Six Degrees of Desperation
How to read The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coens’ masterful, mesmerising six-fold portmanteau Western on Netflix
Spoilers abound — this piece is designed for consumption following a viewing.
Whatever it is Hollywood is up to, the Coens gotta do what the Coens gotta do. In an era of conformity, we can rely on Joel and Ethan to conform only to the demands of the arcane clockwork of their twinned imaginations. Yet their corner of the sand pit, as Joel put it while collecting an Oscar and hoping no one would notice, has expanded its borders in recent years. True Grit (a true Western, even though they denied it) was a $100 million-plus hit. Folk noir musical Inside Llewyn Davis returned them to their seat as critical darlings. Hail Caesar! remains an under appreciated splash of period Hollywood reverence and irreverence that bore beneath its gleaming surface a breathless and parodic inquiry into everything from the mysteries of the creative process to Marxist ideology to the articles of faith, but told finally of a man who finds he loves his job. Meanwhile, Noah Hawley’s television incarnation of Fargo has snaked through three highly popular seasons of murder, mystery and Easter Egg hunting in honour of the founding fathers of that pocket of rural monkey business (a fourth pocket of malfeasance is due next year). It is arguably the best thing on the small screen. That is until now.
Lorks a lordy, how we raised skeptical brows when the news came that the Minnesotan-born clever-clogs were to make a television series for Netflix. Actually, no one actually said they were making a television series. At least, neither Joel nor Ethan said they were doing any such thing. They simply announced that their next enterprise, going by the reassuringly Coenesque nomenclature of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, was backed by the streaming monolith. We put two and two together and bellowed sell-out to the four corners of the world wide web. Truth is, or might be, they never intended that to be case. Interviewing Tim Blake Nelson (Buster Scruggs hisself) for Empire magazine, the actor and good friend of the Coens claimed we all had a firm grip on the wrong end of the stick. This was always due to be a movie in six parts. One of Western complexion and complexity. (For a fuller explanation of the film’s gestation, I refer you to a previous blog on the matter: https://tinyurl.com/ybzo69xn)
You could say this latest Coen endeavour is six Coen films in one, but that doesn’t really qualify what we are dealing with. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a Western anthology comprising a half-dozen short stories, ballads if you like, or to be specific “Tales of the American Frontier,” each drawn from a well-thumbed tome that serves as the framing device — recreated for the occasion in exquisitely antique detail. To emphasise the literary thread that has often drawn their films together (they are as much inspired by old books as old films, perhaps more), we see the pages turned to gorgeous “full color plates” that could be concept art of what is to follow. Then to the opening page of each tale, worded in florid tribute to the tradition of Western yarns, which cut to the real fake thing, and then out again at the end, film returning to text.
People, critics mainly, tend to get the whole Coen-thing wrong. It is not movies, their chosen medium, that they ironise with their exacting craft but the intricacies of storytelling itself. What is the wont of stories? Where do they come from? What do they convey to us? About us? What do we require of them? What shapes do they take? Do they break? What if you tire before they’re done?
“We’re only interested in one thing, Bart,” madcap mogul Jack Lipnick once spitfired to a stupefied Barton Fink. “Can you tell a story?”
These are six stories about stories. A Western in six parts that each knowingly, whimsically and brutally dissect the very purpose of Westerns. A clever-clever framework that might frustrate those in search of the meat of characterisation and the slow-burn drama that come with your standard feature film (whatever that is). The artifice and play have never been closer to the surface, even than that pearly pastiche of glistening Hollywood storyhood The Hudsucker Proxy. I admit I missed the heft, the long game of a Miller’s Crossing or Inside Llewyn Davis, but there are distinct pleasures here that ripen on multiple viewings. Ironically, given its small screen destination and all the corresponding fuss ahead of time about the Coen narrative guiles potentially being stretched out like taffy, this is a film that celebrates brevity. And more ironic still, it is also a parody of the notion of the television serial. On one level, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs casts a flicker of doubt over the current shift in narrative sophistication toward the small screen. Here, you might say, is a series in film form.
The temptation to compare and contrast each of this six-shooter of Western chronicles should be resisted. They are designed as a collection, one which hints at a subtle internal chronology. The unifying theme is that of manifest destiny — what guides humankind’s bloody forward momentum? In this case, Westward ho. The stories follow a path through six seasons: summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer, finishing with an autumnal ride into permanent winter. And there is somewhere beneath the larkish humour and unforgiving cruelty of frontier life, an examination of America itself, the overarching subject of the Coens career.
