The movie A Serious Man is a 2009 satirical dark comedy film by brothers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Although the film shows the life of a middle-aged American Jewish man in an absurd and even a bit bizarre way, the life of a middle-aged American Jewish man is full of frustrations, but what is revealed under the absurd and bizarre plot and humorous irony is a modern man Dead and alive, a paradoxical vague state of existence. In order to capture and represent this very common but especially delicate and fragile state, the Coen brothers used a series of less common ways of story connection, scientific theorem, word suggestion, etc. Besides - it's actually all from the Jewish tradition, which has led many people to think that this movie is just a movie about Jews. This conclusion, yes or no, should belong to the category of "Schrödinger's theme". While this paradoxical, vague, neither here nor there state is difficult to describe with exact prophecy, this article attempts to make clear the subject of how the Coen brothers were poorly described.
1. Evil spirits, professors, lawyers and rabbis
"Serious Men" is divided into two distinct parts, and the two parts are not related in terms of content alone. The first part is very short, only seven or eight minutes, and probably takes place in a Jewish town in Poland in the 19th century. One snowy night, her husband, Vivi, came home from selling geese, saying that he had met Treto Groshkovel on the way, the one who was studying in Krakow, Mr. Groshkovel. When his wife heard it was this person, her eyes changed, and she immediately said, "We are cursed. That brother Roshkovel died of typhoid three years ago!" Husband Vivi said, "How is it possible! Saw the man and talked to him. How could he be dead?" Dora said, "You met dybbuk!"
I once introduced what a dybbuk is in the article "Sister Ida". In short, a dybbuk, which can be translated as "evil spirit", is an evil spirit that exists in Eastern European Jewish legends. Generally speaking, evil spirits are the most evil people during their lifetime. After death, their souls cannot go to heaven, and even hell refuses to take them in, so they can only roam the world in pain. Sometimes it is attached to the living person, causing the living person to suddenly change their behavior and sometimes speak a foreign language. If the evil spirits are not expelled from the living people, the living people will not live for long, so it is necessary to ask the rabbi (the head of legal and religious affairs in the Jewish settlement) to exorcise the demons. So, from this description, it can be seen that the Coen brothers made a mistake here, because the evil spirit is only the soul of a person and has no entity, but in the movie, the Coen brothers let the dead person appear——
Back to movies. Just when Vivi explained to Dora that Mr. Goroshkovel was a real person, there was a knock on the door of their house. When he opened the door, Mr. Goroshkovel was standing outside the door - it was Vivi. Wei invited him to the house for a bowl of hot soup. Although Dora let Mr. Groshkovel into the house, she was extremely unkind to him. Brother Roshkovel, who didn't know whether it was a human or a ghost, said that he didn't drink soup, so he came to see it, and Dora replied, "Evil spirits don't eat!" After several verifications, Dora decided that brother Mr. Roshkovel is an evil spirit, so he inserted the ice pick in his hand into Mr. Roshkovel's body. Mr. Groshkovel fled and disappeared into the deep snowy night.
This concludes the first part. If you think this movie is a horror movie, you are dead wrong, because the second part lacks any horror or supernatural elements from the start. Larry, a lecturer in the physics department at the university, was Jewish, had a Jewish wife and had two children. Recently, his younger brother (and possibly older brother) Arthur has also been crowded into their house. Larry works diligently and conscientiously, and treats his family with due diligence. He thought he had a pious and harmonious family in accordance with Jewish law, but his wife cheated on an old Jewish widower named Cy Eberman. Not only that, because Cy Eberman was devoutly Jewish, if he was to marry Larry's wife, not only would Larry and his wife be legally divorced, but he also needed to have a divorce signed by the rabbi. A divorce certificate (called get in Hebrew) for the religious aspect of the ceremony. Therefore, in order to divorce his wife, Larry not only had to go to a lawyer, but also to the rabbi of his community to resolve the matter. Neither the lawyer nor the rabbi seemed to take Larry's business to heart, and neither party provided Larry with an effective solution to the problem.
At this time, Larry's job also had problems. As a college lecturer who is no longer young, Larry was recently selected for tenure at the university. You must know that in American academic circles, the tenure of a university is extremely important to a lecturer: without a teaching position, he is a temporary worker in the university, and there is no guarantee of living welfare and teaching work. The university can let him go at any time; Faculty members are regular employees of the university, and all of the above are guaranteed. Therefore, generally people who teach in American universities hope to get a teaching position, and Larry is at the crossroads between getting a teaching position and not getting a teaching position. At this critical juncture, someone wrote to the faculty selection committee that Larry had a character problem. And there was a Korean student who failed the test who wanted to bribe Larry to revise his test results. The student's father even went to Larry's house and warned him to give his son a decent grade no matter what, otherwise he would resort to legal proceedings.
And Larry's troubles didn't stop at marriage and career. His daughter had a rhinoplasty behind his back, his son had a Columbia Records record he had signed for months, and his younger brother had illegal gambling—Larry felt like he was in control of his life, but he actually Relatively ignorant of everything that goes on in life. To make matters worse, his wife's affair partner, Cy Eberman, died suddenly in a car accident. At his funeral, the police came to arrest his younger brother for organizing illegal gambling, although they ended up hearing that their family was having a funeral. He was not arrested.
Although the relationship between Larry and his wife eased after the death of Cy Eberman, and their less obedient son also held a Jewish rite of passage, in the process of separating from his wife and preparing for a divorce, Larry met with Received a $3,000 bill for a lawyer. He had always wanted to give the money back to the Korean student who tried to bribe him, but now he was shaken. He changed the student's grade from F to C, and then to C-. He wanted to pay the bill, but received a call from the hospital saying that something went wrong with his physical examination and that the hospital had to talk to him. At this time, the hurricane hit, and his son stood outside, watching the hurricane get closer and closer...
