Comparative Study Between Homer\'s Odyssey and the Coen Brothers O Brother Where Art Thou

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Homer in Hollywood: The Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Could a Hollywood filmmaker adapt Homer's Odyssey for the screen in the same way that James Joyce did for the Modernist novel? The idea of a high-art film adaptation of the Odyssey is actually at the center of the plot of Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film Contempt, and the Alberto Moravia novel on which Godard's film is based. In Contempt, Prokosch, a rich American dilettante film producer played by Jack Palance, hires Fritz Lang to film a version of Homer's Odyssey, then hires a screenwriter to write it and promptly ruins his marriage to Brigitte Bardot. Fritz Lang gamely plays himself -- joining the ranks of fellow "arty" German-born directors who had earlier deigned to act before the camera (like Erich von Stroheim in Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, playing a former director not unlike himself, or even Otto Preminger in Wilder's Stalag 17, playing a concentration camp commandant who behaves like a Hollywood director) -- yet Fritz Lang's film version of the Odyssey is only glimpsed in preliminary rushes within the film, only to provoke the producer's wrath as being too "arty." In point of fact, it appears to be a straightforward film of Homer's story with Greek marble statuary and aquamarine Mediterranean waters seemingly out of a Giorgio di Chirico canvas (Godard 1963). We are perhaps invited to imagine the rest being a highly aestheticized affair, a technicolor retread of Lang's own cinematic epic Metropolis, but we never see the completed film-within-the-film (Lang 1927). Partly because James Joyce's Ulysses is still regarded as the supreme achievement of Modernist literature -- and is itself an adaptation (of sorts) of the Odyssey -- Godard uses the very idea of a film adaptation of the Odyssey as either an idea of cinematic "art" or else a vulgarian's notion of what cinematic "art" should entail. Whose vision is it to be, the producer's or the auteur's?

It is precisely that Joycean and Modernist impulse that Will Self, in a recent piece for the Guardian surveying the Coens' oeuvre even as it considers their 2011 release True Grit, attributes to O Brother, Where Art Thou? Of the film, Self says "this isn't just a retro-style depression-era chain-gang jailbreak movie, but a retelling of the Odyssey to boot. It's James Joyce with a catchy country soundtrack instead of all that brain-ache wordplay" (Self 2011). Invoking Joyce sounds like we are in the territory of serious art, yet the Coen Brothers are constantly toying with notions of what "serious art" might actually mean in film -- indeed that very question lies at the heart of the title character's dilemma in their 1991 breakout film Barton Fink, as he tries to make serious art out of a studio B-movie screenplay about professional wrestling -- it is only fitting that they should face the challenge of adapting Homer's Odyssey head-on. Yet from the very title of their 2000 feature O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the knowledgeable viewer is already made aware that the Coens are not merely adapting Homer, and are certainly not adapting Homer straightforwardly, in the way Jack Palance's overbearing producer Prokosch demands of his screenwriter in Godard's story. O Brother, Where Art Thou? was, in fact, the first adapted screenplay that the Coens ever attempted at the time of its release in 2000, although since then they have collaborated on several more adaptations and/or remakes of existing material, and to some extent they are making a Coen Brothers film first and foremost, and a Homeric adaptation only secondarily. But in order to assess the Coens' adaptation of Homer, and their larger achievement in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I think it is necessary to approach several topics individually.

First I think we must situate O Brother, Where Art Thou? within the larger context of the Coens' oeuvre, in order to clarify questions of genre, pastiche, and allusion (their title itself is an allusion to previous Hollywood film) -- and also to broach the question of what sort of freewheeling adaptation they have made of their source material. Although capable of remarkable fidelity in the two westerns they have adapted from novels by Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis, the Coens approach to Homeric source material resembles more the oblique approach taken to "adapting" the Old Testament Book of Job in A Serious Man (2008). But we will also discuss various other works (both film and fiction) which provide a nexus of allusions and source-materials well beyond Homer. Then we must consider O Brother, Where Art Thou? straightforwardly as an adaptation of Homer's narrative in the Odyssey, by going through and tracking the choices they make in conflating, omitting, or enlarging certain of the original episodes. Finally we may also ask in what way it resembles other important films that use Homer's Odyssey as a point of departure for adaptation: in addressing this topic, we may use as examples not only Godard's Contempt, but also the more oblique version of Homeric epic presented in Stanley Kubrick's arty sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. I hope to show that both Godard and Kubrick seem interested in a separate aspect of the Odysseus legend that does not derive directly from the Odyssey itself, but from later poets ranging from Dante to Tennyson working with the Homeric source material as adaptors, building the legend of an after-life to the Homeric Odysseus that seems to be central to Godard's and Kubrick's use of the Odyssey but is vastly less important in the Coen Brothers' approach. And finally I hope to address the ways in which the Coen Brothers are taking a specific route in adapting the Odyssey, and it is the same one that James Joyce and arguably the Roman writer Petronius Arbiter (author of the Satyricon) took, by following the general plotline of the Odyssey and looking for equivalents -- but more importantly, all three of these loose adaptations of the Odyssey discover what it is about the Odyssey that is most enduring for future generations. Although an epic, it ends with a recognition -- and to a certain degree a reconciliation -- between husband and wife. It is like an epic whose ending comes straight out of the archetypes for the "mythos of comedy," as Northrop Frye once identified them, which classically ends in marital reconciliation -- and as such these approaches to the Odyssey on the part of very different artists allows for an approach to a "comic epic" (Frye 283). I think that this is essentially the Coens' own view of their achievement in O Brother Where Art Thou?; in interviews they downplay the seriousness of their approach to the Odyssey, claiming that their film "combines the Three Stooges with Homer's Odyssey" perhaps to make the film sound more approachable for a general audience or merely to play up the weird hybrid genre of the film, but they also imply that frankness of their epic ambitions when they describe it (only half-slightingly) as potentially the "Lawrence of Arabia of Hayseed movies" ("Production Featurette" 2001). I think this qualifies their chief debt to Homer as the application of a post-Homeric category -- comedy -- onto the template of the Odyssey itself, which the Coens do as surely as Petronius Arbiter and James Joyce did in different prose fictions, to produce an archetypally comic and epic narrative.

