The idiotically criminal universe of the brothers Coen.

Davis, J. Madison

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STORYTELLING GENRES satisfy a psychological need in those who consume them; otherwise, they could not be genres. The traditional romance novel tells us that love is ideal, unyielding, and sexy. The stories provide an ideal its readers can aspire to, a refuge from the belches and forgotten anniversaries of real-life relationships. The Golden Age mystery proposes another ideal: a rational and orderly world in which murder will out and justice is served. It tells us that the universe is not an amoral hurly-burly, despite our nagging fear that it is. As various subgenres of crime writing evolved, the subgenres were perpetually redecorated with different characters, settings, and criminal schemes, providing a constantly evolving panoply of fictional crime that satisfies various needs at different times. Many of them are so dark in their implications that the original salve which soothed our fears has been replaced.

Most crime novelists settle into a comfortable niche and, to a greater or lesser degree, repeat themselves to feed both their own inner needs or those of their book-buying fans. Some try different styles and approaches under different pseudonyms: Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark; Edith Pargeter writing as Ellis Peters.

Even then, we can often perceive insistent obsessions under the masks. Joel and Ethan Coen have centered almost all their films on crime, and their inventiveness has quickly created a list of films that includes several masterworks. Yet the Coen brothers, a brilliantly creative two-headed beast, have maintained a consistency in their work that one might describe as a bemused noir. Their main characters are usually lovable idiots who find themselves drawn into various criminal enterprises. Like most noir heroes, they have no way to escape their fates, but their unjustified faith in their own cleverness erodes the implications of tragedy that usually characterize noir vehicles. We are allowed to think these people are funny in order to avoid thinking we are not just as subject to similar weaknesses and random misfortunes.

Their first film was inexpensive. Blood Simple (1985) is the story of a bar owner who hires a private detective to murder his adulterous wife and her boyfriend. Even this brief summary exposes the noir provenance of this tale. The title comes from Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1929) and describes a state of confusion brought on by violence. In the original release of Blood Simple, an explanation of the term appeared over black at the movies beginning. Some years later, the brothers re-edited the film. Spouses arranging murder is reminiscent of novels like James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936), but we also see the noir theme of people caught up in their own inflated misconceptions of themselves and underestimation of others, driven to act without really knowing why. Some films demonstrate brilliance in twisting a familiar form into a new shape. The Coens would go on to do that a lot. However, Blood Simple stays well within the genre but never seems derivative because of the convincing and clever way it presents this story. You quite often know when a thriller is supposed to deliver a surprise, but for it to truly surprise and yet to seem integrated to the traditional elements of the genre is an artistic accomplishment.

The caper film, in which the main characters attempt to pull off some kind of "impossible" theft, is particularly suited to the Coen sense of humor. The Coens were involved in two remakes of British caper films, The Ladykillers (2004) and Gambit (2012), which were both considered flops. Criticized for being overly broad, The Ladykillers, starring Tom Hanks, was considered a poor adaptation of the original film (1955) starring Alec Guinness. Gambit was based on a 1966 movie starring Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine. Starring Colin Firth and Cameron Diaz, Gambit is broad as well, but in a 1960s wacky sort of way. An impecunious art expert tries to scam an obnoxious billionaire played by Alan Rickman. There are the usual caper tricks, in which the plan goes apparently awry only to reveal another level of the scheme. The Coens wrote but did not direct or edit Gambit, yet a number of its traits are familiar from their films. Its hero is a lovable schlemiel opposed by a wincingly evil character. Though the characters think they have everything figured out, unforeseeable twists endanger the schemes, as if to say that the universe has no inherent order, at least none that humans are capable of predicting.

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), for example, has an earnest rube (Tim Robbins) trying to live out a Horatio Alger life. He is drawn into a dirty stock scheme by an executive (Paul Newman) and triumphs in spite of--or perhaps because of--his idiocy. Raising Arizona (1987) tells the story of a dimwitted petty criminal (Nicolas Cage) who contrives a kidnapping scheme out of love for a policewoman, his wife (Holly Hunter), only to be pursued by a fearsome and unstoppable biker detective on a motorcycle. As different as is the relentlessly dark No Country for Old Men (2007), it nonetheless has a similar correspondence of characters. Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) is the sympathetic fool this time. He thinks he can get away with the money sought by Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Chigurh is less a character than an irresistible force of evil. The pattern also holds in the Academy Award-winning Fargo (1996), as an embezzling car salesman (William H. Macy) arranges the kidnapping of his wife to get the money to save himself. He hires two oddball criminals: one (Steve Buscemi) pretty much another idiot and the other (Peter Stormare) a stone-cold killer not unlike Anton Chigurh.

