Does "offbeat" count as a worldview?

Just today, my colleague Lynnea the Movie-Lady was kind enough to invite me to submit an abstract for something to be included in the volume on the Coen Brothers that she is co-editing. Over lunch, we cussed and discussed this Outlawyer stuff I posted on a little while ago, and tonight I sent her an abstract. Just between you and me and the virtual gatepost, the title--"'I don’t have some way to put it—that’s the way it is': The Outlawyer as a Recurring Character in the Films of the Coen Brothers"--despite its clunkiness, may be the best thing about it. I hate writing abstracts. I'll spare you this one, and you can thank me without knowing why.

Eh. Launch the sucker and see if she floats. I just don't want to screw up my friend's book with said sucker, you know?

Anyway, in the abstract I promise to take a stab at some reasons why the Coens are fascinated by this type of character, so earlier today I did a bit of Googling about to see if somewhere out there someone has hazarded a guess as to the Zeitgeist of their version of the Universe. Lynnea had warned me at lunch that little if any sustained criticism of the Coens is out there, much less of the sort that I would be looking for, and she was right (though it's a bit surprising, given that these guys have been making films for almost 30 years now). The answer to my question, more often than not: "offbeat," with "quirky" in second place; I also recall "dark" used a couple of times. Each is used in front of "worldview," which itself remains stubbornly unpacked, as if the reader knows immediately in what that worldview consists. Complicating matters is that all the reviews of No Country for Old Men note the absence of this offbeat worldview.

I don't know about you, but these begged questions' tin cups are rattling pretty loudly.

Are we so post-modernized that we are now, even, post-metaphysics? Have the Big Questions been so thoroughly answered (or, alternately, have we've decided they don't require answers) that a writer can say, in effect, "My worldview is offbeat" and the masses nod comprehendingly, saying, "I can relate"?

Obviously, this character-type appeals to something in the Coens or else he wouldn't keep appearing, in more and more ominous form, in their films till we see its apotheosis in Chigurh. But what? "Offbeat" easily works for the most part for Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona, but only at first for Charlie Meadows in Barton Fink, and not at all for Chigurh.

Anyway. This isn't a bleg; I'm just asking some questions out loud that seem to me to matter regarding the Coens' films. I'll let you know if I get something beyond "offbeat."

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More on "Outlawyers": A note on inadequacy

In its immediate context, an affirming statement . . . but imagine Anton Chigurh wearing this. Image found here.

I was distracted by yesterday's posts and so didn't get around to posting this: Apologies for not earlier acknowledging Zunguzungu's kind mention of a post of mine here. His post (about which more below) is of the sort that makes you wish that your own work were worthy of mention there but you feel that maybe a little merit-by-association accrues to yours thereby via that mention. Anyway, some people have found their way here via that post and his cross-post over at The Valve. If you're here via those routes, welcome.

Zunguzungu's post, titled "You Know Who I Blame? The System!: The Wire, Barack Obama, and Omar for President," indeed covers all that and more: it ends up being a meditation on a version of the American archetype of the Rugged Individualist as embodied by Omar, who is Barack Obama's favorite character on The Wire. After noting some affinities between such characters and my idea of the Outlawyer, Zunguzungu gets to his post's central claim:

[A] true American is someone who makes his own justice.

In this sense, Indians are never the real villains of cowboy movies (and The Wire is not innovative in encouraging us to sympathize with the state‘s enemies); exactly because of the inevitability of their deaths, Indians could even become a figure of romantic attachment, valued almost precisely because every death seems to signify a step forward for progress. No, the real villain in Westerns, gangster movies, noir, and Mafia films is the same villain as in The Wire: “institutions” or an even more amorphous “the system.” And you don’t have to dig very deep into The Wire’s dvd commentaries or interviews with the creators to discover a very basic and overriding cynicism about the possibility of positive reform; as David Simon put it (in a quote I got here), The Wire “overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” These failures are, again and again and again, attributed to “institutions.”

I've not seen any episode of The Wire, but the bit here about "institutions" and The System being villainous made me think back on my Outlawyer post and No Country (and, for that matter, McCarthy's work generally) and realize that the Outlawyer doesn't find the System villainous. Rather, it's the System that finds itself inadequate even to articulate, let alone deal with, the parallel universe that is the code of the Outlawyer.

