| The Coens are clever directors who know too much
about movies and too little about real life.
—Emanuel Levy, Cinema of Outsiders
The adolescent experiences of the young Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, forced
indoors by frigid Minnesota winters, provides a remarkably crystalline metaphor
for their later film work. It is easy to imagine the brothers peering out
their living-room window to witness the very particular and precise ethnographic
detail which would find careful representation in their best received film,
Fargo (1996), then turning to their television-set to observe a Frank
Capra comedy or Preston Sturges farce and discovering moments, characters,
narratives and themes which would find illustration in their most mannered
and artificial work, The Hudsucker Proxy (1993). The Coens have been
drawn to two seemingly irresolvable modes of expression: ethnographic regionalism
and artificial fabrication. It is between these two extremes that the remainder
of their films can be mapped.
Many of the films of the Coen brothers are specific to
particular regions and communities—Blood Simple (1983) owes
much of its character to its Texas setting, Raising Arizona (1987)
paints a very particular picture of the inhabitants of the American South-West,
The Big Lebowski (1998) gains much of its absurdist comedy from its
depiction of the very absurd Los Angeles community and O Brother, Where
Art Thou? (2000) relies on the meticulous recreation of Depression-era
Mississippi. Yet, the Coen brothers are just as assured in depicting artificial
worlds with antecedents in popular culture. Miller's Crossing (1990),
which spins a vast intrigue in an unnamed town, secures much of its conception
from Dashiell Hammett's novels, The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) owes
its physical and thematic construction more to the universe of film noir
than its Californian location, and The Hudsucker Proxy is a patchwork
assembly of Capra settings, Sturges characters and Screwball Comedy tropes.
Barton Fink (1991) might be described as occupying a midpoint position
in such an analytical survey of Joel and Ethan Coen's films. Barton Fink
is set in the 'real' world of Hollywood—an exquisite conception of
an authentic world of pure make-believe, “a society where myth has
blurred with reality.” (1)
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Blood
Simple
|
Ironically, it has been these twin aspects of Joel and Ethan Coen's work—particularised
communities and artificial constructions—which has provided the most
potent ammunition for critics. The Coens' detailed reconstruction of identifiable
communities, with all their quirks and eccentricities, has led many critics
to accuse them of adopting a lofty superiority to their characters. Yet,
when they construct a world with no resemblance to reality they are charged
with avoiding moral or ethical expression. Nearly 20 years since they made
their debut with the independently financed Blood Simple, the Coen
brothers remain in critical limbo—considered to be neither serious
artists nor commercial achievers.
Joel and Ethan Coen were born in Minnesota to academic
parents. The brothers were raised in a typical middle-American, middle-class
Jewish household. Their childhood was largely unremarkable and aside from
the production of a few super-8 home movies, a future in filmmaking seemed
unlikely (Ethan's book of short stories entitled Gates Of Eden contains
pseudo-biographical, though 'fictional', narratives of the Coens' upbringing).
(2) Joel proceeded to New York University where, in lieu
anything better, he enrolled in a film course. Ethan, on the other hand,
ventured to Princeton; choosing Philosophy as his major, he composed a thesis
on Wittgenstein. Joel's film school experience would assist him in landing
a number of editing jobs on small budget films, providing him with exposure
to film production practices. With this grounding the brothers were motivated
to make their own film. With the help of investors from the local Minnesota
business community the Coens set about making their first feature length
film—Blood Simple.
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The
Hudsucker Proxy
|
Joel and Ethan wrote, directed and produced the film, a
working regime they have maintained thus far in their career. They also
edit most of their movies using the single pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. Though
nominally Joel directs and Ethan produces, their duties are said to be shared.
Whilst working with the Coens on The Hudsucker Proxy, Paul Newman
claimed he had “never had two directors…[and]…never worked
with two guys who had equal creative authority who didn't squabble.”
(3) That the Coen brothers don't 'squabble' reflects the
total control they maintain over their vision from script to screen. Anecdotal
reports suggest that actors who skip words (even seemingly insignificant
dialogue) in line readings are politely requested to repeat the exercise
with complete accuracy. The films of the Coen brothers are also rigorously
story-boarded, ensuring the visual conception is affirmed and preserved
by the many other creative talents—cinematographers, actors, editors—involved
in the production of their films. What becomes apparent in the brothers'
approach to movie-making is a desire to control their films completely.
