A suitcase full of money, no matter what the amount, is always a symbol of transformation in American movies, a chance to start your life over again, escape the bonds of your class, your birth, your family, your job, whatever is keeping you down. Traditionally, in the course of American movies featuring suitcases full of money, the expected transformation does not happen — instead, a world of pain is visited upon the receiver until they finally have to give up the money or lose it or give it to charity. A suitcase full of money is a shortcut, a way around the forces of the American system, where People With Money have all the power and People Without Money have none. An appreciable amount of money falling into the hands of People Without Money upsets the system and the system, in one way or another, always retaliates. In America, the movies keep telling you that Money Cannot Buy You Happiness, while the rest of the culture tells you every minute of every day that Money Can Buy You Happiness Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. The system asserts its prerogative: there are no short cuts to improving your life (“There are no clean getaways” is how No Country‘s poster puts it), only hard work and, occasionally, dumb luck. Just look at the Coens’ other movies — whether it’s gangsters, car salesmen or trailer trash families, their movies are full of poor saps struggling to overcome their circumstances, and resorting to crime to do so — and ultimately failing to accomplish anything.

(When Moss finds the case in the novel, he looks inside and author Cormac McCarthy notes: “His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down to forty pounds of paper in a satchel.” I’m tellin’ ya, the guy can write.)

So Chigurh, we could say, is all about the money. It cannot be a coincidence that, in addition to killing anyone who impedes his progress toward the suitcase full of money, he decides innocents’ fates with the flip of a quarter and uses a dime to unscrew the vent covers where Moss has hidden the case.

(Incidentally, here is another argument for Chigurh being in the room with Bell when Bell shows up to look for him — Bell looks down and sees the vent cover sitting on the floor with the screws and a dime sitting next to it. It seems Bell interrupted Chigurh at the precise moment of his retrieval of the case — otherwise why would the otherwise lack-of-evidence mad Chigurh leave a trace of his being there?)

(And let me add here one more layer of coolness to “that one scene:” Sheriff Bell enters the room and stands in the doorway, and he sees his shadow on the opposite wall, turned into two shadows by the headlights of his cruiser. I think that Chigurh is that “second shadow,” one of a number of visual cues [the both of them gazing into the blank TV set in Moss’s trailer is another] meant to connect Bell and Chigurh visually. If Chigurh is Bell’s second shadow, then perhaps that is how he can be in the same room with him but undetected. Or, more interestingly, what if, Donald Kaufman-like, Chigurh and Bell are the same guy? Maybe that’s what

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  meant by the scene being “Lynchian.”)

(However, the screenplay, for what it’s worth, seems to state pretty clearly that Chigurh is in the room when Bell gets there, hiding behind the door, then scrambles to hide somewhere when Bell enters, then goes out the door when Bell is in the bathroom. Just saying.)

ABOUT THAT QUARTER: Is Cormac McCarthy aware that Chigurh is imitating Batman villain Two-Face in deciding innocents’ fates with the flip of a coin? If even my wife, a non-comics-reader, refers to the habit as “Chigurh’s Two-Face Routine,” how could he not?

(Gasp! Two-Face was played in Batman Forever by — omigod! Tommy Lee Jones! And while I’m here, I should remind the reader that the Coens were offered the job of making the 1989 Batman before Tim Burton landed the job. Wheels within wheels!)

The great thing about how the Coens have written the character and how Javier Bardem plays him is that he manages to be both weirdly unplaceable and recognizably human. Take the scene where he walks into the gas station and does his Two-Face Routine with the attendant: he threatens the man’s life with his menacing tone, then suggests that the poor guy’s life, which he doesn’t seem to have given a moment’s thought, is a series of choices that have irrevocably led him to this moment in time, where his fate will be decided by the flip of a coin. When the man wins the coin toss, Chigurh warns him not to put the coin in his pocket, because it’s a special coin, the coin that marked a change in his life. Then, just before he leaves, he gives the man a half-smile and says that it’s an ordinary coin after all. This last line achieves two things. First, it suggests that Chigurh never intended to kill the guy and was just messin’ with him, then it suggests that any ordinary object can be the tool that decides your fate.

