More movie violence than I thought

Ahem, pardon me. I was wrong earlier in saying, first, that the stabbing of the dybbuk? is the only physical violence in the movie, and then was wrong again when I thought the car crash was the only other instance of violence.  However, I am sticking with my story that the movie is fundamentally (physicists like to say that word) a cartoon.  The violence, like the movie, is not to be taken seriously.  So of course the Coen brothers call it A Serious Man.  An obvious alternate misleading title would be A Serious Movie.  However, we can paraphrase good old A. D' Abro (below) and say the obvious is not necessarily credited with any deep significance in moviemaking.  It is the veiled.

The other cartoon-like violence in the movie occurs in each of Larry's three dreams.  First, in the classroom dream, Sy, the serious man of the movie (according to Nachtner, and also according to Sy himself in this particular dream-scene), bashes Larry into the chalkboard while telling him he made a cuckold of him.  Sy doesn't use the word cuckold, however. He uses the f-word, and this is the only time I can think of when an adult utters a profanity, unless you count the Torah hoister muttering "Jesus Christ!" when he almost drops the heavy scroll near the end of Danny's bar mitzvah.  (The kids are using profanity all the time.) The physical bashing of Larry by the dybbuk-Sy in the dream contrasts nicely with Sy's warm-huggy-bear approach to taking advantage of Larry when he, Sy, was alive.

The Sex with Mrs. Samsky dream ends with Sy putting boards over Larry like he was burying him alive, saying "Nailing it down, so important."  This isn't literal violence but is threatening nevertheless.  Mrs. Samsky's cigarette smoke is rather threatening, also, especially when you consider that Larry is, at the end of the movie, called back to the doctor because of something detected in his chest x-rays.

And the shooting, of course, of Uncle Arthur in the Escape to Canada dream.  The dream ends with Mitch being told by his dad, both of them in their hunting outfits with rifles, to shoot Larry next ("There's another Jew, son!") and Mitch aims and fires--then the dream ends.

"No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture," is the disclaimer after the credit roll at the end of the movie.

Coincidences

I was searching for something in my car's glove compartment last week and ran across the reciept from Webb's Auto Service for the last time I got my oil changed.  Not what I was looking for, but I'd written on the back the mileage at which I'd be needing another oil change (the little sticker they put on the inside of the windshield didn't stick).  I thought I might be getting close to time for a change, so I looked over from the passenger's seat at what the odometer reading was. Pre-zactly what the jotted-down mileage was!  That would be: 113,421.  Not bad for a 1996 car, eh?

And today I'm in the Pine Bluff library, waiting for my laptop to boot up and connect to the public wi-fi here, walking over to the stacks where Arkansas-related books are, planning to take another look at my brother Steven's poetry book (Half Life Burning, Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press, 2000), and gazing at the books as I head back to where I know Steven's book is, and what catches my eye?  I mean besides the old copy of Cotton Stealing, written by "Anonymous" and published in 1866 by John B. Walsh Co., Chicago.  None other than True Grit, by Charles Portis, published by Simon & Schuster in 1968!  I might have ignored it (again) but for the fact that it's been in the news lately due to the Coen brothers making a new movie of it.  And also, the coincidence here, the movie hits the theaters today.

Portis dedicated the book thusly:  "For my mother and father".  Acccording to one local wag, Bob Lancaster of the Arkansas Times, Portis created Mattie's personality and way of talking from his (Portis's) mother's personality.  (That information was delivered in a moment when Lancaster was not operating so much in the wag mode.)

In A Serious Man, one coincidence is the simultaneity of Larry's and Sy's traffic accidents.  Larry is not hurt in his collision, in spite of being in a sort of small car (small for those days) and not having the whiplash-preventing headrest of our modern day cars, while Sy, making a left turn in his big ol' Cadillac, is killed.  He musta been hit by a gravel truck or something.

Another coincidence (these are intentional, story-line coincidences) is Danny's resemblance to Abraham's son Isaac as portrayed in the painting on Marshak's wall.  You can see Danny reacting unfavorably to the painting, which is of Abraham being stopped at the last moment from following God's command to sacrifice Isaac. The painting shows a person stopping Abe from cutting Isaac's throat.  I don't know the story that well, but I though it was more like the voice of God at the last moment saying, "This was only a test!"  Anyway,  on the subject of Abraham, earlier in the movie we heard from Rabbi Nachtner, when he gave Sy's eulogy, that the afterlife is not a geographical place "like Canada," and not a place where we'll be rewarded for our good deeds (not a "VIP lounge" where milk and cookies are served eternally), but is rather "in the bosom of Abraham."  Danny can't be too impressed with the desirability of having his soul rocked in the bosom of Abraham after looking at the painting.

