Constructing the Coens From Blood Simple to Inside Llewyn Davis [Hardcover]

Redmon has written the definitive critical study of the films of Ethan and Joel Coen, the writer-director team behind Fargo, Raising Arizona, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Previous critics have portrayed the Coen Brothers as hipsters who make apocalyptic, misanthropic films about American culture made palatable by healthy doses of humor, a nostalgic period setting, and affectionate homages to genre films of the pastespecially film noir, the western, and the musical. Redmon, however, demonstrates that, while the brothers may be snarkyand may employ postmodern storytelling techniquestheir work is soulful and concerned with truth and ethics&. Redmon explains that the Coen Brothers films demand that the audience participate actively in making meanings of the films. The films help viewers become better readers of cinema and of life, and offer us all clues as to how to find truth and emotional authenticity in the grotesque carnival of broken dreams and solipsistic concerns of an America fractured by the culture wars. As Redmon observes, while the Coens enjoy laughing at human folly, they have an ethical worldview, celebrating virtue, condemning evil, and asking us to accept the mystery of the human comedy. Say whatever you want about the Coen Brothers: these men are not nihilists and their films have an ethos.This book combines recent developments in cognitive film theory, genre studies, and adaptation theory to isolate the ways in which the Coens encourage spectators to participate in the ongoing construction of their movies.The films of Ethan and Joel Coen have been embraced by mainstream audiences, but also have been subject to intense scrutiny by critics and cinema scholars. Movies such as Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Raising Arizona represent the filmmakers postmodern tendencies, a subject many academics have written about at length. But is it enough to reduce their features as expressions of postmodernism or are there other ways of viewing their workls3