Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), bk. VII, 516e–518c.
13. Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 10.
14. Ibid., 25.
15. Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Mentor Books, 1964), 28.
16. R. Barton Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2004), 129.
17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), sec. 5. That section begins, “In ages of crude, primordial cultures, man thought he could come to know a second real world in dreams: this is the origin of all metaphysics.”
18. Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1978). Schwartz borrowed and adapted the line from an epigraph to W. B. Yeats's volume of poems, Responsibilities (1914). I am indebted to the anonymous reviewer of this manuscript for this citation.
19. William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 251.
20. Andrew Pulver's original essay from the Guardian, entitled “Pictures That Do the Talking,” is from 2001 and is reprinted in The Coen Brothers: Interviews, ed. William Rodney Allen (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006), 158.
21. Pulver, quoted in Allen, Coen Brothers, 157.
THE HUMAN COMEDY
PERPETUATES ITSELF
Nihilism and Comedy in Coen Neo-Noir
Thomas S. Hibbs
BUNNY LEBOWSKI: Ulli doesn't care about anything. He's a nihilist.
THE DUDE: Ah. Must be exhausting.
—The Big Lebowski (1998)
From their inaugural film, Blood Simple (1984), through the film blanc Fargo (1996), to The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), the Coen brothers have exhibited a preoccupation with the themes, characters, and stylistic techniques of film noir. By the time they made Blood Simple in 1984, neo-noir was already established as a recognized category of film.1 Prior to Quentin Tarantino's darkly comedic unraveling of noir motifs in Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), the Coens were already making consciously comic use of noir plots and stylistic techniques. Lacking Tarantino's penchant for hyperactive and culturally claustrophobic allusions to pop culture, the Coens focus, instead, on traditional noir character types and intricate plots whose complexity is bizarre.
Because it is so often characterized by self-conscious deployment of the techniques of classic noir, neo-noir evinces a strong inclination toward pastiche and the satiric. This makes comic themes more at home in the world of neo-noir than they were in the founding era of noir. Classic noir avoids overt moral lessons and leaves little room for well-adjusted, happy, virtuous types of Americans. The world of classic noir proffers a “disturbing vision…that qualifies all hope and suggests a potentially fatal vulnerability” against which no one is adequately protected.2 Classic noir has deeply democratic instincts: no one wins because the unforgiving laws of the human condition apply universally to every individual. The grim pessimism of classic noir is hardly congenial to the sorts of comic films that flourished in America during the same time period.
This does not mean, however, that comedy is utterly alien to classic noir. The depiction of characters as trapped in a labyrinth at the mercy of a hostile fate can transform the tone of the action from the gravely tragic to the absurdly comic. What initially seems serious and ominous can, over time, come to seem humorous. Angst and fear can be sustained for only so long; endless and pointless terror becomes predictable and laughable. But the shift to a comic perspective involves more than the mere passage of time; comedy is more than tragedy plus time. What matters is the passage of time without any prospect of hope or intelligibility. Life in an absurd universe is rife with comic possibilities. Struggle and striving begin to appear superfluous and foolish. A classic noir film such as Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945) toys with its main character to such an extent that his continued gravity can come to seem a self-inflicted farce. Similarly, the degradation of affection—the perverse erotic attractions in which noir often wallows—lends itself to wry, detached irony, the dominant tone in Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950).
The baroque sensibility of noir has always contained the seeds of stylistic excess, even of the celebration of style for its own sake. In neo-noir, the accentuation of hopelessness and the overtly self-conscious deployment of artistic technique make the turn to dark comedy nearly inevitable. By contrast with classic noir films, whose style is reserved and less self-conscious, neo-noirs almost inevitably draw attention to their style, going so far in some cases as to make style itself the subject of the film. In the very act of recognizing the artifice, we are in on the joke, on the sleight of hand performed by the filmmaker. The result is amusement, even laughter.
As Foster Hirsch points out, one of the distinguishing features of neo-noir is a “cavalier amorality” that can steep viewers in a “depraved point of view.”3 Jean-Pierre Chartier's early and negative reaction to noir seems to apply more aptly to certain neo-noir films. Chartier lamented noir's “pessimism and disgust toward humanity.” Devoid of even the most “fleeting image of love” or of characters who might “rouse our pity or sympathy,” noir, he felt, presents “monsters, criminals whose evils nothing can excuse, whose actions imply that the only source for the fatality of evil is in themselves.”4
Nietzsche and Nihilism
There are, then, important links between neo-noir and nihilism. According to its most trenchant analysts, nihilism involves the dissolution of standards of judgment; for the nihilist, there is no longer any basis for distinguishing truth from falsity, good from evil, noble from base action, or higher from lower ways of life. Nietzsche thought that nihilism would be the defining characteristic of the twentieth century, an epoch in which “the highest values” would “devalue themselves” and the “question ‘why?’” would find “no answer.”5 Nietzsche is most famous for proclaiming the death of God. He certainly does not mean that a previously existing supreme being has suddenly expired; instead, he holds that the notion of God, created by humans to serve a variety of needs, is becoming increasingly less credible. But Nietzsche does not limit the effects of nihilism to religion; nihilism undermines all transcendent claims and standards, including those underlying modern science and democratic politics. The great questions and animating visions—those regarding truth, justice, love, and beauty—that previously gave shape and purpose to human life no longer resonate in the human soul. All moral codes are seen to be merely conventional and, hence, optional.
For most human beings, decline, diminution, and despair accompany nihilism. The bulk of humanity falls into the category of the last man: “Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. What is love? What is a star? Thus asks the last man and blinks. The earth has become small and on it hops the last man who makes everything small.” The contented, petty last men create a society that is ruthlessly homogeneous (“everybody wants the same, everybody is the same”) and addicted to physical comfort (“one has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night; one has a regard for health”).6 These are the passive nihilists, the pessimists, the representatives of “the decline and recession of the power