More below the fold.

In the novel, though not the film, Sheriff Bell says something to the effect that it's not that the people he's dealing with disrespect the law--it's that "they don't even think about it." Exactly: even disrespect for the law would signify a tacit admission that the System, ideally, will ultimately judge their behavior. In McCarthy's take on things (as I quickly survey his novels in my mind), the System is so ignored as to be finally rendered irrelevant and thus inadequate, impotent, pitiable: a neutered villainy. We, too--those of us who say the System still has relevancy--are to blame for this in McCarthy's mind because we collectively pay little more than lip-service to the notion of relevancy. It's a reiteration of Nietzsche (and, in her own way, Flannery O'Connor): "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." Perhaps it's this that lies at the heart of McCarthy's works' power: the realization that he may just be right about this and, holy you-know-what, what the hell are we going to do about it?

This theme is most forcefully given expression in Blood Meridian, chiefly in this cheery little homily by judge Holden:

Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all questions of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural. (Vintage paper edition, 250)

Because language is expressive of Systems (in case anyone cares, if I have an a priori theoretical point of reference, it's Structuralism), language, too, will be found inadequate in the face of that which occurs beyond our Systems' abilities to account for them, as I've tried to get at before. To circle back to something I noted in the Outlawyer post: this inadequacy of language is analogous what I was getting at with regard to the near-absence of a soundtrack--a film's world's language, its unspoken road-map for the viewer regarding how to respond to what s/he sees--in No Country. Or, as I put it to Lynnea the movie-lady as we talked about No Country at graduation this past Saturday, compared to other Coen Brothers films (which, according to Tim Blake Nelson in the "making of" featurette on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD, look as though "they've been directed within an inch of their lives"), it's as though No Country "has no director." I meant that as a compliment, by the way.

None of this is to say that finding a System inadequate is always a bad thing, as my choice for an image for this post indicates, I hope. Indeed, as part of my project over at Domestic Issue I'll be fleshing out the claim that, if squinted at in a certain way, the term "New World" is a potential undoing of the the ultimate System, History (as embodied for my argument by the term "Americas"). Historicizing certainly has value for the establishing of immediate contexts, but too often (certainly in literary studies and, perhaps, in our politics as well) the tendency is to become emsnared by that past to the point that everything, no matter the point in time, seems a perpetual Present--to miss the very particulars that the goal of historicizing was to reveal to us in the first place: "'Twas always thus." What is bad about finding a System inadequate is if we have no adequate substitute for the inadequate one:

"Will there be something else?"
"I don't know--will there?"

UPDATE: As it happens, 3 Quarks Daily, almost exactly on point, has posted this poem by Czeslaw Milosz.

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The Coen Brothers and the "Outlawyer"

From the top: 1)Leonard Smalls, in Raising Arizona (image found here)
2) Charlie Meadows, Barton Fink.
3) Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men (image found here.

My colleague Lynnea the movie-lady (who has not lent me anywhere nearly as many movies as Larry the movie-guy has but who is co-editing a collection of essays and interviews on the Coen Brothers) lent me her copy of No Country for Old Men last week, and I watched it Friday night. I'm only now getting around to posting on it because it is, in the best sense, a difficult film to approach. Aesthetically, it's very different from not only the Brothers' usual, highly-stylized work, but also from just about everything else out there.

One enormous difference in this film, often remarked upon, is the near-absence of a soundtrack. I noted only two moments in the film in which music was used to reinforce the scene, and even then it was barely audible. It's not until we encounter the absence of such a commonplace that we realize just how dependent film-makers assume the audience is on the soundtrack to telegraph to the viewer how we should respond to what we hear and see onscreen.

I'd like to suggest here that the Coens' not having a soundtrack for No Country does more than the obvious of getting us to really watch and listen--and, as a result, really heighten the suspense. It also contributes thematically to the development of a recurring character type in the Coens' films, what I'm calling the Outlawyer. [Aside: I'm sure there's a better name for this type; I'll happily take suggestions in the comments.] This is someone who, because he is a true outlaw--literally, someone outside (that is, beyond the bounds of) the law (not just legal codes, but also systems of morality), cannot be--or refuses to be--judged by that law. These figures are something other than mere criminals. In that aural vacuum of no-music, the Outlawyer establishes his own code; he rules and is ruled by it; thus, the "lawyer" part. At its most effective, we are in thrall to that code--a code, moreover, that we do not fully comprehend and thus cannot predict. This is the realm of horror--a genre that someone in the "Making of" featurette on the No Country DVD says this film partakes of to a certain extent.

