“American Mythology in the Coen Brothers' Odyssey”

The Odyssey is the most obvious source text for the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, with its invocation of the Muse and its opening-credits announcement that it is “Based on The Odyssey by Homer” (the Coens’ claims that they have never read Homer notwithstanding). But the film draws on a number of other source texts as well. The scene in which the chain gang visits the movie theater alludes to a pivotal moment in the 1941 Preston Sturges film Sullivan’s Travels, which includes a fictional film-within-the-film called “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Pappy O’Daniel is loosely based on the historical “Singing Governor” Jimmie Davis of Louisiana, who is mostly known today as the composer of “You Are My Sunshine,” which he used to sing on the campaign trail (just as Pappy requests it on stage with the Soggy Bottom Boys, to seal the sudden change of fortune his campaign has just experienced).

The Coens cast a distinctively “mythical” air over the familiar setting of the Depression-era American South throughout the film, on a visual and audible level. The otherworldly folk and spiritual music that permeates the film draws on American folk and gospel traditions to depict the South as a place where sweet tunes emerge from the mist, and Roger Deakins’s Oscar-nominated cinematography creates a look that evokes sepia-toned photographs but also includes startling and magical flashes of color. The atmosphere evokes a land of mystery that our heroes must navigate, a land populated by beguiling Sirens, Lotus Eaters, and Cyclops.

But one conspicuously mythical element of the film has no clear origin in Homer. When the Soggy Bottom Boys encounter a black man with a guitar case standing alone at a crossroads, we enter a distinctively American mythology. Tommy Johnson tells the boys a story about meeting the devil at the crossroads, and selling his soul in exchange for supernatural talent on the guitar. Many viewers will recognize here the legend of the hugely influential Delta blues guitarist Robert Johnson, whose haunting and haunted songs have been covered by the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, and pretty much everyone else. Very little is known for certain about Robert Johnson—he only recorded twenty-nine songs in his short life (he was killed in ambiguous circumstances at age twenty-seven), and there are only three known photographs of him (see one of them below). His polyrhythmic finger-picking technique was so radical and so widely influential that stories began to circulate that he had met the devil at the crossroads one night, and the devil retuned his guitar and demonstrated new techniques, in return for which Johnson sold his soul in a Faustian bargain—as if the only way to account for his otherworldly talent were to invoke supernatural intervention. This story of the devil at the crossroads has enhanced the Robert Johnson mystique to the point that it’s difficult to separate straight biography from legend. With scant hard facts to go on, the sensational story fills the gaps.

The crossroads legend has been bolstered in part by some of Johnson’s spooky recordings, which evoke the crossroads as a setting, and refer to a tormented soul with a “hellhound on his trail.” Johnson’s early death, shrouded in mystery, only further supports the idea of a moment of reckoning, when the devil comes and collects his due. Take a listen to “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Cross Roads Blues”:

There was actually a blues musician named Tommy Johnson, who was also reputed to have made a deal with the devil. (The devil took quite an active interest in the development of American secular roots music, apparently, which certainly helped enhance the reputation of the blues and its descendant, rock-n-roll, as “devil’s music.” An instance of an almost Greek degree of gods intervening in human affairs?) The Coens have acknowledged that their Tommy Johnson represents a mashup of these two mythical figures in American music. (Robert Johnson’s legend is more prominent, probably due to his early death—it better fits the hellhound-on-my-trail narrative.)

By drawing on this American folk mythology as part of their riff on Homer’s Odyssey, the Coens portray the South as a place where supernatural forces hold sway in human life. And this animates the metaphysical debate that pervades the film, with Everett insisting (verbosely) on a rational, scientific, non-superstitious view of the world—the “only one who remains unaffiliated” in a car with his two companions, who’ve recently been “saved” among the Lotus Eaters and their river baptism, and Tommy, who’s sold his soul to the devil. Like in The Odyssey, we have the sense that our heroes’ story is being shaped and guided by supernatural forces, and that their “affiliations,” like Odysseus’s affiliation with Athena and his lack of affiliation with Poseidon, have grave consequences. Tommy Johnson’s story has no specific analog in Homer, although his is the most overtly “mythical” story in the film. The Coens draw on the American myth of the crossroads and the blues, and the idea of great talent in the “devil’s music” as a kind of magical, transformative power, as Tommy’s guitar playing propels “Man of Constant Sorrow” and the Soggy Bottom Boys’ burgeoning music career (the parallel to legendary fame among the bards’ repertoire in Homer is a popular single on the radio that everyone wants to hear). Their story is profoundly redirected by this supernatural intervention, despite Everett’s doubts, and the devil-inspired recording of Everett’s Odyssean theme song ends up saving them in the end.