PART 1. O Brother Where Art Thou as Adaptation and Pastiche.

In a very important sense, O Brother Where Art Thou? is less like any Homeric adaptation than it is like the Coens' strong series of mid-career films -- from Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) through The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), which follows the year after O Brother -- all of which resemble not so much as adaptations or even straightforward genre films as much as they resemble pastiche. By this I mean that each of those films is heavily dependent upon a knowledge of prior cinema, and a frequent cinemagoers exhaustive knowledge of film genre. Like Miller's Crossing and Barton Fink, O Brother Where Art Thou? is set within the greater context of America's Great Depression in the 1930s -- which was also the moment when film attained a sort of cultural supremacy, and Hollywood under the studio system was turning out vastly more product on a yearly basis than it currently does. The U.S. Government's breakup of the Hollywood "studio system" in the late 1940s -- which asserted that "Hollywood's practices really did violate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act" and issued a legal injunction that the studios sell their cinema chains -- would ultimately prove the death-blow for an entire way of doing business and making films in Hollywood (Friedrich 196). One immediate consequence was the inability of studios to maintain exclusive contracts with performers, which would destroy the great variety of character actors who populated Hollywood films of the 1930s, in a style that the Coens consciously emulate. Another consequence of the demise of the "studio system" was a long-term shift towards quality over quantity in production, which meant the virtual extinction (outside, perhaps, of the horror genre) of "back lot" or "B movies" of the sort the Coens frequently imitate. The irony of the Coens' career is that, out of the marginalized business of "independent" filmmaking, they have so often striven to re-create such period pieces of the golden age of Hollywood's studios. Although Peter Biskind points to the Coens as an example of the larger symbiotic relationship that exists between "independent" filmmaking and Hollywood studio filmmaking, in the way that independent filmmaking "emerges at the bottom to inject new vitality into the system: the Oliver Stones and Coen Brothers of the 80s, the Quentin Tarantinos and Atom Egoyans of the 90s" (Biskind 429), the fact remains that the Coens seem most influenced by Hollywood product that was not independent in the first place, and represented in many cases the quickest cheapest sort of commercial product.

The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) are both set in the 1950s by contrast, but they are still attempts to revive film genres of the 1930s (the latter film is even shot in black-and-white) -- The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) is a pastiche of the "Screwball" comedies of the 1930s, a genre that the Coens had attempted earlier (with a contemporary setting) in Raising Arizona (1987) Meanwhile The Man Who Wasn't There straightforwardly adapts elements of noir and crime films of the 1930s -- in pastiche of various screen adapations of the novels of James M. Cain, like Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) or Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945) -- in the same way that (to varying degrees) Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, and O Brother Where Art Thou? all manage to borrow from different elements of 30s crime films and B-movies generally. Viewers of Barton Fink will also recall that a large element of the film's plot hinges on questions of screenplay genre -- in point of fact, there never was any such thing as a "wrestling picture," although it sounds plausible enough, even though the prospect of the obese Wallace Beery wearing tights is meant to gain laughs from anyone who can still identify the once-famous '30s Hollywood star of the Garbo-and-Barrymore vehicle Grand Hotel, in which Beery beats Barrymore to death with a telephone (1932). Nonetheless, a "wrestling picture" sounds more plausible than the "chain gang picture," which was legitimately a film genre, prompted by Paul Muni's impassioned performance starring in Mervyn Leroy's 1930 film I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, with a genre that continues for a while and includes Humphrey Bogart's wryly comic turn in Michael Curtiz's We're No Angels (1955) -- a role played by Robert DeNiro in Neil Jordan's 1989 remake of the film, with a new screenplay by David Mamet -- and Stanley Kramer's socially-conscious Sidney Poitier -- Tony Curtis vehicle The Defiant Ones (1958). So when O Brother, Where Art Thou? opens, it is clearly and identifiably a film within this specific Hollywood sub-genre, although it is quite obviously a comic entry within that genre. Clearly the Coens are not merely adapting Homer's Odyssey in this film: they are also expanding their portfolio in terms of historical and stylistic pastiche of earlier Hollywood cinema. Again, one needs to be as steeped in the cinema of the 1930s to recognize their title -- "O Brother Where Art Thou?" -- as being itself taken from an earlier film comedy, Sullivan's Travels by Preston Sturges. Sturges's plot involves a Hollywood film director who wants to address the crises of the 1930s (including the Great Depression) by making a heartfelt (perhaps even bleeding-heartfelt) film about the plight of the American working man, to be entitled "O Brother Where Art Thou?" (This was itself likely Preston Sturges's own allusion to Arlen and Harburg's popular tune of the period "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?," and which epitomizes the sincere response to the economic and cultural malaise of the American 1930s.) As Josh Levine summarizes it in his book on the Coen Brothers, where he says the Coens's title

…is a rather esoteric joke, coming as it does from the brothers' favorite Preston Sturges film, Sullivan's Travels. In Sturges' film a Hollywood director of silly entertainments decides to make a serious film about the Depression called by the same name ["O Brother, Where Art Thou?"]: but because he actually knows only wealth and success, he decides to disguise himself as a hobo and go on the road, eventually ending up in prison. The lesson that the director learns while watching the prisoners laughing uproariously at a church screening of cartoons is that audiences don't want to see their lives depicted in movies: they want to escape for a while (Levine 159-61).

