What’s up Wisecrack, Michael here.
You may have seen some of the recent Vlogs where we’ve delved into life changing movies,
Nic Cage movies, and Rick & Morty copypasta.
Today, I thought I’d get a little more personal.
So, I’m going to use this format to talk about a pair of filmmakers who have changed
my life, Joel and Ethan Coen, ie “the Coen brothers.”
You’ve probably seen at least a few of their movies, and we’ve discussed them at Wisecrack
quite a bit.
And while their movies are equal parts hilarious, cinematic, and dramatic, the reason they’ve
been so important to me is their philosophical depth.
I’ve learned almost as much from their work as I did in grad school, and I want to talk
about a few of their films that have changed the way I think.
So welcome to this Wisecrack Vlog on How the Coen Bothers Changed My Life and of course,
spoilers ahead.
The first Coen brothers’ film I want to talk about is A Serious Man.
Set in early nineteen-sixties Minnesota, it’s the story of a physics professor trying to
save his marriage, care for his disturbed brother, prepare his son for his Bar Mitzvah,
and convince his university to give him tenure, all while seeking the wisdom of an elusive
rabbi.
The film brilliantly draws a parallel between physics and religion, specifically Judaism.
Both are systems that try to explain how the world works, and in the film, Larry looks
to each for objective truth as his life falls apart.
Still, he can’t understand why his bad luck persists -he follows the rules, he’s a good
man.
And so, he spends much of the film seeking the advice of rabbi Marshak, but instead receives
only cliches from his mediocre colleagues.
Larry never meets Marshak, but his son does, right after his bar mitzvah.
All the revered rabbi can do is quote Jefferson Airplane lyrics and tell him to “be a good
boy.”
The irony here is magical.
In the final moments of the film, Larry’s luck seems to be looking up.
Then, tragedy strikes, and things go very badly, very quickly.
So badly, in fact, that when I showed this film to a philosophy class I was teaching,
one student, with a stunned look on his face, looked at me and said, “why did you make
us watch that?”
But that’s precisely why I love the Coen brothers.
Their films can be truly upsetting, on a deeply existential level.
This film, in particular, leaves the audience questioning the point of any belief system
that claims to offer certainty.
Like properly Socratic filmmakers, they pose these hard questions without offering any
easy answers.
Instead, they create space for the viewers’ own curiosity and desire for knowledge.
With this film, the Coen brothers taught me something important about the point of philosophy:
that it should never try to give definite answers or provide any totalizing explanations.
This, they suggest, will always end in failure and disappointment.
Aristotle didn’t say “philosophy begins in a complete mathematical understanding of
reality”, he said “philosophy begins in wonder.”
The Coen brothers get at that sense of wonder, albeit in a dark way.
This film also particularly resonated with me because I grew up pretty religious, and
spent my early life trying to use theology to make sense of the world, much as Larry
does.
Eventually, I left religion behind and turned to philosophy, in which I sought the same
certainty that Larry seeks in physics.
But just like Larry, that certainty continued to elude me, and I was forced to face the
possibility of a meaningless world.
Luckily, a different Coen Brothers’ film would teach me how to creatively respond to
a meaningless world.
In case you were too stoned the last time you watched it, The Big Lebowski is a noir-inspired
film that follows “The Dude” as he gets caught up in a web of trouble with a wheel-chair
bound philanthropist, a gang of German nihilists, a hyper-sexual artist in need of adequate
seed, and a pornographer named Jackie Treehorn.
All the while he tries to keep his bowling team together and get his Credence tape back
from his stolen car.
That might not sound like the plot of one of the most philosophically profound movies
of all time.
But The Big Lebowski presupposes the cosmic meaninglessness of A Serious Man, and brilliantly
explores two different ways of responding to it.
On the one hand, we have the German nihilists, who cope with meaninglessness by making techno
music, wearing black leather, tormenting people with ferrets, and setting up elaborate fake
kidnappings.
The word nihilism has been unfairly wedded to Nietzsche.
But ironically, the German nihilists exemplify Nietzsche’s worst fear: that people would
respond to nihilism by rejecting all meaning and value.
In Nietzsche’s terminology, this type of nihilism is a “denial of life.”
On the other hand, we have “The Dude.”
