The Coen Brothers' adaptation of Homer's Odyssey in 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

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.

But otherwise the Coens sidestep the idea of a last voyage after the return home, and adhere to what seems to be Homer's actual narrative: the return of a man to his wife after a long separation. In Homer it is of course the wrath of Poseidon that dogs Odysseus; in the Coens, the Sheriff represents both the years of separation caused by imprisonment and the constant wrathful pursuit of an angry authority figure. By focusing on an episodic or picaresque narrative with a hero running towards his wife and from the vengeful god in pursuit the Coens actually follow in the template of an existing method of approaching Homer. Of course picaresque runs the risk of a fragmented narrative without a strong overarching narrative structure: to some degree this was the substance of Roger Ebert's dismissal of O Brother Where Art Thou? On its original 2000 release, when he complained that the film suffers from "the sense of invention set adrift; of a series of bright ideas wondering why they had all been invited to the same film" (Ebert 2000). At the same time, the proto-picaresque structure of the Odyssey enables any adaptor to present a series of astonishing set-pieces: this is no less true of Joyce's Ulysses (in which the episodes become showcases for stylistic tours-de-force) than it is of O Brother, with its series of large-scale sequences (the Klan rally, the flood) each filmed with its own specific and appropriate visual aesthetic, to which Ebert is presumably referring. This mixture of different elements is made possible by the episodic structure, and it is noteworthy that another work which borrows structure from the Odyssey -- Petronius' Satyricon -- has in a punning title, which was meant to recall not just Satyrs (and satyriasis) but also the Latin "satura," meaning a stew-pot in which differing competing elements are thrown together, a "hodge-podge" or olla podrida (Connors ix). In Nero's Rome, the court satirist and imperial "arbiter of elegance" Petronius wrote an astonishing proto-novel -- which survives only in fragments but which was adapted and filmed by Federico Fellini (Fellini Satyricon, 1969) -- and the scholarly consensus is that the Satyricon's plot is broadly modeled on the Odyssey, and parodies of the Homeric idea of a hero pursued by the wrath of a god from setting to setting. The joke is that rather than the extensive travelogue of Odysseus, the episodes of the Satyricon all seem to be set in locations, both fashionable and squalid, in Southern Italy, depicted with an astonishing degree of frankness and realism -- and the wrathful god who pursues the hero is not Poseidon, the lord of the ocean, but the slightly less lofty Priapus, the Roman garden-god of the erect phallus. As Homer's Odysseus has his reunion with Penelope delayed by the capricious vengefulness of Poseidon, Petronius's protagonist finds copulation with his teenage boyfriend made impossible by impotence caused by the capricious vengefulness of the patron-deity of erections -- and likewise the surviving portions of Petronius's narrative include explicit invocations of Homeric parallels by the first-person narrator, usually within a debased and sexualized context. The best example comes at Satyricon 105.10 where the anti-hero Encolpius invokes the classic Homeric recognition scene in Book 19 of the Odyssey, where Odysseus' old nurse Euryclea is able to recognize her disguised master by the scar on his leg, to describe a rather less heroic incident in which his own disguise is seen through when an antagonist recognizes his penis. Petronius's scene contains additional verbal and plot reminiscences of the episode of the Cyclops; describing these Homeric parallels, Carolyn Connors notes that "Homer's account of Odysseus in the Cyclops' cave is also fragmented and twice refashioned in the Satyricon" and more largely structures the episodes of his sexual picaresque around the various "recognitions of Odysseus" in other Homeric episodes (Connors 37).