The affinities of Stuges's Sullivan's Travels with the Coens' earlier Barton Fink should be readily apparent: both are about the conflict between light entertainment and serious artistic fare, although the plot eventually renders the debate moot as the film becomes a parable of a writer's inability to witness an actual melodrama taking place around him (until he is involved, and a woman is dead because of him). The murderer played by John Goodman is (crucially) physically not unlike Wallace Beery, whom we never see in the film but who is referred to frequently. Barton has utterly failed to take an interest in Goodman's attempts to confess to him what is later revealed; that he is the serial murderer "Mad Man Mundt." Further details in Barton Fink really do require the viewer share the Coens' enthusiasm for the Hollywood "studio system" of the 1930s. A little period knowledge reveals that Barton Fink himself bears significant resemblance to playwright-turned-screenwriter Clifford Odets, who began as a committed socialist playwright writing loud and sentimental indictments of society (such as Golden Boy, eventually filmed with the young William Holden) but ended his career writing screenplays like the astonishingly bitter and macabre -- but technically flawless -- script for Alexander MacKendrick's noir masterpiece The Sweet Smell of Success. Fink's fellow studio scribe W.P. Mayhew is clearly meant to be identified as William Faulkner, a Nobel-prize winning novelist whose work for the studios included noirs like Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945) and Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946). And the morbid hotel in which Barton faces his writer's block is clearly indebted to another serious novelist turned Hollywood hack, Nathanael West, who managed the Hollywood hotel in which visiting writers were housed (Doom 53). Odets, West and Faulkner all churned out genre pictures for the studios like Barton does but the fact remains that Barton Fink itself is, oddly enough, not a straightforward genre picture of any sort -- although on the surface it seems to be a movie about the movie business, like Singin' in the Rain or The Bad and the Beautiful, a ghoulish noir melodrama seems to be happening all the way through the film, it happens offscreen: the severed head is never removed from the box Fink carries. O Brother, Where Art Thou? presents a similar stylistic congeries. And just as Barton Fink invokes Faulkner, West, and Clifford Odets, a similar list of literary allusions could be made for O Brother Where Art Thou?, invoking a canon of American rural or vernacular literature, with some of it from the 1930s-era south depicted in the film -- including Faulkner. Ryan P. Doom suggests that the Coens' choice of setting "surrounds the characters with a snapshot of Faulkner's South (his short novel 'Old Man' also seems to serve some inspiration)" -- there might also be a nod to Faulkner's much-anthologized story "Barn Burning" in the extended sequence in which the Sheriff sets fire to the barn (Doom 102). Other moments provide clear allusions to other Southern writers. Flannery O'Connor's bleak little story "Good Country People" -- about a fast-talking and ultimately treacherous Bible salesman -- is lurking behind their portrayal of the Bible salesman Big Dan Teague. And although in general the fast-talking confidence trickster seems to be more of an American archetype, we might see a hint of Melville's Confidence-Man or Mark Twain's Duke and Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn. (Twain is also an influence on other elements of the Coens' imagination here, including the Mississippi regional picaresque, with a seemingly controversial stand in favor of racial equality, and even for a yokel's tall tale about an amphibian). All of these elements need to be added into the mix in terms of the Coen Brothers basic aesthetic procedure of pastiche: they even present the extended sequence in which Ulysses Everett McGill and his companions save Tommy from lynching at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan is filmed by the Coens as an elaborate parody of a physically comedic (and yet dramatically important) sequence from The Wizard of Oz. It is important to be aware that this is just a basic function of their aesthetic, although they manage to do without it in their straightforward adaptations of the offbeat Western novels by Charles Portis and Cormac McCarthy that they have adapted quite faithfully. In terms of style of adaptation, O Brother Where Art Thou? does not have any predecessors in the Coens' canon, although it has two progeny. The first of these is their widely-reviled remake of the Alec Guinness / Ealing Studios comedy The Ladykillers (2004) in which the setting is moved from England to a present-day rural American South, largely to permit Tom Hanks to speak in the same elaborately circumlocutory con-man's patois that Ulysses Everett McGill employed in the earlier film. (Hanks' performance may be more ghoulish and macabre -- it seems closer to Steve Coogan doing mock-horror in Doctor Terrible's House of Horrible (2001) than it does to Clooney's masterful channeling of Clark Gable in O Brother -- but the actual text of the two characters' dialogue is similar, with that use of unexpected language that is a hallmark of the Coens' writing style. When the Professor in The Ladykillers (2004) asks the elderly African-American woman from whose house he and his crew will dig his tunnel to steal the money if her husband ever "blew the shofar" and she understands it as "blew the chauffeur," it is the same kind of unexpected choice of vocabulary that marks the Coens' verbal protagonists -- one could instance the verbal mannerism of Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona prefacing her demand that Nicholas Cage kidnap a baby with the wail "I'm barren!," or the Dude in The Big Lebowski greeting the Nihilists' entry into his bathroom with a trained ferret with the chill observation "Nice marmot," or the elaborately concocted vocabularies of 1930s Chicago gangsters in Miller's Crossing ("He's got a wart on his fanny") or present-day Midwestern hoodlums and con men in Fargo ("Unguent! Unguent!"). It is this rapid-fire patter speak that is the chief glory of the Coens' style -- enabling George Clooney to proclaim himself a "paterfamilias" in O Brother, Where Art Thou? As glibly as he will later, in the Coens' 2003 romantic comedy Intolerable Cruelty, declare his certainty that Catherine Zeta-Jones's social climbing heroine must have had a "Tenzing Norgay" -- Miles in the latter film actually is a lawyer, while McGill has been sent to prison for impersonating a lawyer. The rhetorical excesses of the legal profession are also accompanied by the air spurious erudition that Clooney uses frequently in O Brother, but had also put on for the Coen's 2008 postmodern spy thriller Burn After Reading, where he euphemistically describes retro-engineering from a "gentleman's magazine" what can only be termed a "fuckmachine" (which he then demonstrates for an awe-struck Frances McDormand). It only makes sense that this idea of talking and bluffing one's way out of situations -- which is certainly the great heroism of Homer's Odysseus in episodes like that of the Cyclops -- should be central to defining Ulysses Everett McGill, who notes in his initial interview with his own Cyclops, Big Dan Teague, that they both are "blessed with the gift of the gab."

