Copyright © 2011 by James Clark
There is a motif, in the Coens’ A Serious Man (2009), which greatly helps clear the way toward engaging the sensualist factors of Teshigahara’s enigmatic and important film, Woman in the Dunes. A physics professor has a family that rears up and bites him very hard. But there is one family member, namely, his adolescent daughter, Sarah, whose disturbance of the peace reaches us in a particularly pronounced way. Due to her younger brother’s stealing, in order to buy drugs, her money (obtained by stealing from her generally inattentive father), she proceeds to assail him on many occasions—amidst other complaints—ripping into a narrative flow not really about her. Invariably, she bursts through a doorway, gets into his face and discharges streams of insults and threats on the order of salty longshoremen, not suburban Minnesota schoolgirls. “You owe me twenty bucks, you little fucker! You fucking shit! Brat-Fucker!” is for her just a warm-up for kicks and haymakers and blood-curdling shrieks we soon find to derive from her cagily homicidal mother. Along the way we discover that this extreme heatedness stems from her quite murderous resolve to obtain funding for a nose job. Combined with those startling outbursts, that business with rhinoplasty casts light upon a register of sensibility being pursued by that puzzling movie. We’re carried into the Absurdist territory of Eugene Ionesco’s play, Rhinoceros (with its characteristic inclusion of a less than stellar academic, the Logician). Absurdist theatre being a latter-day instalment of the avant-garde agitation known as Dada, and Dadaism being an important precursor of Surrealism (with its project of evoking the “more real” in the form of the more sensual), we can take a bead upon the Coens’ (only) apparent descent (in A Serious Man) into breathtakingly cutting anti-Semitism, along lines of Surrealist filmmaking, particularly that of Louis Bunuel and a film of his so closely allied to Sarah et al, namely, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).
Rather than preface the highlighting of Serious Man with a detailed display of Discreet Charm’s rather didactic, blue-chip contrarian domain of receding material gratification, we’ll carry through with the Coens’ delirious and fresh twists, and only afterwards more fully secure their historical roots as seen in Bunuel’s prize-garnering inventory. Sarah, a good place to start for many reasons, finds a degree of companionship and solace with her peers in frequently hieing to a spot known as “the Hole.” Many connotations spin from that name; but, in view of her father’s profession, the gravitational tempest known to physics as a “black hole” could be vying with the gratifying pose of slumming—particularly in view of the art direction here, lofting to us a series of variants of black hole imagery. For now, just one more thread will do, to send us on our way into an extraordinarily rich screenplay. A vignette anticipating the tribulations of our clever but outmatched protagonist, Larry, features a long-ago rural couple in a Polish shtetl (or settlement), the wife (referred to, in Yiddish, with English subtitles, as “a ray of sun” but showing only icy paranoia and hate) concluding—after murdering a visitor whom she imagines to be a ghost—“We’re ruined!” Thereupon a graphic of a black expanse rimmed by dim light comes our way. It soon transforms to a young boy’s ear drum being introduced to the transmitter of a portable musical device, during a middle school Yiddish language class presided over by a teacher who would be more at home in a nursing home. The song this Danny and brother of Sarah is listening to, in order to antidote tinctures of a dying civilization, is Jefferson Airplane’s (soon to be Jefferson Starship’s) “Somebody to Love” (opening with, “When the truth is found to be lies…”), a go-to fount of cutting edge in 1967, the time depicted in A Serious Man. The miniaturization of love there would rear up and give us a sharp wake-up kick by way of Sarah’s devotion to “the Hole,” prescient in view of a band that didn’t get started until 1989, namely, “Hole,” as fronted by a hyperphysical figure named Courtney Love. Sarah and Danny may be going nowhere with their schooling and may have contracted a debilitating historical virus putting them by and large out of the running; but the twist as to an anticipatory (possibility) wave of eventuation surpassing the speed of the (Newtonian) realm of actuality puts them in the thick of the singularities of that quantum physics about which their dad professes to be an expert.