Despite working across a vast array of generic categories
and utilising different thematic approaches it is possible to discern many
recurrent motifs and continuing interests in their films. Joel and Ethan
Coen's striking ability to compose brilliant dialogue for their characters
is perhaps the most distinguished aspect of their work. The dominant critical
approach taken with regard to Fargo focused on the attention paid
to capturing the specific dialect of the Minnesota community. Peter Körte
argues that the attention given to maintaining an authentic language-scheme
is less a simple affectation or cute device and more an “expression
of a very specific experience and mentality,” supporting the notion
that the Coens' ethnographic project is legitimate. (4)
In their postmodern films, such as The Hudsucker Proxy
and Barton Fink, ethnocentric detail is rejected and replaced by
allusions to popular culture. This ties in with the Coen brothers' rampant
application of pre-existing source material in new and ironic ways. It is
this element, common in many of their films, which lends weight to the charge
that their films are empty of new ideas or moral positions. Todd McCarthy
argues, with respect to The Hudsucker Proxy, that “rehashes
of old movies, no matter how inspired, are almost by definition synthetic,
and the fact is that nearly all the characters are constructs rather than
human beings with who the viewer can connect.” (5)
Yet, when the Coens construct 'human beings' they are often accused of adopting
a mocking tone to them. Devin McKinney suggests Fargo is “a
fatuous piece of nonsense, a tall cool drink of witless condescension”
(6) and Emanuel Levy claims that the Coens “have always
treated their characters with contempt, ruthlessly manipulating and loathing
their foolishness.” (7) The fascination with language,
the application of postmodern techniques, attention to regionalism and charges
of arrogant superiority are the most common themes upon which the work of
the Coen brothers is appraised.
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Blood
Simple
|
Joel and Ethan Coen have worked within the realms of various genres, adopting
appropriate methods of realisation to reflect these representational frameworks.
The dialogue in their films is a prominent factor in the organisation and
maintenance of these generic constructions and in the fulfilment of specific
stylistic strategies. The Hudsucker Proxy's synthetic
visual design is mirrored by its stylised dialogue, the criminal milieu
of Miller's Crossing is characterised by memorably rich gangster
jargon, while Fargo's attention to visual realism operates concurrently
with the application of an appropriate regional dialect. Barry Sonnenfield—the
director of photography on Raising Arizona—suggests that the
script has greatest priority to the Coens, arguing that words and structure
are more important than any visual concerns. (8) Language
operates as a cue to the themes and characters in the films of Joel and
Ethan Coen. That they construct dialogue of wonderful inarticulacy, such
as the Dude's (Jeff Bridges) scrambled speeches in The Big Lebowski
and Carl's (Steve Buscemi) consistent malapropism in Fargo, is not
merely a joke at the expense of their characters but rather the critical
interrogation of communication breakdown. The premise of Blood Simple
evolves upon the protagonists' inability to communicate effectively, their
private discourses breeding distrust and confusion that ultimately leads
to the tragic consequences at the film's conclusion. James Mottram observes
that the “four main protagonists, although existing in a unified physical
world, inhabit a separate mental and emotional space that causes repeated
misinterpretations.” (9) With Fargo and The
Big Lebowski the Coens have extended this philosophy of miscommunication
to an ailment of society in which inarticulacy is an observable symptom.
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Raising
Arizona
|
The language styles pursued by the characters in these
films frequently betray repressed or unconscious desires that expose the
value systems of modern cultures. Jeff Evans detects the irony inherent
in the dialogue of Raising Arizona as stemming in part from a gulf
that exists between the florid, loquacious and poetic speech of the characters
and their sparse, homely and modest physical reality. (10)
H.I. (Nicolas Cage) at one point, describes his and Ed's (Holly Hunter)
motor-home existence in the middle of the barren plains of the Arizona desert
as “the salad days”. Raising Arizona is to some extent
about a desire to improve one's position; H.I., a confirmed recidivist,
wants to marry, work, build a home and start a family. He is after the American
dream of prosperity, and in dialogue he has found a way to fabricate a chimera
of success, having failed to achieve it in a material sense. The moral of
the film will finally suggest that this material success is a charade, and
that true happiness and prosperity comes from the modest pursuit of doing
the right thing. This emphasis on the absence of meaning in language is
an earnest critique of aspects of America's culture; of the views and values,
prejudices and hegemonies in these societies. The dialogue in the films
of the Coen brothers offers insight into dominant ideologies, endeavoring
to examine how language works to maintain certain standards and beliefs.
