Intermediate Work:
Now that you've studied the basics, it's time to move onto denser texts. That means going back to Miller's Crossing, an impeccable period gangster drama that's stylized within an inch of its life, but has great reserves of feeling under the surface. Much like their new film No Country For Old Men, it uses crackerjack genre material to reveal what happens when the social order breaks down and it's every man for himself. And no character in the Coen oeuvre defines it better than John Turturro's Bernie Bernbaum, a bookie who operates without any moral code whatsoever. When the hero, an Irish gangster played by Gabriel Byrne, finally takes him in the woods to whack him for his deceptions, Bernie pleas desperately with him to understand his nature; after all, he's a guy who works all the angles, so why should he be killed for it? But, of course, if you spare him, there's nothing stopping him from double-crossing you, because that's his nature too, right? No gratitude, no loyalty. Just Bernie looking out for Bernie's interests.
There's not much imagination to the pitiful dreams of freedom and low-level prosperity that drive an ordinary schmoe to do terrible things in Fargo, the Coens' 1996 masterpiece about a car salesman (a never-better William H. Macy) who cooks up a half-baked kidnapping scheme to bilk money from his wealthy father-in-law. But here, the Coens offer a powerful moral counterpoint in Frances McDormand, a small-town sheriff whose impeccable instincts in getting to the bottom of the case go along with her revulsion at its grisly twists and turns. In the end, there's an almost comic dissonance between the pettiness of the crime and the amount of carnage it yields, yet the final two scenes drive home the tragic inexplicability of it all, too—first by having McDormand wonder aloud why the pursuit of "a little bit of money" could wreck so many lives and then offering a window into her life that's the warmest imaginable portrait of Midwest domesticity.
Still, the Coens' dim, cynical view of human nature tends to prevail and they have bottomless contempt for the charlatans who think they're above it all—including, to an extent, themselves. The brilliant surrealist meta-comedy Barton Fink may be the closest the Coens have come to autobiography; it was reportedly penned while the brothers were suffering from writer's block on Miller's Crossing and is choked with doubt about the whole creative process. In John Turturro's Barton Fink, the Coens mercilessly send-up the pretensions of self-proclaimed artistes who know nothing of the fishmongers of whom they speak. Barton can pontificate endlessly about a theater of the common man, but he doesn't bother to listen to them (here John Goodman's traveling salesman, who could tell him some stories) and he's too detached even to hack out a simple B-movie about a wrestler, an orphan, and/or a dame. His limitations become a cage from which he can't escape and his anguish manifests itself in an unexpectedly abstract final act that's like the literary equivalent of self-immolation.
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