More to this latter seam, painfully diffident Larry is never more up to bracing himself with the powers-that-be than in reciting the facts of academic life to a Korean-American student of his (named , Clive) whom he has given a failing grade in view of a fatal deficiency in mathematics. “You can’t understand the physics without the math. That’s the reality. The math is where it really works.” Just before this pledge of allegiance to Newtonian mechanics as mortgaged to math (and as reverenced by, of all people, Einstein!), we see him in a lecture hall rattling off on the chalkboard calculative equations at the bottom of an otherwise covered display area, leading him to crouch awkwardly at his task, almost as if visiting a latrine. “This is part is exciting… So if that’s that, we can do this… the mathematical proof! And that’s Schrodinger’s Paradox!” The strange eventuation at issue for Larry’s class had surfaced in a “thought experiment” by Erwin Schrodinger, designed to expose an absurdity about the charter rendition of quantum reality, pertaining to a complementarity of wave and particle in the actions of quantum mechanics. The story begins with a box containing a single electron. Without anyone looking inside the box, a partition is installed, dividing it into two equally-sized boxes. (Common sense tells us that the electron must be on one side of the box or the other. But radical quantum interpretation tells us that a probability wave is still evenly distributed across both half boxes. That means there is still a 50:50 chance of finding the electron in either side of the box. The wave only collapses, or comes into productive efficacy, with the electron becoming “real,” when somebody looks into the boxes and notices which side the electron is.) The box rests in a room with an electron detector, wired to a device that will emit poisonous gas on detecting an additional electron in the room. Also in the room is a cat. If one half of the box is opened up, by an instrument on a timer, there should be a fifty percent chance that the electron had entered the room, thereby killing the cat. But full-stride quantum theory would argue that the death-dealing particle as linked to a probability wave is solely a function of a conscious human observer. Until somebody looks inside the room, the room contains a cat that is both dead and alive at the same time, or a cat that is neither dead nor alive. (This scandal can be circumvented in accordance with the quantum situation of primordially creative human intent comprising two phases—comprehensive material indebtedness, and subsequent discharging of the debt by specific human intent as prominently entailing its courage to be exposed to an ecstatical plunge toward obliteration. [Larry smugly prates, “You’ll have to bite the bullet on this thing, Clive.”] But here we want to watch what Larry does with the mathematics that verifies the wild paradox as seen from the disposition of common sense, that is to say, outstanding creative indebtedness.)
During the contretemps with the Korean also-ran, Larry sermonizes, “The math is everything. Even I don’t understand the dead cat.” Clive, the petitioner for rewarding non-mathematical illumination—“I understand the cat”—doesn’t factor in the improbability of inducing dogmatic mathematization away from mathematical precedence. “I’ll lose my scholarship. I feel shame.” But in the course of a messy dispute (his father gets into it, and Larry scores some cheap points due to the former’s mispronouncing “culture clash”) that includes an envelope full of bribery money and a lawsuit against the Prof for defamation of character, Clive not only indicates he knows his way around logical matters pertaining to contemporary science, but also that at the same time he intuits, however vaguely, Larry’s Achilles’ heel spilling over from mediocre professionalism—we hear him stumbling to the effect, “The art of the possible [is not math, but instead] is something else… I can’t remember…” (The art of the possible—politics—entails a carnal rather than mathematico-ascetic set of qualities.) At a second interview with the incongruous Physics student, Larry plays the moralist hand regarding Clive’s gift of cash and his suggestion about keeping it “hush-hush.” Larry: “actions have consequences.” Clive: “Yes, often.” Larry: “No, always! Not just for physics but morally.” Clive: “Mere surmise, Sir. Things are very uncertain.” Larry dreams about wowing his students with a Drive-in-screen-scale chalkboard filled with awesome mathematical truths. He imagines himself pronouncing to throngs of callow youngsters actually filing out of the hall with bored looks on their face, “The Uncertainty Principle! … It proves we can never figure anything out! … But you’re responsible for it on the term test!”
