The Coen Brothers

The Coens are clever directors who know too much about movies and too little about real life. —Emanuel Levy, Cinema of Outsiders

The adolescent experiences of the young Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, forced indoors by frigid Minnesota winters, provides a remarkably crystalline metaphor for their later film work. Born in Minnesota to academic parents, the brothers were raised in a typical middle-American, middle-class Jewish household. Their childhood was largely unremarkable and aside from the production of a few super-8 home movies, a future in filmmaking seemed unlikely. Joel proceeded to New York University where, in lieu anything better, he enrolled in a film course. Ethan, on the other hand, ventured to Princeton; choosing Philosophy as his major. Joel's film school experience would assist him in landing a number of editing jobs on small budget films, providing him with exposure to film production practices. With this grounding the brothers were motivated to make their own film. With the help of investors from the local Minnesota business community the Coens set about making their first feature length film—Blood Simple.

Joel and Ethan Coen have worked within the realms of various genres, adopting appropriate methods of realisation to reflect these representational frameworks. The dialogue in their films is a prominent factor in the organisation and maintenance of these generic constructions and in the fulfilment of specific stylistic strategies. The Hudsucker Proxy's synthetic visual design is mirrored by its stylised dialogue, the criminal milieu of Miller's Crossing is characterised by memorably rich gangster jargon, while Fargo's attention to visual realism operates concurrently with the application of an appropriate regional Minnisota dialect.

Language operates as a cue to the themes and characters in the films of Joel and Ethan Coen. That they construct dialogue of wonderful inarticulacy, such as the Dude's (Jeff Bridges) scrambled speeches in The Big Lebowski and Carl's (Steve Buscemi) consistent malapropism in Fargo, is not merely a joke at the expense of their characters, but rather the critical interrogation of communication breakdown, while Raising Arizona is to some extent about a desire to improve one's position.

Many of the films of the Coen brothers are specific to particular regions and communities—The Coens' detailed reconstruction of identifiable communities, with all their quirks and eccentricities, has led many critics to accuse them of adopting a lofty superiority to their characters.

The Big Lebowski (Joel Coen; 1998)

When "The Dude" Lebowski is mistaken for a millionaire Lebowski, two thugs urinate on his rug to coerce him into paying a debt he knows nothing about. While attempting to gain recompense for the ruined rug from his wealthy counterpart, he accepts a one-time job with high pay-off, to find "The Big Lebowski's" young wife Bunny, who is seemingly kidnapped. He enlists the help of his bowling buddies to solve this crime....but this only seems to screw things up further.......

O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Joel Coen;2000)

Loosely based on Homer's "Odyssey," Everett Ulysses McGill and his companions escape a chain gang and try to reach Everetts home to recover the buried loot of a bank heist. Along the way they are confronted by a series of strange characters, among them sirens, a cyclops, bankrobber George 'Babyface' Nelson, a campaigning Governor, his opponent, a KKK lynch mob, and a blind prophet, who warns the trio that "the treasure you seek shall not be the treasure you find."