So far with the Film Club we’ve managed to work our way through quite a lot of the big name famous directors: Spielberg, Kubrick, Scorsese, Hitchcock, Welles, Tarantino, Cuarón, Scott, Allen, Fincher, Lee, Nolan, Miyazaki and Verhoeven to name just a few… (yeah yeah – I know: but please don’t blame me for the patriarchy). But I’ve always kinda shied away from us getting into the Coen Brothers.

This isn’t because I’m not a fan of theirs. I mean in terms of hit rate they’re probably one of the best values for money out there: Raising Arizona; Miller’s Crossing; Barton Fink; The Hudsucker Proxy; Fargo; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; The Man Who Wasn’t There; No Country for Old Men; Burn After Reading; A Serious Man; Inside Llewyn Davis. I mean all of these films are stone cold classics – the kind of thing that leaves your brain fired and your head spinning. The tricky thing is tho is that a big part of what makes their films so beguiling is that they’re really good at being resistant at attempts to decode and unpack them.

As we saw with the last discussion for all it’s faults Pan’s Labyrinth is pretty good at meaning things. It kinda falls over itself with its symbolism and metaphors and all the rest: and you can follow the breadcrumbs and get deep into a discussion about anti-authoritarianism and religion and imagination and all that stuff (if you want) but well yeah… a Coen Brothers joint tends to have John Goodman holding a shotgun running down a corridor on fire yelling out “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” which is all sorts of fun cool and certainly feels like it means something but it’s not really the sort of thing I think I can put into words. Which means that actually trying to write about it feel a little… daunting you know?

Take The Big Lebowski for example.

First time I watched it I remember sitting there with a look on my face that was halfway between stony and confused. I’d heard that it was supposed to be a comedy but none of it really seemed to be that funny. There was a detective story which seemed like it was about trying to find out who kidnapped Bunny but then it turned out that she wasn’t really kidnapped at all (??) and everything just kinda gets more complicated and sprawling as it goes along until finally… they decide to just go bowling. What the hell man?

I’m not exactly sure what made me decide to rewatch it the first time. Maybe it was the feeling that I was missing something? Or maybe I just wanted to try to untangle the hopelessly tangled plot? I don’t know. But I do remember that the second round was much funnier. Maybe it was just the thing of knowing that none of the plot really mattered and everything was all going to collapse in a big shapeless heap at the end anyway meant that you could just kinda sit and enjoy the ride you know? Ha. It turns out that if you want to watch The Big Lebowski in the right way then you need to watch it like The Dude. Which is kinda cute if nothing else.

(Feels like maybe The Big Lebowski belongs in that micro-genre of films that somehow magically manages to get funnier each time you watch them along with Withnail and I and… well yeah that’s it actually I think?)

I do remember reading a thing once that talked about how the whole thing is about different types of religions – The Dude is Buddha. Walter is Polish Catholic / Jewish (“So what are you saying? When you get divorced you turn in your library card?”) and The Jesus is… well – he’s The Jesus. But I don’t know if there’s any real deeper meaning there – it’s feels more like a fun hook to hang stuff on. In fact that brings me to my favourite quote from The Coen Brothers which they gave way back when they made Raising Amazon (probably one of my favourites) and one of the interviewers pressed them on the reasons why they decided to go with babies as one of the motifs of the film. Was it something to do with innocence? Or about fear of the future? Or maybe something about reproductive? Obviously expecting somekind of deep and serious and insightful answer from these crazy filmmakers who always seemed to be making some kind of point even if you can’t work out what exactly the point is supposed to be – but instead they got this kinda blank look and then the deadpan answer from one of them which went like this: “A baby’s face is good movie fodder. You just wanna take elements that are good fodder and do something different with them.”

I kinda feel like that’s the secret key for understanding them and their movies: and actually maybe other stuff out there too. Maybe it’s not about trying to construct a story that works as a treatise for the mistakes of human intellectual or how the world should be – maybe it’s just about taking some good fodder and trying to do something different with them?

Or to put it in pictures – if you want to try and decode it all and try to understand what it all means you’re probably just going to end up with something like this:

FRED
Barbican Comic Forum