The films of the Coen brothers are difficult to evaluate, at least for me.
There is a mocking tone everywhere in their movies. The kidnappers, car salesmen, and police officers in "Snow Cream Bizarre Murder", Hollywood filmmakers and playwrights in "Barton Fink", and gangsters in "Miller's Crossroads" are all exaggerated and ridiculous. Unreasonable. A wise and old police flower, even if he finally solves the case, he will arrive after the fact and cannot prevent the continuous occurrence of murders. Even the Coen brothers made a joke. An Asian man who had nothing to do with the whole case asked the police to talk about the past and expressed love, but he turned out to be mentally abnormal. The scene of the gangster melee can be used as a footnote to Borges' novels.
However, mockery is not the purpose. Anything can be the object of ridicule, as long as you want. But mockery does not explain the problem. It seems that this posture of sarcasm can be regarded as the habitual method of the Coen Brothers, and it has become the main feature of the Coen Brothers films.
Using others as targets for jokes can show that one has the ability to be playful, but the skills stop there. A smart person, calmly, puts himself into the core of the mockery, and derives the opposition between the individual and the environment. Others involuntarily enter the first person from the perspective of the third person, or laugh or joy, if sad or angry, suspicious and fearful... And he gently wiped off the ashes of the cigarette, perhaps a subtle ridicule at the corner of his mouth, the hat on the edge of the table, let the wind take it away, and the fallen leaves. This is what makes "Miller's Crossroads" that fascinating Unforgettable portrait. The owner of the hat is lonely, leaving a lonely figure.
This figure is what the Coen brothers deliberately want people to remember, a fierce single image. This figure is Faust cooperating with his own devil, and Zarathustra who has left the world in disappointment and returned to the top of the solitary mountain. However, they are superhumans, they are aggressive, and he lacks their strength. He is not bloodthirsty, even kind, and has such a touch of love for people, but he is full of powerlessness, like that hat, moving with the wind. Passing away, I don't know where to drift. Because he is facing the nihility of "nothing". Barton Fink, "You invade someone else's environment, or you will adapt or you will disappear." Everything is as elusive as in the picture, either frantic or lost. Jing Hua, and Tom at Miller’s Crossroads, seem to have grasped the development of the situation, but the grasp and control of the ending are so weak or lagging, and the people around them are either indifferent or irrational, all of them are indifferent. I don't know where to live, all are not present, only one figure. this is the truth. The Coen brothers made an excellent explanation of existentialism in the form of images. Of course, this is a comment from my perspective, maybe they didn't intend to do so. Who knows.
"The most real thing is nothingness." --Samuel Beckett
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