OH Brother Where Art Thou

O Brother Where Art Thou

Heroes have always been celebrated in mythology, literature and films as men of great courage and daredevilry. By very definition, therefore, a hero has to necessarily be sent off on a quest to achieve some goal and encounter all kinds of danger, adventure and obstacles on his way. Being endowed with extraordinary qualities, a hero is naturally the central personage in any story, irrespective of the medium; a classic case in point being Ulysses in The Odyssey. Joel Coen's O Brother, Where Art Thou is, on the surface, a film that faithfully adheres to the conventional framework of a hero on a quest. The film, however, is a hilarious tongue-in-cheek version of the classic adventure format.

Based loosely on Homer's Odyssey, including a hero with the same name, O Brother Where Art Thou is a tall tale of three convicts escaping from a chain gang in the Depression-era South. The hero, Ulysses Everett McGill (played by George Clooney), in keeping with the intended spoofiness and hilarity of the film, is the anti-thesis of the traditional hero. There is hardly anything noble about him. Yet, he fancies himself as a man of reason. Staunch allies usually support all heroes and O Brother stays with that tradition. However, the film is faithful to its mission of taking a hilarious look at heroes and adventures and so, McGill's two partners, Pete (John Turturro) is an argumentative con while Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) is a sweet numbskull. Hardly, the epitome of men out on a serious mission!

McGill and his partners escape from the chain gang and set off on a quest to recover the $1.2 billion dollar loot that Everett McGill has stashed away. Of course, the odyssey is full of risk and pitfalls and so like the original Ulysses, O Brother, too, has Everett and gang encountering a series of adventures: sirens; bank robber George 'Babyface' Nelson; and a KKK lynch mob. They even get beaten up by a Bible salesman. In spite of the apparent disparate nature of the adventures of the escaped convicts, it seems that the Coen brothers chose deliberately to intertwine some of them such as the Ku Klux Klan into the framework of Homer's Odyssey (the blind prophet, the seduction by the sirens) in order to take an irreverent, but semi-serious look at Southern politics and culture of the 1930s. For instance, the film's depiction of the Ku Klux Klan's rally is simultaneously frightening and ridiculous with all the cross-burning, hateful rhetoric, the threatened sacrifice of a black man interspersed with the chorus line dancing.

The example above of the Ku Klux Klan scene serves to establish that the film, despite its surface comedy and ability to arouse merriment among its viewers, does have many subtle layers of meaning. The Ku Klux Klan episode in itself is not just a comment about the racism in the South but also a much larger statement about conflicts that pit man against man. The hero, Everett McGill, has shades of a man with a dual personality. He wants to win his wife and family back and yet, he is unwilling to give up the loot as well. More indicative of the fact that McGill is a man still in search of his true identity is the fact that he mocks his cohorts as "dumber'n a bag'o hammers" for getting saved at an outdoor baptism, only later to seek redemption himself even though the act is triggered by a crisis (he is about to be lynched).

Brother is also a story that seems to portend that man ultimately is hapless against divine forces. The film initially hints as such with the blind old man in the railway push car who prophesizes that the "treasure you seek will not be the treasure you find." The film also shows the purity and unquestioning nature of man's belief in the divine especially in the creek-side baptism scene, which is filmed with a mystical, almost ethereal touch. Man's relationship with the divine is portrayed through other touches as well such as the baptism scenes and the encounter with the Bible salesman.