“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.