Of the many recurring themes in the works of Joel & Ethan Coen, the idea that is grappled with most often, the one that shows up in almost every one of their movies, is death. It appears as inciting incident, as in Marty’s death in Blood Simple, as triumphant climax, as with Small’s death in Raising Arizona, and as over-the-top joke, like the famous “Thomson Jitterbug” in Miller’s Crossing. Even in the Coens’ comedies, death looms. Burn After Reading climaxes with the brutal murder of Richard Jenkins’ innocent gym manager, The Hudsucker Proxy opens with a suicide, and O Brother Where Art Thou features the constant threat of death from hanging, fire, and being turned into a toad.
The movies listed above all touch on death to varying degrees, but many of their films, works like Fargo or True Grit, have plots and themes that are even more explicitly rooted in death and its effect on lives.
No Country For Old Men is the Coens’ clearest statement on a theme they’ve been playing with their whole lives: the sudden brutality and random nature of death. Inside Llewyn Davis is a film about the aftermath of a suicide, about grief and self-loathing and the loss of control it brings.
This brings us to the Coens’ latest: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, released earlier this year on Netflix.
The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs is not only a film entirely about death, but a film that attempts to encapsulate everything the Coens want to say about it. Given all of the above, it is unsurprising that Joel & Ethan could not contain all of their thoughts on the subject in a single story. Hence, Buster Scruggs’ anthology format, each story facing a different facet of the central theme. It is also unsurprising that these stories revisit aspects of death that Joel & Ethan have explored before.
In fact, watching Buster Scruggs is like taking a crash course in the Coens’ approach to death, each vignette touching on one of their core ideas, exploring it, and revising it.
I. Death as power struggle
The first tale, the titular Ballad of Buster Scruggs, is a straightforward gunslinger story. Buster is the fastest gun in the west. He rides into town, kills anyone who crosses, offends, or challenges him, and is ultimately destroyed by someone just like him, a sharp-shooter looking to be the top dog. Thematically, this is old ground for the Coens’. This is death as power. The ability (or inability) to efficiently snuff out life confers control and domination of any situation to Buster. He’s a little ridiculous in his white suit with his guitar and his songs, but he can afford to be. Anyone who challenges him winds up dead.
Death as power is one of the oldest ideas in the Coens’ playbook. Blood Simple, Crimewave, Fargo and True Grit all touch on it. Miller’s Crossing is entirely concerned with the control that comes with a willingness and ability to kill, and is ceded when that willingness slides. In No Country For Old Men’s Anton Chigurh the Coens’ explore the idea that even this control is limited, ultimately relinquished to fate, either by choice with a coin flip, or by violence with a car crash. Buster, on the other hand, only loses control when someone more skilled comes along. Rather than delve into the complex ways in which control can slide, Buster’s story offers us a simple lesson: If you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
But that’s not to say Buster doesn’t have a larger point to make. From the first moment of the segment, Buster is presented as cartoonish, larger than life. His white suit, the way his voice reverberates off the canyon, perfectly providing him with harmony. He is the only character in the movie to break the fourth wall, addressing the audience directly. We see him deal out cartoon violence, stylized and goofy, void of consequence. Then when he dies, he becomes an angel and harmonizes with his murderer as he flies up to heaven. Even Buster’s own death is silly and consequence-free. Like something out of Tom & Jerry.
The point is clear: This approach to death, as a simple means of control, clean and unmessy, is a cartoon. This first story sees the Coens’ looking at their own early approach to death and dismissing it as juvenile and unrealistic. Like Buster and his eventual murderer: everything is black and white.
To further this point, this is the only time the Coens’ show us a lead character’s death on screen. Many other characters will die in this movie. But this is the last time we actually see a protagonist’s final moment. This choice seems to suggest that the Coens’ don’t just see their own former approach as juvenile, but any attempt to grapple with death by direct depiction as a lost cause. We must approach death in cinema as we approach it in our own minds: circumspectly.