In other contexts Larry would be called “a company man.” The Coens seem intent on showing him to be no man at all. Or, at best, a player capable of sensing and addressing lacunae in his life, but not the important lacunae. His wife, Judith, a stay-at-home-mom but also a political adept displaying a flawless control of ruthless reasonableness, determines that she would be much better off married to a neighboring widower, Sy Ableman, whose instinct and appetite for smarm matches Judith’s productive reading of the optimal pillage of a sentimental traditionalist homeland. When Larry hears from her about the Machiavellian shift—prefaced by the expertly sadistic ambiguity of, “You know the problems you and I have been having, Larry…”—he, errs, debating-wise, by squeaking out questioningly, “No one’s done anything?” Upon that, she slides into courtroom probity, “This is not about Whoopsy-Doopsy!” Sy purrs, “No one’s playing the blame-game, Larry…” And they go on to consign him to a nearby motel, the Jolly Roger, liking the adultery optics and embracing their piratical roots. The flim-flam includes Sy’s being right for Danny’s approaching Bar Mitzvah. From out of the rolling religionist axiomatic, Judith, claiming to be pressed by Sy (a rather difficult but giddily unassailable entry into the records, particularly, as she has come into close kinship with the dead-eyed lady in the prologue, slashing at frozen foodstuffs with a ice pick and walking all over her conciliatory husband, Velvel [whom the ghost refers to as “a rational man”], only to deploy the vapid mantra, “Blessed is the Lord,” on believing herself to be “ruined”), depicts herself as requiring not merely a divorce—she in fact empties all of Larry’s bank accounts soon after the moment at hand—but a “get,” a document, presented by a husband to his wife, acknowledging, “You are hereby permitted to all men.”
She had been on record as solicitously urging her F-graded and demoralized husband to consult one of the rabbis at their synagogue, and he does manage to come face to face with a backup, a hyper-oxygenated Junior Rabbi, Reverend Scott, whose equivocal name implies a degree of confusion not apt to inspire his benumbed client. Scott seems barely to have heard of the orthodox notion of a get, but, from out of a sort of Mad Hatter’s hospitality—more accurately, a March Hare’s hospitality (Sy being a sort of Cheshire Cat and Judith a sort of Red Queen), he becomes a sounding board and devil’s advocate for the novice politician. Larry complains, “A bolt from the blue! I don’t know what end is up…” (Earlier, encountering a woman in leg braces and very comfortable with the spiritual resources of Judaism, Larry had mooted some kind of vaguely perceived heresy: “Everything I thought was one way turns out to be the other.”) Scott directs Larry to the bedrock of the faith, namely, that there is no fully satisfying resolution of a collapse like his, and that therefore he should settle for modest gifts, for example, the parking lot visible from the office window. The vaguely wayward young counsellor does float the challenge of attaining to “a capacity for wonder” within mundane facilities, “…a fresh perspective…” But that approach to understanding sails far above Larry’s head, as conveyed by the skills of actor, Michael Stuhlbarg, with facial and bodily emanations of excruciating, frozen chagrin. Despite his wife’s billboard-size self-coronation and readily discernible derangement, Larry reports, “She says things have not been going well… I thought they were… But she’s better at these things.”
Regarding himself as a platinum-list intellectual and thereby claiming a pass, deferring to entities like Judith and the rabbis, on the grubbier precincts of intent, Larry has settled into the historically gratifying interpersonal register of some form of idiot savant—with his bilious smirk and wispy teacher’s-pet voice, and a soul-mate brother, Arthur, sponging off his household as a perpetual guest while developing a mathematical schematism which he calls the Mentaculus, eventually leading Larry to give him the bribe money to get rid of him, and consequently give Clive a passing grade. Clive’s dad, inhabiting a historical circle not so quick to shower honors upon that specialization, tells him, with regard to the seemingly incoherent legal proceedings against him—to which Larry refers, in terms of, “Either he left the money, or he didn’t [cf. Schrodinger’s cat]”—“Accept the mystery.” During a second visit to the synagogue, for a chat with the Mad Hatter, a.k.a., the senior rabbi, the avatar of mysterious uncertainty (in physics) is subjected to a chauvinistic flim-flam about a dentist in the congregation discovering along the inner wall of a goy-patient’s teeth a Yiddish message, “Help me! Save me!” Unfortunately confirming the petitioner’s prejudice about what mystery-talk amounts to, the stand-up comic (only, he’s seated at his desk, sipping tea) continues, “Is it relevant? … Helping others couldn’t hurt… We can’t know everything.” Larry snaps back with unaccustomed rancorous involvement in B-level matters, “It sounds like you don’t know anything! Why are we driven by God to ask questions, if He doesn’t give answers?” The corporate-looking theologian advises, clinging to the dentistry metaphor, as if regretting not having followed up that other career, “Those questions you have are like a toothache. Leave them alone, and they will go away.”