But in a sense, the style of adaptation here most resembles the Coens' later "version" of the Old Testament story of Job in A Serious Man. In reality what they present is not really so much an adaptation of Job as a midrash -- a serious rabbinical commentary -- upon the story. Elements of A Serious Man derive from actual Jewish religious tradition, in particular the recording of Hasidic folktales (which frequently deal with the supernatural) by Martin Buber, and the serious re-interpretation of the Kabbalah and other forms of Jewish mysticism pioneered by the scholarship Gershom Scholem, and used as the basis for a paranoia-tinged thriller in Darren Aronofsky's debut feature, Pi. The Coens manage to take Judaism and its mystical traditions seriously in the film, but only in its parable-like directness does A Serious Man resemble the actual Biblical source material -- otherwise it is quite subversive in its equation of the series of three rabbis from whom Larry Gopnik seeks wisdom with the comforters of Job. The method of adaptation is bleak, but it still retains traces of their signature wit: such as the way in which the Torah's commandment about coveting thy neighbor's wife is wordlessly dramatized in a scene of voyeurism and nude sunbathing that could only take place in the '70s milieu of the film. O Brother, Where Art Thou? takes a similarly oblique approach to Homer much of the time, or certainly adapting Homer at the same time that incorporates other influences, or manages to make itself a film that is quite consciously "about" the elements of Homeric poetry transposed realistically to an American setting. I will examine the Coens' transposed setting next, and conclude with an assessment of the Coens' achievement in the context of other approaches to Homer.

Part 2. O Brother, Where Art Thou? As Homeric Adaptation.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? begins with the sounds of a chain gang at work, chanting as they break rocks. But the screen remains blank until text appears:

O Muse!

Sing in me, and through me tell the story

Of that man skilled in all the ways of contending,

A wanderer, harried for years on end… (O Brother, 2000)

The quotation is not attributed and its source is not identified (until the credits inform us that the film is "based upon 'The Odyssey' by Homer," it just seems to exist as a formal beginning to the story. It's actually Robert Fitzgerald's 1961 translation of the Odyssey, with some minor changes: Fitzgerald actually begins "Sing in me, Muse, and through me" -- and more closely following the Greek he gives "in all ways of contending" and "the wanderer," but otherwise the Coens follow his translation exactly (Fitzgerald 1961). But here, the "sung" quality of the Homeric poems -- the notion that they were performances which re-enacted epic and heroic deeds of the past -- seems to link with the singing which accompanies the forced labor of a chain gang. The relation of this opening sequence to the Homeric source material is oblique, however it is possible that the Coens are making an allusion to what is perhaps the major event in Homeric scholarship over the past hundred years -- namely, Milman Parry's proof that many of the signature poetic devices of the Homeric poems (such as the constant epithets applied to Odysseus) are not merely a lazy way to fill up the complicated dactylic hexameter in which the poems are written with filler that has the correct syllabic count, but are also a hallmark of the oral tradition in which the poems were originally composed and recited before being written down. The line of convicts chanting as they break rocks seems likely to be an allusion to the original oral context of the Homeric poems. Ryan P. Doom in The Brothers Coen argues persuasively that the Coens are making us aware of the almost pre-modern oral culture of rural Mississippi in this period: he thinks their approach to the Odyssey "enhances the notion of oral tradition. Greek tales survived through storytelling about human tragedy. In the same respect, the characters in O Brother use storytelling as part of their odyssey" (Doom 99). The convicts in the film's opening are singing what seems to be a spiritual, but the lyrics conceal a suppressed ballad of a great criminal or underworld figure, or at least a figure of folklore on the order of the Paul Bunyan whose statue looms large over the snowy landscape of the Coen Brothers' Fargo. The lyrics of the opening song tell of the Biblically-named Lazarus who is some sort of outlaw, allowing for a sort of pun on both the Bibilical and wanted-man poster connotations of the phrase of "dead or alive":

Well the high sheriff

He told the deputy

Won't you go out and bring me Lazarus?