The Coens also draw on a more historically grounded element of American mythology in the Tommy Johnson thread, by depicting the Ku Klux Klan as both a form of American “monster” and agents of the devil (with ties to electoral politics, too). Tommy believes that “nothing can save him now”—this is the moment of reckoning for selling his soul—but the heroes save him and evade the devil, killing the Cyclops with a burning cross (another “mythical” artifact of American history). The “sheriff” who trails the boys (and Tommy), complete with his “hellhound,” is a supernatural figure who doesn’t answer to man-made laws. In the Robert Johnson legend, the devil is a black man and a guitarist, and according to Everett he is “red and scaly with a bifurcated tail,” but in Tommy’s version he’s “white, white as you folks, with empty eyes and a big, hollow voice.” This sure fits the profile of the sheriff, with his mirror-empty sunglasses reflecting flames and his terrifying, gruff voice of condemnation.

Poseidon doesn’t hold sway in the landlocked Delta where this film is set, and the Greek gods are mostly alien to American shores (outside of the work of Rick Riordan and Neil Gaiman, that is). The Coens animate their story with more familiar elements of American mythology: the Klan is scarier to us than a Cyclops would be, in large part because these are monsters with a real historical basis, and the hollow-eyed white devil/sheriff is a more terrifying hellhound to contend with, even if he does leave Tommy with some wicked chops. 

“Qualms about Odysseus and Revenge”

Many first-time readers remark that Book 22 of The Odyssey has a strikingly modern or contemporary feel. Maybe this has to do with the relentless graphic violence, and the way that Homer’s speaker at times seems to revel in the gory or sadistic details. The killing of Antinous—although surprising that it comes first, and so quickly—has an especially cinematic quality to it. Homer’s “camera” moves in slow motion, cutting from Odysseus aiming his bow to Antinous raising his goblet to drink, tilting it back, just about to taste it . . . when an arrow pierces his throat and he falls dead, spilling the wine (and plenty of blood) and kicking over the table. We can imagine this book as a sequence near the conclusion of a Quentin Tarantino film. It’s not just that it’s violent; it’s the way that the violence is fetishized as a kind of art, an aesthetic display that serves a cathartic function for the reader, a release of pent-up tension and a sense of culmination. We are meant to enjoy this scene—if you get into this kind of thing, that is.

And of course many perfectly decent, well-behaved, nonviolent people enjoy scenes of righteous slaughter on movie screens. The climax of The Odyssey feels so modern in part because contemporary cinema has acclimated us to representations of rough justice. There’s a bit of the vigilante in Odysseus—he doesn’t invoke the law of the land to evict the suitors from the palace and to exact some kind of fine or community service for their crimes, and after the slaughter he fears persecution and exile. The man whose honor, home, and family have been violated is the one who gets to administer justice himself (ably assisted by his recently come-of-age son, a loyal swineherd and cowherd, and the more-or-less righteous goddess Athena). And he shows no mercy. There’s an aesthetic symmetry to the arrangement. However horrified we’d be to learn of such an event in real life, within the confines of fiction, our aesthetic pleasure in reading of the suitors’ violent comeuppance blurs with a kind of moral or ethical satisfaction. It feels like justice. Poetic justice.

Odysseus is a paradigm of the epic hero, but he emerges here as a more specific subset of the hero category: a revenger hero. The revenge structure has been recycled many times over the years; audiences clearly respond to it. The narrative arc virtually writes itself, and only the details change: the protagonist is wronged in some way at the start of the story (convicted of a crime he didn’t commit; his wife and children harmed; his career ruined; his palace overrun by swaggering suitors), and he spends the bulk of the narrative tracking down the perpetrators and plotting his revenge. (And there are a few woman-centered iterations of a revenger plot: see Tarantino’s Kill Bill vols. 1 and 2 for a good example.) The final act depicts the culmination of the revenger-hero’s plot—part of the appeal, I think, has to do with the pleasure of watching a plot being formed, and then seeing it come to fruition. We see the author’s and the hero’s plots come together—as in The Odyssey, where Homer’s plot, Athena’s plot, and Odysseus’s plot all converge with the slaughter in the hall. It’s not chaotic and random; it’s a well-planned tactical maneuver. The revenger is a kind of author of his own story, and we take pleasure in seeing a plan come together.

Odysseus is one of the earliest revenger heroes in Western literature, but we also hear (repeatedly, and pointedly) of another revenger story within The Odyssey—the story of Agamemnon’s murder being avenged by his son, Orestes, which Zeus cites in book 1 as a paradigm of justice served (1.34-44). When Agamemnon hears about Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors from Amphimedon, down in the Kingdom of the Dead, he gives his enthusiastic approval (24.193-224). The Homeric vision of justice entails the wronged (or someone working on behalf of the wronged) returning and taking vengeance, repaying a grave wrong and punishing those who have wronged him. Athena’s eyes flash with approval throughout the slaughter in book 22. She likes what she sees.

But stories of revenge always leave me a little cold. The sense of catharsis, and of poetic justice, is fleeting, and a sense of pointlessness and futility often overshadows any sense of justice restored. Hamlet is another classic example of a revenge story—with the young prince feeling pressure to avenge the death of his father at the hands of the man who has just married his mother (a version of the Agamemnon story)—but my favorite parts of that play are when Hamlet is unsure how to proceed, doubting the point of revenge even as he’s aware that it’s expected of him, his duty as the prince. Hamlet is miscast in the role of avenger, and that’s what makes the play so good. We see a guy trying to talk himself into the role, to work himself up to the task, even as his doubts persist. The play ends in a bloodbath, with Hamlet dying along with pretty much everyone else (it is a tragedy, after all), and there’s little sense of comfort or resolution in the prodigious body count. The king’s death has been avenged. And now everyone is dead.