Proceeding with the only feature of the reconstructive ideation making any sense to him at all (since it seamlessly coincides with the conventional logic of imperial science), namely, the helping others that couldn’t hurt, Larry knocks on the door of his neighbor, a woman whose husband “travels a lot.” He announces to her, “I’ve decided on helping others… in a neighborly way… If you need anything…” Though yet another dead-eyed princess—she raises the factor of the neighbors to the other side of Larry’s house (“Goys, aren’t they?”/ “Yes, very much so!” [The guy next door, with whom Larry has been locked into a squabble about the property line, has a blonde crew cut and on a school day, a sore point with Larry, he takes his kid hunting and returns with a shot-up deer slung to the roof of his car])—she moves along with some level of dedication to what she calls “the New Freedom” (“Are you ready to take advantage of the New Freedom?”). Soon they are seated on her sofa smoking her marijuana, and Larry, for whom this was an inaugural event, muses about Reverend Scott perhaps being right. “What did he say?” she murmurs, her face somewhat softened from its baseline of felony investigation. “He said all my problems are a matter of perception.” This under-endowed reverie is interrupted by the siren of a police car bringing Arthur home amidst a web of sodomy charges. (A current playing into such abortive takeoffs involves Danny whining bitterly to his pre-teen schoolmates on their school bus about owing those twenty dollars to a moose-like bully [named Velvel]—the money having been confiscated along with his radio. This like-minded cadre of self-styled devotees to subtle inspirations triggered by drugs, consists of brow-knitted, studiously gutter-mouthed half-pints who come to us as already cemented in middle-aged resentments which all the pot on the planet could never lift so much as an inch.)
In addition to Sy—“Good to see you, Larry… The way we handle ourselves in this situation is very important”—the talent pool of diplomatic mellowness features one of Larry’s colleagues, Arlen, who is the chairman of a committee deliberating on the protagonist’s bid to attain tenure. He periodically materializes at the doorway of Larry’s office, slightly bent over in signalling humility and affixed to the doorframe like a large slug (or hookah-smoking caterpillar). His reporting to the candidate has to do with anonymous and eloquent—therefore, not from Clive—letters the committee has received accusing the petitioner (apropos of basking in peer endorsement) of “moral turpitude.” Arlen is at great pains to assure the science pro these rude raspberries carry no weight with the committee. “There’s nothing to worry about.” On Sy’s death in a car crash, Judith laments copiously and conspicuously, restores Larry to tenure in her heart and while attending Danny’s Bar Mitzvah as a proud and loving parent and wife (where the boy of the hour is destabilized but far from enlightened by a whack of grass, leading to his Yiddish reading coming forth as sonic vomit), she remarks, “Sy had such respect for you. He even wrote letters to the tenure committee.” On completing the drill, Danny is directed to the rabbi emeritus who rattles off the Jewish names of “the members of the Airplane,” and tells him to “be a good boy.” Prefacing his visit with, “Danny was magnificent! Mazel tov! You have to savor it” Arlen simpers—in alluding to the professionalization process during which the candidate remarked, with no discomfort, “I haven’t published anything”—“You’ll be very pleased.”
Surreality in the air, we find a silver lining of sorts in: first, Larry’s probably about to discover, at a hastily arranged discussion of test results with his doctor—a test which we beheld at the outset in its check of one of his ears, as contributing to the spate of black hole imagery—that he has terminal cancer; and second, in Danny and his plague-ridden friends about to be consumed by a tornado bearing down on them while the octogenarian pretending to be a teacher fumbles myopically with the lock on the storm shelter.
