It may be the most overworked expression of existential crisis in the language, a phrase quoted so often it has become little more than a flippant cliché, and yet, to be or not to be: that really is the question at the heart of A Serious Man. The latest Coen brothers film opened recently to predominantly good reviews, and it certainly went over well with the crowd I was in the other night. But, in spite of all the laughs it got, it’s hard to say just how much irony is implied in the title. A lot of the laughter I heard rippling around me had a bemused, nervous undercurrent, the kind of chuckle you give when you aren’t sure if laughter is the expected response but still wish to signal you’re in on any joke that may have been intended.
Like much of Joel and Ethan Coen’s best work, A Serious Man mingles pathos and levity, not in order that the one should undercut or relieve the other, but to reveal just how fine is the razor’s edge between the two. Incongruous humour is one of the brothers’ favourite devices for keeping an audience off balance, and when the pretense of straight comedy is suddenly dropped, the viewer is bracingly made to see how brutal outrages and genuine pathos are sometimes born of unlikely beginnings. You might call this the reductio ad absurdum school of black comedy, where the dangerous potential of an amusing premise doesn’t fully reveal itself until after you’ve taken the hook. Such abrupt shifts in tone can register like a sucker punch to the solar plexus. If they don’t morally implicate you for finding humour in what may turn out to be no laughing matter, then they at least make you wonder what you found so damn funny in the first place.
This is part of what’s going on in A Serious Man. It doesn’t make sense to describe the movie in terms of plot, since that would imply a cause-and-effect chain of events set in motion by characters acting deliberately. Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a middle-aged suburban Jew who teaches physics at a local college in the ’60s, is the quasi protagonist of the film, if not of his own destiny. Gopnik is an emasculated, ineffectual milquetoast, a spear-carrier in the ugly melodrama of his own life, and yet a man more to be pitied than scorned. His failure to intervene in the events of his life — a crumbling marriage, a household off its axis, a controversy that threatens his job — is not merely the result of a deficit of will, for of what use is free will in a universe ruled by chance? How can our actions be meaningful if we have limited or no control over their consequences — if they have no consequences at all? (Early in the film, a student attempts to bribe Gopnik for a passing grade. “Actions have consequences” is the professor’s rebuke. “Yes. Often,” says the student in clipped monotone. “Always! Actions always have consequences!” Gopnik insists, pounding his desk as if to persuade himself as much as the student seated opposite.) And what if — to echo one of the movie’s repeated refrains — we’ve done nothing at all and yet find ourselves squarely in the path of the tornado? What if action and inaction lead to precisely the same outcome: who’s to say this or that is the better course?
In many ways this is familiar terrain for the Coens. Time and again in their films, blind chance intrudes into the lives of characters and capsizes the notion of a world in which everything happens for a reason. As Anton Chigurh, the coin-flipping mercenary of No Country for Old Men, observes from behind the barrels of his shotgun: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” Of what use is any rule, for that matter, when we are just a coin toss away from a confrontation with the forces of random chance that a character like Chigurh represents?
Larry Gopnik is very much the plaything of such dark powers, and the Coens surely mean for us to see our own smallness in him. Gopnik is so preoccupied with the “uncertainty principle” that he dreams of chalking up an acre of blackboard with a complex proof of the theorem. (“It proves we can’t ever really know what’s going on. So it shouldn’t bother you. Not being able to figure anything out.”) And yet, the obscure mathematical notation closely resembles his simpleton brother’s nonsense scribblings in the so-called “Mentaculus,” a small journal which the latter describes as a “probability map — of the universe.” It’s not altogether clear how seriously we should take Gopnik’s embrace of (or capitulation to) the principle of uncertainty: it seems equally a craven refusal of responsibility and a philosophic acceptance of the absurd. Gopnik has allowed himself to be written to the margins of his own life, but though he has done nothing either to deserve or avoid what he gets, what should one do if the consequences are unpredictable? What does the universe owe us apart from whatever luck happens to be our portion? As one of the rabbis who Gopnik consults points out, “Hashem doesn’t owe us anything. The obligation runs the other way.”
With his life unravelling in his hands, Gopnik seeks stability in his Jewish heritage, but its rituals and traditions are presented as arid, cryptic, or mindlessly rote. Yet his search for meaning is never completely ironized, and often quite poignant. In the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There, the protagonist attempts to take control of his destiny with disastrous consequences; Gopnik submits to circumstances and ultimately recovers some semblance of his old life — for what it’s worth. But, as the last shot of the film makes clear, there’s still no getting out of the path of the tornado. It would seem the Coens have answered Hamlet’s question as sensibly as possible. To be or not to be? More like damned if you do, damned if you don’t. So what are you laughing at?
(Photo courtesy of Wilson Webb/Focus Features)
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