Fascinatingly the scholarly consensus that Petronius is writing a parody of the Odyssey in some way coalesced only after the artistic achievement of Joyce's Ulysses in 1922: to some degree Joyce's very serious but very comic epic Modernist novel empowered Classicists to understand that serious responses to Homeric source-material were not necessarily solemn responses. This was understood in antiquity by ascribing to Homer not only the authorship of his two great epics but also of the first mock-epic, in which a battle between frogs and mice is narrated as with the characteristic epithets and similes of the Homeric heroes. To a certain degree epic always inevitably invites mock-epic, and Homer's Greek and Roman readers knew this by ascribing the first mockery of Homeric epic to Homer himself, thereby establishing it as a genre which could be approached rhetorically and poetically (as Homer does it) or under the guise of a realistic novel (which is how Petronius establishes his mock-epic tone, by the lowness of his subject matter). Joyce, of course, does both of these in Ulysses and to some degree Joyce is very much on the Coens mind as they write O Brother, Where Art Thou? The Coens apparently wish to downplay the seriousness or significance of Joyce the same way they do with Homer. Doom notes that although the Coens

utilize the basics from Homer's The Odyssey, though their adaptation is far from direct. The Coens play coy: 'Neither of us have read The Odyssey." Joel explains, "I actually read The Iliad in college, but The Odyssey, no. We read the classic comics version of it and we saw the Kirk Douglas movie of it." (Doom 97).

Of course Camerini's Ulysses (1954) is filmed in the sword-and-sandals Technicolor of the Fritz Lang footage in Godard, and gives no hint as to the Southern setting. Again Doom quotes the Coens themselves: "When an interviewer asks the Coens why they placed the Odyssey in the rural South, Ethan could only state, 'On the face of it, it's an idiotic idea, isn't it?'" (Doom 99). But Doom also notes that the Coens clearly drew inspiration from Howard Waldrop's 1989 novel A Dozen Tough Jobs, in which the Greek legend of the Twelve Labors of Hercues is relocated to the "Jim Crow" American South of the 1920s, and Hercules replaced by "Houlka Lee," an African-American hero intended to recall the likes of Stagger Lee -- Penny's suitor in O Brother is named "Waldrip," presumably a wink in the direction of the novel, but the Coens are clearly fascinated by Waldrop's Americanization of the methods of Ulysses, and use his approach to take on Joyce's subject matter.

But I think ultimately there is a hint that James Joyce is more central to the Coens' take on Homer than any of these other mediating influences. To some extent, this hint is like the Sherlockian dog-that-does-not-bark, but it is remarkable that O Brother, Where Art Thou? is almost unique among the Coens' original screenplays in including no Jewish characters. They manage to find a Jewish presence in the frozen tundra of Fargo and in the desert wilderness of Raising Arizona (where the FBI investigators discover that Nathan Arizona Senior once changed his name from "Nathan Huffheins"), but there are no onscreen Jewish characters in O Brother, Where Art Thou? There is, however, a reference to Jews in Homer Stokes's speech to the Ku Klux Klan rally -- reminding us that the American Klan, in the years depicted in O Brother, was equally dedicated to persecuting African-Americans, Jews, and Roman Catholics. It is due to Joyce, I suggest, that the Coens ultimately choose to expand the Homeric Cyclops episode from the outdoor picnic in which Big Dan Teague clubs McGill and Delmar. Since the Coens are so careful and Dickensian in the naming of their characters, one suspects that they may know that "Teague" is itself an ethnic slur -- within the religious and sectarian conflicts in Ireland, "Teague" or "Taig" has been a dismissive term for Irish Catholics (not unlike "Mick") for well over two centuries, and is still used by Ulster Loyalists (Share 368). Whether or not Big Dan Teague is meant to be an Irish Catholic -- highly unlikely, given his membership in the anti-Catholic K.K.K. -- the name the Coens choose signposts their indebtedness to James Joyce's earlier version, the unnamed "Citizen" who assaults Leopold Bloom with anti-Semitic abuse and a thrown biscuit box. This eventually prompts Bloom's equivalent of the blinding of the Cyclops, in which he asserts those facts to which the one-eyed Citizen is willfully blind:

-- Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Savious was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God

-- Whose God? Says the citizen.

-- Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me. (Joyce 329).

