The Batman

My spring break has started with a bang. Having avoided reading much about The Batman but having been impressed with the trailers, I caught a late-night showing on a whim opening day. I was enthralled. The Batman is intricately plotted and well-written, atmospheric, refreshingly low-stakes, and—what is more—despite beginning a new film series for my favorite superhero, it’s not an origin story.

Happy Halloween

The Batman begins on Halloween night in Gotham, two years into Bruce Wayne’s career as Batman and about a week before the city’s mayoral election. While Batman fights a gang of muggers across the city, a figure in glasses and a spookily crude mask stalks the incumbent mayor, watching as the mayor’s wife and son leave to trick-or-treat. With the mayor alone, the stalker breaks into the house through a skylight, knocks the mayor unconscious with a strange hammer-like tool, and, having calmed himself from that initial excitement, begins to unspool a roll of duct tape.

Later, with dawn and the discovery of the crime, Gotham Police Lieutenant Gordon calls in the Batman, who is not exactly welcome at the scene of the murder. And it is murder—the mayor is dead, suffocated in duct tape, with one thumb severed and cryptic messages about Gotham’s lies scrawled in blood around the room. As Batman and Gordon continue the investigation semi-officially they discover something even more unsettling—a card inscribed with a children’s riddle and addressed To the Batman.

The sleuthing goes on, as do the murders. Before long the killer has a name, The Riddler, and the cat and mouse game he plays with Batman and the police grows more elaborate and his promised revelations of corruption more wide-ranging and damning. To track him down, Batman follows the Riddler’s hints into the world of organized crime, particularly the Carmine Falcone mob and its leadership’s primary hangout, The Iceberg Lounge. This is a nightclub run by the Penguin, Falcone’s chief lieutenant, and while looking into the Penguin’s ties to powerful Gotham City officials Batman meets Selina Kyle, a club waitress with her own side hustle in burgling and revenge.

Proper procedure

I don’t want to say much more about the plot, as one of the distinct pleasures of The Batman is the detective work. This Batman is very much a detective, working logically and methodically, gathering and examining evidence, chasing leads and occasionally red herrings. His teamwork—both on the side of law and order in the form of Lt Gordon or outside the law with Selina Kyle—is crucial to his work and another of this film’s pleasures. Batman and Gordon have real chemistry and respect for one another despite the fact that, as Gordon notes, “I don’t even know who you are, man.” The Batman is not a superhero movie of the bloated Avengers variety, as fun as those are, but a procedural, set in a dense and richly tactile world but limited in scope to the crimes being committed by one man and investigated by a handful of others. It’s great.

The acting is also superb. The standout is Robert Pattinson as Batman, who gives a wonderfully subtle performance despite the mask and gear. Pattinson is especially good at using silence, which the script wisely gives the character a lot of, as in the scene in which Batman finally gets to interrogate the Riddler. Paul Dano does more with the Riddler than I thought possible, posing a genuinely creepy threat in the first two acts of the film before, upon his arrest, appearing both pathetic and deeply, alarmingly disturbed. Again, watch that interrogation scene. Zoë Kravitz’s Selina Kyle (she’s never called Catwoman at any point in the film) is also a surprise, and her collaboration with Batman, in which she has her own agenda and is willing to dump Batman’s plans to pursue it, is excellently plotted and performed.

The performances in the smaller roles also stand out, especially Jeffrey Wright as Gordon, who is dogged and taciturn but a capable partner for Batman. Andy Serkis makes an interesting Alfred, bringing a lot of gravitas to an underwritten part, and Coen brothers stalwart John Turturro was good as Carmine Falcone—a soft-spoken, avuncular, disarming liar. But the scene-stealer par excellence is Colin Farrell as the Penguin. His exchanges with Batman include some of the wittiest dialogue in the movie and his role as both nightclub manager and mob enforcer make him an interestingly daunting target of Batman’s investigation.

But again, I don’t want to say much more about the plot.

While The Batman does have its share of exciting set pieces—like the car chase with the Penguin excerpted in all the trailers—its story is driven much more by Batman’s character (about which more below), the mechanics of investigation, and mood. This is one atmospheric movie. If Christopher Nolan took inspiration for The Dark Knight from Michael Mann’s crime thriller Heat, The Batman owes a lot to David Fincher’s two great serial killer films Seven and Zodiac, where chilly settings and an atmosphere of pervasive dread are half of what makes the film work. This film’s Gotham is old, ancient even, with brooding stone skyscrapers and gothic and neoclassical architecture rather than the concrete, glass, and brushed steel of Nolan’s films, and it is dark, overcast, and constantly rainy. This Gotham looks and feels like I have always imagined it would—old, East Coast, grand but decayed, and cold and wet, with layers and layers of city to descend into.

The Fincher feel extends to the cinematography by Greig Fraser, who also shot Dune. Fraser shot The Batman in rich, dark, shallow-focus compositions that are carefully composed and controlled. This, along with the set and costume design, give the film a grit and intensity unlike even The Dark Knight. They also make it one of the best-looking movies I’ve seen in years, and the atmosphere only enchances everything that happens onscreen. The shadows in this film really hide things.

Further, this film’s Riddler is not just a punster in a green suit, but a serial killer, and even dresses in a disturbing homemade costume complete with his own symbolic logo, not unlike the Zodiac killer at Lake Berryessa. He leaves ciphers and taunting riddles for the police to solve before he commits his next crime, lives in a creepy apartment filled with closely-written ledgers, and, like Seven’s fictional John Doe, he has a sweeping, apocalyptic mission.

The Batman comes of age

Once the full extent of that mission is revealed, The Batman enters its grand and operatic final act, where it dabbles in The Dark Knight Rises territory in terms of scope and theme. But as much as I love the Nolan movies, even that one, The Batman does what The Dark Knight Rises set out to do better, especially thematically. The Batman explores genuine corruption, societal rot, the morally tricky question of vigilantism, and the seething resentment of an underclass fed on lies—about both the best and the worst of their city’s history. It does all this quite well but always in a way arising organically from the story, never with clumsy speeches or sermonizing. In fact, the characters who explicitly bring up such themes only do so as an excuse for their own resentments. Selina Kyle actually uses the phrase “white privilege” in one scene, unaware that she’s talking to Bruce Wayne, illustrating without calling attention to it the emptiness of such slogans as a diagnosis of what ails a dying culture.

The Batman is not an origin story, but it is a coming-of-age story. Early in the film we see Bruce Wayne logging a night’s activities in a notebook labeled Gotham Project, Year Two. The word project is important, I think. There’s a lot he’s still perfecting, like his dramatic entrances. At the beginning of the film, Batman just walks into situations, using the thudding of his boots to intimidate bad guys. Tellingly, not all of them oblige, and he has to solve a lot of problems with brawn.

This Batman is capable but still unsure of himself—his goals, his methods, his purpose. In other words, he’s an adolescent. Pattinson’s performance conveys all of this brilliantly, giving his Batman both menace and uncertainty in key scenes. Again, the standout scene is his interrogation of the Riddler, where his controlled silence saves him from a potentially grave mistake, but this tension runs through the entire movie. Only at the end, when he’s mastered the art of appearing unexpectedly, found the moral line he shouldn’t cross, and first questioned and then returned to the sense of noblesse oblige with which his father imperfectly served his city—that is, when he’s proven himself—does he emerge purposeful and confident. And we know this when he rejects a final temptation and turns, purposefully, toward Gotham.

