The Cinema of the Coen Brothers by Jeffrey Adams

Author:Jeffrey Adams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, ART057000, Art/Film & Video
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-07-14T04:00:00+00:00

Marge investigates the crime scene.

Blood Simpletons

Along with the pervasive humour of incongruity, the Coens include the usual grab-bag of in-jokes. There is, for instance, an off-colour reference to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) in Carl’s tasteless witticism in answer to his escort’s query about why he is in Brainerd: ‘Just here on business, in and out, you know, “the old in-out”’ (in A Clockwork Orange, a euphemism for sexual intercourse). There is also an oblique nod to the Coens’ actor friend Bruce Campbell, famous for his roles in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series. Campbell had appeared previously in Crimewave, the Coens’ early collaboration with Raimi, after which he took a bit part in The Hudsucker Proxy. The soap opera Gaear watches at the cabin hideout is a clip taken from the actual lowbudget TV show called Generations which aired on a Detroit channel in the 1980s and featured Campbell. An equally obscure tribute to a friend and collaborator is found in the end credits, which identify the unfortunate motorist Gaear shoots in the back with the symbol for ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’, a native of Minneapolis, but actually played in the film by J. Todd Anderson, the Coens’ storyboard artist. Another obscure but perhaps more meaningful insider’s joke concerns Marge’s longlost admirer, Mike Yanagita, whose name has been interpreted by some as a reference to the Japanese cultural anthropologist Yanagita Kunio, whose research focuses on folk tales and legends narrated in regional dialects (Rowell 2007: 193).

Entertaining as such in-jokes might be, a fundamental and certainly less subtle source of humour in Fargo is based on the astonishing stupidity of the criminals. Indeed, much of the comedy in the film results from the absurd simple-mindedness of its hapless bad guys. ‘One of the reasons for making [the criminals] simple-minded,’ Ethan explains, ‘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’ (Allen 2006: 80). Joel elaborates: ‘We were trying to bring both the villains and the hero down to a recognizable, ordinary scale. The hero isn’t a super-cop; she’s a very real ordinary person with ordinary and mundane concerns’ (Allen 2006: 82). Two years after Fargo’s release, Sam Raimi made A Simple Plan (1998), a noir blanc set in Minnesota featuring Billy Bob Thornton in a Coenesque story of ill-fated criminal scheming by backcountry dim-wits. Like Raimi’s bunglers, none of the players in the Coens’ crime farce can carry out a simple plan. Jerry’s plot is initially undermined by Carl’s absent-minded inattention to the Ciera’s license plate. His failure to handle the problem by bribing a state trooper results in Gaear’s impulsive violence and the deaths of three innocent people. Wade’s obsessive need to

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