Let us proceed, episode by episode of frontier strife.
1. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
The first of the tales is the tallest, the silliest, the shaggydoggiest. Key to the Coen methodology is how they set the storytelling idiom upfront, provisioning us with the means with which to engage with what they have in store. The rules of the game, fair and square. So it’s not like they don’t warn us. When the opening caption of Fargo declared, dubiously, that the following events were “based on a true story,” the purpose was to direct our disposition toward the syntax of the true crime documentary — the loopy circumstances of ordinary malfeasance. A Serious Man began with what appeared to be a self-contained short story concerning the eventful visitation (or not) of a dybbuk (that vengeful spirit of Hebrew legend) to a late 19th century Eastern Europe shtetl. The point being this Yiddish yarn embodied themes that held true for the misfortunes of a physics professor in sixties Minnesota. You know, fate, curses, God’s unreadable vicissitudes, the long slog of the Jewish people, death.
This titular opener, cut from the dapper cloth of the singing cowboy flick (see Hail Caesar! for a more thorough grounding in this neglected siding to the Western tradition), quite apart from the distinct flavour of its content, unveils the ground rules for this entire salad bar of the Western genus: madcap, knowing, dissembling, violent, loquacious, hilarious and black as the inside of a chicken.
We cut to Monument Valley, John Ford country, sandstone buttes ranging into the distance like the skyscrapers of the dreamy New York in The Hudsucker Proxy. The footage is honest-to-God, but the place feels like a sham. This is folklore geology — the sun-scorched never-never of Western fantasy.
Clip-clopping into view is Buster Scruggs, strumming his guitar and launching into a ditty called Cool Water while sat upon his affable horse, Dan, chin to chaps in pale duds, a rhinestone vaquero about as realistic as a rodeo clown. We even get a playful angle from within his hollow instrument — so you can forget Anthony Mann for the time being. Beneath the whitewashed surface of this lonesome drifter (all the characters prove itinerant one way or another) we find Tim Blake Nelson with a goofball patter at once savvy and out-of-place. O Brother, Where Art Thou?’s Nelson is one of few returnees to the Coen universe, and in Buster we are surely being asked to recall his bumbling savant from that classically-minded scurry through Depression era Mississippi. Ears bent double by his enormous Stetson (like Billy Bob Thornton, the fake cowboy in Intolerable Cruelty), he’s hardly the model of a model gunfighter. That, though, is the trick of it. Coen antiheroes reveal hidden depths (or in the case of The Dude, hidden shallows). We don’t know anyone, not that well. Buster is as infectiously cheery as Marge Gunderson, but, when stirred, will prove as deadly as that mellow mobster Leo O’Bannon.
Buster addresses us directly, grinning through the fourth wall. A narrator of the story like The Stranger in The Big Lebowski, but this is his own tale. Nevertheless, even if his ceaseless spiel is more self-regarding than ruminative, he is instructing us to regard the mythical toolbox of the genre at hand.
The measure here is cartoonish, uber-pastiche. As he steps through a creaky saloon door, Buster pats himself down leaving a Buster-shaped cloud of desert dust in his wake. The Raising Arizona-like array of Looney Tunes antics is further telegraphed by the short-lived encounter with this bar full of varmints. Chief of whom, chest crisscrossed with bandoliers, hairy face fixed in a tobacco smudged grimace, is the spit of lizard-stalking Leonard Smalls. Early evidence that the brothers will be rummaging back through the pages of their own mythology as well as the fine print of the Western. The gunfight is swift and preternaturally deadly; a drum fill of impossible sharpshooting. Buster is a miraculous pistoleer, imparting death with an efficiency in direct correlation to his hammy exterior.
“Always put one on the brain,” Johnny Caspar famously admonished his henchmen in the masterful gangster pastiche of Miller’s Crossing. A lesson adhered to in these annals of American mortality with foreheads repeatedly puckered and brain matter doing a Jackson Pollock on the wall behind. Caspar was big on philosophising. The world needs rules, he insisted. Without rules, well, we would be back in the jungle. Genres need rules too. Stories need rules. Buster’s purpose is to slope through Ford country declaiming the law of cliche.