Bring him dead or alive

O Lord

Bring him dead or alive

Well the deputy

Well he told the high sheriff

Well I ain't gonna mess with Lazarus

He's a dangerous man, O Lord, he's a dangerous man

Even within the woeful context of the forced labor which accompanies the song, the sentiment still seems to be the glorification of some larger-than-life figure, as in similar African-American song traditions like "Stagger Lee" and "John Henry." Out of such legends great epic heroes might be built up, over the course of generations, purely within an oral tradition. The movie seems to be suggesting right off that Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) -- whom we glimpse in the next shot, escaping from this chain gang with two other men before ducking down into the growth to avoid being seen -- is precisely such a folkloric figure as the Lazarus of the song. Although the soundtrack quickly shifts to "Big Rock Candy Mountain," which has the equivalent associations of an oral tradition of tall tales, and again seems to suggest not so much the Homeric poems as the bardic tradition that produced them, and that functioned as a sort of mass-media in the days when technology had not yet even advanced as far as writing. Milman Parry was, of course, able to find examples of oral tradition still in the 1930s among Serbian guslars that corresponded to the compositional techniques of Homeric poetry because he saw that Homer "presupposed a different kind of poetry from all that we are familiar with," and sought out ethnographic proof that Homer's stylistic hallmarks were proof of an oral tradition (Parry xxi). But the Coen Brothers are also certainly aware that Parry's 1933-5 research work -- which falls so close to the 1937 setting of O Brother, Where Art Thou? -- was conducted in a sort of golden age of American ethnography which accompanied the establishment of anthropology as an academic discipline by Franz Boas and Margaret Mead (among others) in the 1920s and 1930s. This newfound curiosity about "folk culture" in the 1930s saw academics and folklorists seek out "old timey" material as avidly as Stephen Root's blind collector of songs does in O Brother, when the Roosevelt administration's New Deal included funding for ethnographers recording folklore and oral narratives in areas like Appalachia and the Ozarks: many recordings not unlike those which comprise the best-selling soundtrack of O Brother were made purely out of anthropological interest, and the Soggy Bottom Boys' "Man of Constant Sorrow" was itself first recorded by folkorists collecting material in Appalachia in 1922 ("O Brother," BBC News, 2002). We can view Parry's work on Homer within the same larger explosion of interest in oral cultures which included, in the same time period, the emergence of studies of African-American orality in Zora Neale Hurston's ethnographic work and ultimately her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937 (the same year in which O Brother is set), and -- as the anthropological fever reached Hollywood itself -- the invention of the narrative documentary by Robert Flaherty in pioneering features like Nanook of the North (1922, the same year that folklorists first recorded "Man of Constant Sorrow) and Man of Aran (1934). The convergence in the 1930s of Parry's pioneering work on the orality of Homer with the WPA efforts to preserve oral folklore of the rural American South seems to have struck the Coens as the primary reason to set their adaptation in the 1930s South: the orality of the culture is confirmed when radio seems to be the predominant medium in the society the Coens depict: the one newspaper depicted crucially goes unread before it burns in a campfire, and the film attended by Ulysses Everett McGill and Delmar (and eventually Pete with his new chain gangs) proves the triumph of oral culture over new technologies when the men can barely resist speaking over the film itself, eventually attracting attention from the Sheriff's agent guarding the chain gang in the cinema. Ryan P. Doom in his chapter on O Brother, Where Art Thou? In The Brothers Coen (entitled "Three Convicts and the KKK") emphasizes the film's obsessive interest in the media of oral transmission in the small rural communities -- dramatized in the closest thing to a central running plotline over the course of the film as a whole, namely the accidental rise to stardom of the Soggy Bottom Boys due to the invention of recording and broadcasting technologies, but primarily due to word of mouth -- but also emphasizes the way in which all the other plotlines trace campaigns of information, misinformation or outright deception. "We ain't one-at-a-timin' here, we mass-communicatin'," growns "Pappy" O'Daniel, utilizing what is clearly a neologism to describe an era in which Roosevelt's radio addresses were deemed a particularly intimate way to engage the nation, while Pappy has his own equivalent broadcasting perch by hosting and sponsoring a variety show. The Coens based "Pappy" on two separate real-world Southern governors: "Pappy" O'Daniel of Texas (not Mississippi as in the film), who actually had the sort of radio presence that the Coens' "Pappy" has, and the other of whom -- Governor Jimmie Davis of Louisiana -- was the singer-songwriter who actually wrote the ditty "You Are My Sunshine" (which "Pappy" requests the Soggy Bottom Boys to play as he pardons them) in 1940 four years before winning the gubernatorial election. If we consider modern "spin" or public relations to be an outgrowth of a heroic sense of defining one's own myth (the way that "Babyface" Nelson consciously does in the film, in defiance of the epithet attached to his name which he detests) is most apparent in the overarching political plot of the film. In that strand, Menelaus "Pappy" O'Daniel, Governor of Mississippi, is running for re-election against the reform candidate (and secret KKK Grand Wizard) Homer Stokes, but we see all the political public relations machinery of both campaigns constantly -- which may possibly be a reference to the Cave of the Winds in the Odyssey, if we understand that politicians like Homer's Aeolus pump out a lot of air, but can occasionally tender favors (even if those favors may ultimately, like a gubernatorial pardon or a radio broadcast, be made of air).

Including names like "Menelaus" and "Homer" signpost the Coens' affinity for their source material -- as well as an amusing glance at a culture which frequently did employ Classical names in the time period depicted -- and to a certain degree act as obvious jolts for the audience to remind them that there is meant to be an ancient and dignified source to all the hayseed hijinks depicted onscreen. In terms of similarities to the episodes of the Odyssey, though, these are actually rather easy to work out. It becomes apparent that the frame story of having Ulysses in prison -- and, as we learn relatively late into the movie, only having recently learned of his wife's intention to re-marry. His wife is named Penny, short for Penelope, and this functions as the overarching frame narrative of the Homeric "nostos" or return to Ithaka on the part of Homer's hero. In place of the chief suitor, Antinous, we are given "Mister Vernon T. Waldrip," and according to the veritable Greek chorus of angelic little girls who together take the part of Telemachus, "he's a suitor" -- repeating their use of the classically Homeric word. Of course Vernon does not have fellow suitors, because Penny has actually accepted his engagement. This is a pivotal difference from the Homeric version of Penelope, who unweaves her tapestry on a nightly basis to buy time from Antinous and the other suitors, certain in her faith that Odysseus will return -- the sentiments of the Homeric Penelope are, of course, expressed in the Latin tag which Pete struggles to pronounce, but which Ulysses Everett McGill will raise in his quarrels with Penny over her engagement to Waldrip, "amor fidelis," which means, one presumes, something along the lines of "constant love" (of which the image of Penelope has been used as a sort of poetic emblem).

