What Happened to Delmar in O Brother Where Art Thou
John Goodman every bit Big Dan Teague (IMDB)
The 1-eyed dude abides.
Well actually, John Goodman, playing bible salesman Large Dan Teague, doesn't so much bide, every bit he assails.
Breaking a massive branch right off the tree for utilise as gild, Teague wallops 2 main protagonists in a scene that has become a authentication of the Coen brothers' O Blood brother, Where Art Thou? The scene is film schoolhouse clip-effective. Teague, only slightly taller than George Clooney's Ulysses Everett McGill, seems to tower over his victims, cheers to conscientious camera angles. For a moment, Teague seems to embody Polyphemus, Homer'due south massive mount of a cyclops, as he robs the two men of their sick-gotten aims.
Yeah, the full general outline of the Greek epic is there, simply in that location is much more. First, at that place is the swipe at Bible Belt morality; Teague admits early in the scene that he's only in the scripture merchandise for the money. Then at that place's the cartoon-like violence—Tom and Jerry skirting the contours of the Classics Illustrated-version of the Odyssey with some allusions to Twain. Finally, there's the sly nod to the amphibian-focused sadism of the Beavis and Butthead characters as first introduced in Mike Approximate'south 1992 festival short, Frog Baseball game.
Unlike in the epic, withal, Ulysses Everett and Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson) don't outwit the big galoot. Teague prevails. Telling the tale of the cyclops through the lens of high and low culture, the Coens hammer home a fatalistic criticism about the ways that commerce, violence, and cosmetic Christianity prevail in American lodge.
October marks the 20th ceremony of United states of america theatrical release of the Coens' first music-focused comedy. Although initial reviews were mixed, O Brother, Where Art Thou? has weathered well, condign, adjacent to 1998'due south The Large Lebowski, peradventure the about universally loved of the Coens' films even if critics at the time, such as Roger Ebert, wondered whether the brothers left too many threads incomplete. I tin hardly quibble with Ebert. A music-packed satire that stages Homer's Odyssey in the Jim Crow S, created in part to answer the philosophical ponderings of a 1940s screwball comedy? That must have been one hell of a pitch meeting.
These unfinished only occasionally vivid threads nevertheless are what is most endearing virtually the film. A perfect film, no. But i that even my 11-year-erstwhile son thinks is hilarious and which raises interesting questions almost what it ways to exist a decent human beingness in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter demonstrations against police violence, yes.
My interest in the movie'due south flaws and strengths led me to incorporate O Brother into a college topics grade that I periodically teach near the culture, music, and political history of the South during the first one-half of the 20th century.
The decision to center the class around the film didn't come up easily. The first time we watched it, I worried that the larger-than-life storytelling manner—a facet early reviewers derided as fluff—might nowadays a fake view of a region already field of study to too much caricature. But as the students and I dug deeper, nosotros realized that dissecting the film led united states of america to greater insights about the untruths surrounding some of the myths about the Due south too as the legacy and the origins of actual Southern mythologies such equally Stagger Lee and John Henry. We also concluded that central institutions depicted in the movie such as the racist Solid South political system and the notable offspring of that organization, such as Huey Long and Memphis Boss Edward "Red Snapper" Crump were indeed deserving of the caricature.
The most obvious byproduct of the motion picture is a mini-folk revival that encourages Americans to revisit the dejection and reclaim disregarded genres such equally bluegrass. Listeners today may nonetheless be navigating the half-life of this resurgence in the lingering radio yawp of Caamp, the Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, and their imitators.
Simply beyond reviving interest in musical Americana, the motion picture gets many things correct about the American S. At first glance, the politicians in O Brother appear to be cartoonish, attention-seeking buffoons who seem to have no parallel in postwar American history. I mean, putting yourself back in the year 2000, could y'all imagine Bob Dole or Al Gore acting like that?
Now, in these times of the Trump administration, nosotros understand that cartoonish buffoons not only capture attention just get elected to the highest offices in the land. From a historical standpoint, we now know that large segments of the state have been electing cads for some fourth dimension, many of whom, like governors Pappy O'Daniel in Texas (memorably depicted by Charles Dunning in the picture), Jimmie Davis in Louisiana, Big Jim Folsom in Alabama, and Fiddlin' Bob Taylor in Tennessee, actually performed country music to become elected.