And of course, in Larry's dream of Arthur attempting to escape his legal troubles,  the place of sanctuary is intended to be Canada.  The early parts of that scene--the sign that tells us Canada is the destination and the fact that a boat is the mode of escape--made me think of Tim O'Brien's story "On the Rainy River".

Music in the movie

Danny's transistor radio seems to be somewhat magical, in that it's not only playing "Somebody to Love" in the opening classroom scene and the closing whirlwind scene, but also played it for Rabbi Marshak, apparently, otherwise how would he quote from the lyrics (slightly misquote, but never mind) and also choose to name members of Jefferson Airplane for Danny?  When the old principal of the Hebrew school examines the radio with a rather transcendent sort of curiosity, then slowly puts the earphone in his hairy ear and truly seems to go into a transcendent state, I couldn't tell what music was playing.  Ditto for Danny's return to the classroom, when he is inserting the earphone--it's not "Somebody to Love" but could be another song on the Surrealistic Pillow LP.  Two other songs from that album are used in the soundtrack.

The actual soundtrack, the musical theme of the movie, is something else I really like about it.  I'm not sure of the ethereal tune's actual notes, some of which are played on harp and some on piano, but they are quite harmonious.  I plan to try to pick out those notes on my piano, a recent purchase from Martin Piano Company in Pine Bluff (Rudolph Wurlitzer, refinished black spinet, $600).  I've taken lessons for a year and a half from a local piano teacher named Henry Moore, who's around ten years older than I am and seems to be a good teacher (better teacher than I am a student).  I was just using a cheap electronic keyboard to practice on until I bought the piano this month.

Why did Santana Abraxas and Creedence's Cosmos Factory both get mentioned in A Serious Man as Columbia Record Club selections of the month (for May and June), when they weren't released until 1970, three years after the movie's time period?  Well, I just realized that that is a third instance where three years has some relevance in the movie (can you name the other two?).

The Hebrew chanting and singing in the movie, including the song Dem Milner's Trern (The Miller's Tears) are another transcendent aspect of the soundtrack. 

An interesting aside on "Somebody to Love":  In an interview on Fresh Air (January 2009), Bruce Springsteen mentioned something about the "subtext" of rock n' roll being that it makes you want to take your pants off (I heard that story second hand so I don't have the exact quote).  A friend of mine once told me that when "Somebody to Love" started playing on her car radio, her young son in the back seat--five or six years old, I'm guessing--almost immediately started to take off his pants.

For starters

My take on A Serious Man is that it's the Coen brothers doing their version of slapstick.  In actual slapstick routines, and also in many old cartoons such as Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner, and others from the 50s and 60s (and earlier), some of the characters continually get "hurt" physically, and it's funny.  Ditto for A Serious Man, but the hurt is emotional rather than physical. So we are not supposed to take A Serious Man seriously.

Just as some people don't care for the pratfalls and the Three Stooges' style physical comedy, some people don't care for and don't get the comedy in A Serious Man.  Pat Calkins, my best friend during junior high, watched part of the movie with me recently, and when the alleged dybbuk is stabbed by Dora, he just sort of didn't get it, wondering out loud by saying something like, "She stabbed him after he helped them?"  Well, you really do have to pay attention, and have missed the essentials of that part of the movie if you don't get the reason she stabs him. And you're going to be lost to the humor of the rest of the movie if you don't find the dybbuk?'s response to his stabbing to be funny.

The stabbing in fact is the one instance where there is a physical slapstick moment.  Maybe that's why the Coens refer to the opening sequence as being like the cartoon that preceded the feature presentation back when they (and I) were kids.  Well, okay, the car wreck is physical humor.  And Michael Stuhlbarg's body language--enhanced by 1967-era pants and shirt--and facial expressions are also excellent physical comedy.

So, anyway, I let Pat off the hook less than halfway through the movie.  He wanted action, and actually asked me if someone was going to get killed--he needed to anticipate some serious physical movie violence in order to keep up his interest. The movie he had on his mind was Lord of War. That was the movie he wanted me to watch, and I did check it out from the library the next day.   And I like it, unlike him and his low opinion of, or at least lack of interest in, A Serious Man. 

