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.

Food For Thought: Absolute Truth vs. Individual Interpretation

by Arturo Virzi 

There are two theories of communication regarding meaning. Is the true meaning of an authors work inside the authors head? or is the meaning endless because the knowledge regarding any work of art is endless.

In other words: do you believe art has absolute truth or do you believe the meaning of art reveals itself through individual interpretations?

A perfect example for this debate is Inception. Do you think that Nolan knows if the top fell or kept spinning? Or do you think he wanted us to debate the film endlessly. And if Nolan knows the answer to these question, does it even matter. Shouldn’t art speak for itself even when it doesn’t hand us the answer in a silver platter.

Similar to Blade Runner as well since there are two different versions of the film. Ridley Scott has stated numerous times that Deckard is a Replicant, while the screenwriter says he isn’t. Is he? Isn’t he? And does it matter?

Since everything is a sing of a sing, and the qualities of meaning are all metaphysical, the closes things we’ve got to it (meaning) is language. We watch incredibly ambiguous and vague films at the art house cinema down our street and immediately associate them with “hidden meanings”. We might be convinced of our interpretation, and might not even see it as such. But what if we meet someone close to the author of said work and he said we were wrong. Would we? Does the person closer to the source have a higher authority than we do when it comes to judging his work? Does a creator ever emancipate himself from his work, or do they remain linked.

The closer you are to the author, the close you are to the real meaning. Or does the work speaks for itself, and the true meaning lies in the interpretation of the audience.

Absolute Truth vs. Individual Interpretation.

Our Favorite Films: "400 Blows"

by Arturo Virzi

The 400 Blows is a magnificent masterpiece by the critic-turned-director Françoise Truffaut, not just because of its historical importance and artistic value, but because of its emotional resonance with the audience. The film follows a young boy by the name of Antoine Doinel, who is heading for a life of crime in the streets of Paris. This unwanted child is nothing but a mere product of his own parents disinterest in him, and by the time we first see him, the harm has already been done. It was one of the first times in cinema that the center of gravity lays on a young boy, while the adults seem to act unsympathetic and relentless. Doinel is not only sympathetic, but can also be described as an epitome of the coming-of-age genre anti-hero, al’a Holden Caulfield. From forging letters, to skipping school, lying to his parents and stealing a typewriter, we witness his downfall not as a sequence of tragic events, but as mere childish angst and anger. Francoise Truffaut pays tribute to his hero, Alfred Hitchcock, not by name, but by style. He is obviously influenced by American films as much as French, and he chooses to shoot the film with a realistic documentary style, but employed with elaborate track shots, and conventional wide angle shots, that show Paris in a beautiful nostalgic light. But one of the films defining characteristics is that it does not offer trite nostalgia, or clichéd plotting. Instead we get an extremely honest, sympathetic, and wholly heartbreaking observation of youth gone astray. Together with Breathless, The 400 Blows was one of the first films of the film phenomenon known as French New Wave, and still proves itself to be a timeless seminal work.

                The misunderstood Doinel has a whole mystery of his own. The film has certain levity to it; nothing is brought up with too much attention other than the famous, and synonymous final shot. The shot has Doinel running away from the observation center and reaching the ocean, only to turn back again and face the audience. This is the first time he sees the ocean. The ambiguous scene has been interpreted by many. Some say Doinel is Truffaut’s alter-ego, and he simply comes clean at the end, by washing his feet at the end of the film, as a symbol to the film he just made about himself, and about his melancholic childhood. The scene is powerful and extremely emotional. The fact that the film has such an emotional resonance even today is a testament to its greatness. It has no cheap melodramatic formulas, and its hard to describe the plot because one could say it doesn’t really have one. The premise is clear, but the plot isn’t derived out of someone’s imagination, the plot results in the conflict between the characters, similar to the way it works in real life. The tension between Doinel and his parents, the troubles of Doinel at school, these aren’t simple paradigms the film uses to move on a story, but more like a playground it decides to use for its players to expand. The film has one particular shot, where Doinel stands inside a police vehicle with three hookers and a criminal, and he is being driven away from home. As he looks through the bars outside into the streets of Paris, we get the sense Doinel has been nothing but a victim of his own fate as a product of his environment. That sad nostalgic shot of Paris left me speechless, thanks not only to Jean-Pierre Leaud singular performance, but to Jean Constantin, the composer.

                Not all is sad and gloom in Doinels life though. We take a peek at the positive things such as his good friendship, and his love for the writer Balzac. We also see self-referential glimpses of Truffaunt love of film, and he sneaks into the movie theater with his friend when he’s supposed to be at school. In fact, one of the rare “happy moments” in the film is about Doinel going together with his family to the cinema and watching a film. If the film is as autobiographical as its author says it is, film might have saved Truffaut from a life of crime. I wish I could say more about the film, but the truth is that it has to been seen by everyone. I cannot sum up in this short article the great impact a film like this has on the soul.