A Serious Man, the Film by and about Coen Brothers

aseriuosman

I have been thinking about this film for a couple of days, a serious work of art. This is not a nostalgic flick, nor is this a sugar flavored tale set in the old country. This is a very personal film about St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis. The film is set in 1967, the year the character of the movie Danny Gopnik and the older brother Joel Coen had his bar mitzvah. Although 1967 is not mentioned in the film, the brothers are very specific, in an interview they said “if it was 1966 or 1968 it would have looked differently”.

There is this idea promoted by Tyler Cowen (another misspelling of Cohen?) in his blog and in his latest book. He speaks of the new Internet Autism. Tyler says that autistic people channel the world, they ignore and block-out vast areas of human experience and instead focus intensely on a specific channel. Hence the new Internet Autism that enables all of us to channel and remix the news and the information stream hyper locally and super narrowly and autistically ignore the rest. Perhaps now I have the key to the body of their work. The Coen Brothers are autistically sensory, they recognize the smells, the images, the sounds, the faces, the tension with the goy next door, the village hottie, the inevitable uncle with an intestinal problem, etc. And this is the reason their (and Tarantino’s films) resonate so viscerally today when this sensory range is at the forefront of the contemporary culture. But the curse of the Jewish is in the Text, it autistically ignores precisely the sensory range so dominant in Coen’s (and Tarantino) films. This is in a nutshell is the age old problem with Jewish education and tradition, sometimes mislabeled as the problem with the “Jewish Religion” (although it’s hard to separate the two).

And so the Coen Brothers created a personal epic, the most meaningful film about suburban Jewish America. Granted I see the film through the eyes of Danny Gopnik, not his father Larry who is the main character of the movie. After all this is the personal vision at the heart of the story.

Larry Gopnik in his class

“A Serious Man” is the most amazingly textured film that condemns the textual. The horror and the dull ugliness of a Midwestern suburbia recreated with the vividness of a sensitive teenager. The minor characters bulge to the screen as grotesque exaggerated caricatures with comic bodies and movements. Those minor characters hold the film together, the story is framed in between the visits to the three Rabbis. And then there is the musical channel, the Jefferson Airplane song “Somebody to Love” takes turns with a Yiddish song. In an interview the brothers said it was the musical backdrop – “rock ‘n’ roll and the Cantorial music”. And this brings us to the channel that is autistically tuned off by Danny Gopnik, the day school and more broadly the textual. He sits in his Hebrew class with a secret radio plug in his ear and goes through school, and specifically through his bar mitzvah ceremony in a pot induced daze.

The film opens with a rashi quote: “accept with simplicity everything that happens to you”
( תמים תהיה עם ה’ אלקיך (דברים י”ח : י”ג
התהלך עמו בתמימות ותצפה לו, ולא תחקור אחרי העתידות, אלא כל מה שיבוא עליך קבל בתמימות, ואז תהיה עמו ולחלקו

Larry Gopnik, the father, enters a Kafkaesque plot preempted by the five-minute Yiddish mini-film. An episode with the Dybbuk somewhere between Lvov and Lublin. And although there is no obvious connection to rest of the story, I see it as an announcement by the Coen brothers that the film is about Jews who call themselves ivrim because they are m’ever, from the other side of the river and everything they do is connected to what happened elsewhere, i.e not here. Ethan Coen said “it feels right”. The paradox of this film is that you are not really sure if this is a comedy or a horror. I am leaning and landing on the horror side of the river.

Danny Gopnik meeting Marshak

P.S. Notes from the nitpicking department (blame Scarsdale Rabbi Dan Sklar, the consultant):

If you are in Poland don’t mix Polish and Litvish Yiddish dialects.
Dybbuk is the Amercan projection on the Polish Yiddish culture (even though the original movie Dybbuk was produced in Poland), you could do better to authentically evoke that time .
In Poland they wouldn’t call the holy town of Lemberg, Lvov (this is the Russian name of the town after the Ukrainian Lviv).
Mrs. Gopnik, not having a get doesn’t mean you are an aguna.
The character of the 3rd Rabbi Marshak. My guess is that the prototype was Rabbi Jacob Twerski? I doubt he had an open Sephardic style Sefer Tora with a human skull lodged in it, nor is Rabbi Jacob Twerski going to have a reproduction of the 1601 “The Sacrifice of Isaac” by Caravaggio on his wall. But knowing the Twerskis, he indeed could have had some strange animals in formaldehyde around.
The suede yarmulkes (and those metal clips) were not yet invented in 1967.