As “regional independents”, Joel and Ethan Coen
have spread their film wings right across the extensive lands of the United
States. Blood Simple and Raising Arizona document the South-West,
Barton Fink and The Big Lebowski are each set in Los Angeles
and Fargo is perhaps the most prominent film ever to capture the
specific culture of Minnesota. The Coens have acquired a reputation for
a certain kind of ethnographic expression through the critical exploration
of particular cultures. Mottram maintains that these film locations are
never arbitrarily chosen but rather the settings “speak on behalf of
the characters; ironically, people who, more often than not, are inextricably
linked to their homeland”, noting that the “heat of Texas in Blood
Simple is symbolic of the moral inferno that the characters find themselves
in.” (11) The use of Texas as a setting for Blood
Simple coincides with the style and concerns of the film's chief inspiration,
James M. Cain. Joyce Carol Oates proposes the moral environment of Cain's
novels is such that:
…one understands how barren, how stripped
and bizarre this Western landscape has become. It is as if the world
extends no farther than the radius of one's desire…To be successful,
such narrowly-conceived art must blot out what landscape it cannot
cover; hence the blurred surrealistic backgrounds of the successful
Cain novels. (12)
With Blood Simple Joel and Ethan Coen use Texas to develop a similarly
surreal environment, of flat, featureless plains, endless highways and stifling
heat.
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The
Man Who Wasn't There
|
The Coens' most recent film, The Man Who Wasn't There, returns to
James Cain as a touchstone, reinventing his fiction through the subversion
of its generic and literary conventions. The Man Who Wasn't There
is set in traditional Cain country—a Californian town named Santa Rosa.
But the Coens are less interested here in representing an authentic Californian
community and more concerned with manufacturing a stylised film noir
cosmos swathed in existentialist apathy and passivity.
Miller's Crossing is also set in an intensely rhetorical world, every
setting seems overly precise and affected, not so much a step back in time,
more like a return to familiar representations from the past. Ethan Coen
declared that in Miller's Crossing “the city's an anonymous
one, the typical 'corrupted town' of Hammett novels.” (13)
Fargo, on the other hand seems to carry with it a documentary authenticity.
The film's prologue—which attests to the veracity of the depicted events—may
be a red herring, but it does acknowledge the film's agenda—the maintenance
of a coherent system of realism. The peculiar snow-capped setting and the
equally exotic Scandinavian-inflected dialogue reinforces the particularly
provincial nature of the representation. Whereas Minnesota is integral to
the design and conception of Fargo, Los Angeles is fundamental to
The Big Lebowski. Josh Levine argues that the Coens populated The
Big Lebowski with types who could not exist anywhere else but “in
the sunny land of complete informalness and surreal juxtapositions.”
(14) The wandering-intrigue narrative of The Big Lebowski
is perfectly suited to experiencing the widely diverse and divergent community
of Los Angeles, a culture equally receptive to doped-out slackers, right-wing
militants, German nihilists, Malibu pornographers and a pederast named Jesus
(John Turturro).
Barton Fink
is also set in Los Angeles but its specific placement in the more particularised
culture of Hollywood allows for a more fantastic conception. Joel and Ethan
Coen's interpretation of Hollywood in Barton Fink is less a denotative
representation and more a symbolic interpretation. The Coens place the eponymous
hero Barton (John Turturro) in a living hell when he sells his creative
soul to a motion picture studio. Barton Fink contains a stimulating
mix of accepted history, anecdotal and apocryphal elements and pure fiction.
A similar methodology is adopted for O Brother, Where Art Thou? which
offers a technically precise and culturally astute recreation of 1930s deep-south
America but frames the narrative using Homer's The Odyssey. The mixture
of historical detail with an archetypal fiction narrative is a postmodern
paradigm. Yet, neither of these films come close to The Hudsucker Proxy
for re-imagining the past. With The Hudsucker Proxy the Coens eschew
all resemblance to reality to produce a remarkably artificial world that
owes almost all of its inspiration to old movies.