(He goes on quite a bit more in the book: “Dont put it in your pocket. You wont know which one it is,” he says, then adds: “Anything canbe an instrument. Small things. Things you wouldnt even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People dont pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say, it’s just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it’s just a coin. Yes. That’s true. Is it?”)

(Chigurh seems disgusted with people in general, but he saves an unusual level of contempt for the gas station guy, perhaps for not paying attention to his life enough. In the book he goes so far as to call him a “cracker,” a word I have a hard time imagining coming from the Chigurh as played by Javier Bardem. What riles him so about the attendant? I think it’s that he married into his job — just like both Ed Crane and Big Dave did in The Man Who Wasn’t There — and is therefore less than a man. He didn’t seek out his fate, he just kind of let it happen to him without thinking about it.)

Now then: Chigurh in the book ends up in a totally different place. He kills everyone in his way to get the money, and then he returns it to its rightful owner, much to the owner’s bafflement, as the owner did not hire Chigurh and has no idea how he found him. Chigurh in the book wants to set things right, to return the life-changing suitcase full of money to its rightful owner (that is, Capital) and preserve what he sees as his natural function, quite literally a capitalist tool. A well-paid tool, but a tool nonetheless. Perhaps Chigurh understands, like Mose the Magic Clock-keeper in Hudsucker, that capitalism is the thing that keeps this old Earth a-turnin’, and by keeping the money for himself he would be upsetting the gears of that unstoppable machine. Chigurh is not swayed by the promise of the suitcase full of money — he “knows his place” and, ultimately, is a “good boy” who restores economic equilibrium to his world.

Chigurh, in the movie, is a man (a deeply insane man, but still a man) who embodies a more savage and cutthroat image of capitalism. The Man Who Hires Wells refers to him as a “loose cannon,” that character most reviled by The System, the lowly tool who Goes Into Business For Himself. In the movie he has what we screenwriters call a Bright Idea: he’s going to kill everybody and run off with the money. He’s a “maverick,” he’s going to rip everybody off and live happily ever after, chuckling to himself about how much smarter he is than everyone.

But, as Mamet would put it, There Was One Thing He Forgot. Chigurh does his Two-Face Routine with the attendant and with Carla Jean, Moss’s wife, emphasizing the effect of chance on the lives of innocents. The attendant, one of the working stiff sheep that wander through Coen movies without a clue, obeys Chigurh’s commands, but Carla Jean calls him on his bullshit. Chigurh says the coin, chance, will decide his victims’ fate, but Carla Jean recognizes that even the decision to leave someone’s life up to the toss of a coin is still a decision — in a heartbreaking act of bravery, she refuses to play his game — and it is a game. Chigurh likes to think of himself as a god, but he’s something sadder and more pathetic — he’s a man who likes to go around pretending he’s a god. So Carla Jean refuses to play his game and Chigurh kills her anyway, and then goes outside and gets creamed by a station-wagon in a totally random accident. The man who teases others with his pretensions to chance gets laid low by the genuine article. Of course, he walks away from his random accident (his money buys the silence of the boys who see him) but that’s another story. As far as the movie is concerned, Chigurh may have beaten The System, but the Universe has other ideas.

(This all plays out slightly differently in the novel. Carla Jean protests his Two-Face Routine, but ultimately calls the coin-toss — and loses. Chigurh is then hit not by an anonymous station-wagon but a carload of drug-addled teenagers. The book seems to want to say that Chigurh is hit by the ultimate product of his trade [drug-addled teenagers], but the movie turns the accident into a Message From God. Both work on different levels, and the movie does an excellent job of taking the plot-points of the novel and, through canny compression and subtle changes, turning those plot-points into the soul of the book, the spirit between the lines, and is reason enough to call No Country one of the great adaptations of all time.)

NEXT, I will gas about generally cool stuff in the movie

These people feel this way, I think, for two reasons:

1. They believe that Moss is the protagonist of the movie and therefore deserves more narrative consideration. But No Country, like Blood Simple and Fargo before it, has no protagonist — only characters we like and characters we don’t.