Although this is one of the great ripostes to anti-Semitism in twentieth century literature, it is worth noting that Bloom's heroism is mundane. He merely speaks truth to bigotry, then runs away, even though Joyce wraps Bloom's exit in the full rhetoric of mock-heroic and even Biblical election: "And they beheld Him, even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over Donohoe's in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel" (Joyce 332). But the Coens are clearly fascinated by Joyce's decision not only to represent Odysseus as a modern urban Jew in Dublin, but also to represent the fundamental culture-clash between Odysseus and the Cyclops as the twentieth century wrangling between Jew and anti-Semite. In their handling of the Cyclops, the Coens seem to have derived inspiration from Joyce, while at the same time expanding the level of bigotry to the various crusades of the Klan: Joyce and the Coens alike would be anathema to Big Dan Teague for religious if not racial reasons.

Conclusion: The Coens, Homer and "Comic Epic"

If the stance against bigotry in both Joyce's Ulysses and the Coens' O Brother, Where Art Thou? represents the moral core of each work, it is important to note that the works themselves are undeniably comic. In this, they each resemble the earlier borrowing of Homer's Odyssey by Petronius, in an attempt to achieve an epic scope and grandeur for what is essentially a comic story. By offering an epic with a happy ending, Homer sets the scope for future "comic epics" -- and allows the Coens to rise above the specificity of the genres they pastiche and the historical periods they represent or reference, along with the idiosyncrasy of their language and settings, to approach more universal themes. Additionally they sidestep the trap set by Godard, in wondering whether there is a way to adapt the Odyssey that doesn't alienate audiences by its own artifice: instead, by making an audience-friendly but highly literate and allusive B-movie, they solve the conundrum faced by the film director in Sullivan's Travels: how to make an artistically complicated and finely-wrought work that still appeals to a broad audience.

Filmography

Pi. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. 1998.

Ulysses. Dir. Mario Camerini. 1954.

Blood Simple. Dir. Joel Coen. 1984.

Raising Arizona. Dir. Joel Coen. 1987.

Miller's Crossing. Dir. Joel Coen. 1990.

Barton Fink. Dir. Joel Coen. 1991.

The Hudsucker Proxy. Dir. Joel Coen. 1994.

Fargo. Dir. Joel Coen. 1996.

The Big Lebowski. Dir. Joel Coen. 1998.

O Brother, Where Art Thou? Dir. Joel Coen. 2000.

The Man Who Wasn't There. Dir. Joel Coen. 2001.

Intolerable Cruelty. Dir. Joel Coen. 2003.

The Ladykillers. Dir. Joel Coen. 2004.

No Country for Old Men. Dir. Joel Coen. 2007.

Burn After Reading. Dir. Joel Coen. 2008.

A Serious Man. Dir. Joel Coen. 2009.

True Grit. Dir. Joel Coen. 2010.

Mildred Pierce. Dir. Michael Curtiz. 1945.

We're No Angels. Dir. Michael Curtiz. 1955.

Fellini Satyricon. Dir. Federico Fellini.

Nanook of the North. Dir. Robert Flaherty. 1922.

Man of Aran. Dir. Robert Flaherty. 1934.

The Wizard of Oz. Dir. Victor Fleming. 1939.

Contempt. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. 1963.

The Big Sleep. Howard Hawks. 1946.

Crossroads. Dir. Walter Hill. 1986.

We're No Angels. Dir. Neal Jordan. 1989.

The Defiant Ones. Dir. Stanley Kramer. 1958.

2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir Stanley Kubrick.

I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang. Dir. Mervyn LeRoy. 1930.

Doctor Terrible's House of Horrible. Dir. Matt Lipsey. 2001.

The Sweet Smell of Success. Dir. Alexander MacKendrick. 1957.

Golden Boy. Dir. Rouben Mamoulian. 1939.

Sullivan's Travels. Dir. Preston Sturges. 1941.

Double Indemnity. Dir. Billy Wilder. 1944.

Stalag 17. Dir. Billy Wilder. 1953.

Sunset Boulevard. Dir. Billy Wilder. 1950.