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Blood
Simple
|
The films of Joel and Ethan Coen are not merely constructed from the pieces
of other films and references are not drawn solely from the domain of cinema
history. The Coens seek to work with well known source material, extracting
the essence of an author's approach and re-deploying this style within a
different and original environment. With Blood Simple the Coens endeavor
to re-contextualise the basic elements of the James Cain novel. Blood
Simple owes a notable debt to the style of James Cain, but also to film
noir, neo-noir, the tenets of independent film in the 1980s,
the crime genre and the eccentricities of Texas culture. The Coen brothers'
films negotiate the issue of fidelity by furnishing adaptations that reject
a linear relationship to one model or source text. Miller's Crossing
is based loosely on two Dashiell Hammett novels, The Glass Key and
Red Harvest, and it also engages in a more general sense with Hammett's
style and themes. The Big Lebowski is perhaps more ambitious as the
Coens, influenced by Raymond Chandler, fashion a story around the world
of a doped out loser and social-league ten-pin bowling. With The Man
Who Wasn't There, Joel and Ethan Coen return to James M. Cain. But once
again the relationship to their inspiration remains paradoxical. The
Man Who Wasn't There is concerned with transgressing many of film
noir's most important conventions, summarily problematising its connection
to James Cain, a chief inspiration for the entire noir movement.
The Coens have chosen to exclude all emotion from their protagonist, the
monotone Ed (Billy Bob Thornton), to make him as dispassionate and detached
as possible, prompting Graham Fuller to categorise the film “anti-noir”.
(15) Without the crucial elements of passion, desire and
sexuality, The Man Who Wasn't There undermines the very genre that
frames it.
Barton Fink is less a subversion of generic conventions and more
an ironic reexamination of history. It is both a critique of the Hollywood
system then and now, and a reworking of the myth of the leftist artist in
the 1930s. It seems, with Barton Fink, the Coens secure great enjoyment
in debunking the typical celebration of the common man by exposing the egotistical
motives that trump altruistic intention. The Coens subvert the myth of the
suffering playwright with their depiction of Barton Fink as a pompous and
self-absorbed author who is out of touch with the very people he claims
to write for, and about. The Coen brothers have sought to rework and reevaluate
the past by engaging with history in a hyper-critical way. The self-conscious
manner of the Coen brothers' films always foregrounds both history's and
fiction's textuality.
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The
Hudsucker Proxy
|
In the films of the Coen brothers the process of story-telling is often
laid open to exposition and demonstration. Barton Fink is a Hollywood
film set in Hollywood, the hub of American story-telling. The Hudsucker
Proxy is a defiantly referential film that overtly exposes its textual
design; the film's narrator, an initial indication of the text's narrativity,
stops the film midstream and directly addresses the audience. O
Brother, Where Art Thou? foregrounds the narrative framework of its
trajectory in the opening credits when the brothers cite The Odyssey
as the film's basis. With Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy
and O Brother, Where Art Thou? the Coen brothers are highly self-conscious
in the manner of their storytelling. Their narrative tools, particularly
in The Hudsucker Proxy, are often deftly self-reflexive. To insist
on exposing the devices of construction immediately cues the viewer to the
construction of all texts. Linda Hutcheon identifies a mode of “metacinema”
in which the formation process of subjectivity and narrativity has become
a staple. (16) And it would appear that the Coen brothers'
films befit such a classification. Their use of distancing narrational modes
such as voice-over exposition in Raising Arizona and The Man Who
Wasn't There, the direct address prologue in Blood Simple and
The Big Lebowski, and the rigid application of generic convention
in Miller's Crossing are all elements which foreground the construction
processes involved.