Conclusion

If I have any complaints about The Batman, they’re relatively minor. The social media angle of the Riddler’s killing spree feels slightly underdeveloped, as does Serkis’s Alfred. I hope we get more of him in the sequel. And while the film has excellent special effects and—again, refreshingly—doesn’t rely too much on CGI, there’s perhaps a tad too much in the climax. But at this point that’s nit-picking.

Otherwise, The Batman is a magnificent movie. It’s got an intricate plot and writing that doesn’t spoon-feed the audience the story; interesting characters excellently performed; brilliant visuals and atmosphere; and, to my shame, here’s my first and only mention of Michael Giacchino’s score. It’s some of his best work; listen to the entire soundtrack here. Further, in addition to being enjoyable on its own merits as a crime drama and superhero movie, The Batman engages with genuine seriousness with some deep themes, and does so in the form of the story itself. Like its hero, it uses silence and observation to great effect. It’s a rich, subtle character study wrapped in a compelling and enjoyable procedural thriller.

I could do with more movies like this.

Song that can't be bought or sold

Alan Jacobs has a lovely and deeply melancholy reflection on orally transmitted song and music, sparked by a recollection by the poet Edwin Muir, a native of the Orkneys. Here’s a particularly poignant reflection from Jacobs himself, one that chimes with memories of sitting with my grandparents on their front porch, eating popsicles and talking:

When my late father-in-law was a child in Columbiana, Alabama, his family was very poor, and could afford no musical instruments; so evening after evening, they just sat on the front porch and sang in four-part harmony. All of them experienced music in a way I never have and never will. Eventually they did a little better, financially, and Daddy C—as I would call him, decades later—got a cheap guitar from Sears as a Christmas present. But he had no one to teach him to play until a friend of his sister’s, a fellow his own age but from Montgomery, came by one day and taught him a few chords. That friend was named Hank Williams—and yep, it was that Hank Williams.

That’s a marvelous surprise ending, and the stuff family lore is made of, but Jacobs’s line about his father-in-law “experienc[ing] music in a way that I never have and never will” expresses what I was driving at in my memorial reflection on Jon Daker last week. That was a world in which a great store of music, stories, and culture was still traditional in the literal sense of being handed over or handed down, generation by generation. That world is disappearing, replaced, as I noted, with canned music by digitally tweaked and scrubbed professionals, with whom we compete at our peril.

There is great danger in this state of affairs. I feel this acutely in the case of my own children. Jacobs touches on this anxiety by quoting this passage from novelist and critic Marina Warner: “We are in danger of cultural illiteracy, of losing the past. If nestlings are deprived of their parents’ song during a certain ‘window’ at the beginning, they will not learn to sing. This sounds uncomfortably recognizable.”

And summing up, Jacobs writes:

Children will always play, when allowed to, and people will always sing. But will they play or sing anything that can’t be bought and sold? Will playing and singing, in the Western world anyway, ever again be anything other than a set of commercial transactions?

Read the whole post. It’s worth your while. And for a related point, listen to this piece by the late Roger Scruton, “The Tyranny of Pop Music.”

Jon Daker, RIP

I learned yesterday that a genuine internet legend died this week, aged 82. His name was Jon Daker.

Jon Daker was the accidental star of one of the first real viral videos, a two-minute public access TV segment in which he sang in a recital organized by an elderly piano teacher at his church. I discovered this video in college, in the days before YouTube, embedded with other segments from the same broadcast on an already ancient website that I believe is now defunct. There were probably about fifteen or twenty minutes total preserved from that recital, including some standup comedy, choral numbers, and other soloists, and while many of these were funny or awkward, Daker’s was far and away the funniest of them all—one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

It’s an accidental comedy masterpiece, growing continuously funnier from start to finish. Daker awkwardly introduces himself, he misses his first cue and rushes to catch up, he visibly forgets the lyrics to his second number, he tries to recover with a little gesture and movement at the mic only to end up humming his way to the final lines of the song, and all the while Mrs Unsicker, the piano teacher, sits playing away at her upright piano like a machine. Daker’s portion of the show is only a minute and a half long, but he wraps those ninety seconds up with an iron-jawed stoicism and an obvious sense of relief.

I’ve watched this clip every so often for close to twenty years, and it never, ever stops being funny.

But why? Part of it is the obvious—it’s awkward, it’s embarrassing, he forgets the words, he clearly doesn’t know what to do with his face. His utterly rigid body language screams his keen, moment by moment awareness of how badly it’s going, and that with the pianist pounding through his two songs like an automaton heedless of his calamity there is no stopping. Then there are subtler things—the perfect comedy timing of his name, misspelled, popping up onscreen after his introduction and in perfect time with Mrs Unsicker’s first chord; or the truly daft pairing of Charles Wesley with Dean Martin. The more you watch it the more you see.

But for me, the laughter—and I laugh till I cry—is also a laugh of recognition. It’s sympathetic, even affectionate. I see in Daker’s ninety seconds of gawping, humming, halting Sprechgesang my own worst case scenario for public performance. I flop sweat for him as he nears the end of his set. It’s the laughter you share with your buddy who completely blew his lines in the Christmas cantata, grateful it wasn’t you but glad you can laugh him through the embarrassment. Because in that situation Daker is me, right down to the eyebrows.

That is, he would be me—if I had the guts and humility to volunteer for a solo on television, accompanied by a lady from my church.

Which brings me to this piece by Jonathan Aigner, which I ran across—in keeping with the spirit of Jon Daker—completely by accident this morning, thus learning that Daker had died. Aigner’s tribute to Daker is a genuinely sweet and surprising piece, not least because of the details it offers about the real man behind the viral video. But this passage in particular struck me:

You see, in a world plagued by sin and evil, in which churches increasingly have no room for church musicians without commercial appeal, Jon Daker represents hope, joy, and faith. Here is a regular guy who has managed to lift the spirits of millions thanks to his love of singing and a willingness to crash and burn with dignity.

In my classes I have often lamented to my students that for all the pop music on the radio and store PA systems, we actually live in a less musical world than our ancestors, who had songs for everything and celebrated, mourned, worshiped, mocked, marched into battle, or simply began their daily chores by bursting into song. Think of the last time you heard someone singing in public for no apparent reason, I tell them, and consider how odd you almost certainly found it. That was the norm even within living memory. Now, unless one has the polish of a professional (and digitally assisted) singer, you’ll be hooted into silence.

But there’s a deeper point here, and an explicitly religious one. Aigner links to an earlier post of his in praise of church choirs, in which he invoked Daker with both obvious affection and in service of a great point:

There’s no way John would make it onto any praise team anywhere. He’s not cool enough, young enough, or stylish enough, and his tendency toward performance anxiety doesn’t help, either. But, you know what? John obviously loves to sing, and I’m guessing his service in the Chancel Choir at First United Methodist Church is diligent and earnest. We already know he can match pitch (and sing in diverse styles), and having sought out the services of Mrs. Reva Cooper Unsicker, he must be quite teachable. For those qualities, he would be more than welcome in most church choirs. He could sing in my choir any day, although I probably wouldn’t let him do “Amora” too, okay?

Seriously, there seems to be a trend in contemporary worship culture that says unless you look a certain way, dress a certain way, have the right personality, fit into the targeted age bracket, or meet some other predetermined “coolness” factor, you cannot lead in corporate worship. This is wrong. Worship leadership should resemble the radical diversity of Christ’s Kingdom, and a choir facilitates this quite well.

