Joel Coen on movies vs TV

In my 2022 movie year-in-review I mentioned my exhaustion with TV and my preference for movies. Joel Coen, from a 2020 podcast with longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins on why he and brother Ethan have stuck to movies and not ventured into TV, explains a little of what goes into my preference:

[L]ong-form was never something we could get our heads around. It’s a different paradigm. Not to be shitty about it, but you can look at stories that they have a beginning, middle, and end. But so much of television has a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a middle, until the whole thing dies of exhaustion. It’s beaten to death and then you find a way of ending it.

We’ve all watched TV shows like this. Even some of our favorites fit the arc Coen describes here.

One of the reasons I hope movies and movie theatres survive is that the discipline of the form makes moviegoing better than binge-watching even a good TV show. The discipline of the filmmakers to turn out a compact, well-crafted, self-contained jewel—rather than giving themselves permission, as so many TV showrunners do, to sprawl all over the place—and the discipline of the audience starting a story and not being able to stop it, having to receive it continuously in the form intended by the filmmakers; these are virtues that dissipate in the size and potential aimlessness of a TV series.

There are exceptions, of course, but who has time to find them? And I’ll carve out space for mini-series, which demand some of the same beginning-middle-end discipline as a two-hour drama. Not for nothing is the five-episode Chernobyl and the six-episode The Night Manager the best TV I’ve seen in the last few years.

I’m currently listening to the full Deakins-Coen interview on my commute between campuses. I discovered it and the passage above thanks to this short post from World of Reel.

Entertaining hypotheticals

Dakin Matthews as Colonel Stonehill in True Grit

The Coen brothers’ adaptation of Charles Portis’s novel True Grit hews very closely to the source material, with the dialogue often coming from the novel verbatim. But one of my favorite lines is a Coen creation, inserted seamlessly into Mattie Ross’s haggling with Colonel Stonehill, licensed auctioneer, cotton factor.

When Stonehill insists that he is not liable to Mattie’s family for a horse stolen from his stables, Mattie argues, “You were the custodian. If you were a bank and were robbed you could not simply tell the depositors to go hang.”

Stonehill replies with this immortal line:

“I do not entertain hypotheticals, the world as it is is vexing enough.”

I have used this line many, many times in the classroom. I commend it to other history teachers.

Entertaining hypotheticals, musing over What ifs, is the great trap of historical study. Leaving behind the already “vexing” question of what actually happened to pursue imaginary alternate histories based on decisions never made, accidents that never happened, or outcomes that one would simply prefer—this is almost always a waste of time. Such histories are fundamentally unknowable precisely because they never happened. Per the late Kenneth Minogue:

“The future is largely inscrutable; indeed we may count ourselves exceptionally fortunate if we acquire much of an understanding of the past.”

Stick just with what happened and you’ll be busy the rest of your life.

Alternate history can, however, be fun. During a sick day this week I started Robert Harris’s novel Fatherland, which takes place in Berlin in 1964, but a 1964 in which Nazi Germany won World War II and the city is preparing to celebrate Hitler’s 75th birthday. And it’s a great novel—an engaging, well-paced, suspenseful, carefully imagined mystery thriller. Harris has done his research and made this setting as plausible and as deeply rooted in reality as it can possibly be.

But there are the nagging details—foremost among them, how likely is it that Hitler, whose health was disintegrating by 1944, could have lived to the age of 75? (Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle does this slightly better, since Hitler is dead and Martin Bormann is the Führer by the time that one begins.)

This is less of a problem for a mystery thriller, of course. But then some people play the hypothetical game in deadly earnest. Yesterday, yet another Instagram story from a hugely popular law, government, and history “explainer” who bills herself as “American’s Government Teacher” came my way. Writing to celebrate a flute solo at the Library of Congress as a significant moment in American racial politics, the author attacks James Madison thus:

He was one of the reasons we have something called the 3/5 compromise, which permitted people who owned other humans to count them as 3/5 of a person in an effort to increase their political power.

Without the 3/5 compromise, slavery would have ended at least 60 years before it did.

Ignore the fact that the Three-Fifths Compromise was effectively stricken from the Constitution by the 13th and 14th Amendments, so that this should read “we had something called the 3/5 compromise;” that who exactly benefited from the compromise was hotly debated then and is, among honest historians, hotly debated now; and that the compromise did not assert that certain unspecified people were only “3/5 of a person” but stipulated that only three-fifths of their total population would count toward apportioning congressmen. This last is a self-congratulatory, politically useful, and therefore ineradicable myth, but a myth nonetheless.

