In 2008 No Country for Old Men won the Academy Award for Best Picture, adding to the reputation of filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, who were already known for pushing the boundaries of genre. They had already made films that redefined the gangster movie, the screwball comedy, the fable, and the film noir, among others. No Country is just one of many Coen brothers films to center on the struggles of complex characters to understand themselves and their places in the strange worlds they inhabit. To borrow a phrase from Barton Fink, all Coen films explore "the life of the mind" and show that the human condition can often be simultaneously comic and tragic, profound and absurd. In The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, editor Mark T. Conard and other noted scholars explore the challenging moral and philosophical terrain of the Coen repertoire. Several authors connect the Coens' most widely known plots and characters to the shadowy, violent, and morally ambiguous world of classic film noir and its modern counterpart, neo-noir. As these essays reveal, Coen films often share noir's essential philosophical assumptions: power corrupts, evil is real, and human control of fate is an illusion. In Fargo, not even Minnesota's blankets of snow can hide Jerry Lundegaard's crimes or brighten his long, dark night of the soul. Coen films that stylistically depart from film noir still bear the influence of the genre's prevailing philosophical systems. The tale of love, marriage, betrayal, and divorce in Intolerable Cruelty transcends the plight of the characters to illuminate competing theories of justice. Even in lighter fare, such as Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, the comedy emerges from characters' journeys to the brink of an amoral abyss. However, the Coens often knowingly and gleefully subvert conventions and occasionally offer symbolic rebirths and other hopeful outcomes. At the end of The Big Lebowski, the Dude abides, his laziness has become a virtue, and the human comedy is perpetuating itself with the promised arrival of a newborn Lebowski. The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers sheds new light on these cinematic visionaries and their films' stirring philosophical insights. From Blood Simple to No Country for Old Men, the Coens' films feature characters who hunger for meaning in shared human experience -- they are looking for answers. A select few of their protagonists find affirmation and redemption, but for many others, the quest for answers leads, at best, only to more questions.
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""The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers offers a very smart, provocative, and stylishly written set of essays on the films of the Coen brothers. The volume makes a convincing case for reading their films within a wide array of philosophic contexts and persuasively demonstrates that the films of the Coen brothers often implicitly and sometimes explicitly engage with central issues in the history of western philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Baudrillard, and MacIntyre." Michael Valdez Moses, author of The Novel and the Globalization of Culture" --
""This volume is written for both fans of the Coen brothers and the philosophically curious, without the technical language. Both educational and entertaining, this philosophical compilation is recommended for public and academic libraries, particularly those with degree programs in philosophy and film."--Joshua Finnell, Library Journal" --
About the Author
Mark T. Conard is assistant professor of philosophy at Marymount College. He is the series editor of The Philosophy of Popular Culture series and the editor of numerous books, including The Philosophy of Film Noir, The Philosophy of Neo-Noir, and The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rebirth of Tragedy,
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This review is from: The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers (The Philosophy of Popular Culture) (Hardcover)
Friedrich Nietzsche believed for a time that the composer Richard Wagner would be able to unite all the noble impulses of art into an opera capable of sublimating European culture, just as classical tragedy ennobled the Athenians. Wagner failed, even in Nietzsche's judgement, but I am reminded of him every time I see a Coen Brothers film. Like Wagner, they have created a stage upon which the plastic/Apollonian (cinematography, lighting, set and costume) engages the musical/Dionysian (script, drama, soundtrack). But where Wagner failed, the Coens have succeeded. Their films together constitute the rebirth of tragedy here in modern America - a multimedia art of moral choice, with a philosophical vocabulary and contemporary significance. There's nothing deeper or more relevant on the American scene.
And I guess that accounts for just why this book so utterly blows the doors off any other "Philosophy of" book I've encountered. Like Woody Allen or Stanley Kubrick, the Coens produce film that is not merely philosophical, but is philosophy itself - the kind of art that drives fans to study philosophy in the first place. But, in approaching the Coens, you do need some guidance. These are two guys who know the canon, cold, from Homer (O Brother Where Art Though) to Kant (See Walter in the Big Lebowski) to Heidegger (Barton Fink). At least part of the opacity of their films stems from the audiences unfamiliarity with these themes. And this is where this book comes in handy. This is a collection of truly thoughtful, high caliber works of scholarly criticism. It is so much better than similar titles like "The Simpsons and Philosophy" that I kinda wish it had a different title. Oh well, bottom line: if you like either philosophy or the Coen Brothers, you'll LOVE this book. Expect to gain new insights on Barton Fink's wallpaper, the Dude's relationship with the old cowboy, and the nature of Anton Chigurgh. The authors are all philosophers, but they clearly love and understand film, and come at some of these problems from a film-studies perspective. I can only hope the same people involved in this will follow up with a "Philosophy of David Lynch."
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Breakdown and analysis,
This review is from: The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers (The Philosophy of Popular Culture) (Hardcover)
If you value and appreciate great film making and script writing this book breaks down the fundamentals of philosophy by the Coens through short essays.
6 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Coen Brothers' Movies plus America equals mirror . . .,
This review is from: The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers (The Philosophy of Popular Culture) (Hardcover)
This book provides a fantastic and long overdue intertextual analysis of what the Coen Brothers have aimed to capture on screen and harness from the soul . . . what emerges most strongly is a sense of how terribly important NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN has been in terms of narrative evolution and an exchange of meta-cinema for a kind of pure storytelling - similar in structure and effect to the brutally succinct writings of William S. Burroughs. I recommend this book highly, because this is the time for more of us to look extra hard at the work of the Coen Brothers . . . their filmic America stands now as a very reliable and unrusted mirror of where we all are today . . . and may NOT be tomorrow.
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