As for the actual Homeric episodes, the correspondences are many but often the exact level of similarity to the Homeric original that the Coens are courting is left ambiguous. Numerous commentators have pointed out that Pete and Delmar are not merely stand-ins for the crew of Odysseus, they also have names that mean "rock" and "of the sea" and are presumably meant to correspond also to the Homeric Scylla and Charybdis -- they represent not merely allies, but also obstacles the Coens' Ulysses must steer himself between. After the initial escape, the first episode sets the tone for the Homeric adaptations that follow: the unnamed "Blind Seer" (as he is called in the film's credits) whom the convicts encounter on the railroad tracks, shortly after having tumbled by turns out of the boxcar. This unnamed character plays the rough equivalent of the blind prophet Tiresias, whom Odysseus and his crew summon from the dead for his counsel, although this man is very much alive, however he emerges from nowhere (preceded by the screech of his cart) in a way that seems inexplicable: how has he not been run over by a train? For reasons of cinematic structure -- if you are going to have a prophecy, it is best to have it bookend the plot -- then it should be placed in the first act of the screenplay, so the Tiresias episode is moved early. But also typical of the Coens' approach to Homer, it conglomerates elements from different episodes. The elaborately formal exchange in which they ask to join the old man -- "Mind if we join you, old-timer?" -- mimics the various guest-host exchanges that pervade Homer's episodes. (It also introduces the term "old-timer" as applied in earnest, which becomes crucial at the climax of the movie when Homer Stokes accuses the Soggy Bottom Boys of not even being authentically "old-timey.") But then the Coens promptly give the old man an allusion to Odysseus's most famous spoken words in Homer, from the episode of Polyphemus: "I work for no man….I have no name." This, of course, functions as a signposting allusion to one of the best known Homeric moments among the general population -- but so does the man's blindness, which links him in the popular imagination immediately with Homer himself moreso than Tiresias. But this moment is their chance to find an authentic tone to strike in their approach to the weirder (supernatural or monstrous) elements of the Homeric original, and they find it in an earlier example of the vernacular tradition of the Mississippi region in which O Brother, Where Art Thou? is set: namely Mark Twain. The little vignette with the "Blind Seer" seems to find an authentic equivalent to Homer by mediating him through various aspects of Mark Twain's vernacular writing which might be seen as rough parallels -- for Homer there are narratives of great and cunning deeds, for Mark Twain there are tall tales and the acts of confidence tricksters. The Coens' constant allusions to the comparable oral-culture context of their film and the Homeric original can therefore be extended to include the most Twain-like element of the narrative (besides its episodic nature and its setting), which is the astounding frequency with which the characters deceive each other. Ulysses Everett McGill lies to Pete and Delmar about the buried treasure; Penny has lied to his daughters, saying he was hit by a train; Big Dan Teague deceives them with his hospitality turned hostility; also, with Waldrip and Stokes, he conceals membership in the menacing secret society of the Ku Klux Klan. The blind African-American preacher-man seems like Jim telling Huck Finn a ghost story in earnest: his strange little pushcart even seems like Jim's raft, compared to the grand riverboat of the boxcar -- in particular, it establishes a tone of Christian religious fervor, the sort that pervades Pentecostal denominations in America's south, replete with glossolalia and actual legitimate belief in things like prophecy, as a way of harnessing the supernatural elements of Homer's tale but making them credible within a context of what is believable within the context of Twain-like tall tales about the rural South in the era of the Scopes "monkey trial" and the electrification of the most isolated rural communities through Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority -- which provides the context for the climactic flooding which sweeps away the Sheriff and his dog, but in which the lives of Ulysses, Pete and Delmar are miraculously preserved. Lest anyone think that Mark Twain is the only legendary American novelist who hovers as an influence over this film, their lives are preserved by a floating coffin, in a clear allusion to the climax of Moby Dick -- trumped by the revelation that Tommy has also survived, floating upon the desk which contains the ring that Ulysses Everett McGill had come to obtain.

After the "Blind Seer," the next humans that Ulysses Everett McGill and his companions encounter are the feral and heavily-armed prepubescent Hogwallop boy, and then Washington Hogwallop, Pete's cousin. Wash removes the men's chains and offers them a place to sleep for the night, but promptly turns them in to the authorities for the bounty. By way of apology, as the Sheriff's men are besieging the convicts in the barn, and set fire to it (which may be a wink in the direction of one of William Faulkner's most anthologized stories about the rural American South in the 1930s, "Barn Burning") Cousin Wash feels compelled to offer an apology for having betrayed his "kin." This talk about "kin" is repeated a number of times in the Wash episode and will be invoked repeatedly throughout the movie by Pete. It is clear that, again, the Coens are attempting to invoke certain elements of the social context of the Homeric poems -- in particular their emphasis on correct behavior in guest-host relations, and their presentation of numerous episodes in which this basic rule is violated. Of course kinship structures are related: "Pappy" O'Daniel's grandiose first name reminds us of the man on whose behalf the Trojan war was waged, yet the chief general was not Menelaus but Agamemnon. The "kinfolk" relations that Pete and Cousin Wash are constantly invoking imply a level of intimacy that can breed loathing -- after the betrayal Pete muses that his father had always enjoined him "never trust a Hogwallop" -- but the basic establishing fact is that kin owe something to kin, and that this is the bond (rather than a guest-host bond) that gets betrayed in this episode. But I think there's a crucial but brief moment which establishes what the Coens actually think the Homeric parallel, and it comes before Wash betrays the three escapees, when he is offering them dinner. The structure of the scene -- with Pete's repeated question "Where's Cora?" which is met with the claim that she "R-U-N-O-F-F-T" is intercut with Wash offering a meal to the men (a crucial part of the Homeric guest-host relationship). The meat in the stew is stringy and bright pink, and for a moment the possibility seems to hover in the air that, in fact, Cora is what is being served for dinner. Wash then reveals that it's week-old horsemeat and he reckons it's gone off, but the true Homeric parallel is to the episode of the Laestrygonians. Cannibalism is a subject with no easy equivalent in contemporary society, but the Laestrygonians practice betrayal of Odysseus and their guests by eating them -- Cousin Wash Hogwallop will prove equally perfidious, but it's telling that the Coens (and the audience) are able to entertain the possibility that this man and his son are eating their wife. It seems like the sort of thing that might take place in this part of America.

