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Introduction
Viewer beware.
To casual observers, the films of Ethan and Joel Coen notoriously confound audience expectations. Refusing to adhere to genre conventions or movie-marketing ploys, the Coens' cinema can even leave professional journalists like Charlie Rose searching for a common denominator. Viewers who try to locate a common theme, directorial signature, or political streak may only see technical bravura, sly cinema in-jokes, or sidesplitting gags. But the depth and breadth of the Coen brothers' body of work—one of the most impressive and, strangely, influential in independent cinema today—bespeak an intelligence and cultural acuity that is rich, highly topical, and certainly hard to pigeonhole. Audiences may be excused for missing the obvious point of the Coens' work. It's not about the message; it's the medium. Or so these high priests of the lowbrow art of moviemaking would have you think.
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But think again. The eleven movies the fraternal filmmakers have produced to date not only upend expectations, but they also show how our view of the world profoundly affects what we accept as "reality." The Coens' cinema dresses up belief to look like knowledge, testing the viewer's perspicacity or, at the very least, jolting us out of our escapist comfort zone. While watching a Coen movie, it's a good idea to keep in mind the warning of Blood Simple's narrator, "Nothing comes with a guarantee." Their self-conscious movies all implicitly carry a similar message: caveat spectator.
Trickster Mythmaking
Like the West African trickster god Eshu, the Coens and their films encourage us to leave our assumptions at the theatre door. Eshu is a provocateur who dons a two-colored hat, revealing only the red side to one man and the white side to his friend, to show that people can be simultaneously right and wrong. Like this mischievous but benevolent god