2. They are used to movies with three acts, and No Country has four.

The Coens knew that by revealing, 90 minutes into their 2-hour movie, that Moss is not a protagonist would be a major stumbling block for an audience, and they also knew that a movie with four acts is a riskier commercial prospect than one with three, and writers as skilled as the Coens could have easily tailored their adaptation to address these problems. The result would have been 100% more commercially successful, and cinema would have been given a cracking-good diversion instead of a sad, harrowing masterpiece.

(As it is, things turned out okay after all. No Country, with its budget of $25 million, is turning out to be the Coens’ biggest grosser so far, and that’s not counting international box office, where it should do quite well, considering the fact that it has probably less dialog than any Coen movie so far.)

STRUCTURE: The four acts of No Country go like this:

Act I: 0:00 to 29:00 — Introduction of Chigurh, Moss finds the money, goes back to the scene of the crime to give a dying man some water, gets caught by some people who have come to get their heroin, is chased into the Rio Grande. Chigurh is hired to retrieve the money, and promptly kills his superiors.

Act II: 29:00 to 1:09:00 — Introduction of Bell. Bell investigates the “colossal goatfuck” in the desert. Chigurh pursues the money. Moss packs his wife Carla Jean off to Odessa to stay with her mother while he deals with whoever is coming for their money. Three-way showdown in the Regal Motel between Chigurh, Moss and some Mexicans hired, unbeknownst to Chigurh, to also recover the money. Carson Wells, a bounty hunter, is hired by the Man Who Hires Wells (that’s his character’s name) to kill Chigurh and recover the money.  Moss retrieves the money and proceeds to the Eagle Hotel, where he has a second showdown with Chigurh, in which both men are wounded. Moss, in bad shape, repairs to a hospital in Mexico.

Act III: 1:09:00 to 1:35:00 — Moss and Chigurh repair their wounds and prepare for another round. Wells tries to get Moss to listen to reason. Moss hangs tough at first but then realizes he needs all the help he can get, and calls Wells — too late, as he has just been killed by Chigurh for interfering with his plans. Moss gets out of the hospital, recovers the money again and makes plans to meet his wife and mother-in-law in El Paso. Chigurh figures out Moss’s plan and proceeds to El Paso on his own, but not before stopping off to murder the Man Who Hires Wells.  Bell meets with Moss’s wife Carla Jean and tries to enlist her help in saving Moss. Moss arrives at the Del Rio Motel in El Paso and flirts with a woman at poolside.

This is No Country‘s most daring move — the Coens put a fade-out in the middle of a non-resolving scene, deliberately frustrating audience expectations of the big shoot-out and, unannounced, completely change the focus of their narrative with 27 minutes left to go in their movie.

Act IV: 1:35:00 to 2:02:00 — Bell arrives at the Del Rio Motel seconds too late to save Moss, who is gunned down by some Mexicans looking for the money. Carla Jean arrives at the motel just in time for Bell to tell her her husband is dead. Bell and a colleague commiserate about the state of things these days. Bell goes back to the motel to have a showdown with Chigurh, but does not, for reasons discussed below. Later, Bell visits his wheelchair-bound uncle, who reminds him that the violence that Bell has been cowed by is not new, it is endemic to the American experience and especially West Texas. Meanwhile, Chigurh goes to visit Carla Jean in Odessa, despite the fact that he has recovered the money and Carla Jean has done nothing to him. He kills her and feels pretty good about himself, but is then hit by a car in a totally random event. Still later, Bell retires, unable to face the escalating violence in the society he thought he loved. He relates two dreams to his wife.

THAT ONE SCENE: Many people are confused by a crucial scene in Act IV. Bell goes back to the Del Rio Motel to have a showdown with Chigurh. He goes to the door of Moss’s room and sees that the lock has been punched out by Chigurh’s cattlegun — so he knows that Chigurh has been there. He studies the empty lock cylinder and sees movement within the room, so he knows that Chigurh is inside the room. And indeed, we see Chigurh is inside the room, with his shotgun, pressed against the wall, studying that same empty lock cylinder, where he sees movement from outside. So he knows Bell is outside and about to come in. So Bell knows that Chigurh is inside the room and Chigurh knows that Bell is outside the room.

