The Excluded Man
No Country for Old Men might have seemed an unlikely film to fall under the influence of the Coen Brothers – for one, it’s an adapted story – but on further introspection, Cormac McCarthy’s famous novel is a proper reflection of the brothers’ style since it deliberately rejects all sense of order in the universe. It is the kind of story in which ordinary people get caught up into events too large and mad for anybody to possibly comprehend at any one time. Their follow up, Burn After Reading, proved that chaos is an immutable law, but it took their latest film, A Serious Man, to – ironically – make sense of that law. As Todd McCarthy wrote, “This is the kind of picture you get to make after winning an Oscar.” It’s also the kind of picture that you don’t really deal with until it has dealt with you.
A Serious Man begins with the story of a man, his wife, and a dybbuk – a malicious specter or spirit – in a small shtetl at a time in the early 20th century when the Jewish community was only generations away from integrating into a modern world that for so long they had stood on the outside of. Displacement is at the heart of all good Coen Brothers fiction, but cultural displacement is at the heart of Jewish fiction. The story is like a joke without a punch-line, containing the kind of anticlimax that the Coen Brothers specialize in. To argue about the nature of something’s nature is grounds for domestic anxiety. Life is either filled with spiritual mystery or random noise, and to fret and argue about which is which represents a kind of comic burden. Is the stranger at the door a dybbuk, or is he a real man? And when the wife stabs him, does she invite a curse, or does she kill a human made of flesh and blood? Anxiety flows from the indeterminate nature of things that to anybody else might surely represent certitude.
“The often cruel jokes of a century ago about the anxiety of being a greenhorn from the shtetl with an old-world accent,” Mark Harris wrote in New York Magazine, “gave way to the urban anxiety of the first-gen Americans running small businesses, which in turn gave way to the suburban anxiety of their children, who were enjoying the American Dream but still couldn’t get into the country club.” This is the world that Larry Gopnik, the main character of the film, inhabits. He is only a few generations removed from that small Jewish town, a suburban Jew on the eve of the sexual revolution, which his children stand on the precipice of but he himself cannot enter. It was at a point of history when both religion and culture were in the thrall of an existential crisis and, as Jim Emerson points out, Times ran a cover that read, “Is God Dead?”
Larry Gopnik is of the same generation that includes professional carper Woody Allen, but Woody Allen, who might not exactly have been running with the kind of elite circles that got into the country clubs, was in on the joke. For all of his kvetching, his chronic compulsions were a way of interacting with the world. Obsessed with death, egotistical yet compulsively self-effacing, and subordinate to baser instincts that he tried to rise above, Woody Allen may have understood that the world was ending, but he also understood that cynicism facilitated a subtle confidence, and he treated it as a public emotion.
In a world where nothing is certain, maybe confidence and faith are indistinguishable attributes. That may be why Larry Gopnik seems so insecure, unable to comprehend life’s mysteries but more importantly unable to comprehend why life is mysterious in the first place. Larry is not “a serious man”, even though he claims that he hasn’t done anything, which he mistakenly sees as a virtue. The question is whether a man as unassuming and psychologically vulnerable as Larry suffers more than anybody else, for he is in a bad stretch of luck. Clive, a student of his, both bribes and blackmails him (a paradoxical strait, to be sure). His boss, who like all good bosses seems to exist mostly within the frame of the door to his office, informs Larry that someone is sending threatening mail on the eve of his tenure. His daughter is stealing money for a nose job, apathetic to her father’s suffering, and his wife, somehow aware that Larry is on a path toward annihilation, wants a “get” (a divorce) so that she can hook up with Sy Ableman, a man who is confident and by all outward appearances in control. Even Sy’s name is a reflection of his ability.