No, ignore all that. Look at the “would have” in the second part. Whether slavery would have ended in 1805 as opposed to 1865 is unknowable. There is no way of knowing whether this is true, because it did not happen. This is pure speculation—an uninformed, irresponsible hypothetical. And the true story, God knows, is vexing enough.

So much for being an “explainer,” but keep celebrating that flute.

If you must entertain hypotheticals, think of it as a parlor game, or a delicate fictional trick that should only be attempted by a master craftsman. Otherwise, Col Stonehill’s advice should serve us all well.

A Coen brothers miscellany

Buster rides into town

The trailer for latest Coen brothers movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, dropped last night. While it had been announced as a miniseries to premier on Netflix (that’s our second Netflix-distributed film this week, incidentally), it’s apparently been retooled as a single film, an anthology telling six separate but apparently interrelated western stories.

The Coens have had an clear affinity for the West and westerns since the beginning of their careers. True Grit and No Country for Old Men are the obvious examples, but Blood Simple, despite its modern setting, spends a lot of its runtime on lonely Texas roads and in a saloon; Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski have plenty of cowboy elements, including a bank robbery by bandits in dusters and the great Sam Elliott himself as the semi-divine Stranger; and, not accidentally, the ultimate hero of Hail, Caesar!—the man most aligned with his telos, the man least comfortable in the corrupt world of Hollywood, and the man who helps Eddie Mannix recover his own teleological role in the world—is a singing cowboy. Whenever a man in a cowboy hat appears in a Coen brothers movie, you can bet something big is about to happen.

The film has a stellar cast. Liam Neeson and Brendan Gleeson, two of my favorite actors, pop up in the trailer, along with Coen veterans Stephen Root and Tim Blake Nelson, who so wonderfully played Delmar in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Also interested to see Ralph Ineson, the weak but determined father in The Witch. I could do without James Franco, but I trust the Coens to do something good with him.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs looks appropriately weird for the Coens: a combination of humor, violence, surrealism, and glimpses of beauty that no one else can blend.

Throughlines

Here’s an interesting video essay on the Coens I watched recently. To cut through the clickbaity titles, “The Theme of Every Coens Movie” or “How Every Coen Brothers Movie is Connected” is money. Or, to be more precise, greed.

I’m sure I’m not the only person to notice an identical black briefcase full of money as a plot element of both Fargo and No Country for Old Men, or a similar briefcase (and one ringer) in The Big Lebowski, or Linda’s this-wordly striving for cash for elective cosmetic surgeries as the driving force behind Burn After Reading, or the obvious greed of Paul Newman and M. Emmett Walsh in The Hudsucker Proxy and Blood Simple. You can grab examples from every Coen brothers film, which this video essay does. It’s thorough and very well done.

My one quibble is that with the essay’s language about the Coens critiquing “capitalism.” That’s just too ideological for the Coens. It’s the kind of language the Commies use in Hail, Caesar!, a bunch of Marxist neckbeards who ignore the one working class person they encounter, their cleaning lady (remind you of anyone else?). They’re the targets of none-too-subtle ridicule, something I think the essayist should have taken into consideration. While the Coens show a deep concern with greed, I don’t think their problem is with money generally or capitalism specifically.

You might be in a Coen brothers movie if…

One more video tidbit, a YouTube listicle about some of the recurring tropes, plot elements, and themes running through the Coens’ films. This touches on a few of the other things I’ve mentioned above—especially the corruption wrought by the love of money, which is the root of all kinds of evil—and also examines the morality of the Coens’ stories. It’s a fun watch, and worth the fifteen minutes.

The Coens and personality

I have a theory that, with now eighteen films under the Coens’ belts, you could create a pretty comprehensive personality test just by having a person pick their favorite—or two of three favorites—from the Coens’ filmography.

My own favorite is Barton Fink, while my wife’s is Raising Arizona, my brother’s is Burn After Reading, and I have friends who swear by Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and others. Their films are so varied in subject matter and tone that there’s something in there for everyone, and with a proper method of analysis you could use a list of favorites to learn a lot about a person.

Somebody jump on that.