And that, in its turn, brought to mind CS Lewis and Uncle Screwtape. In Letter 2 of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis’s elder devil mentors his nephew, a tempter in training, with reflections on how to distract his “patient,” the human man subject to temptation, with the embarrassing reality of church:

When he [the patient] goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like ‘the body of Christ’ and the actual faces in the next pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy’s side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father Below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.

The one-word name for this temptation, of course, is pride. To which I have to say, Mea culpa—I’ve been guilty of precisely what Screwtape describes here. But this beautiful imperfection, this “radical diversity” that Aigner describes, is the real and joyous face of the church, and I’m willing to bet, based on the way Jon Daker put himself out there, willingly entering into a situation I certainly never would for the sake of the people he knew best, that pride did not enter into his character much. He’s a man we do well not to laugh at, but with.

The world needs more Jon Dakers, and not just because of the laughs. As Aigner fittingly concludes in his piece, “may his memory outlast the internet.” RIP.

Watch the original—first uploaded to YouTube in the summer of 2006!—here or embedded above. For an extra layer of comedy, here’s a version with very literal subtitles. Be sure to read all of Aigner’s memorial post for Daker at Patheos here, and take a moment to read Daker’s obituary in the Peoria Journal Star here.

Lewis and Scruton on monarchy, titles, and celebrity

I’ve been reading Against the Tide, a posthumous collection of Roger Scruton’s journalism and essays collected by his literary executor, Mark Dooley. It’s good stuff so far, though not as deep or meaty as Scruton’s longer work (like the essays in A Political Philosophy or especially Confessions of a Heretic) owing to the limitations of journalism. But, also owing to the limitations of journalism, these pieces are punchier, more humorously combative. You can feel Scruton winking in some of them in a way you seldom get when he’s unpacking Kant or Wagner.

At any rate, this passage on aristocracy and its vulgar modern ersatz, celebrity, published as a “diary” piece in the Spectator, August 25, 2016, particularly caught my eye:

Of course, in the first-name culture that now prevails, titles might seem merely decorative, and offensive to the cult of equality. The death of the Duke of Westminster has briefly raised the question of what a titled aristocracy does for us. My own view is that titles are much to be preferred to wealth as a mark of distinction, since they give glamour without power. They promote the idea of purely immaterial reward, and represent eminence as something to live up to, not a power to be used. Of course they can be abused, and a kind of snobbery goes with them. Take them away, however, and you have the mean-minded obsessions of ‘celebrity’ culture, the American idolization of wealth or the power cult of the Russian mafia. An inherited title sanctifies a family and its ancient territory. The poetry of this is beautifully expressed by Proust, who wrote of an aristocracy from which everything had been taken except its titles—think of ‘Guermantes’ and compare it with ‘Trump’.

That paragraph caught my eye because it echoes, at a remove of three quarters of a century but with startlingly precise parallels, this favorite passage from CS Lewis’s wartime essay “Equality”—coincidentally also published in the Spectator, and on almost the same date, August 27, 1943:

We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man’s reaction of Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked’; but watch the faces, mark well the accents, of the debunkers. These are men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach—men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, of film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

You can read the entirety of Lewis’s essay “Equality” at the Spectator’s archives (paywalled) or here. It’s collected in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays, which is perhaps my favorite short collection of Lewis’s writings. I’ve previously quoted the line about “gobbling poison” as recently as the new year, in this post on Ernst Jünger’s vision of the homo religiosus in The Forest Passage.

The podcast Stasi

Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) at his listening post in Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others)

Speaking of omnipotent moral busybodies, this short piece in the Atlantic, which profiles the mission and struggles of the people monitoring podcast content at Media Matters and other listening posts, came to my attention yesterday by way of Alan Jacobs’s blog. Jacobs’s pithy commentary caught my attention. He confesses his surprise at two things:

(a) that to many Americans it now seems normal for people to devote hundreds of hours of their lives to listening to one podcast solely in order to find something, anything that can be used to shame the podcaster; and (b) that the people who behave in that way think their actions are politically meaningful.

I highly recommend reading the Atlantic piece, as it provides a uniquely open and unashamed profile of people who seem utterly unaware that they are colossal, thundering creeps. Devoting hours and hours to listening (at 2x speed, since they are not only creepy but lazy*) to podcasts they don’t like, carefully cataloging offenses, filing bullet-pointed reports to be used as political ammunition, struggling with a workload based on ever-growing mountains of raw material, hoping for laws requiring podcasts to be transcribed and indexed for greater “accessibility,” and congratulating themselves for tackling such difficult but important work, they remind me of nothing so much as the Stasi.

The Stasi (short for Staatssicherheitsdienst or State Security Service) was the East German secret police. Far more powerful, pervasive, organized, and effective than the underfunded and understaffed but more infamous Gestapo, by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 the Stasi had vast, well-indexed archives covering the activities of over five million people, and one in four East Germans were working for them as informants.

But what reminded me of the Stasi wasn’t just the Atlantic’s subjects’ left-wing politics or their obsessive ferreting out of offense, but their work ethic—their startling willingness to do drudge work:

But going big and searching manually through the archives of any podcaster with a substantial back catalog requires not just time but motivation—an axe to grind, or at least an angle. “It was not a terribly glamorous reporting process. . . . It was not like what they show in the movies.” It was just sitting around listening to some guy talk.

I think it was that line that brought to mind the Stasi, and specifically the image of a small, quiet technician sitting in an attic, attentively listening—Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler in the magnificent film The Lives of Others. In that film, pointedly set in 1984, Wiesler is assigned to watch playwright Georg Dreyman, a seemingly loyal Party man who has used the stage for dour dramatic messaging about the oppression of capitalism but whom the authorities now suspect of subversion. The film is thorough in its depiction of the bugging process, of the cataloging and reporting of every bit of potentially relevant minutiae (right down to “Geschlechtsverkehr,” sexual intercourse, in one report), of the horrible consequences for everyone, and, above all, the listening. Wiesler and others take long shifts in Dreyman’s attic, just listening, staring at the walls as Dreyman’s life plays out through their headphones.

For Wiesler, this ends up being not only transformative but redemptive, and depicting this transformation is the great power of The Lives of Others. But for the people in this Atlantic piece?

I doubt it. Part of my pessimism in this regard is the striking tone† of the report, both on the part of the subjects and of the Atlantic’s writer—not just reportorial, though it is an informative profile; not just approving, though the listeners’ work is treated as obviously legitimate and their struggles as obstacles that must by any means be overcome; but participatory. The author inserts a revealing parenthetical late in the piece:

(As a sometimes-listener of the chat show How Long Gone—they get good guests and they’re always laughing together!—I have imagined what it would look like to CTRL+F the entire catalog for all of the hosts’ weird comments about fat people.)

There you have it. This is the behavior of bitter exes, of forum trolls, of the weird kids we knew in high school who actually kept enemies lists. Though this piece seeks to portray its subjects’ work as legitimate owing to the heinous threat posed by Joe Rogan (whom I don’t follow and have intentionally avoiding mentioning before now) and his “misinformation”‡—or racial slurs, or transphobia, or “sexist comments,” or whatever—it becomes clear at this point that this industry of Stasi hirelings is driven by personal animus.

