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The Philosophy Of The Coen Brothers

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Author by : Mark T. Conard
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2009-01-01
Publisher by : University Press of Kentucky

ISBN : 9780813125268

Many critics agree that Joel and Ethan Coen are one of the most visionary and idiosyncratic filmmaking teams of the last three decades. Combining thoughtful eccentricity, wry humor, irony, and often brutal violence, the Coen brothers have crafted a style of filmmaking that pays tribute to classic American movie genres yet maintains a distinctly postmodern feel. Since arriving on the film scene, the Coens have amassed an impressive body of work that has garnered them critical acclaim and a devoted cult following. From Raising Arizona and Fargo to O Brother, Where Art Thou? and No Country for Old Men, the Coens have left an unmistakable imprint on Hollywood. The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers investigates philosophical themes in the works of these master filmmakers and also uses their movies as vehicles to explore fundamental concepts of philosophy. The contributing authors discuss concepts such as justice, the problem of interpretation, existential role-playing, the philosophy of comedy, the uncertainty principle, and the coldness of modernity. The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers is not just for die-hard Lebowski Fest attendees, but for anyone who enjoys big ideas on the big screen....

The Philosophy Of The Coen Brothers

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Author by : Mark T. Conard
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2008-12-12
Publisher by : University Press of Kentucky

ISBN : 9780813138695

“Written for both fans of the Coen brothers and the philosophically curious, without the technical language . . . educational and entertaining.” —Library Journal Joel and Ethan Coen have made films that redefined the gangster movie, the screwball comedy, the fable, and the film noir, but no matter what genre they’re playing with, they consistently focus on the struggles of complex characters to understand themselves and their places in the strange worlds they inhabit. To borrow a phrase from Barton Fink, all Coen films explore “the life of the mind” and show that the human condition can often be simultaneously comic and tragic, profound and absurd. The essays in this book explore the challenging moral and philosophical terrain of the Coen repertoire. Several address how Coen films often share film noir’s essential philosophical assumptions: power corrupts, evil is real, and human control of fate is an illusion. In Fargo, not even Minnesota’s blankets of snow can hide Jerry Lundegaard’s crimes or brighten his long, dark night of the soul. The tale of love, marriage, betrayal, and divorce in Intolerable Cruelty transcends the plight of the characters to illuminate competing theories of justice. Even in lighter fare, such as Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, the comedy emerges from characters’ journeys to the brink of an amoral abyss. However, the Coens often knowingly and gleefully subvert conventions and occasionally offer symbolic rebirths and other hopeful outcomes. At the end of The Big Lebowski, for example, the Dude abides, his laziness has become a virtue, and the human comedy is perpetuating itself with the promised arrival of a newborn Lebowski. The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers sheds new light on the work of these cinematic visionaries. From Blood Simple to No Country for Old Men, the Coens’ characters look for answers—though in some cases, their quest for answers leads, at best, only to more questions....

The Philosophy Of The Coen Brothers

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Author by : Mark T. Conard
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2008-12-12
Publisher by : University Press of Kentucky

