Frances McDormand in Fargo
Ben van Welzen parses how the Coen Brothers reimagined such genres as the Western and film noir to create their own unique cinematic touchstones.
A snowy Midwestern crime thriller, a comedic bowling neo-noir, a bluegrass musical Odyssey, a greyish New York character piece, an Old Hollywood caper — these are all settings, genres, and cultural touchpoints that filmmaking brothers Ethan and Joel Coen traverse across their catalogue, among many more. Since their breakout neo-noir Blood Simple in 1984, the Coen Brothers have written and directed over a dozen films that navigate the Western canon, constantly drawing from and building upon stories and themes that have shaped our collective attitudes. From Shakespeare and Homer to Bob Dylan and Cormac McCarthy, the Coens condense centuries of thought into a filmography that forces these seemingly disparate figures and their artistic sensibilities to collide, intertwine, and assemble into a body of work that both celebrates the past and challenges audiences to reconcile this past with the modern media landscape.
Among the genres that have dominated American narratives, few have had a marked rise and fall like the Western and the noir. In the first half of the 21st century, cowboys and private detectives seemed to pervade every story on the page and on the screen, but now they’re relegated to tiny shelves in bookstores and the uncharted depths of streaming service catalogues. Of course, these genres haven’t completely escaped the public consciousness, but rarely do we treat mainstream Western or noir films purely as their genre. Instead, every new Western is either a remake or a reexamination of the genre’s glory days (see the anti-Westerns like Unforgiven) and nobody will take you seriously if you call a newer movie a “noir” instead of a “neo-noir” (see my careful wording in the first paragraph). Nevertheless, these modern entries often fail to further advance the genre, and instead get caught in the firmly understood and comfortable trappings; by design, an anti-Western must keep the past in its sights at all times to properly deconstruct the genre, and audiences use “neo-noir” to simply signpost a morally ambiguous crime thriller without any regard for the noir aesthetic. In an attempt to operate within a generic framework, these films fall into a trap of doubling back on themselves or running away from the genre all together.
That is, until the Coen Brothers came along. Bursting onto the scene with Blood Simple, Ethan and Joel Coen immediately demonstrated both a respectful understanding of the (neo-)noir genre and a playful philosophy of inverting and updating the style for the end of the century. Striking shots of bright light shining through bullet-torn walls recall the dynamic lighting and shadow-play of classic noir, but the frenetic camerawork and overall goofy energy reveal its true low-budget independent nature, like the sea of B-movies that rose in that decade. Despite the usual steady, smooth, and icy camera movements that make up most of the film, several action scenes opt for a jittery, messy, and awkward handheld camera that recalls the work of Sam Raimi more than it does Howard Hawks. This formal wackiness that punctuates the film embodies a fundamental attitude of the Coen Brothers: contradiction.
Noir aesthetics in Blood Simple
Feeding off of well-understood genre tropes, the Coen Brothers build all of their films around some kind of narrative or aesthetic misalignment. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is yet another modern retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, but the Coens morph it into a bluegrass musical; The Big Lebowski is another slacker comedy, but beneath the sleazy exterior lies a classic framed-man noir story; Fargo is another seedy ’90s crime thriller, but the script smooths it over with the cozy sheen of Midwestern politeness. Unorthodox premises like this too easily fall into the realm of being needlessly idiosyncratic and quirky, but in the case of the Coen Brothers, none of the clashing combinations are without distinct purpose. For instance, the bluegrass music of O Brother, Where Art Thou? inserts the dynamic, mythic American folk tradition to properly replicate and celebrate the ephemeral oral tradition that birthed and maintained The Odyssey. The Coens recognize the poetic reverberations of Homer’s work and style, both keeping the audience’s awareness firmly grounded in the beginning of the Western canon and interrogating the capacity of modern storytelling structures to maintain, update, or completely change these aesthetic roots.