Which shouldn’t be surprising—especially if you’ve seen The Lives of Others, in which it turns out that the government’s suspicions of Dreyman stem from a bureaucrat’s obsession with Dreyman’s girlfriend.

I’d say I’m less worried about this kind of thing since Media Matters et al are private organizations and the Stasi was a government agency. But we’re learning more all the time about the way the US government is doing internet-age versions of the same things the Stasi did, but, thanks to technology, on an even vaster scale, and we’re also seeing how little the government needs an agency like the Stasi when powerful corporations and self-appointed case agents will do this work virtually gratis, and answerable only to the mob.

I don’t have a lot of conclusions to draw or solutions to propose, but I do hope a disgust with this kind of thing can grow sufficiently strong and widespread to drive it out of existence. I hope, but I’m not holding my breath.

In the meantime, you can learn more about the Stasi from books like Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, and I can’t recommend The Lives of Others highly enough. Watch it if you haven’t, and think.

Notes, asides, and remonstrations:

*Also stupid. “‘He is the most popular podcast host in the world,’ Paterson told me. Yet few not in Rogan’s intended audience ever hear most of the things he says.” Congratulations, you’ve discovered how an audience works.

†Another revealing choice of words: “This is not to say that podcast fans are incapable of criticizing the voices they spend so much time with—only that they’re also prone to forgiveness.” Note that, here, forgiveness is a bad thing.

‡I’m struck that there is so much debate now about misinformation, disinformation, and even malinformation, but very little reference to truth.

Against the clarity of caricature

Jeremy Black has a good succinct review of Allen Guelzo’s Robert E Lee: A Life at New Criterion, saying in a few words what I struggled to say in a couple thousand last fall. Black rightly notes the many strengths of Guelzo’s biography, as well as pointing out its weaknesses—ideological inflexibility and a refusal to acknowledge historical contingency, whether in Lee’s life or in the broader context of the United States’s history as a republic. For Guelzo, there is, with the benefit of hindsight, precisely one right answer to the one big question Lee had to answer on the fly, as events unfolded. Black mildly offers that “this approach is not completely helpful”:

Guelzo’s comments on treason look far less appropriate from the perspective of the events of 1775 and 1776, and this comparison was certainly one made by commentators at the time of the new civil war. One does not have to be a cynic to ask how far judgments would be different in each case had success been otherwise. This is obviously true if the most talented commanders of the American Revolution are assessed, notably Benedict Arnold and Charles Lee, as well as George Washington. This point raises comparable ones about assessment of the Civil War. So it is more generally when factors are taken for granted and treated outside any political context.

But it is one passing phrase from Black, in relating the fate of Richmond’s Lee monument, that most caught my attention. Noting that the statue has apparently been donated to a museum to be “transform[ed] . . . into a new work of art,” thus institutionalizing the vandalism of 2020, Black remarks that

“Robert E. Lee is one of so many swept from the complexity of life into the clarity of caricature.”

A phrase I’m going to hang onto.

Because the struggle between complexity and caricature is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Complexity is tough. People don’t know what to do with it. I’ve thought and written a lot about simplifying, reductionist accounts of history in the last several years, but what we’re really talking about is caricature: taking away complexity, exaggerating a handful of features—sometimes even just one feature. To continue with the example of Lee, here’s an apolitical anti-slavery Unionist who ends up in command of a Confederate army. That demands investigation and an attempt to understand. But a racist? Well, we know what to do with racists. And we move on to the next statue.

All of which brings Herbert Butterfield to mind, in a line I’ve shared here several times before because I think about it so often as I teach, trying to cram in as much real life complexity and understanding into the two and a half hours I get with my students per week:

“The historian is never more himself than when he is searching his mind for a general statement that shall in itself give the hint of its own underlying complexity.”

— Herbert Butterfield

It’s a tightrope walk, but worth infinite pains.

In the meantime, I think the good, honest student of history could do little better than to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn: “Let the caricature come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”

Read Black’s full review at New Criterion here or at the link above. Compare the thoughts on a passage in Black’s Short History of War I shared last month here. And speaking of historical figures it’s fashionable to dunk on, I reviewed Black’s biography of George III for the Penguin Monarchs series on the blog last June, which you can look at here.

Omnipotent moral busybodies

Two quotations from dramatically different contexts that make the same broader point:

First—Orestes Brownson, in his essay “Liberalism and Progress,” October 1864. Brownson was a pro-Union, anti-slavery New Englander but was nevertheless impatient with the radical Puritan-descended ideologues surrounding him, radicals like the author of the unpublished manuscript to which he’s responding here, in which its author advocates “exterminating the southern leaders, and new-englandizing the South”—what in any other context would now be called cultural genocide. In this passage he critiques the culture that produces such men:

The New Englander has excellent points, but is restless in body and mind, always in motion, never satisfied with what he has, and always seeking to make all the world like himself, or as uneasy as himself. He is smart, seldom great; educated, but seldom learned; active in mind, but rarely a profound thinker; religious, but thoroughly materialistic: his worship is rendered in a temple founded in Mammon, and he expects to be carried to heaven in a softly-cushioned railway car, with his sins safely checked and deposited in the baggage crate with his other luggage, to be duly delivered when he has reached his destination. He is philanthropic, but makes his philanthropy his excuse for meddling with everybody's business as if it were his own, and under pretence of promoting religion and morality, he wars against every generous and natural instinct, and aggravates the very evils he seeks to cure.

Second—CS Lewis in “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” originally published in the Australian journal Twentieth Century in 1949 and collected in God in the Dock. Here Lewis argues forcefully that modern concepts of judicial rehabilitation are actually crueler than traditional imprisonment or corporal punishment:

It is, indeed, important to notice that my argument so far supposes no evil intentions on the part of the Humanitarian and considers only what is involved in the logic of his position. My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

To return to Brownson’s picture of the New England radical reformer:

He has his use in the community; but a whole nation composed of such as he would be short-lived, and resemble the community of the lost rather than that of the blest.

The thing which I greatly feared is come upon us. Food for thought.

Compare Brownson’s portrait of the 19th-century activist above with Ernst Jünger’s description in The Forest Passage of the modern mass-man—“he will gush humanitarian theory, yet be equally inclined to awful violence . . . whenever a neighbor or fellow human being does not fit into his system”—which I blogged about here. And for a paradigmatic modern busybody, see here.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Macbeth (Denzel Washington) watches as King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson) greets Lady Macbeth (Frances McDormand) in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth

As I noted a few weeks ago when ranking the Coen brothers’ films, I’ve been looking forward to The Tragedy of Macbeth. Not only is a Coen (Joel, flying solo) involved, Macbeth is by far my favorite Shakespeare. I’ve seen the full play several times. I’ve seen an excellent one-hour version performed by only four people. I’ve seen multiple film versions. So I’m glad to say that Joel Coen’s new film adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth is excellent.

I’ve wondered before whether I love Macbeth because it has many of the things that I like in a story—introspection, murder, revenge, a bold streak of the uncanny or supernatural, an eerie atmosphere redolent of unspeakable age, and a climax played out in a stack of corpses—or because Macbeth taught me to love Macbeth and to look for itself in any good story. Regardless, The Tragedy of Macbeth leans hard into the weird and uncanny elements of the play right from the beginning, with a contortionist witch prophesying to Macbeth and Banquo in the mist-gloomed aftermath of battle. Hailing Macbeth with a title he doesn’t possess, she predicts his rise to kingship and the future royalty of Banquo’s descendants and sets the plot in motion.

