O Brother Where Art
Thou? (2000)
There is a Bible in every
wanderer's bedroom,
where there might better be
the Odyssey.
James Hillman, ReVisioning Psychology
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Brother
Where Art
Thou?
(2000)
Cast
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The Coen Brothers
Homer’s The Odyssey
Odysseus—the King of Ithaca
Penelope—Odysseus’ wife (a “spinster”)
The Trojan War: The Trojan Horse
The Journey Home:
Scylla and Charybdis
The Sirens
The Cyclops
Circe/Calypso
Defeating the Suiters
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The poet Wendell Berry, in an illuminating essay on "The
Body and the Earth” (The Unsettling of America 97-140),
suggests that the Odyssey's significance for us today is to be
found in its celebration of essentially ecological values: in its
profound understanding of "marriage and household and the
earth." Berry, a writer who has long criticized the unearthly
longing of homo viator and celebrated the holiness of place,
finds inspiration in its hero's "explicit loyalty to a home":
"Odysseus' far-wandering through the wilderness of the sea,”
he reminds us, “is not merely the return of a husband; it is a
journey home. And a great deal of the power as well as the moral
complexity of The Odyssey rises out of the richness of its sense
of home.” Indeed, Odysseus' "geographical and moral" journey,
Berry suggests, can be "graphed as a series of diminishing
circles centered on one of the posts of the marriage bed.
Odysseus makes his way from the periphery toward that
center.”
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From David Lavery, Faith in the
Distance: The Odyssey of Loren
Eiseley (unpublished)
He praises the commitment to placedness implicit in the famous
"secret sign"—a marriage bed made from a rooted tree—by
which Penelope tests and then recognizes her husband's
authenticity. Berry asks us to recall that Odysseus had
embarked on the final leg of his journey home, despite the
temptation to remain immortal in the arms of Kalypso, by
announcing his desire for his wife in these words:
My quiet Penelope—how well I know—
would seem a shade before your majesty,
death and old age being unknown to you,
while she must die. Yet, it is true, each
day I long for home. (125)
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From David Lavery, Faith in the
Distance: The Odyssey of Loren
Eiseley (unpublished)
And when, after Odysseus refuses to accept Penelope's order
to move their bed outside the bedroom—a violation of a pledge
they had made to each other never to do so—thereby identifying
himself as her true husband after twenty years apart, he finds
himself again in her arms, it is, Berry reminds, to the values of
earth that Homer compares the reunion:
Now from his heart into his eyes the ache
of longing mounted, and he wept at last,
his dear wife, clear and faithful in his arms, longed for
as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer
spent in rough water where his ship went down. . . .(127)
As an anti-Iliad, The Odyssey's great theme, Berry writes, is, in
fact, the value which home assumes for its hero because of the
“memory of his absence, of his long wandering at sea . . . and
even . . . the excitement of his adventures.”
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From David Lavery, Faith in the
Distance: The Odyssey of Loren
Eiseley (unpublished)
Giovanni Pascoli's "Ultimo Viaggio,” a 1904 reworking of
the story's materials, seems to have captivated his imagination
most. Pascoli, like Dante, Tennyson, and Kazantzakis, imagined
Odysseus, in keeping with the modern, Faustian temperament,
becoming restless upon his return home and embarking on yet
another voyage —his last voyage—abandoning home again for
the open sea. For Pascoli realized, Eiseley notes, that
"Odysseus' return to Ithaca, his homeward goal, was in a sense
an anticlimax— that the magical spell wrought by Circe would
follow the hero into the prosaic world. But Pascoli's theme is
quite different from that of a Kazantzakis, who likewise imagined
Odysseus returning to the sea, aspiring to become a world
conquering explorer, or a Tennyson, whose Ulysses dedicates
himself forever to be "strong in will,/To strive, to seek, to find,
and not to yield," who desires "To follow knowledge like a
sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” For
Pascoli, Eiseley explains,
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From David Lavery, Faith in the
Distance: The Odyssey of Loren
Eiseley (unpublished)
picks up the Odyssean tale when Odysseus, grown old and
restless, drawn on by migratory birds, sets forth to retrace
his magical journey, the journey of all men down the
pathway of their youth, the road beyond retracing. Circe's
isle lies at last before the wanderer in the plain colors of
reality. Circe and whatever she represents have vanished.
Much as Darwin might have viewed the Galapagos in old
age, Odysseus passes the scenes of the marvelous voyage
with all the obstacles reduced to trifles. The nostalgia of
space, which is what the Greeks meant by nostalgia, that is,
the hunger for home, is transmuted by Pascoli into the
hunger for lost time, for the forever vanished days. The
Sirens no longer sing, but Pascoli's Odysseus, having read
his inward journey, understands them. Knowledge without
sympathetic perception is barren. Odysseus in his death is
carried by the waves to Calypso, who hides him in her hair.