In more cosmic terms, he jovially reports that you have to play the hand you are given. No backing out, no wriggling free, especially if you’re faced with aces and eights — a dead man’s hand (as held by Wild Bill Hickok shortly before being permanently retired by Jack McCall). Destiny is manifest with the deal of the cards. Buster saunters into a bigger saloon in a town down the line, gives up his shooters (rules of the house), picks up said hand of poker and confronts another surly miscreant with a grin. This is the Mild Wild West.
Even weaponless Buster is happy-go-lethal. Scowling Clancy Brown is dispatched with a wit worthy of the Chuck Jones pantheon, repeatedly putting one in his own brain. There is a discomforting juxtaposition at work: everything is bluster and comedy, silliness indeed, but death keeps on coming like jolts of electricity. Buster is the kind of amoral soul who can continue a running commentary on his own import while blasting the fingers from a duelling miscreant foolish enough to call him out into the street (which looks entirely like a Western set). Blazing Saddles is not a million miles away, then neither is The Wild Bunch.
As predicted, the ballad finishes on a note of whimsy and death, the great full stop. Undone by a harmonica-playing black hat — hey kids, there is always a faster shot and new subgenre heading to town — his mortal coil soaring heavenwards (an angel of dubious stock like Waring Hudsucker) strumming his harp through the clouds (clouds, like gunsmoke and desert dust, imply a blurring of truths), we are reminded that the citizens both of the old West and the Coen imagination are a vulnerable species indeed. Talking of which.
2. Near Algodones
For the second slice, as foretold by the harmonica-playing poke who did for Buster, the subgenre swings Spaghettiwards. It opens almost as a love song to Leone: the pancake flat terrain, the mournful thud of a swinging bucket, the squeak of a chain slung sign, dust kicking up in the gust, James Franco’s putative bank robber casting a squint upon his chosen target, hat brim Van Cleef low on his brow, duster coat fetchingly caught by the guttering air. Naturally, he doesn’t get a name.
Within the ludicrously isolated bank, so ripe for the taking, lurks Stephen Root’s chatterbox teller. Close Coen observers will remark that Root played the blind radio producer behind the The Soggy Bottom Boys runaway hit Man of Constant Sorrow (a redoubtable nomenclature for the grand Coen perspective), among the hyperbolising mock epic of O Brother, Where Art Thou? He’s also got a giddy, hee-haw delivery reminiscent of James Best’s Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazard.
This new tale has the guitar-string taut structure of a joke — one with a peach of a punchline. Then jokes, especially those told with discursive charm, are stories in perfect miniature. Each of the six episodes will devoutly hold to the ineluctable conciseness of literature’s short-story form — mined to great effect by Ethan in his collection Gates of Eden (ballads in noir clothing). What a pleasure it would be to peruse a full copy of the book of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs at leisure. Did the Coens write an entire volume for their own predilection? It wouldn’t be beyond them. Vital in how we parse the movie as a whole is the sure knowledge that none of its constituent parts could conceivably be expanded into a feature film and remain the same tale. I mean they could happily be expanded into features, but right here, right now, shortness is the point. Their power is a glancing blow. A snapshot. An epiphany reached in a particular way station on the twisting path through life. A brief bow on the cosmic stage.
Indeed this one note horse opera ponders the extent to which empyrean fortune plays havoc with our lives, centring on that untrustworthy tributary of fate known as luck and its counterpoint — and backbone of civilisation — justice.
Thus the squeaky teller reveals he is a match for any scurrilous gun-toting outlaw with an eye on his deposits, even those with the stylish demeanour of Tom Reagan from Miller’s Crossing. As Franco tries to make good his escape with the loot (and if there is hard and fast condition of the Coen universe, it’s that no one ever gets away with the loot), defying gunfire with his armour of pots and frying pans like a Tex-Mex Ned Kelly, Root’s resourceful bank employee thumps the robber into obliviousness (thumping, we shall later learn, is another signifier of impending death). He comes to sat upon his horse, noose around his neck, tried and indeed convicted, execution forthcoming, the rope strung over an unfathomably vertiginous branch of a tree (a habit retained from True Grit). “What’s my sentence?” the robber implores his captors like a stumped actor.