Bell comes into the room and looks around. No sign of Chigurh, who could be hiding behind the door, but Bell does not look there. Instead he goes into the bathroom, where he notes that the window is closed and locked. So Chigurh must still be in the room, hiding behind the door. Bell sits down on the bed and sighs and sees that the air-conditioning duct cover has been removed and there are tracks in the dust within. This tells him, and us, that Chigurh has been here and found the money.

I believe that Chigurh is, at that point, still in the room with Bell, hiding, even now, behind the door. Why does he not come out and kill Bell? My wife had the answer for that — Bell has not seen Chigurh, who only kills people who have seen him (for what it’s worth, Chigurh’s phobia of being seen is not so pronounced in the book — it is largely an invention of the movie). What’s more, I think that Bell knows that Chigurh is in the room with him, and chooses not to face him, something hinted at from the very beginning of the movie, where Bell’s main preoccupation is whether or not he’s willing to put his life on the line to face “something I don’t understand” — meaning, Chigurh’s irrational, brutal psychopathology. Either that, or Bell cases the room, finds that Chigurh is not there, and breathes a sigh of relief that he’s gone and that means maybe he doesn’t have to face him.

There is another possibility, one which touches on yet another Coen mainstay, magic. In the scene where Bell commiserates with his sheriff pal, he mentions that he thinks Chigurh is a ghost, that he possesses some kind of supernatural powers. And in fact, in a sixth viewing, I noticed that Chigurh is not visible in the motel room, up against the wall, when Bell comes in, where we saw him just a few seconds earlier. It’s possible that Chigurh is hiding elsewhere in the room at that moment, but perhaps the Coens are suggesting that, under certain circumstances, Chigurh is able to summon the supernatural powers he pretends to have in other circumstances.

The book, for what it’s worth, makes it clear. Chigurh goes to the motel, finds the money, and goes out to his truck. As he’s getting ready to leave, Bell pulls up in his cruiser and checks out the room as Chigurh sits in his truck and thinks about whether or not to kill Bell, and finally decides not to. The Coens, in compressing the physical proximity of the characters, create a much more suspenseful scene (something they do repeatedly in this masterful adaptation) and add a layer of beguiling mystery.

Next, I will discuss the economic politics of No Country and gush over its many triumphs.

*Raising Arizona: the examination of trailer-park life, as well as the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse, here resurrected as the dead-serious Anton Chigurh. (In Raising, the Lone Biker shoots at a lizard on a rock as he drives past, in No Country Chigurh shoots at a bird on a bridge as he drives past — and misses. The scene is straight from the book.) Also, the scene where the fugitive has a strange conversation with a gas-station attendant.

(There is another, funnier reference to Raising — in No Country, Sheriff Bell squats down to examine the dent in the wall made by Chigurh shooting out the lock — in Raising, the Lone Biker squats in the exact same attitude to examine the word “FART” scrawled on the wall.)

*Miller’s Crossing: the hotel ambush, characters leaping out the window to turn the tables on their pursuers, killers shooting through walls to nail would-be attackers. (The Coens altered and re-arranged the action of the ambush at the Eagle Hotel, which is significantly more complicated and less suspenseful in the book.)

*Barton Fink: The long hotel corridor, the lone tenant in the hotel listening for the thing that may be coming to kill him, calling downstairs for help that will not arrive.

*Hudsucker Proxy: this is harder to place, although I notice that the Coens saw fit to have a wise black man give advice to Moss as he hitch-hikes — another scene not in the book. Also there is, I think, a link between the designs of the Hudsucker boardroom and the strangely-designed office of The Man Who Hires Wells.