ISBN : 9780813173238

In 2008 No Country for Old Men won the Academy Award for Best Picture, adding to the reputation of filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, who were already known for pushing the boundaries of genre. They had already made films that redefined the gangster movie, the screwball comedy, the fable, and the film noir, among others. No Country is just one of many Coen brothers films to center on the struggles of complex characters to understand themselves and their places in the strange worlds they inhabit. To borrow a phrase from Barton Fink, all Coen films explore "the life of the mind" and show that the human condition can often be simultaneously comic and tragic, profound and absurd. In The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers, editor Mark T. Conard and other noted scholars explore the challenging moral and philosophical terrain of the Coen repertoire. Several authors connect the Coens' most widely known plots and characters to the shadowy, violent, and morally ambiguous world of classic film noir and its modern counterpart, neo-noir. As these essays reveal, Coen films often share noir's essential philosophical assumptions: power corrupts, evil is real, and human control of fate is an illusion. In Fargo, not even Minnesota's blankets of snow can hide Jerry Lundegaard's crimes or brighten his long, dark night of the soul. Coen films that stylistically depart from film noir still bear the influence of the genre's prevailing philosophical systems. The tale of love, marriage, betrayal, and divorce in Intolerable Cruelty transcends the plight of the characters to illuminate competing theories of justice. Even in lighter fare, such as Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, the comedy emerges from characters' journeys to the brink of an amoral abyss. However, the Coens often knowingly and gleefully subvert conventions and occasionally offer symbolic rebirths and other hopeful outcomes. At the end of The Big Lebowski, the Dude abides, his laziness has become a virtue, and the human comedy is perpetuating itself with the promised arrival of a newborn Lebowski. The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers sheds new light on these cinematic visionaries and their films' stirring philosophical insights. From Blood Simple to No Country for Old Men, the Coens' films feature characters who hunger for meaning in shared human experience—they are looking for answers. A select few of their protagonists find affirmation and redemption, but for many others, the quest for answers leads, at best, only to more questions....

The Philosophy Of Neo Noir

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Author by : Mark T. Conard
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2007-01-05
Publisher by : University Press of Kentucky

ISBN : 9780813172309

Film noir is a classic genre characterized by visual elements such as tilted camera angles, skewed scene compositions, and an interplay between darkness and light. Common motifs include crime and punishment, the upheaval of traditional moral values, and a pessimistic stance on the meaning of life and on the place of humankind in the universe. Spanning the 1940s and 1950s, the classic film noir era saw the release of many of Hollywood's best-loved studies of shady characters and shadowy underworlds, including Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Touch of Evil, and The Maltese Falcon. Neo-noir is a somewhat loosely defined genre of films produced after the classic noir era that display the visual or thematic hallmarks of the noir sensibility. The essays collected in The Philosophy of Neo-Noir explore the philosophical implications of neo-noir touchstones such as Blade Runner, Chinatown, Reservoir Dogs, Memento, and the films of the Coen brothers. Through the lens of philosophy, Mark T. Conard and the contributors examine previously obscure layers of meaning in these challenging films. The contributors also consider these neo-noir films as a means of addressing philosophical questions about guilt, redemption, the essence of human nature, and problems of knowledge, memory and identity. In the neo-noir universe, the lines between right and wrong and good and evil are blurred, and the detective and the criminal frequently mirror each other's most debilitating personality traits. The neo-noir detective—more antihero than hero—is frequently a morally compromised and spiritually shaken individual whose pursuit of a criminal masks the search for lost or unattainable aspects of the self. Conard argues that the films discussed in The Philosophy of Neo-Noir convey ambiguity, disillusionment, and disorientation more effectively than even the most iconic films of the classic noir era. Able to self-consciously draw upon noir conventions and simultaneously subvert them, neo-noir directors push beyond the earlier genre's limitations and open new paths of cinematic and philosophical exploration....

The Coen Brothers And The Comedy Of Democracy

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Author by : Sara MacDonald
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2018-12-31
Publisher by : Rowman & Littlefield

ISBN : 9781498555173

Both critically and commercially successful filmmakers, the Coen brothers have written, produced, and directed numerous acclaimed films over the past three decades. Sara MacDonald and Barry Craig demonstrate that their comedies, in particular, which are often dismissed as mere entertainments, actually present substantial philosophic and political arguments. They examine five of the Coen brothers’ comedies: Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou, and Hail Caesar!. In those works, they discover insightful engagements with such ideas as questions of human freedom, the relationship of reason to religion, and the nature of liberal democracy in the American regime. They demonstrate how sometimes explicitly, but generally implicitly, the Coens draw on thinkers such as Homer, Plato, Dante, and Hegel, while simultaneously presenting popular entertainment....

