O Brother, What Art Thou?: Postmodern Pranksterism, Or Parody with a Purpose?(Critical Essay‪)‬

To pin a label on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, you seem to need more hyphens than warts on ahorny toad. Reviewers, trying to serve up the film as something moviegoers could digest, stirred together a genre soup called something like a "Depression era-Mississippi-buddy-chaingang-roadtrip-musical comedy." Ruminating over the film's allusions to other films, literary texts, and cultural images, critics were invariably troubled by what to call--much less what to think about--such a rich melange. In one particular gumbo of mixed metaphors, John Anderson of Newsday called the film a "collection of free-floating political-cultural myths that the Coens have harvested and wed to literature." Other reviewers, wrestling with O Brother's patchwork of quotations, allusions, and homages, turned to one-word descriptions that evoked the very soup they were trying to climb out of: they called it a mix, a medley, an amalgam, a collection, an assemblage, a trove. While some reviewers reveled in such revelry, some--often the same ones--blamed the film for a lack of coherence, complained that it has "too much of everything going on" (Strauss). Roger Ebert argued that its "narrative train" lacks an engine, while Patrick Z. McGavin argued on IndieWIRE.com that the film lacks an "essential shape" or "essential emotional register." Ah, yes, the search for engines and essences--just where is that master concept to drive the train into the station? What all this talk of quotations, allusions, assemblages, and messiness suggests, of course, is that the Coens are mucking about in the postmodern. McGavin found the film "entertaining, funny, [and] vibrant," but he also declared it "thin" and "weightless," the work of "postmodern pranksters." Reaching into America's pop-culture past for songs, movies, and stories while at the same time reaching into the ancient Greek past for Homer's Odyssey of Homer, the film has everything to justify McGavin's latter charge: reconfiguring cultural referents cut loose from their historical moorings is a hallmark not only of many Coen films, after all, but of postmodernism as a whole. In an interview on the O Brother DVD the filmmakers invoke the very language of postmodernism: it's the "Lawrence of Arabia [David Lean, 1962] of hayseed movies," a "Ma and Pa Kettle movie with really high production values," a "sophisticated Three Stooges film." Elsewhere they invoke The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), and the biggest in-joke of all, Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels (1940). Their self-deprecating humor likewise suggests a decidedly postmodern stance, a resistance to being pinned down by serious intent. In another interview, Joel Coen said that Homer just "seemed like a good hillbilly name," and that he and his brother had never even read the original Odyssey, only the Classic Comics version (Pickle). This conflation of high culture and pop, Greek epic and slapstick, and their deflation of all things "high-brow" are, of course, precisely what leave Coen and his younger brother vulnerable to charges of "postmodern prankster[ism]."