The Brothers Grim: The Films of Ethan and Joel Coen, Erica Rowell, (2007)

Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 392 pp., ISBN 978-0810858503 (pbk), $35.00

The Coen Brothers Interviews, William Rodney Allen (ed.), (2006)

Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 208 pp., ISBN 978-1578068890 (pbk), $22.00.

Joel and Ethan Coen, R. Barton Palmer, (2004)

Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 224 pp., ISBN 978-0252071850 (pbk), $16.95

Erica Rowell’s The Brothers Grim: The Films of Joel and Ethan Coen continues in the short but consistent tradition of books about the Coen brothers’ work. It moves through their films to date in chronological order, one chapter per film, Blood Simple (1984), Raising Arizona (1987), Miller’s Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1992), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), and so on. It provides a plot summary (termed a “Review” by Rowell), background information on the production and critical and box-office reception (which Rowell calls a “Preview”), and critical commentary on each film’s themes and significance (loosely organized by Rowell under idiosyncratic, punny subheadings like “Art of Darkness” and “Farce of Nature”). The prose style is lively, colloquial, and clever.

Several previous books on the Coens’ films have taken a similar approach, also providing separate sections on plot, production background, and critical commentary. Even the punning tendency is distressingly familiar. However, other volumes tend to dwell on the brothers’ sparse biographies, as an unfulfilled gesture toward some sort of authorial significance in the brothers’ oeuvre. Rowell does not. In what seems to be a tentative step toward a more rigorous approach to the films themselves, Rowell examines them with greater concentration than the typically scattershot making-of or makers-of commentary, and even announces something like an analytical framework to apply to the films: the brothers are engaged in “trickster mythmaking” (x); they are creating “modern folk tales” (xi) that subvert film narrative techniques, toy with audience expectations, and “make us rethink our roles as observers” (x). Though this framework is laid out in a brief three-page introduction that never goes much beyond that level of generality and is never consistently followed up in her examination of the films, clearly Rowell means to pursue a research project of sorts. She provides extensive notes, a detailed filmography, and in her “Acknowledgments,” a fervent thanks to film scholar “Annette Insdorf, my thesis advisor at Columbia University” (vii). These elements suggest that there’s some sort of scholarly impulse herein, struggling to be born.

This seems a promising development if examined alongside Ronald Bergen’s The Coen Brothers (2000), James Mottram’s The Coen Brothers: The Life of the Mind (2000), and Carolyn R. Russell’s The Films of Joel and Ethan Coen (2001), all of which skitter through plot summaries, production backgrounds, directors’ bios, and light film criticism in varying proportions. One volume might have better accompanying photos or funnier quotes from Coen interviews or a more engaging prose style than the others, but all tread roughly the same ground, introducing the Coen brothers to casual readers and filmgoers. There is no question that compared to these lightweight products, Rowell’s volume represents a welcome attempt to put a bit of meat on the bones of Coen film criticism.

However, considering the fact that the Coens have been important American filmmakers for over twenty years, this latest introductory text is not so heartening after all. How long will we continue to be introduced to the Coen brothers? How many books will edge toward an in-depth analysis of their films or rigorous argument about their place in contemporary American media culture without actually taking the plunge? Or if taking the plunge, as in Rowell’s case, how to account for the reluctance to stay in the deep end long enough to do justice to the films? Here are a few of Rowell’s concluding remarks about Miller’s Crossing:

Society versus anarchy—society versus freedom. Crossing contrasts the city’s knowns with the wood’s unknowns. Indeterminacy and subjectivity are keys to fill in the blanks of Crossing, where the power of belief can hold sway (99).

This sort of thing is fine as first-draft jottings, but frustrating after several pages of evocative observations about narrative details and shot compositions that fail to add up to anything more substantive. Rowell’s reliance on humorous subheadings begins to look like a diversion from the lack of logical transitions between fairly random observations. It’s telling that instead of a “Conclusion” to each chapter, Rowell gives us a slangy, production-savvy “Wrap.”

