The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers by Cathleen Falsani

Author:Cathleen Falsani [Falsani, Cathleen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Performing Arts, History & Criticism, Film & Video, Religion, Christianity, Literature & the Arts
ISBN: 9780310292463
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2009-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

THE TREES

Like one of King David’s millennia-old laments, the song of alienation and suffering sung by Ulysses Everett McGill and the Soggy Bottom Boys, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” eventually becomes the anthem of his salvation. “For in this world I’m bound to ramble,” he sings. “But there is one promise that is given: I’ll meet you on God’s golden shore.”

Throughout O Brother, Where Art Thou? Everett (George Clooney) contends that he has no use for faith, for the superstitious religious beliefs he might well say are the acme of foolishness. But like the voice of the Holy running through human history, the film’s soundtrack of old-timey gospel songs reaffirm the faith that our antihero — an escaped convict desperate to reconcile with his estranged family — constantly ridicules.

The film begins with an invocation from the filmmakers in the opening words of Homer’s Odyssey:

O Muse!

Sing in me and through me tell the story

Of that man skilled in all ways of contending

A wanderer, harried for years on end …

Despite Joel Coen cheekily insisting in numerous interviews that the brothers have never read Homer’s epic poem about the wanderer Odysseus (or Ulysses in Roman lore), the quote seems to be an invitation to the audience to view the story they’re about to see as more than what meets the eye. It is, perhaps, an allegory, the big story of humankind told through the trials and tribulations of one little man, Ulysses Everett McGill. Like The Odyssey, O Brother begins in medias res, in the middle of things, with Everett and the two dim-witted cohorts to whom he is chained, Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro) and Delmar O’Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson), on the run from a chain gang. The trio manages to make their getaway by hitching a ride with a blind black man trundling slowly down the tracks on a hand-cranked railroad car. Here again, in the words of the blind prophet, we understand that this is more than just a slapstick crime caper. Rather, it is a spiritual odyssey. The blind oracle, who calls the escaped convicts “my sons,” prophesies about the future of their endeavor, saying:

You seek a great fortune, you three who are now in chains. And you will find a fortune, though it will not be the fortune you seek. But first, first you must travel a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril, mm-hmm. You shall see things wonderful to tell. You shall see a — a cow on the roof of a cotton house, ha! And, oh, so many startlements. I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward. Though the road may wind, yea, your hearts grow weary, still shall ye follow them, even unto your salvation.

Set in rural 1930s Mississippi, in the throes of the Great Depression, O Brother tells the comically desperate tale of Everett, Pete, and Delmar, who, in addition to being on the run, are on a mission to reclaim a $1.

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