'O Brother Where Art Thou' review - reformatted
halcombe
In the Coen Brothers' New Film, the Dark, Utopian Music of the
American South
By MARTIN HARRIES
The subject of the Coen brothers' movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? is
authenticity and what a tricky thing authenticity is. So it is no
surprise that the filmmakers give their audience a somewhat misleading
set of authentication papers. The film, directed by Joel Coen and
written by Ethan, announces its debts to certain sources right up
front. But are these the most important ones? The more loudly the film
announces a source, it seems, the less telling that source is. To
declare a source is one way to stake a claim to authenticity. Yet the
most obvious sources here -- and the ones critics most often mention
-- seem like jokes. No one can miss the most obvious, Homer's Odyssey;
the opening credits include the text of the poem's invocation to the
muse (in the Fitzgerald translation, for those who care about such
things). And the film recalls that source in several details and
episodes -- in the name of one of its three central characters,
Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), for instance, or in a
sequence where three singing women on rocks seduce McGill and his
sidekicks, Pete and Delmar (John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson), or in
the overall shape of the shaggy narrative, with McGill's return home
to his wife and daughters. Slightly less loudly broadcast is the
film's debt to Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels (1942); that debt
is, correspondingly, a deeper and more resonant one. O Brother, Where
Art Thou? is the name of the film that the central character of
Sturges's comedy -- who has dedicated his career to making films that
sound very much like Sturges's comedies -- tells his troubled
producers that he wants to make. In the Sturges film, the
director-protagonist feels that his O Brother, Where Art Thou? should
be different from his previous work -- a serious picture about the
difficulties of the Depression. He chooses not to make that movie --
he decides the world needs more comedies -- but the Coen brothers have
made it, though their O Brother, Where Art Thou? is surely not the
piece of politically engaged film-making that Sturges's character had
in mind. I will say a little more about Sullivan's Travels, but my
point about Sturges's film and Homer's epic is that these advertised
influences do not have the importance of the one source that virtually
every frame of the film announces and that critics nevertheless have
neglected. That source is the rural music of the American South, as
captured on recordings made before World War II and gathered, most
famously, in Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music
(Smithsonian Folkways). The Coens try to capture a narrative and
visual world imagined through the shards of the sort of dark, utopian
music collected on Smith's Anthology, beginning with Harry
McClintock's "Big Rock Candy Mountain" in the film's introduction.
The film's source in music is hardly concealed. The leading trio, on
the run after a prison break and augmented by a guitar player named
Tommy Johnson, spontaneously forms the Soggy Bottom Boys and records a
song called "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" for quick cash. While they
live lives of picaresque mayhem, their tune takes Mississippi and
beyond by storm; they have unwittingly become famous. Meanwhile, music
is everywhere. Worshipers in white head down to a river singing "Down
to the River to Pray." The sirens sing a seductive lullaby. Even a
wizard of the Ku Klux Klan sings splendidly before the planned
lynching of Tommy Johnson. The music, then, is for the most part what
film critics call "diegetic"; that is, it is part of the action,
however dreamlike and strange, and not the added texture of a
soundtrack. But claiming that the music is diegetic also raises some
central questions about the aims of the film. The music here is
diegetic as the music in Dennis Potter's Pennies from Heaven is; it
serves its function within the film, and yet the spectator remains
aware of a dissociation between singer and song. O Brother's music is
recorded by others and then sung by the film's characters. The
lip-synching is fine, as far as it goes, but one certainly knows that
George Clooney is not the voice we hear singing the lead on "I Am a
Man of Constant Sorrow." As with Pennies from Heaven, the
dissociation of singer from song is part of what the film is about.
Our simultaneous belief that Clooney is and yet cannot be the voice
behind the song poses a serious question at the heart of the movie.
What is the source of this voice? The filmmakers may want the music
to be diegetic -- they may want to represent it at its source, so to
speak -- but the comic disjunction between the apparent singer and the
song recognizes their lack of access to that source. The "real" voice
singing for Clooney is not authentically of the 1930's, for that
matter, but a contemporary singer -- Dan Tyminski, part of the
Nashville early-music crowd that tries to reproduce an "old time"
sound. The standard complaint about the Coens is that they put a
condescending distance between themselves and their characters.
Anthony Lane in The New Yorker complains about O Brother that "you
feel that the Coens are holding up specimens of their own invention,
as if with a pair of tweezers, and saying proudly, 'Look! Amusing
people! Freaky situations, too!' " Lane continues in a passage that
gives away more about the critic than the film: "Still, it's hard to
dislike any motion picture that features the leading heartthrob of the
age ... wearing a false beard the size of a sheepskin and yowling the
song 'I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow' to a crowd of rapturous
rednecks." I wonder how often critics mistake their own distance, or
even snobbery, for that of the Coens. Those quotations from Lane
typify not only one way of getting the Coens wrong, but also reveal
something particular about how a tin ear for the film's music can lead
to misunderstanding the film. Does Clooney yowl this song? Does he,
for that matter, even sing it? Is this an audience of rapturous
rednecks, or of rednecks of any kind? Dwelling on the scene Lane
describes may clarify a number of points about the ambitions of the
film as a whole. The Soggy Bottom Boys have stolen onto the stage at a
political gathering for the reform gubernatorial candidate, Homer
Stokes (Wayne Duvall), who has just been revealed as the K.K.K. wizard
in the previous scene. Stokes recognizes the Boys as the unholy union
of the three white men who disrupted the Klan's rally and the black
man the Klan had intended to lynch, the guitarist Tommy Johnson.