II. Death as a punchline
If Buster Scruggs’ tale felt familiar to Coen fans, the story of James Franco’s nameless, hapless bank robber is like déjà vu. The story of a “numbskull” (to use the Coens’ term) botching a robbery and narrowly avoiding death, only to get his comeuppance at the hands of fate is a story the Coen’s have told before. The closest comparison is, of course, Oh Brother Where Art Thou, but there are shades the rest of the “Numbskull Trilogy” (Hail Caesar! and Intolerable Cruelty) alongside Raising Arizona, The Ladykillers and Burn After Reading.
When these movies deal with death, they treat it in one of two ways; either as a surprising, ridiculous, threat, such as the barn fire in O Brother Where Art Thou, or as a punchline, as in John Goodman’s death by burning cross in O Brother or The General’s death in The Ladykillers. In these movies, the Coens’ treat near-miss deaths as evidence of the unlikeliness of a life, and actual death as the inescapable finale in the comedy of errors that is human existence.
In the brief tale “Near Algodones”, we see both of these approaches. Franco’s Numbskull is first strung up from a tree, sat astride a horse. He is saved from immediate execution by the sudden attack of a group of Native Americans, but left in a dangerous predicament as the horse moves further and further from the tree, drawing the noose tight. This is the first approach: death as a threat, the potential consequence of the ridiculous, unexpected, scenarios our hero finds himself in.
After escaping punishment for a crime he did commit, Franco is then captured and sentenced for a crime he did not commit. Again, the punishment is hanging. After his previous experience, Franco’s character is cocky, even asking his fellow sentencee “First time?” But this time, the sentence is carried out, and we cut to black as the rope snaps taut. Like the deaths mentioned above, the suddenness of the act, the arrogance of Franco, the unlikeliness of his tale all add up to make the death a joke. A punchline to the literal gallows humour of the story. The tone of the whole piece is as lighthearted as the Coens get. We are laughing along, amusing ourselves with the absurdity of both life and death.
However, much like our first story, “Near Algodones” is not interested in simply retreading this old ground. Again the Coens’ take a look at their own earlier approach and, while not entirely dismissing it, cast some doubt as to their belief in it.
While every aspect of “Buster Scruggs” seems designed as a dismissal of its core conceit, a few simple shots are enough to cast doubt on the comedic approach of “Near Algodones”. Right before the blocks are kicked out from under our hero’s feet, he sees a pretty girl, looking lovingly back at him, we see hope and beauty in his eyes. Then we cut to black, and the audience applauds.
With just these few simple shots, the punchline is transformed from comedic to tragic. Approaching death as a ridiculous performance, as an over-the-top stakes-raising gag, requires that we strip our heroes, at least a little, of their humanity. And when that humanity is reintroduced, we see the performance for what it really is. The brutal ending of a life, for the pleasure of a calloused audience.
III. Death In Art
“Meal Ticket” is where The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs turns on you. Having moved swiftly through gleeful, reckless violence and darkly comic, the tone shifts again, and now no-one is having any fun. With the echoes of that final, tragic cut of “Near Algodones” ringing in your ears, “Meal Ticket” thrusts you into the miserable life of Harrison, an entertainer, an orator who, without arms or legs, is forced to rely entirely on his impresario, a gruff, silent man, played by Liam Neeson. Apart from Harrison’s powerful narrations, the segment is largely silent. We see Neeson’s character set up the stage, collect money, take the stage down, help Harrison to eat, and piss.
As profits and audience interest dwindles, Neeson’s character spots a successful novelty chicken act. He buys the chicken, and places it alongside Harrison in the back of his carriage. He drives to a bridge, tests the depth of the water with a heavy stone. Our next, and final, shot is of the carriage. The bird sits there alone. Harrison is gone.
Of all the segments in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, “Meal Ticket” is the grimmest and most inscrutable. Neither Harrison nor Neeson’s nameless character offer the viewer any way in. Again, however, this is not unprecedented in the Coen canon. In the course of their three decade film career, the Coens have made only three movies about artists and performers. Barton Fink, Inside Llewyn Davis, and Hail Caesar. All three of these are enigmatic in their own right. Barton Fink, notoriously the hardest Coen movie to read, is inscrutable by design, always hinting at some larger point, but never explicitly stating it. Inside Llewyn Davis has its quiet, unlikable protagonist and its inconclusive stance on his actions, and Hail Caesar uses its own lightweight, throw-away nature as a mask, hiding its message inside insincerity.
