wife Judith, two logical rational people. This common quality of the Gopnicks is probably why the don't like one another.
5) If you and your brother joke around in the family playroom in Minnesota
during the 60's, you'll probably end up making funny movies poking fun at everyone you know.
6) Oh, the Story of Job part? Even though God may be killing off and tormenting all the people around you and even giving you cancer and sending mighty whirlwinds after the jews, don't take it personally...Shrodinger's cat doesn't see what is coming either.
7) Acknowledging topic 6, trust in your vision and then DO SOMETHING!
I laughed through this entire movie.
End of the credits: "No Jews were harmed in the making of this picture".
Steve G says:
Please forgive the typos. Danny is a 'stand-in' and is able to understand Arthur's manifesto more easily because he smokes pot. Pot smoking won't give you Arthur's rigorous conclusions.
BTW, 'I'm sure that Arthur's "Just a minute!" has something to do with his relation to time, but the explanation eludes me.
I want to add that I don't necessarily agree with all the Coens' conclusions. I'm just trying to explain what I think they said. There is probably more packed into the wife and daughter, but I'll wait for the DVD.
Steve
Steve G says:
Another question. Are Arthur and Larry two sides of the same person?
1) They are brothers.
2) They live in the same house. They live in the same motel.
3) Both are accused of 'moral turpitude'.
4) One is rigorously rational, the other is rigorously mystical.
5) They both have profound advanced math abilities.
6) They are both about to be murdered for being Jews in Larry's dream.
Jonathan Kiefer says:
Holy moly.