Shouting down their rendition of their hugely popular song, Stokes
makes a speech demonizing their "miscegenated" music. The audience, in
turn, shouts Stokes down, providing an opportunity for the tired and
trailing incumbent governor, Pappy O'Daniel (Charles Durning), who
also happens to be on the spot, to pardon the Boys and to make himself
popular by dancing like a chicken to their music. Many things are
happening here, as this quick summary suggests. But a central point is
that the audience proves itself not to be a crowd of rednecks; the
song may enrapture them, but they also reject Stokes's racist assault
on it, choosing instead to pelt him with food and to send him on his
way. This moment recalls the crucial scene in Sullivan's Travels when
convicts laugh uproariously at a Mickey Mouse cartoon. The Coens,
through this reworking of Sturges, announce the way that music has
provided the model for their practice here: When they bring convicts
into a cinema earlier in the film, they forgo the hilarity and release
of Sturges's scene, saving the rapture for the music. But the
transparently false beard Lane describes at the same time marks a
limit to this rapture. We know Clooney is not an old man from some
Appalachian backwater. We know Clooney is not singing. The star is no
more part of this pop-music utopia than we are. The comedy of O
Brother at once acknowledges what a hoot it is to imagine Clooney and
company as singers of rural music, and at the same time allows its
audience to share the desire to be among those singers. That desire
has led to a lot of confusion and musical garbage, but it has also
contributed to the making of Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. The
difficulty of answering the question of whether O Brother's music is
diegetic is a measure of the difficulty of the game the Coens are
playing. They at once mark the validity of the desire to become part
of a freaky, forgotten, haunted side of American culture and show how
far we are from being able to satisfy that desire. I have written so
far as if none of the characters in the film sings the songs, but that
is not the case. Tim Blake Nelson does sing a version of Jimmie
Rodgers's "In the Jailhouse Now," and, more tellingly, Chris Thomas
King, the performer playing the black blues musician Tommy Johnson, is
in fact a blues musician of some renown. (Other performers in cameo
appearances also sing their own songs.) King's role in the film is a
troubling one; Jonathan Rosenbaum, in a harsh, brief review for the
Chicago Reader, complains that he is one of the film's "expediencies,"
"shuttled onand off-screen as a plot device." The movie falters not
because, as Rosenbaum also complains, it is "contemptuous" of its
characters, but because its canny treatment of the mythologized world
of authentic Southern experience stumbles in its treatment of black
characters. It is as though a sympathetic critique of authenticity
must stop when it arrives at the door of African-American culture and
music. King's Tommy Johnson gets to be the real musician, but, as a
result, he is a cipher as a character. Most traces of any particular
identity disappear in Johnson's role as guarantor of unquestioned,
even mythical, authenticity. (Like Robert Johnson, the blues musician
for whom he is named, Tommy Johnson learns his music from the devil at
a crossroads.) The Coens have discovered a whole new reason to make a
black character a secondary figure: Because he is the film's symbol of
pure music at its source, he can't actually do a whole lot. Unlike the
other characters, King is the blues singer he plays, and therefore
fits only awkwardly -- or, as Rosenbaum complains, only expediently --
into the phantasmagoric texture of a film that celebrates the odd
condition of knowing that one cannot attain the authenticity one
desires. In an essay included in the compact-disc reissue of Harry
Smith's Anthology and excerpted from his book Invisible Republic,
Greil Marcus writes that Smith's collection of ballads "dissolve a
known history of wars and elections into a sort of national dream, a
flux of desire and punishment, sin and luck, joke and horror -- and as
in a dream the categories don't hold." At its best, O Brother, Where
Art Thou? captures that dreamlike quality, as when the film manages to
extract humor and pathos from his companions' apprehension that the
sirens have turned Pete into a toad. In many respects, however, the
film's most disturbing moment, musical and otherwise, is when the
Coens put "O Death," a haunting a capella prayer sung by Ralph
Stanley, into the mouth of the Klan wizard Stokes. "O Death," sings
Stokes/Stanley before a group of Klansmen in formation, "won't you
spare me for another year?" That sentiment, and the very fact of such
compelling musical expression, seems more appropriate to Tommy
Johnson, whom the Klansmen are preparing to lynch. It is hard to know
what the disjunction between singer and song means here, and easy to
feel that one does not want this character dignified with such exalted
expression. The lack of fit between singer and song that works as a
thoughtful and funny joke in the case of Clooney appears here as
something grim. The moment may be simply thoughtless, an erasure of
racial violence in a homogenized picture of Southern rural culture,
where even K.K.K. wizards sing beautifully. The K.K.K. rally dissolves
reassuringly into comedy, and our heroes survive. Or one might
speculate that the scene is one more turn of the screw in the Coens'
representation of authenticity. Not only do we not have access to the
culture conjured by this lost music, but, in the end, we might not
want that access at all. Martin Harries is an assistant professor of
English at New York University and the author of Scare Quotes from
Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of Reenchantment,
published last fall by Stanford University Press.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B14
2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://brisbin.net/Nanci/archives/2001/01204.html
Ian Galbraith
wrote:
>An interesting review from which I've removed the unsightly blemishes:
Now try putting paragraphs in. From what I read it looks like a good
review but........