Page - 117 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

Review: Elijah Siegler, Coen | 117www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 113–120 ism and to exalt the Dude at the same time as a religious entity. Secondly, I have prac- ticed Iai-Do for some years and I am familiar with the concept of Zen, but still I do not see the Zen master dimension of the Dude. Or, perhaps, is this in itself rather a Koan? One of my favourite amongst the Coen brothers films is O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Race). Employing American Southern Baptism as a transparency, the Coens use – as always – bold permanent markers to draw a sketch. And the sketch is, accord- ing to author Chad Seales, notably about black(ened) faces and their “significance … at the center of the story” (p. 132). The four rogues who finally become minstrels and are pardoned for political reasons are merely a vehicle for considering the role of the racial “other”, perpetuated in religion long after the 1930s (the time the film is set in) are over. Indeed the “black minstrel narrative” (as Seales put it) as part of Ameri- can popular culture is something completely new to me. In my opinion, the “Man of constant sorrow” may well be read as a Job motive (the singer suffers poverty and loneliness and yet trusts in the transcendent promise of salvation), and it contains in an nutshell the fate of the protagonists, who survive, but only just, proving the film to be “dystopia: an imaginery place where everything is as bad as possible” (p. 148). Seales modifies this statement immediately – it might as well be an absurdity, which in itself would be “the joke, the inversion of the inversion, the laughing at the laugh- ter” (p. 148). There is no redemption in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Even though we laugh, the minstrel faces make a difference, and the race question is still unsolved, seemingly unsolvable. As far as I have understood the chapter on Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykill- ers (Money) by David Feltmate (I have not seen these films either), he seeks to point out that, beyond its potential for corruption, money also has a certain protecting (“purifying”?) function: “The money sanctifies the relationship, making them able to love each other” (p. 161). Humour is the key to catching up with the incongruities that money both represents and causes – an idea I greatly appreciate but have still to verify from the films themselves. Money, Feltmate concludes, has in some respects replaced the integrative power of religion, gaining some sort of religious meaning by itself. Sidenote: I am surprised that a scholar like Feltmate confuses Belshazzar (cf. Dan. 5) with Balthazar (in the Christian tradition one of the magi mentioned in Matt. 2:1) (p. 151). I turn now to Finbarr Curtis´s contribution on Burn After Reading (The State). In the film, “the state is at once powerful and incompetent, omniscient and clueless” (p. 167). The protagonists share the creed that a superior power beyond the individual social life rules the world, and does so wisely. Curtis quotes C. Schmitt and his thesis that, if the state is threatened, ordinary law may be suspended in a “state of excep- tion”. Given that the United States lives in a state of exception (cf. USA Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act), the parallels are obvious. And indeed the limits of a state painfully occur to anyone who demands absolute security and realises that utmost security means accepting a system more fascist than anything else. But that is not