*Fargo: the simple, moral sheriff with the keen, intuitive detective skills, paired with a deputy whose skills aren’t quite as well-honed as his boss’s, and the final showdown between the sheriff and the psychopathic killer (which, in No Country almost takes place but then, crucially, does not). Also, the document case full of money — magically, the million dollars that fits into the case in Fargo has grown into over $2 million in No Country, but still fits in the same case.  In No Country, Bell goes to a motel to corner a fugitive and checks to see if he’s climbed out the bathroom window, perhaps because that’s where the fugitive in Fargo, Jerry Lundergaard, was caught — the scene is not in the book.

*The Big Lebowski: characters whose life experience is filtered solely through their experiences in Vietnam (which is in the book).

*O Brother Where Art Thou: shooting animals and then commenting on it, another strange conversation between a fugitive and a store clerk. (Too bad Anton Chigurh doesn’t use pomade to style his hair.)

*The Man Who Wasn’t There: executions, specifically by electric chair (in the book, prisoners are executed in the gas chamber).  And the main characters reluctance to speak very often.

*Intolerable Cruelty: the over-zealous, unstoppable attack dog (which does not exist in the book).

*The Ladykillers: dropping things off a bridge, Stephen Root as the man with the money, an orange cat as a harbinger of death. (And, the bird Chigurh shoots at on the bridge is a raven — as though the Coens are trying to kill their own poorly-received movie.  In the book it’s a hawk.)

As a special bonus, there is a reference to The Shining (which, like No Country, is set in 1980), when Moss calls Carla Jean to tell her he’s coming to get her and make her safe. The shot is lifted directly from the scene where Scatman Crothers calls his snowmobile-renting pal from the airport in Denver. The pay-phone is the same model as the one used in The Shining, Moss is placed in the same place in the frame, and, well, the rescue operation turns out about as well for Moss as it did for Scatman.

I invite my readers to contribute their own observances here.

And there in my seat in the small, boxy Paris theater (it was, literally, the last day of the movie’s run in France) I thought “You know what would be a good idea for a movie? A movie that shows the evolution of American music, beginning with its roots in slavery, showing how it springs from both broad sociological movements, yes, but also ties it to the specific rhythms of the everyday activities of the people performing it.” And then the movie began and I realized I am watching that movie right now.

(If you’ve never done it, it’s a real treat to watch an American movie, especially a comedy, with a foreign audience. They laugh at the jokes a few seconds before you do because they read the subtitles faster than the actors can speak.)

O Brother, Where Art Thou stands as the Coen Bros warmest, most expansive, most generous, most delightful, most optimistic movie. That it does all those things without having a proper plot is something of a miracle.

THE LITTLE MAN: Ulysses Everett McGill and his compadres (seemingly the only three white people in prison in Mississippi, who all happen to be chained together), like many Coen protagonists, seek a treasure, the suitcase full of money that will transform their lives and make them worth living. As with most Coen movies, the search for, control over and lack of money is the driving force of the narrative.

Now look at where that money comes from. According to Ulysses, the treasure was stolen in an armored car heist. That would make the money the possession of “the bank,” an institution that lost favor in Depression America for foreclosing on mortgages (which gave a bank robber like Baby-face Nelson heroic status, despite being a certifiable pyschopath). So Ulysses is a criminal, uniting with two other criminals to pursue money gotten in a crime, which was in turn gotten by banks in the act of what was widely perceived as another crime. Ulysses and his pals don’t find their treasure (because, of course, there is no treasure) but they do find success as recording artists, getting paid $60 to sing a song, which the record company then turns into unnamed profits, in yet another kind of criminal scheme. This all ends up benefiting Capital, in O Brother symbolized by biscuit magnate and corrupt governor Pappy O’Daniel, who hands out patronage and represents Politics As Usual.

So there is plenty of money flowing through the narrative of O Brother, and all of it is achieved through ill-gotten gain. Money flutters through the air around George Nelson’s car, gotten as easily as walking into a bank and taking it, lost as easily as running into a crooked Bible salesman. Everything is a con, Ulysses is a fake (as opposed to his “bona fide” romantic rival), everyone is trying to make a dishonest buck. God is a racket, music is a racket, even sex is used as a trick to turn a man in for the bounty on his head. The “real people” of O Brother, the farmers and clerks and store customers, the churchgoers and voters, are seen by all the main characters as rubes, sheep and marks.