You should know the story, so I won’t belabor it. Joel Coen has done an excellent job of trimming the play to a brisk, fast-paced size (the whole movie, including credits, is well under two hours long) while still leaving in all the dynastic complications and the untidy genius of Shakespeare. Case in point: Stephen Root appears briefly as the drunken porter, a bawdy comic relief character whose one scene underscores the darkness surrounding it but that is often cut from more po-faced adaptations, such as the great-looking but overserious 2015 film starring Michael Fassbender. That scene doesn’t have to be there—certainly not in an hour-and-a-half version—but it’s good Shakespeare, and Coen transforms it into good film.

And while both condensing and remaining faithful to Shakespeare’s text, Coen still finds interesting things to do with the play and characters. Ross, one of a crowd of “Noblemen of Scotland” swelling the scene in the play, appears in surprising places, suggesting there is even more going on than the Macbeths’ scheming at the heart of the play. A final, wordless scene just before the credits, with Ross and another character unseen for a long time, also provokes questions—or at least the realization that killing Macbeth doesn’t mean the story is over.

But while the adaptation itself is well done, nicely tailoring the play to the dimensions of a film, it’s the visuals that really elevate The Tragedy of Macbeth. Stagey and sparse, shot in black and white and in the 1.37:1 full-frame aspect ratio of the era before widescreen, and chockablock with eerie images—ravens circling a battlefield, a single witch reflected twice in a pool, a ruined house by a twilit crossroads, a shower of leaves bursting through a window of Macbeth’s throneroom, the ramparts of a castle slashing through a sea of fog—the look of the film is key to its weirdness. I’ve seen the visual style here compared to German expressionism, but it reminded me most of film noir, especially in its use of contrast and sharp geometric compositions, and, in the film’s attention to faces in wide-angled closeup, the austere medieval vision of The Passion of Joan of Arc. The Tragedy of Macbeth is a film in which vast landscapes and castles loom—but always in the background, always half-glimpsed through fog or shadow. Macbeth demands atmosphere, and The Tragedy of Macbeth drips with it.

The performances are excellent as well, with particularly good performances in small parts—a sure mark of a Coen’s touch. I liked Brendan Gleeson as King Duncan and Harry Melling as Malcolm, who make the most of their limited roles, and the aforementioned Stephen Root, who really hams it up as the porter. Alex Hassell’s Ross is also striking, an ambiguous presence whose intentions are often murky but who always seems like a threat. And Corey Hawkins is excellent as Macduff; when Macduff learns that his wife and children have been murdered, Hawkins’s performance moved me to tears.

Macduff: What, all my pretty chickens and their dam / at one fell swoop?
Malcolm: Dispute it like a man.
Macduff: I shall do so; / but I must also feel it as a man.

Hawkins’s Macduff also presents a credible physical threat to Macbeth when their final confrontation comes, and their one-on-one duel on the walls of Dunsinane Castle is tense and surprisingly brutal.

Which brings me to the standouts in the film: Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the Witch.

Denzel Washington’s Macbeth didn’t actually impress me as much as it did many of the reviewers I read. His understatement early in the film gives the character a gravity and seriousness I liked, but he rushes through some of his lines as if challenging himself to finish his speeches in one breath. Odd, but a quibble. But Washington shines in every scene he shares with Frances McDormand’s Lady Macbeth. Hers is the best performance in the film, but their onscreen partnership is indispensable to them both. Their interplay, at once affectionate and a kind of harsh rivalry, full of loving confidences and cruel digs, feels real, especially once the hesitant, scrupulous Macbeth turns the tables on Lady Macbeth and becomes an even bigger and more frightening monster. This was the most convincing and chilling version of that transformation that I’ve seen.

And Kathryn Hunter as the Witch, or Witches—she’s impossible to describe. The bodily contortions, the rasping metallic voice, the seemingly half-bird physicality, the ambiguous manner and expression—explicitly remarked upon by Macbeth in the play—all make her the creepiest version of the Bard’s weird sisters that I’ve ever seen. And the film’s all-pervading atmosphere, that sense of the uncanny hovering over everything, both derives from and contributes to the Witch’s presence. She feels like a real menace, and in watching her you don’t just believe the supernatural elements of the play might be real, they must be.

I could go on. The Tragedy of Macbeth is wonderful, exactly the right mix of the stage and the screen. Like the other major streaming offering from the Coens—The Ballad of Buster Scruggs on Netflix—I hope some benevolent outfit like the Criterion Collection will swoop in one day to save it from the streaming services. In the meantime, find a friend with Apple TV+, like I did, and see this film.

In the House of Tom Bombadil

Anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings has questions about Tom Bombadil. What is he doing in the middle of Frodo’s journey to Rivendell? What does Frodo’s interlude at Tom’s house mean? What’s with the yellow boots and all the singing? But there’s one question, right there in The Lord of the Rings, with which CR Wiley begins his new book In the House of Tom Bombadil:

The hobbits sat down gladly in low rush-seated chairs, while Goldberry busied herself about the table; and their eyes followed her, for the slender grace of her movement filled them with quiet delight. From somewhere behind the house came the sound of singing. Every now and again they caught, among many a derry dol and a merry dol and a ring a ding dillo the repeated words:

Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow;
Bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow.

‘Fair lady!’ said Frodo again after a while. ‘Tell me, if my asking does not seem foolish, who is Tom Bombadil?’

‘He is,’ said Goldberry, staying her swift movements and smiling.

This is a characteristic passage of Bombadilana: charming and upbeat, with a dreamlike half-detachment from that which goes before and comes after it, and—like Goldberry’s answer to the crucial question—both straightforward and enigmatic. No wonder Frodo feels a mite foolish, and no wonder some people get bent out of shape about Tom.

Since Wiley and, in the book’s warm and spirited introduction, Bradley Birzer both share some of their personal histories with Tom Bombadil, let me do the same by way of confession. I may be the only person who has ever read The Lord of the Rings who doesn’t have much of an opinion on Tom. What is he doing there? Well, it’s an episodic adventure, so why shouldn’t he be there? What does he mean? The same thing any character in such an adventure “means,” I reckon. Next question.

Having simply accepted Tom as part of the story, it has never occurred to me to ask some of the questions some people do about him.

Wiley does not tackle all of them, but starting with Frodo’s question for Goldberry proves wise. By looking into who Tom is, he shows us what he’s doing in this story. Wiley begins by gently disposing of a handful of the more popular theories about Tom’s past or identity (that Tom is a Maia gone native, or even the incarnation of Eru Ilúvatar himself, etc.), then turns to the few chapters where he appears, the handful of later allusions and references back to him—including one by Gandalf that is considerably more significant than I ever thought—and a few sources outside the novel, especially Tolkien’s letters. This last source proves particularly helpful, since Tolkien himself, in his gnomic way, insisted that Tom is important to the story, but not precisely how. This is especially telling, as Wiley notes that Tolkien, a slow-working, minutely precise writer, would throw away large passages if he found them unsatisfactory or if he felt them narrative dead-ends, and yet Tom and his hosting of Frodo and company remain.