During Robert Altman's acceptance speech for his Lifetime Achievment Oscar, he mentioned that he wasn't as interested in stories as he was in conversations.  You gotta be interested in conversations to care anything about A Serious Man, because that's what drives the action, and mostly is the action, in the movie.  It's Coen bros' intellectual slapstick.  It's a cartoon made with real actors. 

Like some cartoons--Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner come to mind--A Serious Man has lessons to be learned.  If you think just because someone does you a favor, helps you in some way, like helping you replace the fallen-off wheel of your cart in the snow, that he is your friend or that he is a good person, well, you better be careful.  He could be the equivalent of a dybbuk. He could be pure evil.

Or if you think you're actually in good health because your cigarette-smoking doctor tells you so, but your chest x-rays have not been developed yet, well, you're going to possibly find the "truth" to be a lie.  (The x-ray room, with its door ajar, is shown behind Larry when Dr. Shapiro gives him his supposed clean bill of health.)

And that's only for starters.

Not the Red Owl

The Airplane & the Guest House

The Wikipedia article on Jefferson Airplane is good, better than the Airplane's own website.  From either of those sites and numerous others, you can find out that Rabbi Marshak leaves out two members of the group when he names Grace Slick, Paul Kanter, Marty Balin, and Jorma "...Somebody" (Danny whispers "Kaukonen").  That's the Airplane minus its rhythm section:  Spencer Dryden on drums and Jack Casady on bass.

For some reason I was not a big enough fan of theirs to buy any of their albums (y'all might need reminding here that I was Danny Gopnick's age in 1967) until I saw a review of Volunteers in Circus magazine in 1970 and bought that album (cassette, that is).  However, strangely enough, in the remodeled garage/servant's quarters that my family called the "Guest House" (it's about 600 square feet and has no kitchen--not really a house) there was a Jefferson Airplane poster, not quite a psychedelic one, but it did have a woman's bare breasts on the nose of the falling-apart wooden blimp-like airplane at the center of the poster. This was a drawing/painting, and the way the group's name was written was the only psychedelic thing about the poster. It was hard to tell at first that the words even said "Jefferson Airplane."

The remodeling took place in '65 or '66, and my mother decorated the Guest House partly with moddish posters, including a Beatles poster, a Los Angeles Zoo poster (drawing not photo), and others (from the John Simmons shop in Little Rock).  But the Jefferson Airplane poster was the best of the bunch, although I didn't even know what it was and consequently didn't like it until I was in high school.  Starting in '67, the Guest House is where played my drums.  That's probably also when I started losing some of my high frequency hearing, since the Guest House was basically one big room with wood paneled walls and a brick floor, with maybe a small rug or two.  Quite reverberant, acoustically speaking, which mainly made the snare drum and cymbals louder.  Oop!

Some online reviews/etc of A Serious Man that I like are the Slate review by Dana Stevens, Some Thoughts from The American Scene, and Filmwell "Questions for Further Study".

Veiled quotes

“In the grouping of phenomena it is the similarities established in the impersonal world that are regarded as of particular significance; the more obvious similarities detected by our unaided senses are held to be of minor importance.  For this reason the physicist claims that visible light and invisible ultraviolet light are kindred in nature, for both are electromagnetic vibrations.  The accidental circumstance that the human eye detects the first kind of radiation, and not the second, is viewed as unimportant.  Indeed we need no appeal to theoretical physics to find illustrations of the same tendency.  Thus if we are judging from our immediate sensations, we should presumably claim that sugar and saccharin exhibited a striking similarity, for both are white crystals and have a sweet taste.  On this basis we should be tempted to class the two substances into one family.  Yet insofar as the chemist is concerned, sugar and saccharine are entirely different:  sugar is a carbohydrate containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen; saccharine, though sweet to the taste, has the chemical characteristics of an acid, and its molecule contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and also nitrogen and sulfur.  Likewise, the botanist places in the same family the potato and tomato plants, or the yellow buttercup and the hooded blue aconite.  No obvious similarities can justify such a classification.  These examples and many others that could be mentioned bring out the important point that it is not the obvious that is necessarily credited with any deep significance in science.  It is the veiled.”

--A. D’Abro, The Rise of the New Physics, Volume One (of two), pages 15-16, Dover edition 1951.  Originally published in 1939.

“Inscrutable upon a sunlit day,

Her veil will Nature never let you steal,

And what she will not to your mind reveal,

You will not wrest from her with levers and screws.”

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One, lines 672-675, published in 1808.