The sudden appearance of the baptismal congregants doesn't seem to have any precise Homeric parallel, unless we want to consider them as being somehow analogous to the Lotos-eaters. It is mainly there to make the supernatural riverside events of the later Sirens episode more credible, for the two are presented as vaguely parallel: the baptism is a sort of magic, so it makes sense that Delmar might believe in magic as the explanation for the later episode. Likewise the encounter with Tommy, who seems closely based on the legendary Delta Bluesman Robert Johnson (whose career had been exhaustively examined earlier in Walter Hill's 1986 feature Crossroads, the title of which alludes to the central element of the Johnson legend, presented by the Coens in an aerial shot, namely the crossroads where he supposedly sold his soul to the Devil). These two episodes largely serve to express an atmosphere of religiosity in which larger displays of credulity will be possible: they also help to characterize the chief quasi-supernatural antagonist that Ulysses Everett McGill will face. Taking the place of the traditional Homeric emphasis on Odysseus being dogged by the wrath of the sea god Poseidon is the more elementary chase-plot of the Sheriff (played by Daniel von Bargen) constantly attempting to track down the three escapees, and trailing them with his bloodhound. The supernatural element is lent by the fact that he matches Tommy's description of what the Devil looks like -- although Tommy specifies "dead eyes," the Sheriff wears curious small round mirrored sunglasses which look like dead eyes. He serves Poseidon's function, and the fact that he matches Tommy's description of a demon is enough to make him as supernatural as Poseidon is in Homer. The only element which might seem to link him to the actual Poseidon is the fact that he meets his death by drowning (in an unlikely and otherwise landlocked spot) -- we see his glasses sink beneath the water in the montage that follows the flood, and it would seem to indicate the end of his wrathful pursuit. The fact that it happens under water is perhaps the only wink in the direction of Homer's sea-god. The acceptance of Tommy into the crew as guitarist allows for the episode with the blind broadcaster played by Stephen Root, who corresponds roughly to the blind bard Demodocus who attends upon the court of Alcinoos when Odysseus relates his prior travels to the king and the Princess Nausicaa.

The "Babyface" Nelson episode is the next to occur, and it seems to correspond loosely to the "Oxen of the Sun" episode in Homer: although the Oxen episode involves the actual theft and slaughter of cattle, here the slaughter of cattle is an afterthought to the act of theft which was Nelson's trademark. The Coens again seem more interested in using the example of an FBI-ordained "Public Enemy Number One" to see how reputation and legend operate in the largely rural culture here. (The Coens use of Nelson is otherwise bizarre, because he never operated in Mississippi and would have been dead by the 1937 setting of the film.) But Nelson provides the men with cash, and his episode is followed in short order by a more obviously Homeric one: the three women washing clothes in the river, in an episode that seems like an unholy parody of the earlier baptisms, as they sing an erotic song in sinuous three part harmony -- "You and me and the Devil makes three / don't need no other lovin', baby. / Go to sleep, little baby" -- and feed the men "corn liquor" until they pass out. Delmar awakens first, on the stone shelf beside the river next to a puddle; Ulysses is at his feet, but Delmar does not see Pete. Delmar sees Pete's clothes laid out as though Pete had simply vanished, then spots a toad inside the shirt. Delmar assumes Pete has been bewitched by the women, whom he calls "Sirens," and transformed into a beast: "Them sirens did this to Pete. They loved him up and turned him into a horny toad." Of course this actually conflates several episodes of the Odyssey: the corn-liquor seems to recall the soporific consumption in the Lotos-Eaters episode, whereas the seductive singing -- not to mention Delmar's use of the word -- recalls the "Sirens" episode. But Homer's Odysseus was not taken in by the Sirens' song: Ulysses Everett McGill does fall victim to it. Yet the larger parallel is with the Circe episode, considering that Delmar believes the toad is Pete and keeps the toad in a shoe-box until he can find a "wizard." Homer's Circe transforms the men into swine, but there has always been a strong tendency to moralize this choice of animal among Homer's adapters -- James Joyce sets his version of the Circe episode in a brothel after midnight -- and so Delmar's belief that Pete has become a "horny toad" has its own logic within the sexualized and seductive context of the scene beside the river.

The transmogrification plot will inadvertently lead to the next -- and quite obvious -- Homeric parallel, which is the Cyclops Polyphemus and his corresponding character in John Goodman's portrayal of the Bible salesman Big Dan Teague. Big Dan shares Polyphemus' monstrous appetites, and admits as much during his al fresco picnic with Ulysses Everett McGill and Delmar: "I am a man of large appetites, even with lunch under my belt, I was feeling a mite peckish." But in reality he has intended to steal the cash that he assumes they are keeping in the shoebox, not realizing it is a toad (which Delmar believes to be Pete). He crushes the toad and hurls its little corpse against a tree, which is an effective way of capturing the size difference between the Cyclops and Odysseus. But for reasons of plot development, Homer's Polyphemus episode is here broken up: the violation of hospitality and the murderous intent occur here, in what is basically a robbery, but Big Dan will return at the Klan Rally later in the film. There Polyphemus's almost animal nature finds an echo in the fact that Big Dan is able to sniff out, just as the Sheriff's bloodhound did earlier in the film, the scent of Ulysses Everett McGill's Dapper Dan pomade. The blinding of Polyphemus by Odysseus is given a Hollywood-style big-budget revision: the entire sequence builds up like the sequence at the Wicked Witch's castle in Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939), down to the chanting and synchronized marching, as though the sequence will work up to the blinding of Polyphemus in the same way that the castle sequence builds up to the Witch's destruction at the hands of Dorothy. Instead, as though to pleasingly thwart expectations, the Coen Brothers split the Homeric account into two parts: the flung Confederate flag -- which is on a flagpole sharpened to a perfect spear -- is about the blind Dan in his single good eye like the sharpened stick Odysseus uses. But Big Dan catches it in midair. However the Homeric account specifies that Odysseus uses a burning spear, and as Big Dan looks up, the ritual burning cross of the Klan comes crashing directly down upon him.

