Joel and Ethan Coen

With landmark films such as Fargo, O Brother Where art Thou?, Blood Simple, and Raising Arizona, the Coen brothers have achieved both critical and commercial success. Proving the existence of a viable market for "small" films that are also intellectually rewarding, their work has exploded generic conventions amid rich webs of transtextual references. In Joel and Ethan Coen, R. Barton Palmer argues that the Coen oeuvre also forms a central element in what might be called postmodernist filmmaking. Mixing high and low cultural sources and blurring genres like noir and comedy, the use of pastiche and anti-realist elements in films such as The Hudsucker Proxy and Barton Fink clearly fit the postmodernist paradigm. Palmer argues that for a full understanding of the Coen brothers unique position within film culture, it is important to see how they have developed a new type of text within general postmodernist practice that Palmer terms commercial/independent. Analyzing their substantial body of work from this "generic" framework is the central focus on this book.

Introduction: A brief portrait of the artists; A different meaning for the same old song: Blood Simple; The Coen brothers: Postmodern filmmakers; Uncertainty principle: The Man Who Wasn't There; The exotic everyday: Fargo; The artist, mass culture and the common man: Barton Fink and Raising Arizona; Classic Hollywood redivivus: The Hudsucker Proxy and O Brother, Where Art Thou?; The Coen brothers interviewed; Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret; Filmography