(some spoilers below)
A good Yiddish joke goes like this:
Max and Benny are walking down the street, when Max turns to Benny and asks,
“Benny, what’s blue, hangs on the wall and whistles?
Benny considers this a moment, then replies.
“I don’t know Max. What’s blue, hangs on the wall, and whistles?”
“A can of tuna!”
Benny thinks about this, confused.
“A can of tuna?” he asks. “But Max, a can of tuna doesn’t hang on the wall.”
Max shrugs.
“So you hang it on the wall.”
“But a can of tuna isn’t blue.”
“So you paint in blue.”
“But Max, a can of tuna does not whistle!”
Max throws up his hands.
“So it doesn’t whistle!”
The joke deploys an old Yiddish tactic of burying the punch line. We are set up with the conventions of a joke (or sometimes a parable, or profound revelation), then robbed of this, making a mockery of the joke, the joke teller, and (most of all) the audience, who is racing ahead, trying to guess how this puzzle will come together. The joke frustrates our attempts at order and resolution, and that is what, in a Yiddish sense, is so funny. Really, obviously, we are the punch line.
The Coen Brothers clearly know their Yiddish humor, though even the most dry Yid could probably not have foreseen the nihilistic edges to which they push the genre. A Serious Man, which is often funny, sometimes serious, sometimes odd, time and time again, buries its punch lines. It leads us to Aha! moments, then denies us the pleasure of experiencing them. This happens first in a strange Yiddish folk tale in the opening sequence involving a Dybuck. It happens several other times, as information and plot points are dangled before our eyes, teasing from us our emotional investment, then robbed.
In one such scene, our main character (the poor, Job-esque, Larry Gopnick) is trying to stop his neighbor from building an extension to his home that he, Gonick, believes crosses the property line. It’s a minor plot point in the movie, but one that is built gradually over a few scenes. At last, a lawyer is brought in, an old stumbling man with rolls of papers under his arms (played by Wayne Duvall, the brilliant Homer Stokes of Cohen Brothers’ yore). He coughs once or twice, then before he can unveil his brilliant plan to fix this tricky problem, dies. We as the audience are left groaning. We should have seen it coming. In fact, I suspect many of us (myself included) did. Which is a bit of a problem, because burying the punch line works a lot better when you are waiting for a punch line. When you no longer buy the joker’s bluff, that a punch line is possible, then, well, things are different.
Now, I confess myself a Cohen Brothers fan. Everything up to O Brother I can watch repeatedly. Even as it has become cliché to repeatedly quote Big Lebowski, I can’t, and won’t stop myself. But lately, I am starting to wonder if this technique of refusing to give us the punch line, of ending stories a few scenes short of completion, is interesting or lazy? Once upon a time the cliché was “happily ever after,” and lord knows Hollywood produces plenty of those. But now, this strangely quiet, unresolved ending has become such a convention in certain, what we once called (wrongly) “indie movies,” that it’s all starting to feel to easy. Too quiet.
We have maybe reached the limits of nihilism. There is nothing to say and we know it, no meaning is possible and we don’t expect meaning, so we enjoy the dialogue when it’s good, watch the characters scramble about, knowing their fates pretty certainly, and leave the theater when the credits roll, whether it makes sense to leave then or not. But you know what, I like endings, that’s why I don’t leave in the middle of movies—even bad movies.
Which isn’t to say the movie isn’t good. Maybe it’s great. I don’t really know, which more and more is my outlook leaving movies like this. Maybe I loved it. Who can complain these days? What do you want out of a movie anyways, a life changing experience with all the bells and whistles? As Max might wisely say, so it didn’t whistle…
