Reel Politique: Big Lebowski Studies, No. 3
Thinking today about the Oscars and the Coen Brothers I began reflecting on the Chigurh character in No Country for Old Men. I recall reading in one of the early reviews that Chigurh (who obviously comes from the Cormac McCarthy novel) is unique to the Coen Brothers’ filmography, a figure of malevolent evil that tilts the rest of the film, indeed their output, off balance. Or maybe I wrote that in this blog and no one else made such an observation. In any case, whenever a character or theme seems to appear out of nowhere it is enlightening to look at the filmmaker’s whole filmography and see if there are antecedents lurking in early shadows. And Chigurh turns out to be a purified, reduced, concentrated form of a character who has appeared in Coen films since their first feature,
I began by comparing Chigurh to, of all people, The Stranger (Sam Elliott) in The Big Lebowski. The cowboy isn’t evil, but he is omnipresent. He is the over-voice, the color commentator, (maybe even the shaper of fate like Bela Lugosi in Plan 9). In other words, he has the same preternatural knowledge of other people’s doings and motivations as a serial killer does in a 13 movie, and if Chigurh resembles anyone at root, it is Jason, Freddy, and Hannibal. And in fact the Coens have blended narrator and killer on occasion. PI Loren Visser (M. Emmett Walsh) in Blood Simple is both storyteller, prime mover, and malevolent force. Raising Arizona’s Leonard Smalls (”Tex” Cobb) is a simplified version of this foe, as is The Dane in Miller’s Crossing. Then there is the near-sub-human Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) in Fargo. Even the guy who beats up Steve Buscemi in Paris, je t’aime is a miniature version of Chigurh.
The Coen films that don’t seem to have this narrator/force of evil are The Hudsucker Proxy, O Brother Where Art Thou? (unless it is John Goodman’s Big Dan Teague), Intolerable Cruelty, <emThe Man Who Wasn’t There, and The Ladykillers (arguably their weakest films). Do they need this figure in one of its varieties to give themselves a solid through-line in tales that are otherwise wittily unpredictable?
The point, however, is that often the role of tale-teller and evil implacable force are combined into one person. Chigurh likes to improvise little bullying bet-oriented narratives with his victims’ lives haging in the balance. Charlie Meadows (Goodman again) is a storyteller as well, indeed a better storyteller than the high-priced, pretentious playwright whom the studios have summoned to Hollywood.
In fact, Barton Fink may remain the key Coen Brothers film, the gateway to all their concerns, such as language, social hierarchies, and the ability to weave tales. The film begins by showing the pulleys and curtains that lurk behind the surface of theatrical storytelling. It ends by showing the source of all storytelling, the head, completely detached and neutralized. Fink is contrasted with a famous writer whose secretary, it turns out, writes his novels for him. Storytelling, and then selling that story, appear to be the Coen Brothers’ big themes, and No Country for Old Men is another variation of their exploration of American loquacity and self-mythologizing. And the Coens’ use of the “avenger-narrator,” well, it really completes a film.