[Quirky instrumental music]
Circularity is a motif
that recurs in the Coen Brothers' movies
structurally, in terms of how their stories are told,
but it's also very much a visual motif.
It starts with the ceiling fans in Blood Simple,
which are whirling above the characters
while they were all in different locations,
lying in bed looking up at them,
suggesting this unity between them.
And then those ceiling fans multiply
quite humorously in Raising Arizona at Nathan Arizona's shop,
where one or two ceiling fans
in Blood Simple suddenly becomes 30.
And then, moving forward from that,
there's some pretty significant circular objects.
There's the hat that blows through Miller's Crossing.
The hula hoop in The Hudsucker Proxy
is obviously a major one.
The tumbleweed that introduces The Big Lebowski,
and also the bowling balls in The Big Lebowski;
the hubcap that becomes a flying saucer
in The Man Who Wasn't There;
even the engagement ring set
at the end of Intolerable Cruelty —
the quarter in No Country for Old Men.
"Call it."
[Narrator] They just keep building up
and they keep recurring.
"All right."
"Heads, then."
[Narrator] Whether it's about looking
for meaning in the films
or whether it's just a design principle
that the Coens enjoy...
"Well done."
[Narrator] ... it just struck me that
that was an interesting starting point
and also was a way to get into aspects of recurrence
in circularity in their movies,
structurally and also thematically.
"It is the best I can do."
"Call it."
[Narrator] The loop structure in the Coens —
you see it at all points of their career.
I mean, in Miller's Crossing,
maybe it's more a matter of doubling than it is looping,
but you seem to have the same scenes
played either from different angles
— literally, in terms of the placement of the camera —
or different angles in terms of power dynamics
within the story, or where characters are
in their respective arcs.
There are two meetings between Gabriel Byrne
and John Turturro in Byrne's apartment,
but the second meeting between them also directly mirrors
an assassination attempt
on Albert Finney's character's life earlier in the film.
There are two sequences in Miller's Crossing —
there are two sequences in which John Turturro
pleads for his life from Gabriel Byrne.
[Both] "Look in your heart."
"What heart?"
[Narrator] There's even two sets of love triangles.
There's a heterosexual one in the foreground of the film
and a homosexual love triangle
in the background of the film.
"What's goin' on between you and Bernie?"
"Nothin' Tom. We're just friends.
You know, amigos."
"You're a fickle boy, Mink."
[Narrator] The vertices of those two triangles
kind of mirror and intersect each other.
It's such a carefully written film,
and then, hovering above that,
you have the hat as this organizing principle
and this central enigma — this idea of mystery
that the Coens often have in their films, as well.
[Sweeping orchestral music]
The Hudsucker Proxy really literalizes it
in that it's a movie about a loop.
It's a movie about the creation of the hula hoop,
which then becomes this stand-in
for all kinds of other cycles:
the cycle of innovation, the cycle of fads, the cycle of capitalism...
And even the score quotes "O Fortuna,"
which is a piece about he circularity of fortune.
[Both] "I had the boys down at R&D throw together
this little prototype so that a discussion may advance
some focus, and give you gentlemen of the board
a firsthand look
at just how exciting this gizmo is."
[Narrator] The Hudsucker Proxy's a movie
that literally begins where it ends.
It starts with the main character, played by Tim Robbins,
on a ledge. Even the narration speaks
to the sort of cyclical thing: how did he get so high?
Why is he feeling so low?
And it will circle back to that scene at the end
to fill in the backstory and the context
of what's led him to this suicide attempt.
But in inventing the hula hoop,
he is, in effect, reinventing the wheel.
"Congratulations, kid.
You've outdone yourself.
You've reinvented the wheel."
[Narrator] And not just the cycle of the stock market,
not just the cycle of industry and capitalism,
but also just cycles of human endeavour.
"Hello?" [On the phone] "Hello, Norman.
This is the president."
"Oh, my God. Sir."
[On the phone] "I just wanted to congratulate you.
I'm very proud of you."
[Narrator] You also have these clock-tower characters,
these godly overseers who represent
a dichotomy between good and evil
and whose job it is to keep that circle moving.
"Strictly speaking, I'm never supposed to do this.
But have you got a better idea?"
[Narrator] All the visual circles in The Hudsucker Proxy,
whether it's the hula hoop itself
or the clock face or the little halos
that appear above the angelic characters
who we see in the film, are mirrored in what it's about industrially.
And also just cycles of film history
and the different periods and fashions looping back
to an older mode of filmmaking
and an older period of filmmaking
and cycling it into the present tense.
[Funky jazz music]
In The Big Lebowski, which, superficially,
is this very shaggy-dog, aimless film
about a makeshift private detective
who can't really detect anything...
On the surface, it's really, really loose and baggy,
but it's so tightly constructed,
both in terms of those doubling motifs I talked about
with the two Lebowskis, the two Jeffrey Lebowskis —
the big Lebowski and the proletarian, washed-out Lebowski —
but also, the film's very much about circles and circularity.
