of labor, aptly depicted by Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (Fred Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1923), and the bureaucratic configuration of mass society, addressed in King Vidor's The Crowd (1928), render man an automaton, not simply oppressed by a machine but transformed into one. Bergson's comic figure, manipulated from the outside as if it were a toy puppet and viewed as a depersonalized caricature, mirrors modern man caught up in social conformity, repetitive labor, and psychological habit.
This troubling side of Bergson's vision is accompanied by the prefigurement of an empowering one. Although Bergson wrote Laughter prior to the technological innovations of live-action animation, his understanding of the mechanized puppet looks forward to the cartoon figure. But the inherent sense of victimization in Bergson's characterization of the comic is replaced in animation by a sense of omnipotence. The flexibility and plasticity, termed “plamaticness” by Sergei Eisenstein, of this animated figure suggests an almost redemptive quality.7 Its rubbery nature gives it the power to come back to life. As Steven Dillon puts it, “Cartoonism gives the impression of infinite repeatability. Cartoons tend to be serial, not singular. The cartoon world is cornucopian, overflowing, not empty.”8 This explains why an audience is not threatened by cartoon violence. Toons bounce back, immune from the physical violence perpetrated against them.
Both victimization and empowerment inform the opening scene on the train in O Brother. As I point out above, the freedom and autonomy that McGill believes he has attained once having pulled himself up onto the moving train is quickly proven to be not simply ephemeral but self-deceiving. McGill is a mere toy, not necessarily in the hands of modernity, but of the Mississippi state penal system. The chains, which bind the three prisoners together, are controlled by an external force, a puppet master who in this scene doesn't simply limit their movement but controls it as well. Although the sense of unease, of the innate cruelty of a certain form of comedy, at this particular moment remains enveloped in a comic pratfall, it nevertheless runs throughout the film with varying degrees of emphasis.
What I have referred to as cartoon empowerment enters the scene in a much more subtle manner and through a self-reflexive device. Once McGill has climbed on board and pulls himself up, he peers into the recess of the car and perceives a group of men huddled together. It is from this group that he seeks a smithy. The scene sets up certain expectations in the audience. It is of a type that moviegoers would have seen before in films ranging from the aforementioned Wild Boys of the Road to Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory (1976) and Clint Eastwood's The Gauntlet (1977), as well as countless other “road” pictures. The audience anticipates that McGill will discover a marginalized group of men and women, perhaps even sentimentalized as in a Frank Capra film, who will welcome McGill with the camaraderie of the road, or a group who will throw him off the train, hardened by their failures and unwilling to share with others what they have acquired for themselves.
McGill, however, faces neither friend nor foe. A collection of forgotten men with hollow looks simply stare back at him. Their faces express little more than indifference toward the new passenger. It is a disturbing commentary on the effects of the Great Depression. More importantly, the scene is constructed within a theatrical framework. McGill stands up on the floor of the car as if he were on a fully lit stage, while those already occupying the car sit back in the darkness as if they were themselves an audience for McGill's antics. The scene calls to mind the moment in Sullivan's Travels when the prisoners are marched into a church to enjoy a cartoon. Although this set piece from Sturges's film is used later in O Brother in an overt manner, it is here on the train that it raises serious issues concerning the comic nature of the scene. The prisoners in Sullivan's Travels watch a Walt Disney cartoon in which Pluto is shown at his most elastic. In one sequence he becomes attached to flypaper and chases his own body around in a frustrated circle before flopping on the ground. In another he is wrapped up in a window shade and then spat back out. The prisoners laugh uproariously at Pluto's mishaps, but Sturges does not seem interested in exploring why they laugh. One senses, however, that the laughter is therapeutic not because they are able to divert their victimization onto another entity but because violence itself has been relegated into the plastic world of animation, a medium in which elasticity and repeatability diffuse its threat to their bodies. Pluto is always restored to his original configuration.
The therapeutic empowerment of animation is conspicuous in its absence in the scene in the Coen brothers’ film. Unease is generated not simply through the evocation of Bergson's automaton but in the inability of these men to respond to the animated caricature before them. It suggests that their apparent indifference to McGill's pratfall is symptomatic of their despair. The film viewer recognizes the elasticity of McGill and the lack of a real threat to his body when he falls off the train. The audience within the film, however, seems deadened to the possibility of laughter and hardened to the salutatory effect of cartoons.
One more aspect of the scene needs to be addressed. In his explanation of what constitutes the comic in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to “Philosophical Fragments,” Kierkegaard asserts, “If the reason for people's hustle-bustle is a possibility of avoiding danger, the busyness is not comic; but if, for example, it is on a ship that is sinking, there is something comic in all this running around, because the contradiction is that despite all this movement they are not moving away from the site of their downfall.”9 Men scurrying about hopelessly trying to save themselves would not on the surface seem funny, other than in a sadistic way. But for Kierkegaard it represents the contradiction that is intrinsic to comedy and to life. This is expressed in Kierkegaard's joke as the contradiction between freedom and necessity, between our infinite aspirations and the finite realities that confront those aspirations.10 The crew on the ship, striving to keep itself afloat and yet helpless in its attempt, illustrates the contradiction between our need to take action and the ultimate meaninglessness of that action. It is the existential conundrum of the human condition.
The three convicts attempting to climb aboard the moving train fall neatly into Kierkegaard's comic scenario. They struggle for release and freedom but are bound to one another and in a sense bound to the earth. They reflect our innate belief in the need for action and the ultimate meaninglessness of action. Such a scene generates despair if one focuses on the frustration, but a comic understanding focuses on the absurdity of the moment. The utopian fantasy sung over the opening credits, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” expresses the human need to imagine the possibility of redemption, and its lyrics hover over the attempted escape. The incongruity between the fanciful dream of a place where “bulldogs all have rubber teeth” and the frustrated cartoon characters of the film is precisely what Kierkegaard understood as comic. Perhaps Wylie Sypher best describes the dynamic at work in the scene: “Essentially our enjoyment of physical mishap or deformity springs from our surprise and delight that man's actions are often absurd, his energies often misdirected.”11 In O Brother, Where Art Thou? a host of characters are seeking freedom. That their attempts are more often than not cast as “absurd” and “misdirected” does not diminish their sincerity and expressiveness.
The opening set piece of O Brother depicting McGill and his cohorts failing in their attempt to board the train that would take them to freedom is a multifaceted comic staging and previews the complex and overlapping subtleties of the comic gestures that inform the film.
Challenging Postmodern Aesthetics
Although the climax of O Brother occurs with the Tennessee Valley Authority flooding the McGill ancestral “homeland,” the picaresque set of adventures turns toward its conclusion at the Klan rally that McGill and his fellow escapees have infiltrated in order to rescue Tommy (Chris Thomas King), the African American blues musician they had met and befriended earlier in the film. But more importantly, through its rich collection of allusions to other texts, the scene provides its audience with the most striking and most unsettling set of comic incongruities in the film. These incongruities not only satirize the hooded Klansmen but also challenge the audience to move beyond the aesthetic pleasure of the film's postmodern wit. What has been called the “engaged reinvention” of popular mythologies that