The Coens have expended bold strokes upon this twister of a film about “seriousness” that rises above platitude. (The term surfaces from the lips of the forget-about-it senior rabbi, with reference to dulcet Sy, during his funeral service.) That the course of lucidity merely peeps out at us from such dubious sources as Clive (as to quantum physics) and Danny (as to Santana’s Abraxas, as pirated from Larry’s forged record club subscription, along with another, contradictory title, Cosmic Factory) sends us in search of how the sheer awfulness of everyone in sight here infuses the viewer with an activation of some semblance of its direct opposite. We know every player here should shut his mouth and never open it again.
This filmic device of antithesis just about sums up The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Though its narrative of three chic couples more or less cognizant of their indebtedness to marketing illicit drugs does flip forward once in a while some catchy daftness—as when their dinner party is interrupted by a contingent of French army personnel using the grounds of their estate for manoeuvres, and the lot of them takes a marijuana break only to be lectured by one of the cocaine executives that they should mind their ways, pot being known to lead directly to more insidious products—the film as a whole is an exasperating parade of sterile appetites, noticeably lacking the literary bite and scenic startlement of absurdist theatre. You could call this one motion without traction, as compared with the Coens’ piece being traction without motion; but the nasty task they leave the viewer (accentuated by frightful dreams) is much the same.
What can be made evident, however, is the greatly enhanced guerrilla dash of the latter work. It does not simply focus itself, as Bunuel’s film does, toward reflexively assimilating the odiousness of those onscreen, and subsequently discovering within oneself a current of soundness, now primed to attend to its full combative consequentiality. The focus upon a Jewish ghetto first seems to invoke reaction against a special inflection within world history as a whole, namely, Jewish intellectual ambition. Drawn into what appears to be anti-Semitic violence, the viewer is on notice not merely to pounce toward straightforward discrimination but to discover the wider dismay of that classical rational heritage historically spearheaded by Jewish religious, scientific and humanitarian contributions. Against the charge, therefore, of singling out the conventionality of Jewish experience, the Coens have installed their own version of Schrödinger’s cat—both Jewish and global. You can’t know the nature of the deadly and recuperative thrust until there is a specific, explicit critical move made by somebody coming upon the crisis. At the end of the final credits, they have posted the disclaimer, “No Jews were harmed during the making of this motion picture.” And, true to the vigor of their re-engagement with the Surrealist project, the yes and no being elicited here carries us into the true intensity of the danger of such research. That would also account for the inclusion (in overtone) of the saga of Edward Scissorhands, as polaroided into view from the perspective of Larry on his roof, not, of course, installing Christmas decorations, but instead adjusting his TV antenna so Danny can get clear reception of “F-Troop”—a show that would deliver a glancing and accommodating blow to the many fans identifying with it at some level. From that height we behold a post-War suburban street—grass and garage driveways everywhere. That place has its own volatile babe, its own bully, its own strange house guest and its own increasingly regretful host family. What it lacks is the mountain and love. But even inBurton’s take on the creative edge of science, the general population quickly turns into a lynch mob.
There is, however, yet another dimension of the complex shooting gallery the Coens have in store for us. In the aftermath of Sy’s funeral, Larry, now desperately confused, blurts out, “I’m a… a… serious! …I’m trying to be… I’m not an evil man!” In light of the death-dealing calculus hovering over the events, this thread of drama comes in for an eleventh-hour reprieve. In fact posting F-grades is all wrong for this routedness of normality. Ironically distancing the process of the “get” (for Larry, a chain of mathematical “answers”) does not in fact seek to obliterate the enterprise of Judaism, nor the enterprise of globally accessible rationality. A Serious Man addresses a viewer’s capacity to incorporate those ranges of insistence within endeavors the seriousness of which seeks out intrinsically problematic syntheses with tribal motions. The film’s epigraph, “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you,” functions as a concert master’s tuning cue, going into an evening of wildness for which virtuoso simplicity (a very different thing from Larry’s simplicity) is the only way to make it work.