Luck like the wind will change direction as a native war party (depicted in painstaking stereotype) bloodily do for the posse of cowboys (ditto) about to serve justice on the lone robber, who is literally left hanging on a rope. There follows a lovely bit of Coenesque comic business whereby Franco’s less than affable horse (nameless), inching away in search of fresh grass, positions its rider at increasingly acute angles vis-a-vie rope, gravity and death.
Then, wouldn’t ya know, a cattle hand hoves into view (the hanging tree resides at a busy thoroughfare of Western cliches), who eventually shoots the rope (hat duly doffed to the games of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly) and proceeds to witter on about the availability of a sidekick position (sidekicks being a prominent job opportunity in the entire Coen canon, typically filled by John Goodman) whereupon another gang of law-bringers recapture our put upon antihero on charges of cattle rustling (of which he is innocent). Should we really be rooting for this guy? He then joins a cast of noose-jockeys in what is, presumably, Algodones town square. The hangee next to him blubbering like a baby (or John Goodman) at his fate, which Franco’s sanguine crook accepts as the universe finally going for the big laugh (there’s no escaping a punchline). He still manages to catch a smile from a pretty girl in the crowd and for his few remaining seconds surely contemplates a better life, foreshadowing the frail romantic hopes of story five. The public hanging, with the townsfolk gathered for a good show, is a facsimile of Fort William’s local enthusiasms in True Grit. Execution counts as fine entertainment — a tenet to which the movie business keeps faith to this day — and feeds us directly to the travelling showman of the next diversion.
3. Meal Ticket
The next two stories are regaled with a poetic touch both elegiac and absurd. In the glum-struck Meal Ticket, snow will fall. Conditions run the gamut from the fairy-tale dusting of The Hudsucker Proxy to the icy blast of Fargo. Subgenerically speaking, this is the mud-caked aesthetic of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Altman country. A laden cart rolls into town to put on a show in which the star, in the shape (or partial shape) of Harry Melling (once that cherubic snot Dudley Dursley from all the Harry Potters), proves to be short of arms and legs. He is propped up on a chair and begins to soliloquise at great length and with great passion to the bemused locals. Limelighted by a row of lamps his make-up leaves him as pale as the risen dead.
The entire tale resounds to the oratory delivered by this limbless actor, lordly quotations from Shelley, Shakespeare and, that old Coen-faithful, the King James Bible. We are not told of how he came to lose his standard quota of appendages, but given he concludes each performance with edited highlights from the Gettysburg Address, perhaps we can surmise that the Civil War had some bearing on his misfortune. Then he may have been born this way — fated to live the life of the mind. According to the fliers, he is named Harrison.
All his thunderclap yabbering is another addition to the counterfeit erudition that crops up in the Coen cleverscape. “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Quite. The real genius, however, is that this melancholy and cruelly twisted sonnet is for all intents a silent film. Oh irony as cold and hard as a horseshoe: those profound lines fall as meaninglessly as the snow. According to another intractable law of the Coen world, big talk is for big heads like Barton Fink, the truth of things lies where words cease and actions begin. Liam Neeson, a nameless impresario of certain ambition, and his immobile leading man share not one line of actual dialogue (though, Neeson does entertain his charge with a drunken rendition of Ulster marching ballad The Sash). Yet there can be sensed an epic of devotion in their tired symbiosis; a history of sorry partnership and belonging hovers over the campfire (could they be brothers, like Cain and Abel or Joel and Ethan?). When the gruff proto-producer, heated by his inebriation, dallies with a local prostitute he swivels his charge to face the wall, a joke about performance anxiety and a note of despair. Melling’s thespian must even be dressed, held while he answers the call of nature and spoon fed by his patient promoter, and there is a wicked allusion here to the coddled existence of modern celebrity.
It is tale told nearly entirely in gestures and grunts, and in Melling’s case some polished eyeball emoting, against a stark and stunning backdrop of grim frontier subsistence. It’s also a tale ribald with self-parody. From balladeers to travelling showmen to town hangings to any number of ready purveyors of frontier wisdom, the Coens are inspecting the notion of show business at the vanguard of civilisation. The agelong tradition of storytellers lifting our eyes from the dirt. Have we really come so far from horse and cart to Netflix?