2. Who is a serious person?
The story ends abruptly here. We don't know if Larry ended up getting tenure at the university, what the hell was wrong with his body, or even if his son ended up dead or alive. That's how the Coen brothers told us such a bizarre story that it seemed to ask a question that would never be answered. Indeed, whether or not Larry gets a teaching job, or becomes seriously ill, or his relationship with his wife improves or deteriorates, his specious life, like this question, will never be the best solution. In order to express the state of the crowd, the Coen brothers adopted the following method.
First of all, they added a Jewish legend to the front of the movie that seemed to have nothing to do with the content of the movie itself, which was the story about evil spirits told earlier. Because the Coen brothers did not explain, we have no way of knowing whether Mr. Goroshkovel is an evil spirit, but the phenomenon of evil spirits, which only exists in Jewish folklore, contains two aspects of life and death at the same time— -It is dead in itself, but attached to the living, so we can neither say it is dead nor alive-and its state of being neither dead nor alive, to some extent It's similar to Schrödinger's cat.
There is a scene in the movie where Larry is telling the students about Schrödinger's cat: put a cat in a closed iron container, and install the following equipment (be careful to ensure that the equipment is not directly disturbed by the cat in the container): A very small amount of radioactive material is built into a Geiger counter, and within an hour there is a 50% probability that at least one atom of the radioactive material will decay, and the same 50% probability that it will not have any atomic decay; if a decay event occurs , the Geiger counter will discharge, and a hammer will be activated through the relay, and the hammer will break the flask containing hydrogen cyanide. After an hour, if there is no decay event, the cat is still alive; otherwise, decay occurs, the mechanism is triggered, and the hydrogen cyanide volatilizes, causing the cat to die immediately. The wave function used to describe the whole event actually expresses the state of the live cat and the dead cat being tangled together. (The description of Schrödinger's cat experiment comes from Wikipedia) So, if the iron container is not opened, the cat is both alive and dead to the outsiders. This is similar to the evil spirits mentioned earlier (and similar to Larry's dream about measuring microscopic particles). That is to say, no matter from which perspective, Larry's life is like a cat in a tin container, like Mr. Groshkovel's evil spirit, both alive and dead, neither here nor here. not there.
But at the same time, Larry firmly believes that he is a serious person. What does serious mean? Generally speaking, it should refer to the pursuit of certainty in everything, and not to be confused. So, at Cy Eberman's funeral, the rabbi said he was a serious man, after all, in order to be legally with Larry's wife Judith, Cy Eberman wanted more than the two of them legally. Divorce, and they also have to go through the divorce procedures in the religious process, even though the person with whom he is in love is a married woman. Similar to Cy Eberman, Larry also feels that he is a serious person who treats work and family meticulously, but in the end he still does not know the big and small affairs of the family. of irony.
3. Redemption: The cat trying to escape from the tin container
Although life is so helpless, Larry still hopes to change it through some means. First, he always wanted to be a qualified Jew. He was enthusiastic about Jewish community affairs, obeyed the law, and especially liked to use some Hebrew words in English, most notably the two words get (divorce certificate) and shiva (funeral + memorial service). The reason these two words are obvious is that whenever Larry uttered them, the non-Jew would always ask "What?" and Larry would explain it again in English. And the rabbis of the community are less reliable than chicken soup for the soul. Every time Larry hopes to go to the supposedly wise rabbi to solve a problem, he is either made more inexplicable by the rabbi's inexplicable answer, or he is dismissed by the rabbi. Although he obeyed the law so devoutly, his life was not better because of it, but he was caught in a lot of contradictions, so it can be seen that the Jewish tradition did not save him.
His second means of seeking help is work. He taught diligently and never slack off in his sleep, but his work brought him endless troubles. First, someone wrote a letter to the faculty selection committee to hit him with a small report, and then another student forced him to change his grades by bribery. Finally, his faculty selection result was delayed again and again, and that annoying Jewish colleague still had it every day. Standing in front of his office door hesitantly, he said some plausible and inexplicable things to him. For Larry, work is not a means of redemption, but rather a way of deepening his ambiguity.
And family may be Larry's third means of escaping the murky mire. However, his wife's relationship with him dropped to a freezing point, and he had to move to a cheap motel temporarily. The relationship between the son and daughter was very poor, and the two did things he didn't want them to do behind his back at the same time. The son even showed great hesitation and suspicion on the issue of continuing to be a Jew. Therefore, the family is not the solution to the problem, and Larry also sinks deeper and deeper into the family swamp.
At the end of the film, Larry learns that he may be seriously ill, and at the same time, the doctor asks him to go to the hospital to discuss his so-called serious illness when the hurricane hits. Dying seems like a solution to the problem, but the movie comes to a screeching halt just as the hurricane is in the future. This plot shows the spirit of the Coen brothers to carry out this specious state of existence - even in form, Larry and the audience are not spared, and the answers to the two questions of whether he is sick and whether he will get a teaching position are hidden forever. .
Epilogue
The film "Serious Man" practiced the spirit of irony in both form and content. Although it is called "Serious Man" - I prefer the translation of "Serious Man" - but there is not a single thing in the film. It is true that no one is serious, although everyone is seriously messing with life. Through various artistic or scientific means of expression, the Coen brothers have vividly displayed the subtle state of modern people, which is neither now nor then. Although the outer shell is absurd, the inside is a thorough and true display of the spirit of the times. And this display also corresponds to a Yiddish (Jewish lingua franca) proverb—nisht ahin, nisht aher—neither here nor there.
If so, where am I?
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