That tumbleweed that drifts into town,
bringing the genre of the western
into the genre of the California noir,
also represents a kind of life cycle,
and at the end of the film, the narrator,
played by Sam Elliott, talks about that life cycle,
talks about there being a little Lebowski on the way,
an heir to The Dude,
and he suggests that this is how the human comedy
perpetuates itself through the ages.
"I guess that's the way the whole darn human comedy
keeps perpetuating itself, down through the generations,
westward the wagons, across the sands of time until we...
Ah, look at me, I'm rambling again."
[Narrator] So this idea of perpetuation
and continuity and paternity's very,
very important to the Coens.
Often, the paternity in their movies is anxious or fearful,
like in Raising Arizona. Here, it provides them
with the closest thing I think they have
to an unequivocally happy ending,
the idea that there will be another little Lebowski.
[Lebowski coughing]
[Narrator] Inside Llewyn Davis is a loop
that's really tied to the milieu of folk music.
The character, this folk singer in Greenwich Village,
he introduces a performance both at the beginning
and the end of the film,
because they are the same performance,
by saying if it's not new and it never grows old,
then it's a folk song.
"So if it's never new and it never gets old,
then it's a folk song."
[Narrator] And that speaks
not just to the staunchness of this tradition,
but to his fixity and paralysis within it;
he can't invent. He can't create. He can only interpret.
And we're meant to think both in terms
of the loop structure of the movie
and his own inability to ever learn from mistakes
that he is a very trapped character, and in that way,
it's a very claustrophobic film.
It's a movie that keeps offering its character a way out,
and he never seems to be able to take it.
"No."
[Narrator] Or the film does not permit him to take it.
So in this case, the loop is very much a closed one.
[Both] "You're a funny boy, huh?"
[Both] "What?"
[Both] "Had to open your big mouth,
huh, funny boy?"
[Narrator] There is a way of reading the film at the end,
that even if Llewyn can't get out of it, folk music can
in the person of Bob Dylan, who seems to represent a future,
but it's a future that Llewyn Davis is not gonna be part of.
He's gonna be in Greenwich Village forever.
So, in terms of circularity,
I think that the Coens' movies are very much about time,
or about ideas of time.
They keep making films that are set in the past
but whose characters are looking towards the future,
and sometimes it's in a very comic way.
At the end O Brother, Where Art Thou?,
George Clooney's character talks about
how we're looking forward to a veritable age of reason.
"Yes, sir, a veritable age of reason,
like the one they had in France.
Not a moment too soon."
[Narrator] Or at the end of Fargo,
the story is resolved, and yet Marge
and her husband are in bed
and they have a very time-based moment of realization
that her baby's gonna be born in two more months.
"Two more months."
[Narrator] Or even at the end of The Big Lebowski,
the story is concluded,
but the idea is that the little Lebowski's on its way.
And I realize that, as much as their films master the past —
both the historical past and the cinematic past —
through a really stylized,
nostalgic recreation and representation,
their films seem deeply, deeply anxious about the future,
and if movies are set in the past
that are anxious about the future,
to some extent, you can read them as being
about our present tense.
But I think they're also just always worried
about the future and the uncertainty of what's coming.
In Llewyn Davis, Llewyn Davis' girlfriend,
or semi-girlfriend, played by Carey Mulligan,
asks him, "Why don't you think about the future?"
And he says, "Oh, do you mean flying cars and stuff?"
He can't possibly take the idea
of a personal future seriously.
"Do you ever think about the future at all?"
[Sighs] "The future?
You mean like flying cars?
Hotels on the moon?"
[Narrator] In Hail, Caesar!
both the group of communist screenwriters
who kidnap the George Clooney character
and the representative of the missile developer,
Lockheed Martin, who make the ICBMs in the 1960s,
they both tell Josh Brolin's character
that they represent the future.
[Door clanging open]
"We are the future.
What does that mean?"
"Beats me."
[Narrator] And that's a really interesting —
to use a very Coen-y word — dialectic that plays out:
the idea of who has purchase on and who owns the future.
And so, while a lot of people tend to see
the Coens as nostalgic, some people would even say,
politically, they're reactionary,
that they're yearning for a kind of past.
I think that their views on the past are somewhat unsettled,
and I think their view of the future is always unsettled,
and that's where this obsession with continuity
and lineage and paternity comes from.
They always want, in their movies, to know
that there's going to be a future
and that things are gonna continue.
Their happiest endings are the ones
that reassure us that it will.
Their most frightening endings are the ones that suggest,
on an individual or a collective level, it might not,
like the dream at the end of No Country for Old Men,
which is as death-tinged a moment as I can think of
in modern American cinema.
"I knew that whenever I got there, he'd be there.
Then I woke up."
[Narrator] Or the end of A Serious Man,
which may just be a storm or may be the end of all things.
[Dramatic orchestral music]