(Money is not the only thing that flutters through the frame in O Brother. A number of butterflies also happen by, usually in scenes associated with Delmar. I take this to mean that money, as it is in Lebowski, is an abstract commodity that happens by by sheer chance, or else that Delmar is like a butterfly.)

(And then there are the cows. The Coens go to a lot of trouble and expense to mistreat cows in one scene [“I hate cows!” shouts George Nelson, apropos of nothing], and then place a cow on top of a building at the climax as proof of the Magic Negro’s prophecy. I’m not sure what the cows are all about.)

There’s a moment in Act I when Ulysses and his pals go into the recording studio to sing “Man of Constant Sorrow,” a stunning piece of music direction all by itself, but George Clooney’s doing something interesting in the scene. As Tommy plays his guitar and Delmar and Pete sincerely belt out their harmonies, Ulysses looks, of all things, worried. This always puzzled me until I realized that he’s worried about getting caught in yet another criminal activity — it doesn’t seem possible that “singing into a can” could be seen as a legitimate way to make a living.

(The notion of “artist as outlaw” is one that the Coens share with their fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan [who provides The Dude’s theme song in Lebowski], a connection I will explore more in my thoughts on The Man Who Wasn’t There.)

(But while I’m here, of course there is a more explicit Dylan reference in O Brother with the Coens’ use of “old-timey music,” which was enjoying its first revival in the Depression-era South, and then had a second revival in the late fifties in the North. Bob Dylan recorded the song that Ulysses sings, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” on his first LP.)

(Wash Hogwallop refers to the O Brother‘s economy by saying “They got this Depression on,” a line which has always sounded telling to me. Wash doesn’t see the Depression as the result of any confluence of economic events, he sees it as a a deliberate choice made by powerful people in faraway places, as though one would throw a Depression the way one would throw a garden party, as though it was a deliberate trick played on the poor, uneducated people of the South. Which I’m sure is how it felt.)

MUSIC: Music, we find, transcends the criminal world in O Brother, and is the thing that lifts the narrative from the commercial to the spiritual. As in most Coen movies, there are two major strands of music at war with each other — in this case, “black” music (blues and spirituals) and “white” music (folk and gospel). Instead of symbolizing the conflicts of the main characters as it does in most Coen movies, music here becomes subject matter itself. O Brother, in the course of its Three-Stooges narrative, chronicles a moment in American musical history where black music and white music fused, through the secular miracle of mass communications. Radio in the ’30s was like MTV in the ’80s — it brought all kinds of music into all kinds of worlds that had never heard it before, and musical cross-pollination in O Brother almost single-handedly transforms The Old South into The New South.

(Sam Phillips said in the ’50s that if he could find a white singer with the negro sound and the negro feel, he could revolutionize music. O Brother turns this formulation on its head, having its trio of white singers [who actually are seen in blackface for one sequence] be confused for black singers singing white music — a notion that shocks and enrages the racists of The Old South but delights the enlightened souls of The New South.)

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: Surprisingly, O Brother presents the Coens’ darkest view yet of law enforcement. Police are absent in Blood Simple, comic bunglers in Raising Arizona, corrupt in Miller’s Crossing and menacing in Barton Fink, but O Brother goes so far as to paint them as literally evil, and the sheriff in charge of tracking Ulysses is no less than the Devil himself.

Thismakes tracking the spiritual signifiers of O Brother easy as pie. If Sheriff Cooley is the Devil and damnation, and is symbolized by fire, then God and salvation must be symbolized by water, and water symbols flow through O Brother like, well, I’d have to say like water I guess. The churchgoers in the forest walk down to the river, where their sins are washed away, the sirens pretend salvation while washing their clothes, Pappy O’Daniel, selling his biscuits on the radio, reminds his pious listeners to use “cool, clear water” in their recipes, a flood comes to save Ulysses and his pals, and even Pete’s cousin, who frees them from their chains, is named “Wash.”

