Page - 119 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

Review: Elijah Siegler, Coen | 119www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 113–120 the Dude (see above). The more important point Levy makes here is about herme- neutics. He points out that – in contrast to a common misconception – hermeneutics as a concept cannot be applied to an “object named life” but is merely an inseparable part of this very life itself: “hermeneutics is life, since the energetic dynamics between language and life are not distinct” (p. 231). I will adopt his suggestion (and apply this method for reading this film and other Coen brothers films). Michael J. Altman deals with Death, exemplified through True Grit. He quotes several statements about True Grit’s being the Coens’ most religious movie and ob- serves that this attribution depends on the “extent that things audiences recognize as religion show up in the film” (p. 233). In opposition to this (simple) reading, he suggests we consider both the religious and the Western motifs in the film as genre conventions that are used and rearranged to create a post-Western film about death. After a brief description of the Western and its position in U.S. (media) history (pp. 234ff.), he verifies the role of death in the Coen brothers movies (p. 239), stating that it is “not only irrational but also monstrous” (p. 240) and “the story of a loss in the Coens’ films” (p. 241). Based on a revenge plot (Mattie is bound to see the killer of her father punished), True Grit breaks a tradition of the common Western movie, in which the (male) heroes are materialists and religion is considered a matter for cler- gymen and women (given that the gender aspect of the Christian clergy is tradition- ally vague, religion is depicted as unmanly). In True Grit, religion and materialism are maintained by men and women, but towards neither a secularist nor a transcendent salvation, rather towards death, illustrated by the dozens of corpses lining the way of the plot (pp. 245f.). The Protestant religion that is depicted in the film is more justifica- tion for a secular ethic than a liberating message about something that is bigger than this (material) life. So, for Levy, “True Grit is a religious movie, just not in the ways most critics imagine” (p. 248), and he rejects the cursorily interpretations that focus on, for example, mentions of God in the dialogue, empty rites that are performed with some of the corpses, and the Christian hymn that is part of the soundtrack. “True Grit is a religious movie,” he writes, “insofar as it traces the limits of religion” (p. 249). Jason C. Bivins chapter on Inside Llewyn Davis is subtitled Absence, and indeed this film is absent from my “have seen” list. Bivins claims to “improvise on ‘religion’ in three ways, each one indirectly” (p. 255). It is the essence of improvisation to use the well-known canonical components of an art absolutely freely, but it is also the goal of improvising to find a new and coherent configuration. I am not completely sure I understand the chord Bivins strikes, although I admit that his conclusion on “the religious” being “an atmosphere, an environment, a ripple in space-time revealing a future incapable of sustaining the fantasies of present or past” (p. 270) is consistent with a number of the chapters in this volume. In my point of view, this reduces “reli- gion” to something that is inevitably gone and felt only through the pain of missing it. As a Roman Catholic, I personally object to that position (and maybe that is why I’m pretty uncomfortable with the Coen brothers’ movies …).