Coen

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Author by : Elijah Siegler
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2016
Publisher by :

ISBN : 1481302833

Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, True Grit--Joel and Ethan Coen make movies. They make movies that matter. But do these movies matter for religion? Coen is a masterful response to this question of religious significance that neither imposes alien orthodoxy nor consigns the Coens to religious insignificance. The Coen movies discussed each receive a chapter-length investigation of the specific film's relation to the religious. Far more than just documenting religion in all Coen films--from blink-and you'll-miss-them biblical references to gospel tunes framing the soundtrack--the volume, cumulatively, mounts a compelling case for the Coens' consistent religious outlook with an original argument about precisely what constitutes religion. The volume reveals how Coen films emerge as morality tales, set in a mythological American landscape, that critique greed and self-interest. Coen heroes often confront apocalyptic and unredeemable evil, face human limitation and the banality of violence, and force audiences to wrestle with redemption and grace within the stark moral worlds portrayed on screen. This is religion on Coen terms. Coen teaches its readers something new about religion, about film, and about the kind of world-making that each claims to be....

The Coen Brothers

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Author by : Joel Coen
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2006
Publisher by : Univ. Press of Mississippi

ISBN : 1578068894

Collected interviews with the quirky and distinctive writer/director team of such films as Raising Arizona, Intolerable Cruelty, and Barton Fink...

Doing Philosophy At The Movies

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Author by : Richard A. Gilmore
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2005-03-17
Publisher by : SUNY Press

ISBN : 0791463923

"Doing Philosophy at the Movies finds the roots of profound philosophical ideas in the relatively ordinary context of popular, mostly Hollywood, movies. Richard A. Gilmore suggests that narratives of popular films like Hitchcock's "Vertigo, John Ford's "The Searchers, Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors, the Coen Brothers' "Fargo, and Danny Boyle's "Trainspotting mirror certain epiphanies in the works of great philosophers. Via Plato. Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Zizck. Gilmore addresses such themes as the nature of philosophy, the possibility of redemption through love, catharsis, the sublime, and the human problem of death. Gilmore argues that seeing these movies through the lens of certain philosophical ideas can show how deeply relevant both philosophy and the movies can be....

Apropos Of Nothing

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Author by : Clark Buckner
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2014-09-30
Publisher by : SUNY Press

ISBN : 9781438452555

Everything you wanted to know about the Lacanian critique of deconstruction, but were afraid to ask the Coen Brothers. The Coen Brothers films are rife with figures of absence. In The Big Lebowski, the Dude does nothing. He is put on the trail of a kidnapping that never happened, and solves the crime when he realizes that he paid the ransom with a ringer for a ringer. The Hudsucker Proxy features a dupe who draws zeros throughout the film, enthusiastically proclaiming, You know, for the kids! Barton Fink is a film that revolves around the absence of a film. In Apropos of Nothing, Clark Buckner appeals to these and other figures of the void in the Coen Brothers films in order to articulate the close proximity and ultimate opposition between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean deconstruction. In the process, he situates both theories in relationship to Heideggers existential phenomenology, and undertakes a comparative analysis of the negativity in death, language, drive, anxiety, visual perception, paternity, and the unconscious. Formulating one of the most theoretically rigorous readings of the Coens oeuvre to date, Buckner also offers a readable overview of some central debates in late twentieth-century continental philosophy....

Joel And Ethan Coen

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Author by : R. Barton Palmer
Languange Used : en
Release Date : 2022-08-15
Publisher by : University of Illinois Press

ISBN : 9780252054143

With landmark films such as Fargo, O Brother Where art Thou?, Blood Simple, and Raising Arizona, the Coen brothers have achieved both critical and commercial success. Proving the existence of a viable market for "small" films that are also intellectually rewarding, their work has exploded generic conventions amid rich webs of transtextual references. R. Barton Palmer argues that the Coen oeuvre forms a central element in what might be called postmodernist filmmaking. Mixing high and low cultural sources and blurring genres like noir and comedy, the use of pastiche and anti-realist elements in films such as The Hudsucker Proxy and Barton Fink clearly fit the postmodernist paradigm. Palmer argues that for a full understanding of the Coen brothers' unique position within film culture, it is important to see how they have developed a new type of text within general postmodernist practice that Palmer terms commercial/independent. Analyzing their substantial body of work from this "generic" framework is the central focus of this book....