Of course, a cruel twist of preordained Coen fate awaits. Melling’s actor has not heeded the doom infused in the words he exclaims. Their audience dwindling, Neeson’s canny businessman spies a rival act on the up and up. How can those Gettysburg declarations compete with a chicken that can do sums? As beautifully noted by A.O. Scott in the New York Times, “Meal Ticket is basically Inside Llewyn Davis with a talented chicken in the Bob Dylan role.” Neeson feeding his new headline act — the “Peckin’ Pythagoras” — exposes a devious pun in the title. It’s all about commerce in the end. Wherefore art? His career has literally reached rock bottom.
4. All Gold Canyon
Based on a Jack London story by the same name, this is an eco-fable of sorts, shot with the lambent glow of those high adventure tales set in the heart of the American wilderness that used to open double-bills. Tom Waits’ old-time prospector, like Grisly Adams but grislier, happens upon an Edenic vale, sheathed in mountains, through which curls a stream of crystal clear water. In a montage worthy of those Disney forebears, the valley’s population of formerly undisturbed fauna harken to the arrival of this unsanitary interloper.
The gold prospector has only a donkey for company, a donkey named Lucky. Another isolated soul, half-witted by his lonesome lot, he begins panhandling the water, washing away the soil for traces of his prize, digging up great sods of earth, desecrating the river bank as he roots out a yellow vein. As he works, and the Coens depict his industry with Bressonian clarity and rhythm, he sings or talks to himself and therefore us. He even christens his find “Mr. Pocket”. It’s a very different monologue to the poetry of the previous tale, Waits famous vocal cords as gravelly as the stream bed are hardly distinguishable from the local animal life, or Liam Neeson. There is a growing sense that in small but distinct ways the episodes are sharing motifs, bleeding into one another.
He like Neeson’s prospecting showman is eking out a roughneck version of the American Dream. I was reminded of the opening salvo of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood which finds a grunting Daniel Day-Lewis scrabbling in the dirt, only the mood here is less dense, another tale told in the light of fable. All the same, as the camera glances back across the valley at the story’s end, the “handiwork of man” serves as a stark reminder of the despoliation on its way. Man will gradually gnaw away at nature’s bounty. Not even Disney could stop the rot. We are a long way from the rosy spiritualism of Thoreau.
Meantime, there are plot twists to attend to. This is not a gold rush movie about the heroic finding of that prized metal which would one day decorate the toilet bowl of a spoiled president. This turns out to be a tale about protecting your find from the treachery that inevitably follows its discovery. QED: it’s No Country for Old Men ish.
First we catch our prospector climbing a tree in search of a batch of owl’s eggs in a nest precariously high in the branches, while spied upon by the indignant mother owl. Grabbing the four precious eggs, another treasure, he has a change of heart and takes only one — how high can a bird count anyway? There is an ornithological thread that runs throughout. Buster is revered as the “San Salba Songbird”, Melling’s woebegone actor is billed as the “Wingless Thrush,” here we have an omniscient owl, who might or might not be able to count, and not to forget the clever chicken, who genuinely can’t but it’s easy to fool an audience.
A short consideration of technique. Quite simply, the Coens make it look easy. Whatever narrative turn they imagine, they do so in the full confidence they can meet its demands. There is a sublime ease across the entire collective with the physical rigours of the Western (the stuntwork is impeccable throughout) and shooting in the great outdoors. The production was reputedly a complicated beast, waylaid by inconstant weather and animal wrangling, but every resulting scene is purposefully rapturous. They have turned the flowery confections of this hypothetical book into a visual reality. Swanning through six different styles and landscapes, they envisage backdrops of both breathtaking beauty and elemental corniness. It’s a wonderful balancing act — simultaneously silly and sacred. Due credit to cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, who made me pine not one jot for the otherwise detained Roger Deakins.
Under nature’s imperious eye, the prospector’s actions egg-wise (his bargain struck with nature) either count for or against him. Symbolically, an owl has the capacity to see through deceit; as a spirit animal they are harbingers of death. As with Franco’s bank robber, the prospector’s luck turns sour. A good-for-nothing black hat, as callow as the old timer is wizened (how the next generation want it easy), has followed his path and casually shoots him in the back mid-extraction before pausing to roll an insouciant smoke (which is about as much effort as he expends). Only, as the storytellers have it, the prospector turns out not to be quite as dead as his blood soaked appearances make out and he rises from his gold-rimmed grave to turn the tables on his cowardly foe. The bullet, it transpires, “didn’t hit nothing important.” Should have put one in his head.
