on the form of a set of radical and disturbing contradictions.12
Allusions to The Odyssey, Busby Berkeley, Leni Riefenstahl, the Three Stooges, Robert Johnson, and The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) all appear in the episode. Although these references play off one another in both obvious and subtle ways, the scene is grounded in a particular moment in American history: the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the South in the 1930s. This is, of course, a particularly dark episode in the history of the republic and one that taken in isolation would generate some combination of outrage and guilt in the typically liberal audiences that the films of the Coen brothers might attract. The rich array of allusions, in short, cannot be separated from a historical context that elicits moral condemnation.
It is this historical grounding that undermines a postmodern reading of the episode. The assemblage of popular mythologies, pop culture references, and classical allusions does not, in this case, constitute what Fredric Jameson and others term “pastiche.” Unlike parody and satire, pastiche, according to Jameson, is “the cannibalization of all styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion[,]” and thus constitutes a “neutral practice,” an artistic and cultural form that has been emptied of any ethical perspective and “amputated of satiric impulse.”13 The postmodern pleasure of pastiche is the pleasure of recognizing references, so that engaging a text becomes a game of identification. Moreover, through this consumption of cultural signs, there emerges in the audience a sense of belonging to an “exclusive community,” one detached from both traditional socioeconomic classifications and conventional ethical codes.14 Membership in this sophisticated coterie group, which many in the audience of a Coen brothers film might expect, is sabotaged, I think intentionally, by the context of a Klan lynching of an African American. There is quite simply no possibility of avoiding the historical setting of the episode and the ethical response that that setting demands. Although the scene in question does expose the audience to a heterogeneous grouping of aesthetic styles and allusions, these do not occupy a neutral space devoid of normative values and of what Jameson refers to in this context as “real history.”15
The most obvious consequence of this grounding is that the engaged and directed point of view of satire replaces the neutrality of postmodern wit. The scene opens with McGill and his two fellow travelers looking down from under cover at a Klan ceremony, which they soon learn is a lynching. The members of the Klan are marching in synchronized patterns that immediately call to mind a Busby Berkeley set piece. The Klansmen are, therefore, being mocked as silly men, in silly outfits, and in silly dance formations. Like Satan's band of devils in Paradise Lost who are compared to a swarm of insects, the self-importance of the Klansmen is deflated through a visual simile. The satire is reinforced through a Homeric parallel. The charlatan Bible salesman (John Goodman) who has robbed and beaten McGill and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) now shows up at the rally. His role as the uncultured and violent Cyclops of The Odyssey mocks the office of Grand Cyclops of the Klan.
The set of allusions taken together suggests, however, something more sophisticated than satire, something that relies on irreconcilable comic incongruities within that set of allusions. Perhaps the most outrageous and resonant reference in the set piece is to The Wizard of Oz. The rescue of Tommy from the hands of the Klan visually evokes the rescue of Dorothy from the Wicked Witch of the West. The three escapees take the parts of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. The Klan becomes the army of the Wicked Witch. This creates a jarring incongruity, one that is intensified by the contextualization of the allusion outside its original historical setting. Although The Wizard of Oz was made in the final years of the Depression and is in some sense a typical thirties “road” picture, its presence in the film will resonate with most of the audience in the context of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. For many years before the advent of home video technology, the film was annually shown on television and became an anticipated event, an almost ritualized staging in the living rooms of American families. An allusion to the film generates not simply a memory but nostalgia for “a privileged lost object of desire.”16 In an impish and insidious manner, the Coens have uprooted this warm memory and relocated it to a 1930s Klan rally and execution.
The effect of the allusion on the audience is threefold. First, there is the pleasure in simply identifying the allusion, the sense of belonging to the sophisticated coterie group I mention above. Secondly, there is the pleasure in witnessing a childhood fantasy defeat evil. It is the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion who rescue Tommy from the clutches of the Klan and flatten its Cyclops. The innocence of a childhood fantasy proves stronger than racism. But thirdly, the allusion creates a disturbing and ironic incongruity: that between the dark recess of Mississippi in the 1930s and the living rooms of postwar baby boomers and their children.
Kierkegaard is instructive in understanding the effect if not the purpose of this irony. He asserts in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript that “irony is the confinium [boundary] between the aesthetic and the ethical.”17 The relationship between these two stages and the role that irony plays in the advancement from the former to the latter is treated extensively by Kierkegaard in Either/Or. In part I, a young man argues for the aesthetic point of view in a series of heterogeneous papers on topics as diverse as music, drama, crop rotation, and eroticism. In discussing these subjects, he asserts that one must distance oneself from commitment to any one particular form of artistic expression or to one exclusive human relationship. The aesthete is dimly aware of the existential contradictions of life, but he would avoid them by continually seeking out new experiences, preoccupying himself with the surfaces of life, and generally playing “shuttlecock with all existence.”18 “Everything in life,” says the aesthete, “is regarded as a wager. The more consistently a person knows how to sustain his arbitrariness, the more amusing the combinations become.”19 The aesthete must constantly be changing his orientation to the world.
Part II of Either/Or consists of two letters written to the young man by a judge who represents the so-called ethical point of view. He challenges the self-styled aesthete not necessarily to adopt a specific ethical perspective but to act in the world, to overcome his indifference. “It is not,” he explains, “a matter of choosing between willing good or willing evil as of choosing to will.”20 The aesthete should, in short, cease to be the “plaything for the play of his arbitrariness.”21 The task of the ethicist is to make the young man confront the comic contradictions of the human condition, the ironic incongruities between the body and the soul, the finite and the infinite, the necessary and the free, which inform the human condition.
Jameson's understanding of the postmodern world and the individual enmeshed within its plethora of signs is uncanny in its similarity to Kierkegaard's understanding of the young aesthete and his need for new and changing experiences. Jameson asserts, “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods…at ever greater rates of turnover.”22 It is precisely this consumer of aesthetic commodities whom the Coen brothers confront in their staging of the Klan rally. They do it by fashioning a disturbing comic contradiction that defies the consumptive pleasures of their audience. The filmmakers’ role is that of the judge in Either/Or who demands that the young, sophisticated aesthete confront the ironies of the human condition. Unlike The Hudsucker Proxy, whose comic perspective interrogates socioeconomic conditions of a specific era, the ironic incongruities of O Brother act against its own audience. The Coens are mischievous boys; in this instance, their mischief challenges the complacencies of the postmodernist aesthetic.
Comic Endings
The audience is informed of parallels between O Brother and The Odyssey in the opening credits, when the invocation from Homer's poem appears on the screen: “O Muse, sing in me and through me…that man…a wanderer, harried for years on end.”23 This is an invitation for the audience to search out specific references to the poem as the film progresses. And indeed, we do recognize versions
