Coen Bros: A Serious Man part 4

We’ve met Larry Gopnik and his son Danny and are acquainted with their problems.  What’s the story at Larry’s house?

He’s got a teenage daughter, Sarah, whose sole desires seem to be to fix her hair and to hang out with her friends.  Her little brother bugs her, her parents appall her, her uncle Arthur disgusts her.

The only thing we know at this point about Arthur is that he spends a lot of time in the bathroom, draining his sebaceous cyst.  It is, apparently, his sole activity.

He’s got a wife, Judith, who seems, at first, to be relatively normal, if a little severe.

Danny is on his way home from school.  On the bus, he commiserates with his 12-year-old friends about the loss of his radio and the $20 inside.  This scene is largely expository, although it does give Danny a milieu (his tough-talking pipsqueak friends) to help ground him in some kind of framework for his time.  It also presents a mystery: where did Danny come up with $20 to spend on pot?

Larry comes home to this assortment, apparently clueless to whatever tensions are simmering within his family.  He’s more concerned with his neighbor Mr. Brandt, who either is, or is not, encroaching on Larry’s property by mowing part of his lawn.  Mr. Brandt is one of the few goys present in A Serious Man, and he stands out in this neighborhood — big-headed, brush-cut, pig-eyed.  He is aggressiveness personified, and Larry is worried that he’s trying to expand his property into Larry’s, and fears conflict.  As well he might: the Six-Day War is (depending on when the movie is set) either a recent memory or very imminent.  (It is accepted that A Serious Man is set in 1967, but there is evidence that it is set as late as 1970, about which more later.)  Either Mr. Brandt is a symbol for anti-Jewish aggression, or he merely a gruff suburbanite — we don’t know.

At dinnertime, Larry wants to wait for Arthur to finish in the bathroom, but his family ignores him and starts anyway.  Some patriarch Larry is!  He has a simple wish to include his brother in a family meal and he holds no authority.  Larry’s sense of kinship with Arthur will develop into a key factor in the movie’s resolution.

Later that night, Larry sits at the kitchen table grading papers.  Judith comes in and drops a bomb on him: she has fallen in love with Sy Abelman (who Larry never did call back) and wants a divorce.  Larry is poleaxed by this development: he can barely remember who Sy Abelman is, much less imagine that his wife has fallen in love with him.  "A divorce?  I haven’t done anything," is Larry’s stammered response.  "I haven’t done anything" will come up again and again in different forms in A Serious Man.  Sometimes it means "I am innocent," but it eventually takes on a different meaning: "I have accomplished nothing."  The double meaning is key in Larry’s relationship with Judith, and it raises the question of Larry’s apparent lack of self-examination.  What the hell has he been doing with his life, wrapped up in his math, if his wife can begin an affair with a minor acquaintance and Larry knows nothing about it?  Larry’s head is yet another box he’s never looked into to see if the cat is dead or is not dead.

Also at question, of course, is Judith’s innocence.  She insists that she hasn’t betrayed Larry sexually, but there is good reason to doubt her sincerity.  She either has, or has not, slept with Sy Abelman, and that is a box Larry finds too alarming to look into.

Sy, Judith reports, wants a get, which is a Jewish divorce document, something Larry’s never heard of.  This will turn into a running joke, that everyone, from rabbis to lawyers, must be reminded what a get is.  Sy, who is the only character in the movie who actually uses the words "a serious man" to refer to himself, has a respect for law and tradition that even the religious authority figures in the movie don’t have.  Is this what makes him "serious?"  Or is he merely a pompous windbag who uses religious tradition as a cudgel when it suits his purpose?  Is he, with his citing of religious tradition, a more "serious man" than Larry, who stakes his sense of well-being solely on math?

Still later that night, Larry, with nowhere else to go, sleeps with his head on the kitchen table.  Arthur makes his first appearance — he emerges from the dark, a cloth pressed to his cyst, and drinks orange juice from the can out straight out of the refrigerator.  He is clearly a miserable man, in pain and possessing a thirst that, we sense, mere orange juice will not quench.  Larry looks at him with a kind of tender sympathy: Arthur looks how Larry feels — in pain, miserable and alone, thirsty in a world of darkness.