The latter half of the film is predominantly about the Homeric "nostos" or the actual return of Ulysses to his estranged wife Penny. Obviously this tilts the Homeric narrative toward those specific books which cover Odysseus' return to Ithaka. The Coens present those episodes out of order, to a certain degree: Odysseus first approaches the palace in disguise as a swineherd, and will not reveal himself to Penelope deliberately until the moment is right. His old dog Argus is the only one to recognize him immediately, and perishes directly thereafter. Ulysses Everett McGill, by contrast, has a level of urgency about his activities because he needs to stop the wedding that is taking place the next day: he also cannot precisely approach his own wife and children in disguise. So the disguise element of the Homeric original is displaced into his false-bearded entry onto the concert stage with the Soggy Bottom Boys, where he attempts to patch things up with Penny -- only to discover, to his surprise and Penny's, that the Soggy Bottom Boys have attained a level of popular acclaim that Homer Stokes's decision to seize the microphone and assault them leads to him being run out of town on a rail, and ultimately the deus ex-machina device of Governor Menelaus "Pappy" O'Daniel's gubernatorial pardon for the criminal activities, leaving no obstacle to his remarriage to his wife, save her insistence that he retrieve her ring from the rolltop desk in the cabin where she left it.

This leads to the final segment of the film, which has -- of course -- no strict Homeric parallel: it belongs instead to that long list of genre-bending allusions in their work, by likening the nostos of Odysseus to Penelope to a 1930s comedy of remarriage, of the sort anatomized by Stanley Cavell in his classic study of the genre. But this leads us into a separate topic for discussion, which is the relation of this film to other filmic and literary approaches to Homer.

Part 3. O Brother, Where Art Thou? And Odyssey Versions:

Kubrick and Godard, Ulysses and The Satyricon, and Others

The Coens' choice of imagining the reunion of Ulysses and Penelope as a 1930s "comedy of remarriage" is, of course, a hilarious way to reimagine the ending of the Odyssey -- and is a radically comic approach to marriage as opposed to the radically sexual stream-of-consciousness chapter that ends Joyce's Ulysses -- and provides the most appealing portrait of marriage an American film could provide. But what is important is that it is an element of film history and shows the Coens' willingness to re-imagine Homer within their own particular affinity for pastiche of relevant pre-existing period or genre films. As freewheeling as their adaptation may seem, it is noteworthy that they do attempt an episode-by-episode correspondence. This places them solidly within one camp of Homeric adaptors -- those that I would call the "comic epic" school -- and opposes them to other noteworthy directors such as Godard and Kubrick who played with the same Homeric source material. Neither Godard's Contempt (1963) nor Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) are actual adaptations of the Odyssey but both signpost their interest in the Homeric text, Godard within the plot of the film and Kubrick mainly in the title. Yet Godard gives us the hint as to the reason why Kubrick invokes the Odyssey, by quoting the post-Homeric tradition of considering the Odyssey not as a comic epic (with a finality in the marital reunion that provides resolution to the story) but rather considers the ending of the Odyssey, on the model of Homer's Iliad or Virgil's Aeneid, as elliptically inconclusive. A tradition of legend not included in Homer's text holds that Odysseus did not remain in Ithaka until his death, but eventually handed over the rule to Telemachus and made one final westward voyage beyond the Pillars of Herakles (the present-day strait of Gibraltar) and vanished. This is the version of Ulysses that is enshrined in Dante's Inferno CITATION and Tennyson's dramatic monologue "Ulysses" -- and it is noteworthy not only that this non-Homeric postscript is quoted explicitly in Godard's film, when the screenwriter reads from Dante's account of Ulysses. Tennyson removes the element of condemnation from Dante's portrait and makes Ulysses' last voyage into a heroic vitalist effort -- "Tis not too late to seek a newer world," Tennyson's hero exhorts his crew -- and this twist on the post-Homeric Odysseus legend seems to provide the basic template for the latter half of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Astronaut Dave Bowman in the Kubrick film seems to follow the pattern of Dante's Ulysses lost in the maelstrom and telling his tale in hell. For Dante as well as Homer it was folly to sail westward into the Atlantic Ocean, yet what intervenes between Dante and later depictions of the same legend is, of course, the European discovery of actual new continents to the west of the Pillars of Hercules. In Dante's time, such a westward voyage indicated a journey into the great unknown: whereas for Tennyson or Godard, the legend of Ulysses' final journey seems to point towards America. The Coens get this sense of the great questing mind of Tennyson's Ulysses, but rather than translate it into a sense that Ulysses Everett McGill will be wandering forever, it translates into a sense that his conversation with his wife will carry on for decades. His anthem "Man of Constant Sorrow" now looks to be a reference to the constant waspishness of his wife's commentary, and he seems to have escaped a chain-gang only to return to the proverbial "old ball and chain." The closing line calls attention not just to the "heroic task" that Ulysses Everett McGill has completed, but also Penny's refusal to acknowledge the task as either heroic, or even completed. The Coens want us to think that the affectionate argument of husband and wife will continue on indefinitely after the movie ends -- that is how the movie ends -- and in that sense, the iterative urge to heroism that we see in Dante, Tennyson, Godard and Kubrick becomes an iterative urge for husband and wife to engage in the same constant but affectionate bickering. Ulysses Everett McGill's "gift of the gab" now translates into a scenario where sheer rhetoric (even adversarial rhetoric) is the means of expressing genuine affection.