(Then there is the moment where Sheriff Cooley almost lynches Pete by torchlight during a thunderstorm, and even makes a reference to the “sweet summer rain,” the Devil, we might say, quoting scripture to suit his purpose.)

The flood at the end of O Brother is caused by the building of a hydroelectric dam, the dam that’s going to bring enlightenment to the South. Which would make Franklin Roosevelt God, I guess, but it’s worth noting that George Nelson, in his final appearance, rejoices that it is electricity generated by this dam that’s going to shoot through his body and make him “go off like a Roman candle.”

(Radio is a force explicitly linked to God in O Brother — the soul-saving music goes out on it, Pappy O’Daniel depends on it for his campaign, and, at the climax, when Ulysses tells Cooley that the governor himself has pardoned him, on the radio, Cooley’s icy reply is “Well we ain’t got a radio.”)

MAGIC: There is a higher percentage of supernatural occurrences in O Brother than usual, or so it seems. Pete gets turned into a toad, but then it turns out not, the Devil buys Tommy’s soul, or maybe not, God saves Ulysses, or maybe that’s just the federal government. There is a balancing act going on all through the movie, every time something mysterious happens another explanation soon comes along to render it mundane. Magic is mostly cleansed from the narrative, but doubts still linger — in the final shot, the Magic Negro who advises Ulysses in Act I is seen still pushing his handcar across the railroad tracks of the New South.

“Everybody’s lookin’ for answers” in O Brother — some turn to racism, some turn to crime, some turn to sex, some turn to old-time religion, some turn to political reform. Penny’s daughters turn to her. The only answer that seems to be “right” is music, which seems to be able to heal all wounds and knit together a sundered society.

THE MELTING POT: Ulysses and his wife, Dan Teague and Pappy O’Daniel are all Irish-American. I don’t know where Delmar is from, and as for the Hogwallops, well, your guess is as good as mine. (Dan Teague, I’m guessing, is a reference to “McTeague,” the protagonist of Eric von Stroheim’s Greed. Other characters seem to be French-American, such as the Radio Station Man, and then there are the Afrian-Americans, largely unnamed (except for Tommy Johnson, the Robert Johnson stand-in) who make up a kind of Greek chorus.

The movie starts with the image of the chain gang singing a spiritual and ends with the image of a photograph of a rebel soldier being washed away in a technologically-induced flood. There are centuries of history in those two images, tracing the history of the south from slavery, the Civil War, through Reconstruction (which gave birth to the KKK), widespread poverty, the Depression and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which, as Ulysses notes, created a New South, literally washing away centuries of backward living, superstition and corruption (I remember visiting relatives in the South in the 1960s, and there were still plenty of people who were the first in their families histories to own telephones). Which is all very interesting, but one must note, what does that have to do with us?

I think O Brother, in a way, is about the internet. In the same way that radio (and then television) changed the way America saw itself, the internet is doing the same thing to the world. The language that Ulysses uses to describe the New South (“They’re going to run everyone a wire, hook ’em up to a grid”) could be applied with greater accuracy to our global situation today. And, without a doubt, we find ourselves in the middle of another cultural cross-pollination, which, according to the philosophy of O Brother, will save us from ourselves.

Following this metaphor would mean, of course, that America in AD 2000 was a nation of racist, intolerant, superstitious, backward-thinking yahoos. Oh, wait.

One nice thing about the generosity of O Brother is that it is not absolute. Pappy O’Daniel is, without a doubt, a corrupt, cynical politician, and is still very much in charge at the end of the movie. We like him better than we like Horace Stokes because Stokes is a blatant racist and O’Daniel endorses mixed-race music, but even in Ulysses’s moment of redemption there is still a threat behind O’Daniel’s endorsement — O’Daniel will pardon Ulysses only if he promises to go straight, which Ulysses promptly does. But, given the moral universe presented in the movie up to that point, it’s hard to imagine Ulysses being very happy working a straight job.

ECHOES: O Brother features the second of (to date) three scenes in Coen Bros movies where escaped fugitives have peculiar conversations with clerks in roadside establishments.