The Odyssey seems not entirely sure about its own revenge structure. Odysseus’s “berserker” mode renders our sense of him as a righteous judge rather ambiguous. He kills everyone involved, with no distinction and no mercy, and by the end of book 22, we’re seeing gratuitous dismemberment and torture in addition to mass slaughter. It all seems a bit much—especially in light of the suitors’ crimes. Hamlet dithers and delays, even when he’s pretty sure his stepfather has killed his father and stolen the throne. He has a much more valid motive for revenge than Odysseus, and he still has to talk himself into it. In the final book of The Odyssey, some dissenting voices emerge to question the hero’s triumph: we hear reference to the families of the suitors mourning outside the gates; we see Odysseus’s indiscriminate slaughter denounced by the ghost of Amphimedon and by the grieving father of Antinous, Eupeithes (who is then promptly killed by Laertes, Odysseus’s father—in what seems like a gift, or generous gesture, on his son’s part. Talk about poetic justice!). Eupeithes’s grievances are legitimate enough to resonate with the populace of Ithaca, stirring up a civil war, which Athena is only able to thwart by erasing all memories of those killed, essentially voiding the whole meaning of the revenge plot (if no one knows there’s been revenge, has there really been revenge?). All of this suggests that the poet feels a little uneasy about the outcome of the plot.

The grief of the suitors’ families—and their outrage at Odysseus’s extremely violent form of justice—draws our attention to the moral bankruptcy of revenge as an ethos. It feels good, even in vicarious fictional form. We want to see these swaggering punks get what’s coming to them. But slaughter only goes so far, and once the catharsis takes place, we still just have a bunch of dead bodies. Nothing has been restored; the revenger has still been wronged. It’s not quite as satisfying as it should be.

My favorite example of a deconstruction of the revenge plot is Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film Memento. It’s one of the most inventive narrative structures ever attempted in cinema, and a fascinating, mind-bending experience to watch, with a story that mostly moves backward chronologically. It features a classic revenge plot—a man whose wife has (ostensibly) been raped and murdered, and he’s singlemindedly tracking down the perpetrator to kill him. But Leonard, the protagonist, also is afflicted with a post-traumatic neurological condition that means he can’t form permanent new memories, or hold on to memories for more than ten minutes. He comes up with some creative ways to try to combat this condition, to turn his experience into some kind of coherent narrative even though his own mind keeps slipping the details of the story. He writes himself cryptic notes, and tattoos certain “facts” about the case onto his body, so he’ll never forget. And he struggles to pursue a kind of detective story, identifying and tracking down his wife’s killer, in the absence of short-term memory. It is all that he does. He’s a single-minded revenger with literally nothing and no one else in his life.

The film opens with the ostensible moment of revenge: the protagonist shoots and kills a man. But we have no idea who these two people are, or what their relation to one another is, so the moment is drained of significance. The film’s plot then moves backward in time, reconstructing the story (as Leonard has had to reconstruct it himself), filling in how he’s determined that the guy he shoots is the guy he’s after. And we’re pretty sure it’s the right guy. But we have our doubts, and the possibility that Leonard has been projecting rather than uncovering a plot is present throughout. He is extremely vulnerable to others’ manipulation, of his actions and his understanding of the facts. The more we see, the less we seem to know for certain. At one point, it is suggested to Leonard that his quest for revenge is pointless because he won’t really know he’s gotten revenge—he’ll forget about it right away, it won’t fit into a larger narrative framework that gives revenge its meaning.

The director, Christopher Nolan (known to many of you from the Dark Knight films), unravels the idea of revenge at a fundamental level by compelling us to see how it depends upon a surrounding narrative to give it meaning—and if we can’t be sure about that narrative, we can’t take the proper aesthetic and moral pleasure in the act of revenge. Leonard is a sympathetic character, but his status as a righteous hero is in question. His extreme single-mindedness is as much tragic evidence of his victimhood and trauma as his neurological condition. He becomes oriented entirely around his revenge plot—his life literally has no other storyline. His whole meaning is entangled in his role as revenger, but that role is premised on uncertain facts and incomplete knowledge. The revenger is a little crazy (like Hamlet), thoroughly obsessed to the point of mania, but also very sad. He can kill the guy he thinks probably killed his wife, and nothing will be restored to him, he will gain no “closure”—in fact, the tenuous meaning that shapes his life will then, ironically, disappear. He’ll be a revenger without a cause.

I’ve never been in a position where I’ve felt I’ve had to take revenge on anyone, and I’ve been fortunate never to have had a loved one taken from me by someone else’s violence, so perhaps I’d feel differently if I were in Hamlet’s or Leonard’s position. Maybe the revenge would bring some satisfaction or closure. But my sense is that the desire for revenge would create the illusion or expectation of closure that could never be satisfied by a stack of bodies.