So in a series of short topical chapters, Wiley examines what we see and hear of Tom through the hobbits and his creator, focusing especially on what Tom does in his limited time in the story. He looks at Tom’s use of song and language, his role as “master,” his household, his relationship with Goldberry, and the grim incident with the barrow wight. Along the way, Wiley brings in some especially insightful comparisons with other key characters, like Saruman, who pursues a mechanical or technical mastery alien to Tom, and he concludes with a beautifully written and genuinely moving meditation on what Tom means for the future of Middle Earth—restoration.

Wiley does not pretend to have “solved” the mystery of Tom Bombadil—“if Tolkien meant for Bombadil to be an enigma,” he writes, “who am I to try to clear things up?”—but he does present a compelling argument that Tom’s presence is an important thematic counterpoint to the later darkness of the story, a vision of unspoiled, unfallen dominion over creation that treats the world as an end rather than a means, and of the delight and divine restfulness that comes with that dominion.

In the House of Tom Bombadil is a brisk, easy read, but rich and thought-provoking. I breezed through it in two sittings, relishing the insight it brought to a character I had taken for granted and not thought deeply about, and I look forward to revisiting it soon. I highly recommend it to anyone who has read The Lord of the Rings and wondered about Tom, but especially to anyone who has wondered what goodness is supposed to look like in the middle of a fallen world.

On kids and making art

An observation from British novelist JG Ballard, which I recently ran across at writer Austin Kleon’s blog here:

“Cyril Connolly, the 50s critic and writer, said that the greatest enemy of creativity is the pram in the hall, but I think that was completely wrong. It was the enemy of a certain kind of dilettante life that he aspired to, the man of letters, but for the real novelist the pram in the hall is the greatest ally—it brings you up sharp and you realise what reality is all about. My children were a huge inspiration for me. Watching three young minds creating their separate worlds was a very enriching experience.”

— JG Ballard

Kleon notes that Ballard, whose wife died unexpectedly in their early thirties, raised his three children as a widower.

There’s a lot to think about here, and someday I’d love to develop a full-length, completely thought-out essay on the topic of family, creativity, and the pernicious myth of the genius whose art excuses his neglect of his family. (Kleon links to a pretty good takedown of that myth here.)

But for the time being, suffice it to say that good art is directed other-ward, and the good artist begins with a desire to show, to tell, to share. As Roger Scruton explains it in Why Beauty Matters, the child’s desire to share his or her vision gives us one of the purest expressions of the artistic impulse we can find. That desire is an innate link to our fellowmen—binding them to us and, perhaps more importantly, us to them—and we break it at our peril. As Kleon puts it, “Art is for life, not the other way around.”

And remember that there is no fellowman closer than your own flesh and blood.

My children have greatly enriched my life, not to mention my artistic perspectives and impulses, and they are, after all, the only thing I’ve made that will last forever. I can always find ways to work around them—and, indeed, I have. But if I ever find myself in the position of having to choose between them and my art, to hell with my art. Literally.

What passive voice is (and isn't)

Permit me a moment of annoyance.

It’s become apparent to me, through years of reading, that a lot of professional writers don’t know what passive voice is. I emphasize that I’m noticing this in professional writers, because these are people who should know better. Here’s the passage that finally broke me, from a long-form essay on cognitive dissonance within the pro-life movement:

A friend of mine was at a big conservative Christian donor conference recently and told me a prominent speaker there used the phrase, “women who have experienced an abortion.” . . .

This extreme passive voice expression goes beyond saying that women who abort their babies are victims who don’t deserve moral blame; it treats abortion as something that just happens to a woman. . . .

Emphasis mine.

Here’s the thing—the phrase the writer here picks out is not written in the passive voice. It’s vague, clunky, and awkward, an unnecessary circumlocution, but it is not passive. What the writer means here is everything I’ve just said about the phrase’s construction, with the added implication that the use of this phrase betrays deceitful intent, but it is not passive.

So, a brief, highly annoyed primer on what passive voice is (and is not):

Passive voice is not:

• Any sentence including the verb “to be.” This should be obvious, but apparently isn’t. Because to be is a passive sentence’s auxiliary or “helping verb,” this can trip people up. As I’ve argued before, reliance on to be in your writing can weaken it, but that’s not the same thing as the passive voice. Here’s an example from way back of an otherwise careful and observant writer striking blindly at any passing be verb in hopes of hitting a passive construction.

• The progressive aspect. This is, in any verb tense, a construction that indicates than an action is ongoing. Above, I wrote that I am noticing this trend. I am still the subject of the sentence, and I am doing something. This is the active voice, even if the main verb is still to be. See above.

• Vagueness. This is the real bone of contention for the writer quoted above, and I’ve noticed “passive voice” or “passive language” used disparagingly of vagueness, bureaucratese, or other (usually official, almost always political) obfuscation and deceit—what Dilbert calls “weasel words.” I hate these forms of linguistic shiftiness as much as anyone, but obscuring your meaning behind jargon or constructing statements so as to diffuse or avoid blame is not, in itself, the passive voice.

Passive voice is:

Not a particular usage, tone, or even intent, but a grammatical voice—that is, per Britannica, the “form of a verb indicating the relation between the participants in a narrated event (subject, object) and the event itself.” To demonstrate using the classic example:

Active: The pitcher threw the ball.
Passive: The ball was thrown by the pitcher.

There are two “participants” in this “narrated event”: the ball and the pitcher. In one, the pitcher (actively) acts upon the ball; in the other, the ball is (passively) acted upon by the pitcher.

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. This shouldn’t be hard.

How to identify the passive voice

Here’s a simple way to identify passive voice constructions: you should be able to ask By whom? or By what? of them. Asking these questions of a passive sentence highlights the fact that the “participant” that would ordinarily function as the subject of the sentence has gone missing as the action has been inverted. So:

• “Mistakes were made.” (The classic weasel word statement.) By whom?

• “The town was destroyed.” By what?

• “The generalissimo is being overthrown.” By whom?

• “The cornfield has been destroyed.” By what?

• “It is said that money cannot buy happiness.” By whom?

Now compare a few other sentences (or fragments) that I’ve seen incorrectly labeled “passive” online:

• “Women who have experienced an abortion.” A fragment in the first place, but as it’s the women who are doing the experiencing, this is still grammatically the active voice.

• “This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” Whatever this is, it’s doing the unfolding, and despite its clunkiness this sentence is still written in the active voice.

• “The suspect’s death at the hands of police appears to be entirely unjustified.” Chop out all but the grammatical essentials and this reads death (subject) appears to be (verb) unjustified (predicate). This is an overcomplicated and clunky sentence, but not passive.

Conclusion

If when you describe some language as “passive” you mean written in the passive voice, with what would normally be the object in the subject’s place but being acted upon, then more power to you.

But if when you say this you mean that the language in question is deceitful, misleading, obfuscating, suspiciously hedging, or simply a lie—if, that is, your problem is not with the speaker’s grammar but with his motives—then say that. You’ll be more accurate and, what is more, you’ll make your own meaning clearer.

Ranking the Coen brothers

Joel Coen’s new solo movie, The Tragedy of Macbeth, goes into wide release via Apple TV+ this weekend. According to the Hollywood rumor mill, Joel undertook this project on his own because Ethan either “didn’t want to make movies any more” or is “giving movies a rest.” I hope it’s the latter, as I’ve followed the brothers since chancing upon their work more than twenty years ago and they’ve produced some of my favorite movies.