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These figures, then deftly satirized in O Brother, were pioneers in combining celebrity, entertainment, and political ambitions generations before Ronald Reagan, Trump, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, as I relate in my contempo book I'd Fight the Earth: A Political History of Old Fourth dimension, Hillbilly, and Country Music. Like villain Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall) in the moving-picture show, Big Jim fifty-fifty hauled out a saucepan and mop pledging to "clean out the capitol", some 68 years before Trump and his promises almost draining the Washington, D.C. "swamp".
Then there's the Greek mythology thing. The Coens must accept been divining the fustiest crannies of Southern gentility when writing that—for upper-form white Southerners in the tardily 19th and early 20th century were simply gaga for the Classics. Nosotros all know of the Doric columns on Gone with the Wind'south Terra, simply four Southern cities and higher towns were vying to be "Athens of the South" while builders were erecting Greek-influenced Plantation Revival architecture faster than Huey Long could skim the Louisiana land coffers. Nashville even erected a full-scale replica of the Parthenon, complete with an intact forty human foot tall statue of the goddess Athena!
You see, when the planters of the Onetime South met up with the industrialists of the New, Ancient Greece was appealing: a mythically democratic yet decidedly nonegalitarian slave-owning gild. The Confederate monuments that protestors are toppling today are oft drawn from the same font of Greco-Roman influences, especially in their depictions of women as goddesses and emblematic figures.
Christy Taylor, Musetta Vander, Mia Tate every bit the Sirens [© Touchstone Pictures / Universal Pictures – All Rights Reserved / (IMDB)]
O Brother falls downwards a scrap when it comes to bodily depictions of Black people. Critics such as Matthew W. Hughey have attacked the film for offering abbreviated and uni-dimensional portraits of its few notable Black characters: bluesman Tommy Johnson and an unnamed blind seer. The Johnson character, an on-again-off-again comrade of the three white heroes played by talented musician Chris Thomas King, is a mashup of the existent-life dejection performers Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson, whose supposed bargain with the devil O Brother touts uncritically. The blind prophet (Lee Weaver), on the other hand, can be read as a simple spinoff of the "Magical Negro", that silver screen stereotype whose race appears to give him affinity with foreign or spiritual forces.
Chris Thomas King as Tommy Johnson (IMDB)
I reached out to Grammy-winning artist Rhiannon Giddens on this question, wondering what a working musician who has done a lot to educate the public on the African American sources of country, bluegrass, and traditional music idea about the depictions in the motion-picture show. Giddens said that while the music of O Blood brother had a "huge impact" on her, she likewise feels circumspect nearly the way Black music and culture was portrayed in the picture show. "Unfortunately the portrayal of black music followed the same old tropes," she says, "but they are very potent tropes that have been forced upon the American narrative and nosotros are just only offset to challenge and dismantle them in a significant way."
My students weren't especially upset at these depictions and the way they contributed to the softly anti-racist arc of the picture. They didn't expect much more from Hollywood, but they too wished there was more than screen time for Black characters and more than attention to the storylines connected to Black music history. Several told me they appreciated the way the moving picture introduced them, as hip-hop fans, to music their grandparents performed or were partial too. Many were excited nearly the way our course challenged them to make connections betwixt contemporary releases and older forms of the blues and gospel.
The film'due south depictions of women are likewise somewhat weak. Penny, played past Holly Hunter and loosely based on Homer'southward Penelope, makes a few appearances and exerts a smidgeon of agency over her life, but her personal choices are erratic and barely rise in a higher place the stereotype offered in the original epic.
Perhaps side by side to the cyclops matter, ane of the more memorable scenes involves three backwoods Sirens, expertly voiced but not portrayed by Emmylou Harris, Alison Krauss, and Gillian Welch. Bathing in a river, the 3 Sirens lull Ulysses, Delmar, and Pete to sleep with their highly sexualized version of "Didn't Leave Nobody But the Baby". One of the students in my class noticed in her newspaper that the song, a slave lullaby often titled "Become to Sleep Little Baby," stemmed way back in Black southern folk culture. She was particularly struck by Bessie Jones's version and her explanation about how it reflects a precious, perchance stolen, moment between a Blackness mother and child. That something so personal is used commercially to back up the well-nigh sexualized scene in the movie merely didn't sit so well, when the class talked virtually it.