The collected films of the Coen brothers seem to daunt the critics and scholars taking them on in book form. The results tend to be a strange prose blend of plodding thoroughness and desperate riffing: painstakingly detailed plot summaries, bibliographies, and filmographies bump up against jokey asides, amusing fonts and photos, glossaries of slang terms used by Coen characters, and comical investigations of literary and cinematic allusions in the films. Writing essays on individual Coen films seems to ease the strain on authors; at least they don’t try to compete with the Coens in witty wordplay, a hopeless endeavor. While there are innumerable worthy critical and scholarly articles on their individual films, and even a few volumes of collected essays such as The Coen Brothers’ Fargo, edited by William G. Luhr (2004), there is as yet only one book-length analysis of any note by a film scholar: R. Barton Palmer’s Joel and Ethan Coen (2004). Palmer’s book earns this dubious honor by having a coherent argument to make about what’s going on in the Coens’ films, and making it.

Palmer argues that the Coens are postmodern filmmakers whose work, belying the famous condemnation by Fredric Jameson, “engages in a dialogue with genre and with classic studio films that does not slight the political and the cultural” (60). In Palmer’s view, the Coens continue a filmic tradition of political and cultural criticism within genre and studio-constrained filmmaking that dates back to the stylistically and thematically daring film noir of the 1940s and 1950s, and continues through the Hollywood Renaissance films of the 1960s and 1970s. As Renaissance practices flamed out in the resurgent corporate commercialism and conservatism of 1980s Hollywood, according to Palmer, the Coens seized their advantage with the rise of the “commercial/independent” film in the 1980s. This new form allowed for the Coens’ continuation of the Hollywood Renaissance “critique of American society and its national cinema” (44) via their sophisticated deployment of postmodern techniques of reflexivity, hybridization and dissonant intertextuality.

One may certainly disagree with Palmer’s argument regarding the Coens’ films and their place in our history and culture. Indeed, Palmer generously provides the counterarguments of such critics as Pauline Kael and J. Hoberman, who are no fans of the Coen brothers (44-5). However, one cannot deny that Palmer makes a real argument. He states a thesis, puts forth claims, provides reasons and evidence, addresses potential objections, and draws conclusions. He cites existing scholarship usefully, that is, in such a way as to inform without impeding the flow of a graceful prose style. He discusses in depth those films important to his argument, in the order that the argument necessitates, and then only those aspects at issue. No chronological plod here through every film, every plot, every character, every box office take. This is a book for those who have already made the acquaintance of the Coens through their films and are now ready to think about their work seriously.

Which brings us to the puzzling case of The Coen Brothers Interviews, edited by William Rodney Allen. Who is this book for? It is a given that those people who are sufficiently interested in reading everything the Coen brothers have to say about their films and filmmaking process will likely want to read The Coen Brothers Interviews. However, for that rabid group of readers (which includes this reviewer), the Coens need no introduction. And if we get an “Introduction” we want something beyond the merest ABCs of Coenology. Allen’s intro seems pitched to people who saw Fargo once and liked it, but thought it was pretty weird, and then perhaps took a chance on O Brother Where Art Thou?

Admittedly, one feels a certain envy for William Rodney Allen. Having landed the plum assignment of editing the collected interviews with the brothers for the University of Mississippi Press, he presumably received payment for putting together this sampler of “all the major interviews” (xi). Conveniently for Allen, it seems the series editor has made it a policy that these books of interviews with prominent filmmakers such as Clint Eastwood and Ridley Scott be printed in their entirety, without elision or comment. As Allen warns us, “Consequently the reader will at times encounter repetitions of both questions and answers…” (xxii).

He’s not kidding. Take, for example, the two-decade’s-worth of dutiful reporting on the collaborative methods of the writing-directing-producing Coen team. We get similar accounts of their equitable labor-sharing on pages 12, 50, 56-7, 60, 85, 150-151, 166-167, and 185. Questions and answers about whether or not they ever fight (the answer is “No”) appear on pages 41, 65-6, 85, 87, and 185. By page 191, Joel Coen finally expresses his weariness of these exchanges: “’Well, I’d be perfectly happy never to have to answer anything again about how I work with Ethan. Or whether we have arguments, or….You know what I mean?’”

We know what he means.

To give Allen his due, he acknowledges, repeatedly, this problem inherent in collected interviews. But, he assures us, “…the significance of the same questions being asked and the consistency (or inconsistency) of responses will prove of value to readers in their unexpurgated form” (xxii).