Below the fold, some sketching out of this.

Leonard Smalls (played by Randall "Tex" Cobb) in Raising Arizona is the first of these characters, but as his first appearance in the film shows, he's actually what will prove to be a caricature of the Outlawyer, and it's in large measure the accompanying music that signals this:


We're meant to laugh at Smalls, with his "Mama didn't love me" tattoo and bronzed baby shoes--Raising Arizona is a farce, after all--but in No Country there's a brief but telling moment that links its Outlawyer to Smalls, when Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) also takes a pot-shot at an animal from the truck as he's driving. No pleasure but in meanness, as O'Connor's Misfit, perhaps the Coens' prototype for this character, would say.

Except. Neither Smalls nor Barton Fink's Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) nor Chigurh appears to derive any pleasure from their meanness--indeed, for us to say that, or to characterize their behavior as meanness, would be to read them in accordance with what we assume is true of such behavior. Each, instead, figures himself as performing something of a service for at least some of their victims: Hy sees Smalls as an avenging angel "unleashed" to punish him for his sin; Charlie tells Barton that be knows what it's like for people when things get balled up at the head office and so "I help them out;" and in this early scene from No Country--which alone may have won Bardem the Best Supporting Actor Oscar--Chigurh makes the gas-station attendant focus on the here and now in a way that, one is certain, he had never in his life done before:

"Will there be something else?"
"I don't know--will there?"

It's like peering into an abyss, that moment, which the remainder of the scene only reinforces. Tellingly, the ambient noise--is that some sort of droning note?--gets just a bit louder at the 2:43 mark, "What's the most you ever lost on a coin toss?" then gradually grows louder (though it remains very faint--less like music than like blood rushing in the head) till it suddenly ceases at the 3:57 mark--the revelation that the coin is "heads."

Never to me have fanbelts looked so much like hangman's nooses as they do in this scene.

Whereas in earlier Coen Brothers films the Outlawyer has not been the protagonist, I'd make the argument that Chigurh is No Country's central figure: his actions render the film's world as blank as the west Texas landscape. The film's trailer, you'll note, isn't about Josh Brolin's Llewelyen Moss or Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Ed Tom Bell: as with all good horror films, it's about the monster--or, more precisely, their attempting, and failing, to understand the monster:


By the way: it's no accident that you hear far more "music" in the trailer than you do in the entirety of the film. The point of the trailer is to introduce the audience to the film--that is, it's supposed to provide some clues as to how to approach it. But the "music" we hear is more like sounds, some of them almost ambient or "found" in quality. Melody is absent; it's all atmosphere, and not a pleasant one at that.

I have some vague ideas as to why the Coens might find the Outlawyer such a compelling figure, but the operative word here is "vague." I'll let you know when I figure out something about that.

UPDATE: My good friend R. Sherman of Musings from the Hinterland has also posted a review of No Country, this one focusing on the correspondences between McCarthy's novel and the film. For what it's worth, I think he's spot-on.

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"I could tell you some stories . . . ": Barton Fink, narrative, and listening

"What's in the box?" indeed. Image found here.

Barton Fink (1991; dir. Joel Coen)

[Spoiler alert: I do talk explicitly about certain important scenes in the film, especially below the fold, but my sense, given the nature of this film, is that it's unspoilable. Knowing what's coming will make it no less mysterious.]

Last night, I decided I needed some weirdness in my life, so I watched Barton Fink. In the article I linked to just above, the consensus of the three post-ers on the film is, "It's about heads." Yup: I got that, too (the film is filled with references to them). And?

And that, I realized this morning as I was walking the Scruffmeister and thinking about this hermetic film, the echo-chamber that political dialogue has become in the blogosphere, and Winnie-the-Pooh, is precisely why this film is so hard to talk about: It needs a verb.

