Deep Thoughts about A Serious Man

The Coen brothers have always had two sides: a brainy, Big Questions of Life side, and a playfully ironic side that loves nothing more than a good sight gag.  The same guys who brought us Nic Cage chasing a pampers-laden dog and George Clooney dragged off a freight train by his chained-up buddies gave us John Goodman racing down a hall screaming “I’ll show you the life of the mind” and Javier Bardem potting crows on a Texas bridge.  And although they’ve alternated “serious movies” with comedies for years, their peculiar genius lies — at least in part — in their ability to integrate their two sides.

A Serious Man fuses these two aspects of their filmmaking better than any has done to date.  It is a very funny movie, and full of big ideas, and the key is that the ideas emerge from the comedy and the comedy from the ideas.

Their intentions are signaled right up front, in the prologue set in a Jewish shtetl on a snowy night, many years ago.  A peasant comes home to his wife and tells her that he’s been helped on the road by a wealthy neighbor, whom he gratefully invited home to share in a bowl of soup.  But when his wife finds out who it is, she blanches: seems the neighbor died three years earlier.  It must have been a dybbuk who’d helped her husband, and here the idiot had invited him back to the hut.  And before you can say “let the right one in,” there’s a knock on the door, and it’s the neighbor (Fyvush Finkel), looking for soup.

Like any good opening, it tells us how to read the film.  The husband is skeptical, pooh-poohing his wife’s suspicions, and indeed the neighbor looks solid enough.  In fact, the wife stabs him in the chest with an icepick and he bleeds, seemingly debunking the dybbuk theory.  And sitting there, I thought:  ok, I know what this is about.  It’s another tired screed on rationality versus religion: they”ll find their dead neighbor in the snow, just one more victim of unbridled superstiti0n.

But just when we think we know what’s going on, the door is slammed in our face.  Literally — we are outside in the snow with the maybe-dybbuk, looking back inside the hut, and the husband says something like “you killed our neighbor.”  To which his wife replies “Nonsense!” and slams the door.  We are faced with a blank door, a dead end.  We are left uncertain about the fate of the couple, and about whether or not Fyvush Finkel’s character is indeed a dybbuk (in the closing credits, Finkel’s character is listed coyly as “dybbuk?”).

As Greg Ferarra points out in his excellent essay, uncertainty is a major theme of the A Serious Man.  In the end, can we know the answers?  Can we count on anything?  Or are we doomed to relativity, to things being true only in limited spheres where the rules we have constructed for ourselves obtain?  Do these worlds crumble the minute anything impinges upon those them, the minute something unexpected pokes it’s head into their bubble?

That is exactly what happens to Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), teacher of Physics at an unnamed Minneapolis college.  Larry is a Jew:  a spiritual descendant of those long-ago shtetl dwellers.   Only instead of being bound by superstition, he is just the opposite: a man of science.  Physics is everything to Larry, and he understands it better than he ever will his family or, indeed, life in general

But it’s not the whole of physics he understands, just the mathematics.  He admits as much to a student named Clive (David Kang), come to complain about an exam he flunked because he didn’t know the math.  Gopnik explains to him that he can’t do physics without the mathematics, but Clive is adamant.  If he receives a failing grade, he will lose his scholarship.  And besides, he says, he understands the dead cat.

Gopnik is surprised: “You understand the dead cat?”  Clive nods.  Gopnik continues  “But . . . you . . .  you can’t really understand the physics without understanding the mathematics.  The math tells how it really works.  That’s the real thing. The stories I give you in class are just illustrative; they’re like fables, say, to help give you a picture.  An imperfect model.  I mean — even I don’t understand the dead cat.  The math is how it really works.” (emphasis mine)

Note what he says: “That’s the real thing.”  For Gopnik, the math is the real thing, not those messy stories that are like the fables of his ancestors.  Larry is a man of science, a man of mathematics, not some superstitious peasant.

The “dead cat”  refers to Schrödinger’s Cat, a thought experiment devised by Erwin Schrödinger to illustrate a problem with an interpretation of quantum mechanics.  Basically, he said, the mathematics of quantum mechanics leads to the conclusion that a cat sealed in a box, under certain conditions, can be both dead and alive, and that its state is only fixed when the box is opened and the cat observed.

Gopnik, by his own admission, understands the math, but not “the dead cat.”   The problem is, the cat is the point, and how can he claim to understand Schrödinger’s paradox if he doesn’t understand that the simultaneously alive and dead cat is nonsense?  If he doesn’t “understand the cat,” he can’t get why the mathematical prediction is, as Schrödinger put it, “quite ridiculous.”  Gopnik understands math, but not the “reality” it describes.

I’ve written before that the Coen brothers are the quintessential post-modern filmmakers.  Not that they necessarily buy into all the razzle-dazzle, but that they are shaped, more than most, by its precepts.  One of the pillars of post-modern thought is that truth is contextual, that it is relative to one’s sitz im leben, ones situation of life.  As a result, whereas in modernity the idea was to strive toward some universally-accepted truth, that we can be sure of,  in post-modernity we swim in a sea of competing narratives, competing world views. Uncertainty is the overriding value in a post-modern world.