While he is not explicitly identified with nihilism in the film, The Dude’s lifestyle
embodies Nietzsche’s preferred response to nihilism: that is, the “creation of value.”
In an apparently meaningless world - for the Dude that was Ronald Reagan’s America, , it’s
up to us to create our own values.
That’s exactly what “The Dude” has done.
Unlike the German nihilists, The Dude and his crew affirm what they enjoy,
The Big Lebowski was so important to me because it showed that a lack of religious or philosophical
meaning doesn’t necessarily equate to a meaningless life.
In fact, it frees us to create our own meaning by affirming the things that we love.
At the same time I became obsessed with the Big Lebowski, I was also getting into the
writings of Søren Kierkegaard.
Fittingly, Kierkegaard’s philosophy is similar to Nietzsche’s, in that he’s also responding
to nineteenth-century Europe’s reliance on religion to provide meaning.
For Kierkegaard, this meant that truth isn’t something you read about or arrive at via
rigorous intellectual gymnastics.
Rather, the truth is something you do.
That is, you don’t affirm the meaningfulness of bowling by saying “I like bowling,”
you do so by hitting the lanes with your friends.
There is a line I love from Kierkegaard where he says “decision is the little magic word
that existence respects”, which means that you aren’t going to have a meaningful life
until you decide to do something, whether that’s go bowling, write your novel, or
simply take a long walk in the woods.
The takeaway here isn’t that we should all be wearing bathrobes, smoking joints, and
drinking White Russians all day (though if that works for you, well done).
It does, however, mean that we all have the freedom and responsibility to create lives
that affirm what’s meaningful to us.
Let’s say God or Plato don’t have all the answers.
That doesn’t mean our lives have to lead to leather pants, German techno, and cutting
off people’s toes.
The last Coen brothers film I want to talk about is Inside Llywen Davis.
It’s the story of a Bob Dylan-esque folk singer in early nineteen-sixties New York
trying to make it as an artist.
Spoiler alert, it’s not working -and to add insult to injury, actual Bob Dylan shows
up at the end.
This film might not have the explicit philosophical import of A Serious Man or The Big Lebowski,
but I love its subversive critique of a particular American ideology, namely, the myth of “do
what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
It highlights the misleading cruelty of this collective fantasy, showing that, for every
Bob Dylan, there are thousands of singers almost as good, but not quite.
No matter how hard Llywen tries, we just know things aren’t going to work out.
Francis Ha, another black and white film from 2013, has a similar message, except that this
film’s titular character realizes she doesn’t need to “achieve her dream” to be happy.
Instead, she gets a day job, and finds space to pursue her creative interests on the side.
But in Inside Llywelyn Davis we know he’s never going to wise up and quit.
Instead, he’ll burn every bridge and sleep on every couch and get beaten up in every
alley.
His whole life is like an example of Nietzsche’s eternal return.
As the philosopher depressingly describes it:
“This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable
times more; but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably
small or great in your life will have to return to you,”
In other words, let’s say you’re Bill Murray stuck in Groundhog Day -- Would you
be happy to live THIS day… forever?
Let’s be honest, at a certain point, we’ve all wanted to be a famous author, singer,
actor, scientist, chef, or podiatrist, when in reality, that level of fame and success
happens for like 0.01% of people, at most.
And while that might sound depressing, there is a freedom that comes from realizing that
there are ways to live an interesting and fulfilling life besides being Bob Dylan.
In this way, we can see Inside Llywelyn Davis as a cautionary tale, not only because of
the character’s inability to realize his limitations, but also because he treats everyone
like shit along the way..
Which brings us to another one of the grand philosophical ideas in this film: maybe don’t
be a dick?
Conclusion: I could go on about the Coen brothers’ incredible
filmography for hours, and if you wanna buy me some beers, I will.
But these three films in particular affected on a deep level.
And maybe, more importantly, the Coen brothers taught me that films are capable of not only
repeating the philosophical ideas of others, but of being philosophical texts themselves.
That’s why I keep coming back to these films over and over again.
Just like Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals or Kierkegaard’s Repetition, they are works
that always seem to offer new interpretations and insights.
They just happen to be much funnier than anything poor Friedreich or Søren ever wrote, sorry
guys.
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