At the level where most films and, by extension, narratives function, Barton Fink is as inscrutable as the box Charlie Meadows puts in our hero's "good hands." Most films, even Coen Brothers films, are "about" Something. It's not a derogatory thing to say that someone has given shape and direction to the vast majority of narratives such that, when the reader/viewer comes along, s/he follows a pre-determined, marked-out path that, if the maker(s) has/have done well, the audience won't be aware of--or, in the case of certain genres that carry familiar expectations with them, won't care or will even demand be present. Barton Fink, though, feels more like a surveying of a surface of events and images that someone--the viewer--is required to make some sense of. It's a film about a theme, as opposed to most films, which "just" have themes.

The box is inscrutable because it remains unscrutinized, at least by Barton. This member of the audience, at least, scrutinizes it more than he does.

The verbal analogue to the box is Charlie's catch-phrase, "I could tell you some stories"--a phrase which, each time he utters it, Barton not only doesn't invite him to share one, he cuts him off. The occasion of their first meeting, in fact, is Barton's complaining about Charlie's noise and Charlie's wanting to confirm that Barton was the one who complained--in effect, Barton wants to shut Charlie up before he even meets him. Of course, the irony in all this is that a) Barton reveals that he (apparently) has only one story to tell; and b) doesn't even recognize this fact. To put it another way: Even as Barton tells Charlie that he wants to "write about people like you. The average working stiff. The common man," we get the strong feeling that Barton is, at least during the time of the film, only able to write about writing about them.

More below the fold.

From a transcript of the shooting script:

BARTON
Well, I don't mean to get up on my high horse, but why
shouldn't we look at ourselves up there? Who cares
about the Fifth Earl of Bastrop and Lady Higginbottom
and - and - and who killed Nigel Grinch-Gibbons?

CHARLIE
I can feel my butt getting sore already.

BARTON
Exactly, Charlie! You understand what I'm saying - a lot
more than some of these literary types. Because you're a
real man!¹

CHARLIE
And I could tell you some stories -

BARTON
Sure you could! And yet many writers do everything in
their power to insulate themselves from the common man -
from where they live, from where they trade, from where
they fight and love and converse and - and - and
. . . so naturally their work suffers, and regresses into
empty formalism and - well, I'm spouting off again, but to
put it in your language, the theater becomes as phony as a
three-dollar bill.

CHARLIE
Yeah, I guess that's tragedy right there.

BARTON
Frequently played, seldom remarked.

Charlie laughs.

CHARLIE
Whatever that means.

Barton smile[s] with him.

One way to talk about Barton Fink is as a dramatization of the Death of the Author². Here, though, I want to talk about Barton the character as someone who is dead as an author. It might as well be his head in that box . . . assuming, of course, there's a head in there.

Accompanying the film's obsession with heads is one about listening--or, more accurately, not listening. "Listening" would extend here to include attentiveness to visual noise, of which the Earle Hotel is full (such as, to give a couple of examples, a hall full of shoes waiting to be polished yet whose owners, with the single exception of Charlie, remain invisible and all-but-unheard, and the picture of the woman (a Siren with no song?) sitting on the beach--accompanied by the sound of surf when the camera turns on it). But Barton asks no questions of any of these things; instead, he stuffs things into his ears to keep from hearing them³.

The producing of narrative requires listening--to language, to circumstance, to a place and time--and out of that listening derive meaning, or at least a point. Barton has an ideal he wants to achieve through his art, but ideals are not plots. The result is pretty but ultimately empty language. Once a (traditional) narrative is produced, though, it can't "listen"--that is, it has to keep out at least some competing possibilities or else it will collapse under the weight of negotiating all of them.

Charlie, unlike Barton, hears too much: even though Barton's room is located between Charlie's and the lovers who disturb Barton (they're barely audible to us), Charlie not only hears them in his room, he says he can practically see what they're doing. It's no surprise that Charlie is the one with the stories to offer an ear-plugged Barton. But Charlie's problem, we learn, is not that he has a surfeit of stories; it's that he has one that subsumes all those other stories, one he can't keep under wraps but which oozes out of him like the pus from his infected ear.

The film's climactic scene (a still from it leads off this post) is one that will feel familiar to fans of the Coen Brothers, drawn as they are to apocalyptic moments involving figures who locate their actions beyond good and evil: think Leonard Smalls in Raising Arizona, the sheriff with the mirrored lenses in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. There is no arguing, either literally or figuratively, with these men. Their actions are in service to a narrative; what's more, that same narrative creates a white noise that drowns out all else--which is, of course, what is so frightening about apocalyptic narrative. Of these figures I've listed, though, Charlie is an exception. His actions are no less evil; but, even as he explains why he does what he does--just "help[ing] people out," he says--he also says, "I just wish someone would do as much for me" and berates Barton for--guess what?--not listening.