It is possible to read A Serious Man in that way, as a clash of competing narratives.  Larry and Clive represent two ways of “knowing,” two modes of understanding the world.  One is “fuzzy,” imprecise, and drives the doyens of modernity nuts.  The other is logical, consistent, and mathematically coherent but, in the end, does not predict anything above the molecular level.  Nothing that’s alive, anyway

And the remainder of the movie proves this to be true.  From the moment Clive leaves his office, Gopnik enters a fun-house slide  into mathematical incoherency.  His wife, without any notice, says she wants a divorce.  His son is obsessed with good television reception, and mysteriously runs home every day to escape a large classmate.  His daughter is — perhaps, we’re uncertain! — stealing money to save for a nose job.  And his friend Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), with whom Larry’s wife is cuckolding him (or  maybe not!), just wants a hug.

In the face of all this, Larry turns to something that might offer certainty, that might give a modicum of security: his faith.  To be sure, it’s  not without a little prodding: everyone is telling him “Go see the rabbi, go see the rabbi,” but the problem is that it’s a large synagogue and there are three of them.  And so he begins to work his way up, starting with the young, wet-behind-the-ears Rabbi Scott, who tells him to look for God in the parking lot.   Next, he sees the mid-level Rabbi Nachtner, who tells him a story that may (or may not!) apply, but that he refuses to interpret for the bewildered Gopnik.

Finally, after exhausting all the possibilities, he begs for an audience with senior Rabbi Marshak, and as the rabbi’s forbidding secretary opens the door to his sanctuary — the holiest of holies! — we can see him at his desk through the door, staring into space.  The secretary bends down to whisper in his ears, then pads back to tell Larry “He’s busy.”

The rabbis specialize in one kind of knowledge — the spiritual — but is that really what Larry needs? Does he not need, much more than that, a good, competent lawyer?  And maybe some marriage counseling? All who urge him to see the rabbis confuse two kinds of knowledge.   When Larry, who is rightfully cautious, asks what the rabbis could possibly tell him, he is told “If I knew that, I’d be the rabbi.”  He goes to the rabbis wanting to know what God wants of him, what he has done wrong, but what he needs to know is what to do, how to go on from here.

The notion of the separation of spheres of knowledge is a modernist idea — it began with the writings of Immanuel Kant in the 1700s and, some say, actually enabled modernity.  Where the Coens — and post-modernist thought in general — depart from this line is that there is no clear winner or loser among the choices.  The rationalist realm of mathematics and clear, unambiguous solutions fails him as much as does the fabular stories of his ancestors.  His lawyer is a dud, his doctor gets it wrong — at least at first — and he can’t even get his TV to work.   In the Coens’ post-modernist world of competing narratives, everything is contingent, nothing is for sure.

Finally, a Gopnik does get an audience with Rabbi Marshak, but it’s not Larry. It’s his son, come to talk to the old man at the occasion of his bar mitzvah.  As the boy sits nervously across from the Marshak, fear etching his face, the rabbi simply stares at him for a beat then hands him the transistor radio that had been confiscated from him at Hebrew School.  His only words to him are “Be a good boy.”

Be a good boy.  Is this the answer to Larry’s life, the answer to his dilemma?  Is it that there is no answer, no concrete rules to live by, that you just do the best you can?  Or is Marshak simply senile?  We don’t know, and have no way to find out.  The Coens’ movies rarely give easy answers; nothing is certain, everything is contingent.

But there is a ray of hope: as Larry and his wife watch the bar mitzvah of their son, they are drawn closer together.  Soon they are holding hands and casting shy looks at one another.  For a moment, it seems as if the fables have triumphed, as if religion has won out in the end.  But the final scene negates all of that, as the fates of two of Larry’s family are left hanging by a thread.  There are no sure narratives, no solid rules in life, nothing but uncertainty, and random chance takes control of the Gopniks’ own story at the finish.

I’ve seen a number of efforts to deduce the Coens’ opinions on the matters touched upon in the film.  I think if they are there, they are buried too deeply to discern with any reliability.  To be sure, this may — or may not! — be the most personal of their films.  And although the brothers have been characteristically cagey, they did grow up Jewish in 1960s Minneapolis, and because of that,  A Serious Man has a more intimate feel than their other films.

Perhaps the ultimate irony — another mark of the post-modern — is that a film that pits fables versus rationality is structured like a fable itself.  As been oft-remarked, it bears some resemblance to the story of Job from the Hebrew scriptures.   Job, who like Larry is a good man, loses it all, and three friends talk with him about it, but do not give very satisfactory answers.  Finally, God steps in and tells him “Tough.  I’m God, and you’re not.  I created the earth and the stars and the universe, and I can do anything I want.”

And perhaps that’s the answer:  in the finale of A Serious Man, God — or fate, or random chance — steps in, in the form of illness and catastrophe.  And he/she/it  tells these puny little humans, with their mathematical formulas and their attempts to define the ineffable, that there is nothing they can do.  Like Anton Chigurh, to whom fate sends a marauding car that nearly kills him, the Gopniks are caught up in a nihilistic world, and there’s nothing to be done.

But then again, maybe that’s not the point at all … in the end it’s impossible to tell.