Unrelentingly unimportant

Posted by admin on Oct 1, 2008 in Arts & Culture | 0 comments

In 2007, Joel and Ethan Coen released No Country for Old Men, a grim tale of greed and evil revolving around a cat-and-mouse manhunt and a briefcase filled with drug money. The film was haunting, tense and immersive; it won Picture of the Year, among three other Oscar victories.

No Country joins a wealth of award-winning and celebrated films from the Coens—including Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?—that paint a similar image of humanity, regardless of era or circumstance, as being motivated chiefly by materialism and self-preservation. Llewellyn Moss (No Country) forsakes his entire life to keep a cache of drug money; Jerry Lundegaard (Fargo) initiates a chain-reaction of murders to fake his wife’s kidnapping and subsequent ransom; the Dude (Lebowski) ignores legal and ethical boundaries to secure a few thousand dollars and a new rug; Everett (O Brother) deceives his friends with delusions of treasure into a life-and-death pursuit solely for his own gains.

To further darken these intimate portrayals of selfish protagonists, the Coens consistently supplement the central plot with a weak, inactive or corrupt form of “good,” thereby tipping the films towards a world of complete and pervasive evil. Not only are the main antagonists greedy and immoral, but so too are the politicians and average citizens (O Brother), the affluent and the degenerates (Lebowski), and the police and the criminals (No Country, Fargo, O Brother). In fact, the only crucial difference in the use of character from 1987’s Chief Marge Gunderson (Fargo) and 2007’s Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (No Country) is that Gunderson’s questioning inadvertently forces the criminals to make mistakes and reveal themselves; Bell just follows the bloodshed as a tired, disillusioned old man whose years of experience have only shown him what little difference he can make, regardless of effort. There is no active good in the Coen universe, only a thin façade of hope disguising the irrelevant, outmatched spectator beneath.

These themes have risen again in the Coens’ latest black comedy, Burn After Reading. A cast of witless, self-absorbed characters from the CIA and a small fitness centre cross paths with each other as they each seek their own good fortune. With motivations ranging from plastic surgery and blackmail to jealousy and sexual exploitation, Burn After Reading is a circus of infidelity and paranoia that leaves none of its characters untouched by corrupt, irrational personal choices. The result is highly amusing, tightly written, well acted and just as darkly implicit of a fallen human nature as the rest of the Coens’ work.

In a Times Online interview, frequent collaborator and Burn After Reading star George Clooney admits that “there’s not a lot of great messages in their films [because] Joel and Ethan [Coen] don’t really set out to teach anything…they’re just irreverent. They have fun.” Ethan agrees, stating that the characters “can’t be made to stand in for any large social or political considerations…they are unrelentingly unimportant.” That attitude only adds to the chilling worldview of their films, that not only is man incapable of choosing what is right, the choice he makes is irrelevant within the darkness of the world. There are no heroes; we are simply unimportant, expendable, immaterial and inconsequential.