American Landscapes of the Coen Brothers

September 14, 2007

Emily and I have been on a Coen Brother viewing spree. Having now watched a good portion of their films in close succession, what strikes me is the consistently strong use of a specific American landscape. Let me lay out the films and their settings:

Blood Simple - Texas

Raising Arizona - Arizona

Hudsucker Proxy - New York

Fargo - Minnesota

The Big Lebowski - Los Angeles

O Brother Where Art Thou - the South

The Man Who Wasn't There - Northern California

Intolerable Cruelty - Los Angeles

The Ladykillers - the South

I have not yet re-watched Miller's Crossing, but it has many scenes set in New Orleans.. and that adds another distinctive landscape to the mix.

Looking at this list of settings, it is notable that the Coen Brothers have treated several of the most distinctive regional landscapes in the US. It is as if one element of creating a film is to look around the country and decide on a landscape.. and then the story gets draped over the setting. That scenario especially makes sense with a film like Ladykillers that is relatively unsuccessful in terms of story but has a strongly imagined physical setting.

Several doubles appear in the list above, but these often resolve when carefully considered. Intolerable Cruelty and The Big Lebowski are both set in Los Angeles, but these two views of Los Angeles are hardly mutually recognizable.. the one filled with upper crust scenes and the other with Ralphs and a bowling alley. Taken together these two films could be considered a stereoscope of Los Angeles. Something similar could be said about the historical/mythical south of O Brother and the contemporary south on display in The Ladykillers.

In their sense of place the Coen Brothers are the heirs of 19th century American regional fiction.. although obviously not limited to a single region, they accomplish the same end: establishing versions of American landscapes that are entwined with fiction. Their settings tend also to be historically related to genre choices (Chandleresque noir in LA, screwball comedy in New York). They expertly settle a type of story in a real place.. and thereby affirm a kind of regional identity.

In contrast to the sureness of the landscape, the central character of a Coen Brothers film is often blank.. oddly passive. This characteristic is present in its most extreme form in The Man Who Wasn't There.. in which Billy Bob Thornton is a passive black hole that sucks down everyone around him. But in Fargo (Marge Gunderson) and The Ladykillers (Marva Munson) the central character is positive, but is nevertheless strangely passive in pursuing the good.

What we don't tend to find in a Coen Brothers Film is a self-directed character who can manipulate his/her environment with correct knowledge of the situation. The bad guys often think they can control what is around them.. but fail comically and horribly. The good guys are usually a long way from the truth.. but triumph anyways (think of Abby at the end of Blood Simple who shoots her adversary.. but thinks he is somebody else: "I'm not afraid of you, Marty!" But it is not in fact Marty that she has shot!