5. The Gal Who Got Rattled
This, I suppose, could be classified as a romance. It is the only female led story. That of Zoe Kazan’s Alice Longabough (an odd sort of name that leaves you wondering at a hidden significance). She is a creature sprung on her nerves. An innocent due to be married to her priggish brother’s unseen business companion in Oregon in the kind of deal that was no doubt the destiny of many young women of the age. The story, the longest and most developed (hence, most of the characters are granted a name), opens in fine Coen tradition around a bickering dinner table — the contentious topic being the nature of nerves (it is another of those crucial Coen openings in miniature) and the distinct possibility that this boarding house might be riddled with a deadly malediction. Grandma Turner (the same one as in True Grit perchance?), we are informed, is “finished.” We cut to the wagon trail wending its way through the endless prairie coated in a golden gleam if anything even more blessed that Henry Hathaway’s Plains chapter in that tiered epic How the West Was Won.
At the heart of the tale is a genuine human interaction where neither party wants the other one dead. A connection is made as rare as a vein of gold. When Alice’s brother Gilbert (Jefferson Mays) is consumed by consumption, she is left at the mercy of the dubious claims for restitution made by their hired boy. The fact that all the Longabough funds were mistakenly buried in her brother’s waistcoat in an unmarked grave half a day back (in a reversal of All Gold Canyon, wealth is inserted back into the earth) puts a hitch in any plans for the future. The entire tale is another spin on that running theme of the frontier as a commercial opportunity — folk headed West to improve their fortune. Out of this predicament, Alice comes to know handsome, mild-mannered Billy Knapp (Bill Heck), one of the wagon train’s rugged hands. Smitten with the quiet young lady, he suggests the answer to her dilemma could be another arranged marriage, betwixt the two of them. She has at least had the chance to size up this fellow, and Kazan’s gobsmacked response to the proposal is worth your Netflix fee alone. The truth is, in their hesitant but verbose interactions (Kazan’s effortless enunciation of “apothegm” surely signs her up to the Coen company for life), she has grown quite sweet on him too. So happy endings are on the horizon, if they ever get there. Stoney-faced Alice even manages to giggle at the antics of prairie dogs.
Talking of which, this fifth tale also marks the first actual shaggy dog to show up. The mutt in question was the companion of Alice’s unbending brother and has been driving the good folk of the wagon train to distraction with its incessant barking (a case of canine nerves). He also gets a name. That of President Pierce. President Franklin Pierce was a thoroughly unlikeable, wholly entrenched anti-abolisionist, whose sour political perspective paved the way for the secession of the south and the Civil War. And if that echoes a more recent administration and its fixed beliefs then that is as it should be.
A short consideration of political subtext. In among their nimbly edited, precisely arranged, knowingly preposterous cornucopia of the Old West, the Coens have leaned into the political. There is a warning being delivered through the lens of history and genre about America’s potential for unchecked power. The law of the gun, so to speak. Beneath the cover of their playfulness and irony, there is a stark reminder that the violent idealism espoused by the panoply of the Western is still being bought into wholesale by the kinds of people who don’t tend to go and see Coen brothers movies. America’s current travails, fuelled by the manipulation of myths to vouchsafe isolationist views, are being probed through the lampooning vision of these thoughtful Minnesotans.
“Uncertainty, that is appropriate for matters in this world,” Billy reflects, opening up in Alice’s company, as she finds her nerves are settled by his presence.
President Pierce, the human one, lost all his children to illness and that dog proves as turbulent an agent of fate as the ginger cat(s) that scampers through Inside Llewyn Davis. And it will be his bark (like the querulous ghost of her un-dearly departed brother) that draws Alice into peril. Isolated from the train, in the face of an oncoming native raiding party (which bears a remarkable similarity to the party that interrupted the hanging in Near Algondones), a bitterly ironic fate awaits our heroine. Defended by Billy Knapp’s seasoned boss Mr. Arthur (Grainger Hinds) she is advised that if it seems they are “licked,” rather than surrender herself to their savage foe and a terrible fate, her only option is to put one in her brain. But how can you be certain when you are licked?