As the 2000s progressed, the Coen Brothers doubled down on these distinctly American sensibilities, turning their eye away from crime/noir and towards the modern Western. Skipping forward 29 centuries from The Odyssey, the two filmmakers looked to another writer who had already developed his own distinguished oeuvre: Cormac McCarthy. McCarthy’s novels like Blood Meridian, Suttree, and No Country for Old Men took direct aim at the myth of the literary Western, stripping away all of the glory and honor to leave a bleak shell of violence, cruelty, and apathy. His stories are grueling yet beautiful, terse yet complex; like the Coen Brothers, he relies on an uneasy balance of contradictions to lay bare the genre’s true nature.
In a surprising turn, the Coens adapted McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men in 2007, abandoning all of their playful sensibilities to faithfully bring McCarthy’s nihilism to the screen. At first, No Country plays like a standard Coen Brothers generic reimagining as they update the classic dichotomy of well-meaning loner cowboy and invading predatorial hunter to the plains of modern Texas. But the film is relentless. What begins as an exciting cat-and-mouse ends in a haunting study of the purely evil Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) as he rampages across the decrepit Texan desert. Unlike other anti-Westerns, though, No Country never cedes an ounce of comfort or familiarity; the Coen Brothers never linger on the stunning landscapes of films like Unforgiven and they never set up explosive action set pieces like Django Unchained. The film doesn’t simply critique the moral framework of old Westerns, it abandons the framework entirely by replacing the righteous heroes and wicked villains with a postmodern inability to believe anything. Apathy and nihilism reign supreme as the film’s senseless violence kills off anyone regardless of their moral stance. Good guys don’t die and bad guys don’t die; everybody dies.
Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men
In a way, the Coen Brothers’ entire career built towards No Country for Old Men. Although it certainly primarily operates within the Western tradition, the unbalanced moral values and stark visual compositions still borrow from and update the noir framework. In fact, the inexplicably invincible and unrelenting villain draws upon the Western and Southern gothic, both of which immensely influenced McCarthy’s novels. The film sees the Coens at the height of their power, cashing in on all of their cultural understanding to add a towering pillar to the Western canon. Nevertheless, even after it also won them Best Picture at the Oscars, No Country remains an oddity in their catalogue. Outside of that singular world of plain brutality, their films maintain a touch of lightness, fun, and humor to play against the violence. So, though their career may have climaxed with No Country, an earlier film must embody their consistent style more cohesively, and among all of their works, nothing sums up their career quite like Fargo.
Fargo is an American myth for a new age. After a title card that lies about the film being a true story, it opens with a grand string arrangement as headlights emerge from a road entrenched in snow like a cowboy appearing in the Western frontier. As the vehicle gets closer, we see it’s just a well-used tow truck dragging another car across Minnesota. Immediately, Fargo casts grandiosity onto the quaint world of the lower-middle class Midwest, elevating an otherwise simple crime thriller to a tale of wide implication. Nothing in Fargo is traditionally glorious; the characters have thick regional accents, the violence is grisly, and everyone is simply exhausted from the corporate rat race. Regardless, the Coens find majesty in these simple lives, letting the neighborly chit chat and cozy politeness welcome the viewer into a warmth unfamiliar to most audiences. Used car lots and local dive bars are the new grand backdrop for the world, and pregnant cops and loving husbands are its heroes.
Fargo opens with a mythological attitude
As Ethan and Joel Coen have slowed their output and focused more on solo careers, Fargo has endured and grown in relevance. In an age of recessions and extreme wealth disparity, the quotidian woes of the Minnesotans ring true, and the film translates these seemingly mundane troubles into folk and legend. In fact, the world the Coens created has proved so potent that FX has built an acclaimed anthology series around the film, each season placing a new crime and new cast of characters in the small town. Fargo is more than a crime thriller, it’s more than a town, and it’s more than a TV show. Fargo is the American; it’s a universe, a canon, a mythos that celebrates the least of us, exposes the best of us, and dignifies all of us.
Fargo will be screened at IU Cinema on June 14 in a new 4K restoration as part of the series Critics’ Pics: Selections from AFI and Sight & Sound.