Yet each of these movies offers a window into “Meal Ticket”. For Hail Caesar, it can be found in the climatic scene where the fixer Eddie Mannix slaps some sense into his star, George Clooney’s Baird Whitlock.
“You’re going to do it because the picture has worth. And you have worth if you serve the picture.”
Barton Fink and Inside Llewyn Davis both also have scenes where an artist faces an industry bigwig, who confronts them with the reality of their profession. For Barton Fink, it’s one of the Coens’ many “Big Man Behind A Desk" scenes. Barton, having failed to turn in an acceptable script, faces Michael Lerner’s all-powerful studio head, Jack Lipnick.
“You arrogant son of a bitch!”, Jack yells “You think you’re the only writer than can give me that Barton Fink feeling?”
Llewyn Davis’ scene is quieter, more mournful. This time the studio head is F Murray Abraham’s Bud Grossman, and instead of the self-important bluster of Lipnick, Grossman gives Davis his silent, serious attention. “Play me something from inside Llewyn Davis” he earnestly requests. What follows is a beautiful rendition of The Death Of Queen Jane. The camera tracks almost imperceptibly inwards towards Oscar Issac as he pours his heart into this grief-stricken ballad, until his face fills the screen. Its one of the few moments of pure sincerity, of emotional honestly, we see in the film, and it leaves a lasting, powerful impression. When the song is finished, Davis’ raw emotional voice still hanging in the empty air, we cut back to Bud Grossman. He pauses, face impassive, for a moment. Then he speaks.
“I don’t see a lot of money here.”
Bud offers Llewyn a place in a folk trio that he’s putting together, but Llewyn declines.
In these three scenes, spread over three inscrutable movies, we catch a glimpse of the Coens’ struggle with the idea of the artist. They are interested in the idea that an artist’s worth is tied into the worth of their work, and the degree to which that worth is determined by it’s marketability. In “Meal Ticket”, we see these ideas taken to their extreme. Harrison’s value to his gruff protector is entirely determined by his orations’ popularity, and it is only through these orations that we ever see him communicate to the outside world. Ultimately, like Barton Fink, like the potential third member of Bud Grossman’s trio, Harrison is replaceable, interchangeable. In Eddie Mannix’s terms, he has worth because the picture has worth, but the inverse is not true.
In Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, the commercial success of Soggy Bottom Boys’ recording gets them pardoned, but not saved. The pardon is rejected by their would-be executioners. It is only fate that saves them. In the world of the Coen’s, art cannot save you, but it can condemn you. Art can condemn you to Barton Fink’s world of incomprehensible fear and frustration, to Llewyn Davis’ lonely life of obscurity and guilt, to Baird Whitlock’s brainless obedience. Or, in Harrison’s case, to all of the above. A life lived in service to a capricious benefactor, who can just as easily end your life as prolong it. Like the chaos at the end of Barton Fink or the endless loop that Llewyn Davis seems to find himself trapped in, Harrison’s death shows us the misery that an art lived for life leads to when your work stops being valuable to others.
This thesis seems to hold regardless of the Coens’ actual opinion of the art in question. They depict Davis’ song with reverence and love and Whitlock’s movie with fondness and nostalgia, but have a more cynical view of Fink’s scripts (which we never see). Harrison’s orations are presented as dramatic, and sometimes having quite dramatic effects on their audiences, but in the end, their effectiveness wears off. Eventually, the art’s impact is lessened. His performances are treated with some of the nobility of Davis’, seeming to offer a crumb of comfort for the artist. At least, in some small way, your efforts are not in vain. You do have an effect on lives, even at the expense of control over your own.
It is in “Meal Ticket” that we start to get a sense of the bigger picture that The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs is aiming at. In order to make sense of death, we have to understand life. Harrison’s death mimics his life both in its bleakness and cruelty and in its dependence on his performance. Death is not merely a means of controlling life, nor is it the punchline to life’s joke, it is an inextricable part of life.
The second half of the film, begins to explore the ties between life and death, their uncertainties and their cruel truths.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this essay, where we talk about the second half of Buster Scruggs, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Man Who Wasn’t There and A Serious Man, and come to about as much of a conclusion as you can expect from those damn Coens.