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Perhaps the most interesting variation on traditional noir patterns is that of The Big Lebowski (1998), a movie with a devoted following. As comical as it is, its title tells us it derives from The Big Sleep. After the success of Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel and the Bogart and Bacall film, "The Big" became titular code words for noir detective stories like The Big Heat (1953, dir. by Fritz Lang). In the initial run of Dragnet from 1951 to 1959, every episode but the first was entitled "The Big" something: "The Big Beating," "The Big Squeeze," "The Big Excuse," and, my personal favorite, "The Big Little Jesus," a Christmas special. The hard-boiled detective story is so familiar a style and pattern it is easy to mock the once-thought-realistic seriousness of it--especially when it becomes as self-important as radio and television's Dragnet. Variations on the style have produced interesting films like Robert Altmans The Long Goodbye (1973), lighthearted television like The Rockford Files (1974-80), or even the outright farce of Dragnet starring Dan Ackroyd (1987).

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At first, The Big Lebowski doesn't seem much like its forebears, but its echoes of The Big Sleep manifest themselves throughout. The decadence of Chandler's Los Angeles is evoked almost immediately. The very rich General Sternwood of Chandler's story is in a wheelchair. So is Jeffrey "The Big" Lebowski. They both have daughters who are in rebellion. Both plots involve a pornographer. There are echoes of other Chandler novels in the libidinous young wife of a rich old man and the detective being sent as the intermediary to pay extortion. The joke in The Big Lebowski, however, is that "The Dude" (in the role of detective) is a potheaded loser, another lovable inept. According to the narrator, the Dude is the laziest man in Los Angeles, "which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide." Nonetheless, the Dude survives beatings and danger to solve the case. The Big Lebowski thus evokes the recurring noir theme that we are not in control of our destinies. "The Dude abides," but to mistake that for justice or a meaningful principle is foolish.

The Coens' imaginative use of subgenres is obvious in Miller's Crossing (1990), a gangster film that draws from Yojimbo (1961) and its western adaptation, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), as its hero, a deadly killer, gets caught between warring gangs. Fargo, as mentioned earlier, is built around a caper plot, though it avoids being as lighthearted as most caper films by incorporating elements of the police procedural as a very pregnant policewoman investigates the crime. Burn after Reading (2008) incorporates elements of the espionage story with foolish moneymaking schemes by hilariously stupid characters. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000; the title of which derives from Preston Sturges's 1941 film Sullivans Travels) uses Homer's Odyssey as a plot spine to tell the story of dim-witted escapees from a chain gang, evoking such films as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Cool Hand Luke (1967). Perhaps the most purely noir film done by the Coens is The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), released in black and white, set in 1949. A small-town barber (Billy Bob Thornton) blackmails a man who is having an affair with his wife and ends up in the electric chair when things go wrong. One is again reminded, in a broad way, of The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

Perhaps, as with every fortune, there is a crime behind most film plots, but it is even more true of the Coens'. Their remake of True Grit (2010)--far superior to the 1969 original--concerns the pursuit of a murderer. Even the surreal Barton Fink (1991) has a noirish murder and ends with the possibility that Fink is carrying around a head given him by a serial killer. Only a couple of Coen films do not explore the possibilities in noir crime: A Serious Man (2009) and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013). One can recognize the noir universe characteristic of their films in these, but not much in the way of crime-story conventions. As with the work of Alfred Hitchcock, the consistent level of their work makes the selection of their best film an always-arguable issue. They have done such fine work exploring the possibilities in crime stories, and especially noir, that one hopes their best film is yet to be made. Hip deep in a flood of dreary and unimaginative knockoffs, we can always look forward to the Coen brothers' next inventions.

University of Oklahoma

J. Madison Davis is the author of eight mystery novels, including The Murder of Frau Schutz, an Edgar nominee, and Law and Order: Dead Line. He has also published seven nonfiction books and dozens of short stories and articles, including his crime and mystery column in WLT since 2004.