Larry needs to know the spiritual meaning of his suffering, but he is up against the impermeable bound between mysticism and reason, and he is having a crisis of faith, but also of conscience and character. He seeks an easy to understand morality play, so he goes to his rabbis for advice. The story he hears from one rabbi about a dentist who finds a message on the back of a goy’s (non-Jew’s) teeth is kind of like a litmus test for all Coen Brothers films. That we are surrounded by hidden messages without any meaning is a real-life burden reflected in their films, and Larry is told to simply accept the mystery.
God in the modern age has become so entangled in the workings of a complex world that his most basic attributes have become incomprehensible. Some have made recent attempts to insert God into quantum mechanics. Others say that we are living in nothing but a materialistic universe: science is the conflation of the how and why, as to explain how something happened is to explain why it happened, and the messages of life are no more than cosmic coincidences. According to different interpretations, God is possibly dead, indifferent, or indefatigable, working on a cosmic time scale unfathomable to humans (even though Larry’s time on Earth is much shorter). He might even be coming to judge Larry for his lack of faith like he once judged Job. Either way Larry is doomed by his expectations. If there are answers, then he is impatient and lacks faith, but if there are none, then he is derelict and arrested by his own inability to save himself.
The question of whether God exists is never addressed because the important thing is that the characters believe it. But in previous Coen Brothers works, there seems to be no question that the world is lacking in all moral characteristics. It is not just that the world is apathetic to morality, but it almost seems to go out of the way to destroy moral people. In Fargo and Burn After Reading, for instance, innocent people are killed, but the great horror in these movies is that they seldom have any comprehension of why they are being killed. These are movies where people may be killed just by witnessing a murder along the highway. The advice may be to just keep driving, but that would seem to do little to flout the opprobrium that the universe feels for the moral character.
In No Country for Old Men, Anton Chigurh represents the personification of chaos. He bears no remorse for killing those people who find themselves through the act of unassailable universal forces in the wake of his destructive path. At one point early in the film, he decides whether to kill a gas station attendant by flipping a coin. The tension arises because the attendant has no awareness that the coin may cost him his life. The lesson that Anton tries to impart is that atoms and molecules have no ethics. They move with no moral character. But Anton himself is as much bound to the capricious movement of elements. By a random quirk of circumstance, he gets into a car wreck and survives it. The only way to explain why he survived is to explain how it happened. There is no other reason why. Justice implies that the innocent are favored and the guilty are judged, but in an amoral universe everybody is at equal odds at all times, which betrays our idea of how movies are supposed to work. In the world according to Quentin Tarantino, movies are where Hitler is supposed to get his due.
When Larry gets into a car wreck, it seems like the triumphant confirmation that Larry brings all of his problems upon himself. But later we find out through Larry’s grief-stricken wife that Sy also got into a car wreck and dies, which throws the entire efficacy of being “a serious man” into doubt. The afterlife is a place where the injustice of Sy’s death is supposed to be corrected, but the paradox is that the afterlife is supposed to be a reflection of what we do on Earth. That the nature of things is eventually judged based on the highest universal principle must seem to Larry like a superficiality since he is gripped by an incomprehensible burden. To bask within those problems is Larry’s core dilemma: his certainty of the world is quickly wilting, and he is confounded that no one can interpret God’s will. The greatest wisdom of Rabbi Marshak, which he imparts to Larry’s son at his bar mitzvah, is to quote Airplane Jefferson and say, “Be a good boy.”
How we deal with God in a rational world is grounds for a metaphysical crisis. Larry cannot seem to reconcile his beliefs about the world with his beliefs about God. He is excluded and isolated, unable to give himself over to an enduring faith of the unknown, which represents the fractious nature of a man whose chaotic interior life is a reflection of the Jewish lineage that suddenly found itself thrust into a modern or post-modern society that it was ill-adapted for. He is still trying to interpret the world like his ancestors in the shtetl, and he is paralyzed by his own lack of certainty. In a Coen Brothers movie, nothing about the world can seem too careful or too sure.
>Written by d/visible contributor Jacob Stutsman.
