One reason I like A Serious Man is it raises many interesting questions that are internal to the movie and others that are real. Is the old man in the opening sequence dead or alive? The way he reacts to being stabbed with the ice pick is one of the funniest parts of the movie (something like, 'well, come to think of it, i'm not feeling all that well'). In the credits at the end of the film he is listed as "Dybbuk?"--yes with a question mark--played by Fivush Finkel. Then of course there is the real question of the interpretation of the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment. How can the cat be both dead and alive until observed?
A big question for me is why did the Coen brothers have Dick Dutton, on the phone from Columbia Record Club, refer to two albums that weren't released until 1970? Those would be Santana Abraxas and Creedence's Cosmos Factory. Jimi Hendrix's song Machine Gun, played during the "goy's teeth" scenes, is also from 1970. The movie of course is set in 1967, which is when the song Somebody to Love was released by Jefferson Airplane. (An earlier and inferior version of the song was recorded in 1966 by Grace Slick and the Great Society, before she joined "The Airplane!")
I was approximately Danny Gopnick's age in 1967, but I can't relate at all to the pot smoking at that age or the frequent use of the f-word. Oh yeh, the pot smoking came later -- in 1970, actually, when I was in the 11th grade. We never referred to it as "pot" though. That's what we said all the old folks called it. To us it was grass or weed. I only smoked it occassionally, for a few months, until I met my high school girlfriend and quit hanging out with the grass-smoking crowd.