Regular visitor Sheila, a big Coen Brothers fan, comments here that she thinks Barton Fink is the Brothers' finest film. I think personally that I would give the nod to Fargo; having said that, though, I will say that their work is full of ideas and that, if one likes that sort of things in one's films, Barton Fink surrenders fully over to the exploring of its ideas and does so with extraordinary complexity and subtlety. It's like that box, yes--but shake it around more than Barton shakes around his box, and you'll marvel at that box.
__________
¹Maybe it's just me, but I hear here an echo of the Grandmother's exclamation, "Because you're a good man!" in Flannery O'Connor's short story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." Surely, though, the scene that follows is a rewriting of The Misfit's exchange with the Grandmother at the end of that story (about which, if anyone's interested, I had some things to say here):

CHARLIE
How you been, buddy?

He props the shotgun in a corner and sits facing Barton, who stared at him.

. . . Don't look at me like that, neighbor.
It's just me - Charlie.

BARTON
I hear it's Mundt. Madman Mundt.

Charlie reaches a flask from his pocket.

CHARLIE
Jesus, people can be cruel . . .

He takes a long draught from his flask, then gives a haunted stare.

. . . if it's not my build, it's my
personality.

Charlie is perspiring heavily. The fire rumbles in the hallway.

. . . They say I'm a madman, Barton,
but I'm not mad at anyone. Honest I'm
not. Most guys I just feel sorry for.
Yeah. It tears me up inside, to think
about what they're going through. How
trapped they are. I understand it. I
feel for 'em. So I try and help them
out . . .

He reached up to loosen his tie and pop his collar button.

. . . Jesus. Yeah. I know what it feels
like, when things get all balled up at the
head office. It puts you through hell,
Barton. So I help people out. I just wish
someone would do as much for me . . .

He stares miserably down at his feet.

. . . Jesus it's hot. Sometimes it gets so
hot, I wanna crawl right out of my skin.

Self-pity:

BARTON
But Charlie - why me? Why -

CHARLIE
Because you DON'T LISTEN!

A tacky yellow fluid is dripping from Charlie's left ear and running down his cheek.

. . . Jesus, I'm dripping again.

He pulls some cotton from his pocket and plugs his ear.

. . . C'mon Barton, you think you know
about pain? You think I made your life
hell? Take a look around this dump.
You're just a tourist with a typewriter,
Barton. I live here. Don't you understand
that . . .

His voice is becoming choked.

. . . And you come into MY home . . . And
you complain that I'M making too . . .
much . . . noise.

He looks up at Barton.

There is a long silence.

Finally:

BARTON
. . . I'm sorry.

Wearily:

CHARLIE
Don't be.

²In the film, Barton's name often gets shortened to "Bart"--perhaps a nod in the direction of Roland Barthes (pronounced "Bart"), author of the essay "The Death of the Author" (see Wikipedia's discussion here)). To fully explore the intersection between the film and that essay would take another (lengthy) post or, even, article. Surprisingly, a quick Google search turned up no such article, but the link seems blatantly obvious to me. But, you know: consider the source.

There's also this: I had a friend at Rice who made the argument that the tight shot of Barton's typing the word "postcard" at the end of his wrestling-movie script (the same word, by the way, ends Barton's play that we see performed at the opening of the film) is a nod to Derrida's book The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Maybe. It does seem to be the case that this little passage, from the introduction, is echoed by the fact that Barton isn't aware that he's essentially re-submitted his stage play as the screenplay: "You were reading a somewhat retro loveletter, the last in history. But you have not yet received it. Yes, its lack or excess of address prepares it to fall into all hands: a post card, an open letter in which the secret appears, but indecipherably." The ultimate indecipherable text would be the one which its own author cannot even recognize as his/hers.

³I need to watch (and listen) again before I comment too fully on this, but this film's use of ambient noise in the scenes set in Barton's room, much of it barely audible, is fascinating to me. It's surprising that, so far as I know, it is available only in stereo; a 5.1 mix would, I suspect, be quite a treat to listen to.

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