POP FICTION

[44]
I AM A MAN OF CONSTANT SORROW / O BROTHER WHERE ART THOU
practices, and ending up precisely where he started - an apologizing husband and father,
disrespected by his family yet sill optimistic that his lot in life will somehow improve. After all, as
he notes, ‘They’re bringing electricity to this place; everything’s going to be put on a grid,
modernized ...’. Surely then, life will be equitable and he will receive his due rewards.
The Southland as Wilderness
The travels and travails through which the Coens’ propel their fictitious, yet metaphorically
autobiographical, Ulysses are especially revealing projections of their urban, Judaic heritage. I
remember seeing the 1976 motion picture by John Boorman, Deliverance (1972), with my New
York Jewish husband and a few years later the 1978 film Cool Hand Luke (1967), with him, as
well. The South they portrayed seemed to etch itself indelibly on his Hebrew consciousness; and
I suspect the same traumatic viewing occurred to the Coen brothers at an impressionable age.
From these two films, one glimpses the geographic vista south of the Mason-Dixon line as a
terrifying wilderness filled with rapacious, sodomizing hillbillies, corrupt, fat white politicians,
sunglass-clad sheriffs in cowboy hats and armed with shotguns astride horses keeping watch
over chain gangs sweltering along rural roadsides mindlessly crushing rocks with fifty-pound
sledgehammers, pursuing escaped prisoners with a pack of braying bloodhounds and a lynching
rope.
From Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) we can toss in scantily-clad, sexually starved southern belles
who lurk alluringly by the roadside offering moonshine - sirens of the Southland seducing men
and then betraying them for money.
From Coal Miners Daughter (1986) we can draw images of ramshackle shacks hanging
perilously off steep hillsides, papered with pages from Sears catalogues, the overall-weaving
inhabitants chewing tobacco as they gather around the radio playing the ‘Grand Old Opry’ on a
Saturday night.
From Mississippi Burning (1988) we can absorb visions of the Ku Klux Klan, enormously
powerful, brilliantly menacing in its cross-burning, white robed, head-covered ten-thousandmember
fullness, infiltrating the political, judicial and law enforcement functions of Southern
society, merging The Blob and Invasion of the Body Snatchers in an unholy alliance.
And finally, there are encounters with Southern Christianity a lá Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and
Jimmy Swaggert. Southern spirituality is understood as swerving between mindless, blind faith in
cleansing and redemption rituals taking place in murky rivers and flagrantly corrupt, violent and
monstrous Bible purveyors: men who make a damn good living selling the Good Book.