I’ve long sorted the Coens’ work into three tiers—a bottom tier of good but so-so movies, a middle tier of very good ones, and a top tier of masterpieces. I’ve dithered over which movies I’ve sorted into which tier, and more often than not the ranking has come down to longtime favorites and momentary whim. So to commemorate their long and fruitful collaboration and to celebrate the arrival of The Tragedy of Macbeth, I’ve finally made myself definitively sort their movies, bottom to top.

Note: I don’t include here short films produced as parts of anthologies or films they wrote or co-wrote but did not direct. There are some gems there—I’m quite fond of Bridge of Spies, which they did work on, and my wife and I love the underrated Gambit remake starring Colin Firth—but I’m restricting this list to movies that they wrote and directed.

And finally, as I’ll reiterate later, this is essentially a list of favorites, not a judgment of artistic merit, but naturally I do think the two mostly parallel each other.

Bottom of the barrel

Despite going into detail about that three-tier system I’ve always imagined, I include two extra sub-tiers at the top and bottom. Here’s the bottom, a space occupied by only one movie:

Intolerable Cruelty

This is the only one of the Coen brothers’ movies I dislike even a little bit, though it’s fun and clever enough and well enough acted. Part of my dislike stems from a curious shapelessness to the plot—it doesn’t always feel like it’s really going anywhere, which is not unusual for the Coens’ films but doesn’t work here. The main characters are also pretty unlikeable—again, not atypical for the Coens but in this case but it proves insurmountable. But the largest part of my dislike stems from its stylistic throwbacks to 1930s screwball comedies, which are hit or miss but mostly miss: the fast-paced rat-tat-tat dialogue works; the mugging and doubletakes and generally exaggerated clowning for the camera don’t. This is partly a matter of taste (Clooney’s own sports comedy Leatherheads falls flat for me for the same reasons), but it’s especially off-putting in a film set in the present and the result is a weaker film than usual, and the only one of their movies I resist watching.

Favorite line: “He had a device he called ‘the intruder’…”

Third tier

Third tier movies are fine movies that, for whatever reason, I seldom pick to watch. Having completed my rankings, I notice now that all three of these are slightly more arty (for lack of a better word) or thematically obscure than usual, and two have off-beat, potentially unsatisfying endings. That doesn’t diminish my enjoyment, but perhaps that, somehow, makes them a little less fun.

The Hudsucker Proxy

Here’s proof that the Coen brothers can do throwback screwball comedy and make it work. Bizarre and over-the-top, but riotously entertaining and inventive and with a generous dab of the uncanny thrown in. It’s also beautifully shot and designed. It’s bold and bizarre, and though I really like it, it’s just not one of my favorites.

Favorite line: “You know—for kids!”

Inside Llewyn Davis

Calling Llewyn Davis the Coens’ least likable protagonist is really saying something. This is a meandering but continuously interesting film that is long on atmosphere (the chilly, slushy big cities of the northeast and midwest in the most miserable part of winter) and the lore of early 1960s folk singers, and I appreciate the way it gently but clearly shows that the whole bunch were phonies. But Llewyn himself is not pleasant to spend time with and the film’s bookend structure, with its last-minute reveal of significant change coming the way of the folk music scene, feels more like a trick or gimmick than is usual even in the Coens’ bolder experiments.

Favorite line: “I don’t see a lot of money here.”

The Man Who Wasn’t There

A stylishly shot and well-acted black-and-white tribute to post-war suburban noir. You could say this is a triumph of style over substance, but there’s enough classic Coen brothers humor, dialogue, and general weirdness thrown in that it moves along really well. I especially like all of the weird, ambiguous, inexplicable UFO stuff lurking just outside of your awareness through the first half of the movie, and—best of all—Tony Shalhoub’s fast-talking lawyer, Freddy Riedenschneider, and his half-informed disquisition on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. It’s entertaining and intricately laced with irony, but unusually off-beat even for the Coens.

Favorite line: “The more you look, the less you really know.”

Middle tier

Again, this is a list of favorites, not necessarily a list judging artistic merit. The Coens’ “middle tier” movies would be masterpieces for a lot of other filmmakers. That said, this is a strong selection of their movies that I’ve watched many times but aren’t quite in that subjective, all-time-favorite top tier for me.

Raising Arizona

I originally assigned this one to the third tier, as I seldom pick it to watch, but you know what? I quote it all the time (“That’s you boys’ whole raison d’etre, ain’t it?”), my wife and I use it for comparisons and in-jokes all the time, and we have only grown to enjoy it more since having kids. It’s over-the-top and zany (“wacky” is the word cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld ascribed to it, in contrast to a “handsome” movie like Miller’s Crossing) but it never stops being fun and enjoyable. It’s also got a touch of poignancy that sticks with you and runs much deeper than the wackiness, which may be why it sticks with you.

Favorite line: “Son, you got a panty on your head.”

A Serious Man

I really, really admire this movie as a modern (suburban 1960s) retelling of Job, which is perhaps my favorite book of the Bible. It cleverly mimics some of the structure of Job, with a conga line of both disasters and miserable comforters coming Larry Gopnik’s way, and has a dark, ambiguous ending that I really respond to. The Coens also revisit the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle here, with a line I’ve quoted a lot during the last two years: “We can’t ever really know… what’s going on.” But I’ve found in the years since it came out that I simply don’t enjoy it as much as I admire it.

Favorite line: “Please! Accept the mystery.”

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

This anthology film is essentially a collection of shorts, all of them good, some of them small masterpieces. I’m particularly fond of the Coens’ nearly wordless experiment “Meal Ticket”; the Jack London adaptation “All Gold Canyon,” which is almost entirely one old prospector grubbing in the dirt and singing to himself but which nevertheless manages to be riveting; and “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” a by turns sweet and grimly ironic wagon train story that, tonally, feels a lot like True Grit. The opening short featuring the titular Buster is also a hoot. I just wish it were available on home media rather than being sequestered in Netflix. Perhaps the Criterion Collection will rescue Buster someday.

I wrote more about The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in my 2018 year-in-review here.

Favorite line: “I’m not a devious man by nature, but when you’re unarmed, your tactics might gotta be downright Archimedean.”

Blood Simple

If you were to watch the Coens’ filmography in random order and told to figure out which movie was their first, picking Blood Simple would be a lucky guess. This is a moody, well-paced, stylistically confident noir thriller and one of the most suspenseful films I’ve ever seen.

Favorite line: “I ain’t a marriage counselor.”

The Ladykillers

I anticipate this being the most controversial ranking in my list. The deck would seem to be stacked against The Ladykillers—it’s a remake of a beloved British black comedy that still has fans, it was originally written for someone else to direct, it’s got a lot more slapstick than usual for the Coens, and, for a certain kind of person (known colloquially as a snob), the presence of Tom Hanks is a sign of the Coens “selling out.”

I say balderdash. This is the best possible combination of the Coens’ instincts for farce (much more successfully used here than in Intolerable Cruelty), black comedy, and—crucially—that hint of the spiritual or uncanny that hovers over so many of their films. In addition to being funny and quotable as the day is long, with a particularly great running gag involving my undergrad alma mater, there’s something interesting going on with the way the unassuming, crotchety, pious church lady Mrs Munson thwarts the dismissive, pompous, overeducated, and pointedly church-averse master criminal Professor Dorr. Knowledge puffing up? The foolish things of the world confounding the wise? Intentionally or not, there’s a lot of that here. The Ladykillers is not just a black comedy or farce, it’s a morality play.

