Critique&Analysis: "A Serious Man" - Absurdist Philosophy

by Arturo Virzi 

Absurdism Philosophy was created by Kierkegard and extended by Camus. This is an example of how it can be applied to the film, A Serious Man, written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen.

The story about the dentist that Gopnik receives from the second rabbi has no moral, purpose, or conclusion. The story is inherently absurd and neither the rabbi or the dentist have any problem with that. Both of their lives just move on and only Gopnik reaches desperation in search for an answer. Gopnik is not an idiot, quite the contrary actually, he is a brilliant mathematician, and can figure out all of the “hows” and “whats” but cannot comprehend the “whys”. This mirrors itself in the story of the cat, where according to Gopnik, “the cat doesn’t matter, it is just a model to display the physics”. Big mistake, the cat is all that matters, the physics are already there and can be discovered but the meaning of the cat is what Gopnik cannot understand, unlike his morally corrupt student who encourages him to “embrace the mystery”, similar to the way both the dentist and the rabbi embraced the mystery behind the marking on the teeth of a stranger. Larry Gopnik is unable to give meaning, he wants to find meaning the same way we find physics in the real world.

Albert Camus states that life in inherently meaningless, and that we ourselves must give it meaning. There are three ways of doing so: 1) to find god in our life and pretend our meaning is somehow connected to a divine entity. We accept the fact that our world is meaningless because everything will make sense in the afterlife. 2) to reject the absurdity of the real world and try to give meaning ourselves “look at the parking lot”. 3) to accept absurdity, and to embrace it. To see things as they are and not look for much else.

Larry Gopnik’s community seems to be at ease with the world. It’s Larry who can’t seem to do either one of these. He cannot embrace the mystery, he cannot see the beauty in the parking lot, and he somehow expects to hear all the answers from an old rabbi. It’s not just lack of humor he lacks, it’s lack of creativity as well. He doesn’t want to create, only discovery, process, and resolve. Larry can’t stray away from his logic, both his greatest asset and his own demise, and he cannot see the beauty in the chaos.

“What does it all mean” and “God is trying to tell me something” are questions that will not lead him anywhere, especially if he keeps asking other people for the answer instead of making an answer himself. Larry Gopnik embraces the mystery at the end of the film, and tragedy immediately strikes. We can only get the sense that Larry is going to try to connect these unrelated events again with no conclusion.

The Coen Brothers have not just aesthetically modernized the Book of Job, they’ve modernized the substance as well. Larry Gopnik never gets his answer, and he never sees god. It’s the silence of god that drives him mad because everyone else around him seems so sure of it. But when he asks for a message all he gets is silence, almost as if a divine truth has been denied to him. “I’m not a bad man”, he cried because he doesn’t understand “why” god would shun him away. The believes of his community are in conflict with his own, because he cannot embrace the absurd, everything needs meaning. And because Larry Gopnik cannot give meaning he will never find it.

In a way, his brother is just the same. The Mentaculous is a book about probability, mathematical equations and nothing else. And yet, just like Larry, he cannot find sense in things like human interactions. When Larry’s brother cries to him “You’ve got a wife, and kids, i’ve got nothing” Larry can sympathize because he doesn’t know why he got those things, and he didn’t bother to ask until he started loosing them. When we get the things we want, things make sense to us, but when we don’t we wonder “why”. Larry’s brother tried to find the “why” in logic, and Larry is heading down a very similar path.

We wonder “why” the Coen Brothers would have their character endure such a travesty when they’re just doing it ‘cause’.

A Serious Man is a film about the search for meaning, and in that search we find no meaning at all. The Coen brothers were playing god, rolling the dice with Larry Gopnik’s fate.