There are, of course, other threads that the film gets right. The critique of the carceral state and police brutality, though brief, is compelling. I noticed when preparing for the class that the prominently-placed Dapper Dap pomade probably draws from a real-life cosmetic, Sweet Georgia Brown pomade, marketed by the Valmor Products Co. to African Americans in the early on to mid-20th century. Ulysses Everett's devotion to this product and his use of a hair net, as my students discover, gives new dimension to the accusations made past the cinematic villain Homer Stokes that the three heroes are of "miscegenated" origins.
Other subthemes age surprisingly well: the satire, for instance, aimed at the zany Oz-like Klansmen who march in strange formations and could probably O-wee-o their own with the best of today's cowardly groypers and armchair alt-correct trolls. The unsettling aspect is the renewed visibility of such miscreants, whether spreading antisemitic conspiracies on social media or carrying Tiki torches, as they did in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
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Political author and podcaster Mark Hemingway similarly has pointed out that the moving-picture show makes profound distinctions between thoughtful, accurate Christianity and the superficial Lotus Eater-like faith of those mesmerized by "Down to the River to Pray".
Merely of course, there are threads that run afoul. The size-ism of the Stokes rally seems frankly simply plain embarrassing today.
Not everything holds up in this picture show's critique of the American South. Not everything passes the test of time. But it notwithstanding touches u.s. in deep and important ways, making us retrieve virtually how myth, history, and cultural inheritances filter into the nowadays, and about what elements of myth and history we choose to concord onto.
It'south of import to recollect that when the Coens released O Brother on the heels of the 1999 Seattle Earth Trade Organization protests, they were partially trying to answer director Preston Sturges's query about the meanings of art in Sullivan's Travels (1941), the movie from which O Brother inherits its championship. Sturges poses the question of whether challenging audiences to reply politically to stark realities is more effective in making the world a better identify than simply making audiences laugh.
The Coens' rejoinder, it seems, is that comedy can make life more enjoyable and provoke thoughtful conversations about the associations between history and injustice—just as long as the storyline is immersed in old-timey music magic and a digitally-corrected yellow-sepia tone. Given the COVID-nineteen quarantine and the seemingly never-ending onslaught of bad news these days, perhaps blending a little joyful nostalgia with an appeal to thought and action is not the worst combination one can imagine.
Perhaps O Brother's appeal lies in these compelling but unfinished threads, which surprise united states and make us hunger to learn more. Or maybe we relish the film because we are a broken society, nevertheless waiting to be perfected and finished similar the moving picture itself. As Clooney in his function equally Ulysses notes: "it's a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the homo eye."
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Works Cited
Alpine, Mary Kate. "The Complicated Politics of O Brother, Where Art Grand? ". Medium.com. 8 November 2017.
Clayman, Andrew. "Valmor Products Co., est. 1926". Made in Chicago Museum. north.d.
Filene, Benjamin. "O Brother, What Side by side?: Making Sense of the Folk Fad". Southern Cultures 10, No. 2 (summer 2004).
Ebert, Roger. Review of O Brother, Where Art G? RogerEbert.com. 29 December 2000.
Hughey, Matthew Due west. "Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in 'Magical Negro' Films". Social Problems 56, no. 3 (Baronial 2009).
La Chapelle, Peter. I'd Fight the World: A Political History of Old-Time, Hillbilly, and Country Music. University of Chicago Press. Academy of Chicago Press, 2019.
Orr, Christopher. "xxx Years of Coens: O Brother, Where Art Thou?"The Atlantic. 17 September 2014.
Rooney, Kathleen. "'Why Do You Feel Comfortable': On Morgan Parker'south 'Magical Negro'". LA Review of Books. 25 Feb 2019.
Senior, Rebecca. "The Confederate Statues That Have Been Disregarded: Anonymous Women". Washington Mail, 10 July 2020.
Siegel, Janice. "The Coens' O Brother, Where Art G? and Homer's Odyssey". Mouseion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada vii, no. 3 (2007)
Stone, Peter, and Ellen Harold. "Bessie Jones." Association for Cultural Disinterestedness. n.d.
Walker, Jesse. "Before Trump, There Was Pappy". Reason.com, 25 February 2016.
Winterer, Caroline. The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910. Johns Hopkins University Printing, 2004.
Winterer, Caroline. The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900. Cornell University Printing, 2009.
Source: https://www.popmatters.com/coen-bros-o-brother-where-art-thou-2647463395.html