What value, you might ask? That’s what introductions are for, after all, to help us recognize the specific value of the volume in our hands, at least beyond what we can already tell by the title. But Allen’s sixteen-page essay, written in a breezy style suggesting he devoted an entire lunch hour to its composition, seems to have no purpose beyond a kind of Coens-for-beginners survey of their films’ plots, high points, and overall tone. In trying to convey some impression of “that Coen brothers feeling,” Allen mentions images from Coen films which will be familiar to even the most casual contemporary film fan: “…[A] baby strapped in a car seat sits contentedly in the middle of a desert road…a pregnant midwestern policewoman, her gun drawn, follows the sound of the an engine through the snow-filled woods…a fat man wearing a toupee…” (ix). He hazards that for all the “tomfoolery” of their movies, “there’s usually something intellectually serious going on” in their filmmaking (x). But what that something might be beyond “good old-fashioned existentialism” (xi) he leaves to the eggheads. He flatters the Coens through imitation of their vivid dialogue in his own prose style, contributing phrases he’s proud to claim as his own, such as “yokel color” (xiii).

All of this doesn’t do much to illuminate what’s interesting about these interviews, a sadly missed opportunity. The Coens are well known as problematic interviewees. As Allen points out, “Some of their interrogators have described them as bored, mildly annoyed, elliptical, or flippant” (xi). If not quite in the same league as Andy Warhol as interview deconstructionists, the Coens nevertheless submit to the interview process in such a way as to make one question the very nature and purpose of the interview process. What is it, exactly, that readers or watchers of interviews want from these exchanges? Here, for example, is Vogue representative Tad Friend struggling to interview the Coens in 1994:

I start to ask whether there wouldn’t be some value in a clear explanation of their tenets, and then catch myself. Stupid question. ‘If Preston Sturges could somehow be reanimated to write a clear explanation of his working principles, his trade secrets, wouldn’t you want to read that?’

Joel looks uncomfortable. ‘It’s interesting to know that Preston Sturges had a big dog on the set that frequently barked and ruined takes. That’s more interesting to me than anything Sturges could tell me about his working methods.’ He’s aware that he sounds willfully perverse (70).

It seems noteworthy that at this juncture Friend might have generated a revealing answer simply by risking looking obtuse and asking the obvious: “Why? What about the barking dog interests you more than anything Sturges could say?” Instead, Friend gets irritated and asks, “’What if you won an Oscar and had to make an acceptance speech? Would you riff through that emotional moment too?’”(71).

Repeatedly the interviews reveal a nervously defensive and/or belligerent posture on the part of the interviewer, presumably after s/he couldn’t get the expected answers to the often rote questions. The level of interviewer paranoia and hostility seems to rise over the years, indicating the Coens’ reputation is preceding them. Gary Susman of the Boston Phoenix begins his 1998 interview/article with this dismissal: “Don’t expect to find deep meaning in the utterances of the Coens, any more than you would expect to find it in their films” (84). The subject under discussion in the interviews becomes, more and more, the Coens’ presumed attitude toward interviews, as reflected in such interview/article headlines as “The Coens Speak (Reluctantly)” and “Coen Job.” This seems like a conversation the Coens are willing to have, admitting to interviewer Andy Lowe of Total Film that they find it easier being interviewed by “anal, film-geek types” and Europeans, because American interviewers “tend to poke around for” personal revelations (93).

In other words, what we have here is the material for an interesting examination of the rhetoric of the film industry interview: who is the audience, who is the author, what is the attempt at persuasion, what is the intended effect? And what is the specific impact of the Coens’ interaction, or lack of same, upon the established discourse?

Instead, we’re introduced to the Coen brothers yet again, after all these years, as if they were total strangers.

Eileen Jones is Assistant Professor and Program Chair of Film Studies at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film & Media Arts. She earned her BA in English at SUNY Buffalo, her MA and PhD at UC Berkeley in the Department of Rhetoric & Film, and has a background in independent filmmaking, including producing credits on Suture (1993) and The Deep End (2001). She is currently writing a book entitled American Dreamers: Visions of Modern America in the Films of Joel & Ethan Coen.