A great soundtrack, including a lot of archival music arranged, like that of O Brother, Where Art Thou? by T Bone Burnett, helps make the movie and sell its themes. My favorite track, by Blind Willie Johnson, closes the film.

Favorite line: “Why, Professor! I’m surprised.” “Well, uh, properly speaking, madam, we are surprised. You are taken aback.”

Burn After Reading

A broad but incisive satire of self-help and positive thinking culture, with brutal consequences for just about everyone but the person who causes all the trouble, this has some great performances and one of the only genuinely shocking moments I’ve ever seen in a movie. But, based on conversations with friends, its unblinkingly savage satire and willingness to go dark may make Burn After Reading an acquired taste.

Favorite line: “…The Russians?”

Miller’s Crossing

An intricately plotted, well-written, and brilliantly acted gangster movie that is both witty and grim by turns. Miller’s Crossing is a slow burn that rewards close attention and repeat viewings.

Favorite line: “What’s the rumpus?”

Top tier

The top tier consists of my favorites of the Coens’ filmography, movies that I’ve found endlessly entertaining and meaningful and about which I have no complaints. My second and most important sub-tier comes at the end, with my three all-time favorites from among these.

Fargo

The Coens have always shown interest in regionalism—local culture, local mores, and especially local dialect—and Fargo is almost certainly their masterpiece in this regard. It also perfectly mingles wildly disparate tones: nearly documentary-style true crime, kitchen sink realism, horror, and, of course, dark comedy. Carter Burwell’s score, based on a Norwegian hymn, is also excellent.

Favorite line: “And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper.”

Hail, Caesar!

Another potentially controversial ranking, judging from some of what I’ve seen online from people who expected it, apparently, to be a straightforward mashup of classic Hollywood or who have strong opinions about Esther Williams parodies. This is the Coens’ Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and as such follows a handful of specific characters through the Tinseltown zoo over the course of one day. Eddie Mannix, a tough but put-upon studio fixer, and Hobie Doyle, a singing cowboy shoehorned into an arty chamber drama, are wonderful characters (and two of my favorites of any on this list) and offer perhaps the strongest moral center of any of the Coens’ protagonists. In contrast to the juvenile, pompous, sloganeering, resentful Communists threatening to undermine the studio (the same studio, incidentally, from Barton Fink), Eddie and Hobie have a sense of vocation and duty to something transcendent that gives their otherwise absurd lives worth. The final confrontation between the film’s two worldviews, the Catholic Eddie versus materialist Communist proselyte Baird Whitlock, ends with a powerful teleological expression of life’s meaning.

That’s a wonderful theme, but themes do not a great film make. Fortunately, as rich as the film is in meaning, it’s entertaining first and foremost. Hail, Caesar! is a ton of fun, with its parodies of 1950s genre filmmaking, its delight in the workaday activity of a studio, and the sense of a vibrant, gossipy, yet slightly seedy little community within the studio, and most especially its collection of interesting and funny characters.

Favorite line: I’m going to cheat here—it’s either the entire scene with the priest, rabbi, minister, and patriarch or the entire “No Dames” musical scene, a master class in, uh, extended double entendre.

The Big Lebowski

The ultimate hang-out movie: a big, shambling, sprawling, continuously surprising comedy that is by turns funny, shocking, outrageous, and—very briefly—poignant. Meandering but never unfocused, as seemingly aimless as The Big Lebowski is, it is perfectly paced. Drop in anywhere during its runtime and you’ll be there for the rest of it. It’s also perhaps the most quotable movie ever made, which is why, when trying to choose a favorite line for this movie below, I gave up and wrote the first one that came to mind.

Favorite line: “Don’t be fatuous, Jeffrey.”

True Grit

Charles Portis is one of two authors—with Cormac McCarthy—for whom the Coens are ideal cinematic adapters. (I wish they’d take a crack at his final novel, Gringos.) This film, a second adaptation of the novel rather than a remake of the original John Wayne version, perfectly captures the knowing, wry, understated, and witty but surprisingly poignant tone of the book. Great action and performances, especially in the central relationship between Mattie and Rooster, and a beautiful soundtrack elevate and enrich this seemingly simple Western revenge story.

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

Absolute favorites

I’ve really struggled to sort this list into a neat and tidy hierarchy, and if you catch me some other time some of these films may be reshuffled. But not these three.

In addition to my three-tier model of the Coens’ movies, I’ve had a theory for a long time that, thanks to how wildly varied their eighteen films are, a psychologist could potentially create a personality test more accurate than the four temperaments, the five factor model, the Myers-Briggs, or—Lord knows—the Enneagram by simply having people pick their three favorite Coen brothers movies. Here are mine.

Barton Fink

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that writers like stories about writers and like writers who write stories about writers. Guilty. There’s plenty of that to go around, but this is the pinnacle of that genre—my favorite writing movie. Part writer’s block drama, part black comedy, part noirish mystery, part supernatural apocalypse, Barton Fink incorporates several of my favorite kinds of storytelling in a dark but funny and atmospheric package. (It also perfectly captures how I perceive all hotels.) John Turturro is brilliant as the smart but self-regarding and cowardly Barton, and John Goodman, as Barton’s next-door neighbor in the hotel, gives a wonderfully warm and genial performance that only makes some of the film’s final-act revelations more chilling.

I don’t want to say much more, because part of this film’s peculiar power for me was going into it knowing virtually nothing about it. Check it out. Just know that I’m not exaggerating when I say that if I can craft just one climax in one story with the eeriness and uncanny, overrushing sense of apocalypse of Barton Fink, I’ll consider myself a success.

Favorite line: “Me? I just enjoy making things up.”

No Country for Old Men

Well-written, well-acted, beautifully shot in desolate Texas locations, with precisely constructed action and steadily building tension, this is a brilliant adaptation of a great novel and probably the Coens’ perfect movie. And despite its downer ending, I’ve found it and Tommy Lee Jones’s haunting final monologue a profound meditation on the duty to preserve the good in the face of ubiquitous and seemingly unstoppable evil, and it’s only gotten better in the years since I first saw it in theatres.

Favorite line: “Well, it’s a mess, ain’t it, Sheriff?” “If it ain’t it’ll do till a mess gets here.”

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Putting in a couple weeks thinking through, organizing, and writing this list has actually helped me determine that, yes, I do have a single favorite Coen brothers movie, and it’s the very first one I watched over twenty years ago now. O Brother, Where Art Thou? is funny from beginning to end, is brilliantly constructed and written, has a great cast and wonderful soundtrack, and is deepened, sweetened, and made all the funnier by the riches of both Homer and the South. It has a little of everything, and it’s all great.

And, as a nice bonus for me twenty-odd years on from discovering this film and the Coens, this is one of the only films that, reliably, the majority of a given class of students will have both seen and remembered well enough to make it a useful point of reference in class. This isn’t just entertainment for me, it’s actually helped me teach. A rare distinction, and I’m glad it’s true of a movie I love so much.

Favorite line: “Sweet Jesus, Everett. They left his heart.”

Conclusion

I’m looking forward to catching Joel Coen’s Tragedy of Macbeth. In the meantime, thanks for sticking with me through this project, which I’ve been mulling over since before Christmas, and if you haven’t seen all of the Coen brothers’ films, I hope you’ll find something enticing enough here to seek out and enjoy.