“Nobody" has come home to Nothingness. (Unexpected
Universe; my italics)
From David Lavery, Faith in the
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Distance: The Odyssey of Loren
Eiseley (unpublished)
It was thus Pascoli’s great insight, Eiseley concludes, "to
visualize an end in which the trivial and magicless themselves
are transmuted by human wisdom into a timeless dimension
having its own enchanted reality" (The Unexpected Universe 22;
my italics).
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From David Lavery, Faith in the
Distance: The Odyssey of Loren
Eiseley (unpublished)
INTRODUCTION [to the Screenplay for O Brother
Where Art Thou]
Men it was, in the original Odyssey, that the
Cyclops crushed and flong aside. In its modern
retelling, the movie film O Brother, Where An
Thou?, it is a frog. The revision signals times
different, changes deep.
The Cyclops' incarnation in O Brother, Where An
Thou? is as a one-eyed itinerant Bible salesman;
he discovers a frog cached in a shoebox
belonging to two amiable rustics whom he is in
the process of robbing. The scene, though trite,
is striking for the fact that the imprisoned frog
instantly earns the viewer's identification. But why not? Thumping blindly inside its shoebox,
the panicked frog embodies the modern
condition. . . .
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. . . Modern man, no longer possessing the simple
confidence of the Greek sailors - indeed, bereft of
mission altogether - hops fretfully about, banging
his nose against traits so obscure their very nature
is enigma. And too like box- bound frog, he is alone.
Though he may hear muted thumps from other
boxes far away, it is only desperate surmise that
they betoken the strivings of creatures like himself.
His impressions of the outer world are filtered and
untrustworthy. All that he really knows is the
darkness close by. All that is indubitable is his own
anxiety.
Or perhaps there is one other certain thing. If the
present inspires anxiety, the future inspires dread.
Somehow in his smallness and ignorance yet he
knows his fate. One day the lid shall be lifted from
his shoebox and the light shall pour in - signaling
not, however, that freedom has been attained. . . .
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No, the fresh new air now flooding in shall
prove to be the medium of a being beyond
his imaginings who shall engulf him in a
great godlike grip, and squish him utterly. All
dread is, at bottom, dread of being squished.
If evidence for this is needed, consider our
primal reaction to the sound of the frog
being squished in the movie film. It is the
sound, once familiar in restaurants with hard
tables, of ketchup being squirted from a
sputtering plastic bottle - a red cylinder
whose cone- shaped cap bears, at its pierced
pinnacle, congealing dribs that tell of spurts
and squeezings past.
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The sound of blurted ketchup at once
fascinates and repels us. We used, in company
with our fellows, to confront that sound. The
familiar ketchup dispenser was at one time
found on formica tabletops in every roadside
diner and on stainless-steel counters at every
ballpark concession stand; wherever men
gathered and ate meat, there was its simple
silhouette. The disappearance of these bottles
with their intimations of mortality coincided
(and no coincidence!) with the decline of the
whoopee cushion, whose pseudo-gastric
mutterings likewise foretold the final eruption.
This, literally, is man's end: expelled air jostling
squeezed-out innards as they compete for
egress at every bodily opening. This, the flap
and flutter of air and liquid and solid, is the
sound of man's fate.
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More and more, lately, we have tried to deny it.
Disposable ketchup packets whose contents
may be silently dispensed have everywhere
replaced the communal bottle. Toothpaste
tubes no longer retain the print of daily press
of thumb that, accumulating and overlapping
on the old wax-lined metal tube, would display
its history and by extension predict its demise.
No medicine cabinet now swings open to
reveal tube tail upcurling like fin of sounding
whale. And no more do we use garbage bags
of brown pulped paper that soak up the damp
and rot of their moldering contents. No;
everything we handle now springs out, pops
back, or is quickly swathed in plastic so that
we need not witness its depletion and decay,
so that we may tell ourselves that our own
journey does not spend us, does not bring us
closer day by day to death.
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We lie. Death is ours. Art shall discover this
lie. But we have changed over the millennia
that separate us from the bard whose story
we obsessively retell. His expeditionaries were
small only in relation to giants and the gods;
modern man is small, as it were, absolutely. He
is frog. His world is dark. And his art, when it is
honest, shows him tinged with fear.
In its day the whoopee cushion was laughed at;
so do we seek to conquer our fear. No doubt the
movie film O Brother, Where Art Thou? will
likewise be laughed at, but it is the story, bleak
and true, of man in our time.
Carson's Movie Abstract is a quarterly of
movie synopses compiled for professionals
in the humanities. The foregoing, from the
Fall 2000 issue, is reprinted with permission.
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Coen Motifs:
Howling Fat Men: Pappy O’Daniel, Baby Face Nelson
Blustery Titans: Big Dan Teague
Vomiting: None
Violence: Cartoony variety—Big Dan’s whopping of Everett and Delmar
Dreams: The Siren encounter seems dreamlike
Peculiar Haircuts: Everett’s (aided by his pomeade), Delmar’s, Pete’s-Lost Hats: Several hats are worn.
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From Tricia Cooke and William Preston Robertson. The Big
Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1998: 16-23.
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