From Blood Simple to True Grit: A Conversation about the Coen Brothers’ Cinematic West

Ken Egan:

Well, good afternoon. Welcome to an amazing session that’s a combined effort of the Western Literature Association and Humanities Montana. I’m Ken Egan, Executive Director of Humanities Montana, and we’re proud to be working with you. You bring a lot of energy—last night was amazing. Please welcome Stephen Tatum of the University of Utah, who will chair the panel “From Blood Simple to True Grit: A Conversation about the Coen Brothers’ Cinematic West.”

Lee Clark Mitchell and Neil Campbell, left

Susan Kollin and Stephen Tatum, right.

Stephen Tatum:

This panel discussion responds to the call from Editor Melody Graulich, in a recent number of Western American Literature, for an extended critical conversation about the Coen brothers’ cinematic American West, which is to say their deployment of the American West as setting; their use and revision of the traditional film Western genre’s conventions and themes (including hybridizing the film Western with other genres like film noir); and their adaptation, in two of their most recent and well-received films, of “western” literary texts such as True Grit and No Country for Old Men. Our hope is that, as this conversation unfolds this afternoon, our comments will touch on these and other aspects, questions, and even problems associated with the Coen brothers’ cinematic West, from their initial film, Blood Simple (1984), set in urban Texas, to their most recent film, True Grit (2010), set in the historical Old Southwest of Arkansas and Oklahoma. Along with these two films, their preoccupation with the American West and the film Western is registered as well in Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1996), which will be shown here in the Wilma Theatre after this panel concludes, The Big Lebowski (1998), The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), and, of course, No Country for Old Men (2007), which received four Oscars for “Best Motion Picture,” “Best Director,” “Best Adapted Screenplay,” and “Best Supporting Actor.”

To begin, one of the central questions with regard to the Coen brothers and their cinematic West we wanted to focus on is precisely the question of genre. It is a question that the Coen brothers themselves are notoriously evasive about in their various interviews. In the roll-up to the recent release of True Grit, for example, there was an interview in The Guardian in which they say, “If anything, we were thinking about it more in terms of Alice in Wonderland.” And, “In our minds, we never got real close to thinking about it [True Grit] in terms of the western. We weren’t thinking: let’s shoot it in widescreen like Sergio Leone” (Shone). And yet, in other interviews with the media about True Grit, they’ve confessed to feeling the power of the genre influence. Though True Grit is technically set in Arkansas, the Coens filmed it with iconic western landscapes, confessing that their “landscape is a total cheat [in relation to that used in Charles Portis’s novel], but we kind of thought people will think it’s a Western, and some things you just can’t mess with.” So on the one hand, then, “it is a Western, inarguably. There are guys with six-shooter guns on horses, but [on the other hand] it’s not a Zane Grey story. It’s not a Western in that sense” (Haddon). Interestingly, in response to the genre question in The Guardian interview, the Coen brothers do situate themselves and their recent work in a conversation that includes two of the more well-known Western directors in film history. That is, it’s not just that Leone uses a lot of widescreen shots, but also that, to their mind, “Sergio Leone has this weird western opera thing, and it’s definitely not opera. And it’s definitely not that John Ford tragic thing. Our sensibility has nothing...