The films of the Coen brothers display an acute awareness of history and
its inscription in the texts of the past and the present. Joel and Ethan
Coen do not employ pastiche to resolve a dearth of ideas, they actively
examine the texts they draw from as a means to building a bridge to the
past. The Coens deny the usual mythical constructions, they do not invest
in traditional frameworks of representation, rather they interrogate those
frameworks to examine and expose how they construct meaning. With this process
the films of the Coen brothers are diligent in their investigation of history
and its ideologies. Carolyn Russell argues that:
the Coens make films that are highly self-conscious
of their relationship to preexisting film forms. Their movies rely
upon a base of knowledge, cultural and film historical, that is presumed
to be shared between themselves and their viewers. (17)
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Barton
Fink
|
This assertion highlights the very important manner by which postmodern
representations call upon the reader/viewer to complete the text. The role
of memory, reception and intertextuality are crucial to the design in the
Coen brothers' films. By engaging the texts of the past the directors are
able to challenge and critique history through the agency of parody, irony
and self-reflexivity. This confrontation with history's textual construction
enables an exploration and interpretation of ideologies of the past. Despite
all the criticism of their work—their films are merely about other
films, their work smugly proposes the emptiness at the core of art, they
hide behind style to avoid moral and ethical issues—the Coen brothers
nevertheless set up a connection to history through their pithy investigation
into the texts that represent the past. With their keen approach to historical
periods and texts of bygone eras, and their reliance on irony and parody,
the Coen brothers not only engage with history but they question and challenge
the ideologies by which it is constructed.
When the Coen brothers draw on their vast intertextual
web of references in order to inform their films, as is the case in The
Hudsucker Proxy, they are often accused of elitism; of alienating their
audience by servicing only their own penchant for in-jokes and obscure allusions.
Yet, when they set their films in more realistic and genuine settings, as
in Fargo, the brothers are then criticised for mocking their characters.
Fargo endured a barrage of criticism suggesting that the film's portrayal
of the Mid-West region's people was condescending and exploitative. Talk-radio
audiences in Minnesota complained that the film ridiculed them and their
culture, and McKinney suggested that not only was the dialogue inaccurate
in its representation of the true regional dialect but the application of
it by the Coens served merely to diminish the characters rather than particularise
them. (18) It is true that many of the characters in their
films are foolish or ridiculous but often this is indicative of their disposition.
Ethan Coen declared in an interview the objective of representing Carl and
Jerry (William H. Macy)—the nefarious 'masterminds' of Fargo's
abduction plan—as so inept:
One of the reasons for making them simple-minded
was our desire to go against the Hollywood cliché of the bad
guy as a super-professional who controls everything he does. In fact,
in most cases criminals belong to the strata of society least equipped
to face life, and that's the reason they're caught so often. In this
sense too, our movie is closer to life than the conventions of cinema
and genre movies. (19)
The aspects of Fargo that undermine and rally against film convention
and focus on characteristics more attuned to reality give it a naturalistic
identity. Emphasising a character's ineptitude is inextricably linked to
an expression of reality and need not be evident of a specific agenda to
ridicule a community or a society.
Joel and Ethan Coen are often censured for failing to commit to moral or
ethical positions and chastised for constructing worlds of artificiality.
But the truth is, manifest in Levy's pointed condemnation (located at the
beginning of this essay), the Coens are victims of a critical establishment
which considers visual documentation—film and television—to be
unworthy conveyers of the past. The Coen brothers do know too much about
film, they know enough to recognise the conceits of its processes and to
detect the values that such systems are designed to support. And they know
enough to subvert and criticise these systems in order to construct a valid
and important engagement with the past, encapsulating very effective and
substantial moral and ethical explorations. The Coen brothers' wonderful
ear for dialogue, rigid attention to regional re-constructions, inventive
approach to the past, in addition to their professional skill and adroit
technique has resulted in some of the most enjoyable (and critically worthy)
contemporary films.
© Paul Coughlin, March 2003
Endnotes:
- Yannick Dahan, “From Dream to Reality: The Films
of the Coen Brothers” in Paul A. Woods (ed.), Joel &
Ethan Coen: Blood Siblings, Plexus, London, 2000, p. 176
- Ethan Coen, Gates of Eden, William Morrow,
New York, 1998. See, in particular, the stories “The Old Country”
and “The Boys”.