6. The Mortal Remains
Our sixth and final frontier parable opens within a stagecoach making a moonlit flit through an obscure and sinister terrain supposedly in the direction the Colorado outpost of Fort Morgan. As we shall discover, it’s a one-way trip. There will be no slowing, not for anything. The faceless driver never ceases cracking the whip. The ambient light passes from the radioactive smear of sunset to a medicine bottle green before succumbing to an icy-blue lunar glow.
So this is a far less Fordian journey than the Stagecoach-like synopsis sounds. The mood has stiffened into the gothic entanglements of Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allan Poe. The Coens have clearly done their homework, for this final story also recalls a portmanteau horror from the sixties, produced by British stable Amicus, called Dr. Terror’s House of Horror wherein five tales of macabre bearing are relayed from the gathered strangers in the carriage of a train heading to a station they hadn’t intended. In their company is Death, disguised as the Tarot reading Dr. Terror and played with diabolical grace by Peter Cushing.
More than ever, here is that enduring Coen love for the antique curls of language. We are introduced to a company of passengers, ill-met as fellow travellers, but a perfect microcosm of the film’s overall assembly of styles and themes. Each is their own story. Each, given the chance, will prove an obnoxious windbag, eager to weary the other passengers with their own take on the strictures of human nature.
Once again, names are superfluous. The Lady (a marvellous Tyne Daly) is a doughty, Bible-thumping moralist, dividing mankind into the good and the evil. She is heading out to a husband she hasn’t glimpsed for years. How can she be so sure he has remained true, tease her unwelcome companions? She will suffer a coughing fit (a reminder of the consumption that did for the priggish blowhard Gilbert Loughabough in the previous ballad) and a theory abides that she never survives her choking — that is the point death arrives for them all.
The unkempt trapper (Chelcie Ross), all beard and coonskin hat, recalls Tom Waits’ prospector, but proves an unstoppable torrent of self-regarding prattle about men being no better than ferrets, driven as they are by instinct. He also includes the frank admission people have labelled him “tedious.” He’s a Coen staple.
The set-up of a joke returns, in that an Englishman, an Irishman and a Frenchman fill out the manifest. Perhaps we are coming full circle. Could Saul Rubinek’s silly Frenchman (a much mocked tribe throughout) be a middle-aged version of David Krumholtz’s silly Frenchman seen at the card table with Buster Scruggs way back in the first story? “We must play our own hand,” he informs one and all, echoing the opening instalment, citing a more individualistic philosophy — life is what we do with it. Or maybe Rubinek is there to echo his former part as the travelling writer who turns roughhewn facts into Western myths in Clint Eastwood’s dead-eyed examination of the genre Unforgiven.
The Englishman (Jonjo O’Neill) and the Irishman (Brendan Gleeson) turn out to be bounty hunters. “Harvesters of souls,” suggests the Irishman with sinister implication (a third member of their party, deceased, is strapped to the carriage roof). He also claims to deliver due process with a “tump” to the head of those “adjudged to be ripe.” Sat together, they resemble a macabre Laurel and Hardy.
It is the Englishman, our Mephistophelean Stan Laurel, the latest Devil at large in a Coen fiction, who provides this entire wine-dark tapestry of Coenology with its bleak summary. In short, he is the Cushing of this particular passage. And it is he who ponders the telling of tales. “People can’t get enough of them because, well, they connect the stories to themselves I suppose, and we all love hearing about ourselves. So long as the people in the stories are us, but not us.”
As each of these ranging, existential missives from the Western genre explain, stories are what we tell to keep the inevitable at bay. What distracts us from death. What reminds us to live. Stories are how we fill our allotted hours before the bell tolls, or the stagecoach stops to let us board. All roads finally lead to one place alone. All themes are one theme. What is any story but a ghost story?
This riddling, satirical, wonderful, multi-storied film will do little to convert those suspicious the Coens are still up to no good. Or those who can’t stomach a Western. Or those who like their narratives free of bedevilment. Or those who like things spelled out, heartfelt, upbeat. Or those who can’t abide chickens. But given you have by now seen the film, I am sure you do not fall into any such camp. The current that animates the Coens finest work is true of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Like the death-struck passengers of this last ride, they are wrestling with human nature, our fateful passage on this Earth in all its resplendent, silly, terrifying glory. In their company, at least, we can laugh into the void.