Patton Oswalt said something very interesting on a recent Mark Maron podcast (a podcast, by the way, you should be listening to right now). He said that watching a normal film was like someone taking you through a thin door and guiding you by the hand through the movie. He said that watching a Coen brothers film was like someone opening the doors to a massive warehouse and seeing all these different things going on and having to explore yourself, without any guide, to see what was going on.
This made me think of gaming spaces and some of the things Will Wright said in his fantastic SXSW keynote. Essentially that film narratives are linear whereas game narratives are more about exploring a space, and that the only film that really approximates a game experience is Groundhog Day, where the protagonist explores the space (the town on that day) and then returns to his starting point and explores again, learning as he goes.
Applying this to the Coen brothers films I may not get a whole game experience, but I at least acquire a new appreciation for the importance of setting in their films. I usually associate their films with tight structure (kind of the opposite of loosey-goosey gaming exploration), quirky characters, dark humor, a strong but not overbearing sense of theme—but never really setting.
Thinking about it again, though, setting is vital. Sometimes it’s right there in the title. Fargo. Raising Arizona. Other times it’s a little more subtle. The 1940′s Hollywood of Barton Fink. The 60′s Minnesota suburb of A Serious Man. The Depression Mississippi of O Brother, Where Art Thou? Sometimes it’s really subtle. Am I the only one who didn’t grok until the very end that No Country for Old Men took place in the 80′s?
But in any of these cases if you change the setting, you change the movie. The characters have to be different. The story has to be different. Maybe not fundamentally—Brother, after all, is based on “The Odyssey”–but the personality of the film is forever altered. And, in a way, so is the game space.
Now, I still agree with Oswalt’s assertion, but I think the reason it reminds me of a game space isn’t just because of my newfound respect for the importance of setting in the Coen oeuvre. It’s as much to do with what I believe is, if you had to pick just one, the fundamental genre of all Coen brothers movies.
But first let’s hear your thoughts.
I got the whole No Country/80′s thing from the dialog in the gas station.
“You know what date is on this coin?”
“No.”
“1958. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here.”
Though without those lines, the indications that it’s 1980 are indeed extremely subtle.
As for Oswalt’s quote about Coen Brothers films, I thought of it a little differently (though, as a gamer myself, it’s interesting to compare Coen narrative and gaming narrative). Immediately I thought of A Serious Man. In my opinion, if you watch that movie, and all you take away from it is “Well that was a nice narrative, with a beginning, middle and end” you’re doing it wrong.
The film challenges the concept of structure. Hell, it challenges most of the conventions of modern cinema. It does so many things that good movies shouldn’t do, and it gets away with it because you know that the Coens did that shit on purpose. If most films are a straight line, running from beginning to end, then A Serious Man is a meandering line, looping around, doubling back on itself, splitting into multiple lines and eventually stopping ten feet from the finish line before you realize that it crossed the finish a long time ago (though you can’t figure out exactly when).
The Coens like playing with structure like that.
Fargo split off into dozens of other lines, and you’re never really sure which one will end up at the finish, if any at all.
The Big Lebowski is the same way, pumped up to eleven.
No Country for Old Men seems to be wandering, at it’s own pace, in a mostly-straight line, though it doesn’t quite seem to be pointed towards the end, at least until it stops abruptly and teleports directly to wherever the end may be.
And True Grit… well, True Grit is a straight line, running from beginning to end, but it’s still awesome.
Their willingness to upset the established structure of a modern film is why they are among Christopher Nolan and Charlie Kaufman as my favorite screenwriters.
By the way, sorry for the long-ass comment.
No. Long-ass comments are good. They are preferred.
As far as using the coin to date No Country, I am incapable of doing math while watching a Coen bros. movie.
I think most Coen bros. movies fracture into the multiple lines thing you mention, which is why they remind me of gaming spaces, at least as Wright defines them. And I agree that No Country and True Grit are the outliers (both adaptations, not for nothing). Maybe Blood Simple, too, it’s been too long since I’ve seen it.
But for all that fracturing, they’re actually extremely disciplined about structure. It’s just a far more complex structure than Act One, Two, and Three. Nolan and Kaufman, too, though I’d argue that Nolan is using more traditional structures to house more complex ideas. Except for Memento. That’s an entirely new (and quite brilliant) structure.