- John Clark, “Strange Bedfellows” in Paul
A. Woods (ed.), Joel & Ethan Coen: Blood Siblings, p.
121
- Peter Körte, “Looking for a trail in Coen
County” in Peter Körte & Georg Seesslen (eds), Joel
and Ethan Coen, trans. Rory Mulholland, Limelight Editions, New
York, 2001, p. 283
- Todd McCarthy, “The Hudsucker Proxy”
in Paul A. Woods (ed.), Joel & Ethan Coen: Blood Siblings,
p. 118
- Devin McKinney, “Fargo”, Film
Quarterly, 50, Fall 1996, p. 32
- Emanuel Levy, Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of
American Independent Film, New York University Press, London, New
York, 1999, p. 230
- David Edelstein “Invasion of the Baby Snatchers”
in Paul A. Woods (ed.), Joel & Ethan Coen: Blood Siblings,
p. 51
- James Mottram, The Coen Brothers: The Life of the
Mind, B.T. Batsford, London, 2000, p. 20
- Jeff Evans, “Comic Rhetoric In Raising Arizona”,
Studies in American Humor, Ser. 4, no. 3, 1996, pp. 39–53
- Mottram, p. 11
- Joyce Carol Oates, “Man Under Sentence of Death:
The Novels of James M. Cain” in David Madden (ed.), Tough
Guy Writers of the Thirties, Southern Illinios University Press,
Carbondale & Edwardsville, 1968, p. 111–112
- Jean-Pierre Coursodon, “A Hat Blown by the Wind”
in Paul A. Woods (ed.), Joel & Ethan Coen: Blood Siblings,
p. 89
- Josh Levine, The Coen Brothers: The Story of Two
American Filmmakers, ECW Press, Toronto, 2000, p. 140
- Graham Fuller, “Dead Man Walking”, Sight
and Sound, October 2001, p. 14
- Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism,
Routledge, London & New York, 1989, p. 11
- Carolyn R. Russell, The Films of Joel and Ethan
Coen, McFarland & Company, Jefferson, 2001, p. 5
- McKinney, p. 25. The reference to talk-show audiences
complaining about the characters' depiction is cited in Levine, p. 135.
- Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret, “Closer to
Life than the Conventions of Cinema” in Paul A. Woods (ed.),
Joel & Ethan Coen: Blood Siblings, p. 159
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Joel
and Ethan Coen
|
Filmography
Joel
and Ethan Coen as writer, director and producer:
Blood Simple (1983) also editor as Roderick Jaynes
Raising Arizona (1987)
Miller's Crossing (1990)
Barton Fink (1991) also editor as Roderick Jaynes
The Hudsucker Proxy (1993)
Fargo (1996) also editor as Roderick Jaynes
The Big Lebowski (1998) also editor as Roderick Jaynes
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) also editor as Roderick
Jaynes
The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) also editor as Roderick
Jaynes
Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
The Ladykillers (2004)
Joel and Ethan Coen as writer:
Crimewave (Sam Raimi, 1985) also known as Broken Hearts
and Noses, also known as The XYZ Murders
Ethan Coen as writer:
The Naked Man (J. Todd Anderson, 1998)
Joel Coen as assistant editor:
The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1982) also known as Book
of the Dead
Fear No Evil (Frank Laloggia, 1981) also known as Mark
of the Beast
Joel Coen as actor:
Spies Like Us (John Landis, 1985)
Crimewave (Sam Raimi, 1985) uncredited; also known as
Broken Hearts and Noses, also known as The XYZ Murders
Select
Bibliography
References
related directly to Joel and Ethan Coen:
Ronald Bergan, The Coen Brothers, Thunder's Mouth Press, New
York, 2000
Ellen Cheshire & John Ashbrook, Joel and Ethan Coen: The Pocket Essential,
Second Edition, Harpenden, Pocket Essentials, 2002
Peter Körte & Georg Seesslen (eds), Joel and Ethan Coen,
trans. Michael Kane & Rory Mulholland, Limelight Editions, New York, 2001
[contains a reasonably exhaustive bibliography]
Josh Levine, The Coen Brothers: The Story of Two American Filmmakers,
ECW Press, Toronto, 2000
James Mottram, The Coen Brothers: The Life of the Mind, B.T. Batsford,
London, 2000
William Preston Robertson's text edited by Tricia Cooke, The Big Lebowski:
The Making of a Coen Brothers Film, W.W. Norton & Company, New York
& London, 1998
Carolyn R. Russell, The Films of Joel and Ethan Coen, McFarland
& Company, Jefferson, 2001
Paul A. Woods (ed.), Joel & Ethan Coen: Blood Siblings,
Plexus, London, 2000
General References and Articles:
Geoff Andrew, Stranger Than Paradise: Maverick filmmakers in recent
American cinema, Prion, London, 1998
Steven Carter, “'Flare to White': Fargo and the Postmodern
Turn”, Literature/Film Quarterly, 24(4), 1999, pp. 238–244
Jeff Evans, “Comic Rhetoric In Raising Arizona”, Studies
in American Humor, Ser.4, no.3, 1996, pp. 39–53
Graham Fuller, “Dead Man Walking”, Sight and Sound, October
2001, pp. 12–15
Peter Galvin, “I'd Rather Light a Candle Than Curse Your Darkness:
A Bluffer's Guide to the Coen Brothers”, Independent Filmmaker,
Summer 2001, pp. 44–49
Larry E. Grimes, “Shall these Bones Live? The Problem of Bodies in
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Joel Coen's Blood Simple”
in Joel W Martin and E. Conrad Jr. (eds), Screening the Sacred: Religion,
Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film, Westview, Boulder, 1995,
pp. 19–29
David Gritten, “Brothers in Film: An Interview with Ethan and Joel
Coen”, Creative Screenwriting, 6 (1), Jan-Feb 1999, pp. 55–59
Rodney Hill, “Small Things Considered: Raising Arizona and
Of Mice and Men”, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities,
8 (3), Summer 1989, pp. 18–27
Mark Horowitz, “Coen Brothers A–Z: The Big Two Headed Picture”,
Film Comment, September–October 1991, pp. 27–32
Richard T. Jameson, “What's in the Box”, Film Comment,
September–October 1991 pp. 26, 32
Barry Laga, “Decapitated Spectators: Barton Fink, (Post)History,
and Cinematic Pleasure” in Cristina Degli-Esposti (ed.), Postmodernism
in the Cinema, Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 1998, pp. 187–207
Emanuel Levy, Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent
Film, New York University Press, London, New York, 1999
Devin McKinney, “Fargo”, Film Quarterly, 50, Fall
1996, pp. 31–34
R. Barton. Palmer, “Blood Simple: Defining the Commercial/Independent
Text”, Persistence of Vision, No. 6, Summer 1988, pp. 3–19
Katherine M. Restaino, “The Poetics of Dashiell Hammett” in
Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy (eds), The Detective in
American Fiction, Film, and Television, Greenwood Press, Westport,
Connecticut, 1998, pp. 103–110
William Preston Robertson, “What's the Goopus?”, American
Film, 16, August 1991, pp. 18–32
Katherine Sutherland, “Beauty and the Beast, Basic Instinct
and Barton Fink: the Pursuit of Textual Satisfaction”, Textual
Studies in Canada, Vol. 4, 1994, pp. 81–91
Lynne M. Thompson, “Giving Birth to the Artist Within, Barton
Fink's Nod to Stephen Dedalus”, Spectator, 12(2),
Spring 1992, pp. 52–57
George Toles, “Obvious Mysteries in Fargo”, Michigan
Quarterly Review, 38 (4), Fall 1999, pp. 627–664
By Ethan Coen:
Ethan Coen, Gates of Eden, William Morrow, New York, 1998
Ethan Coen, The Drunken Driver has the Right of Way, Crown Publishing
Group, New York, 2001
Articles
in Senses of Cinema
Miller's
Crossing, The Glass Key and Dashiell Hammett
by
Paul Coughlin
O
Brother, Where Art Thou? by Michael Cohen
Web
Resources Compiled
by author
Coen
Brothers Clips
Three .avi
clips from The Big Lebowski.
Coenesque: The films of Joel and Ethan Coen
Straightforward film analysis and biographical information. News on the
site hasn't been updated since September 2002.
Film
Directors - Articles on the Internet
Links to several online articles here. Just scroll down
Gods of Filmmaking: Joel and Ethan Coen
Summary of each of the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, lacking any true
critical engagement.
Official
The Man Who Wasn't There Site
Promotional site.
Unofficial
Miller's Crossing Site
Enjoyable fan site with script, deleted scenes, actor information and
images from Miller's Crossing. Contains a glossary for those who
get lost in Miller's Crossing's tangled gangster jargon.
You
Know, For Kids! The Movies Of The Coen Brothers
Substantial effort at cataloguing a wide variety of information on the
Coen brothers and their films, marred by a poor layout. Includes reviews,
scripts, multimedia and forum. News on the site hasn't been updated since
November 2002.
| Click
here
to search for Joel and Ethan Coen DVDs, videos and books at |
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