O Brother, Where Art Thou?

O Brother, Where Art Thou? denotes two early twenty-first-century mass media phenomena: a moving-picture show past Joel and Ethan Coen and its influential roots-music soundtrack.

O Brother, Where Fine art M? denotes two early twenty-start-century mass media phenomena: a film by Joel and Ethan Coen and its influential roots-music soundtrack. The title comes from Preston Sturges's classic 1941 film, Sullivan's Travels, in which it is the name of the social allegory that fictional filmmaker John L. Sullivan wishes to make to redeem a career he thinks he has wasted on low-cal comedies.

In the 2000 moving picture Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) and two assembly escape a 1937 Mississippi chain gang and struggle to render to excavate buried treasure on McGill'south farm earlier a Tennessee Valley Authority dam project floods information technology. Like Sullivan'south Travels, the movie follows the picaresque format of the road picture. The fugitives crisscross Mississippi at an impossible footstep, make a hitting recording, and alter the course of a gubernatorial campaign in which the "reform" candidate is climactically revealed to be a Klansman.

Similar most Coen films, O Brother, Where Fine art Thou? brims with allusion. Every bit most of the picture show's promotional materials proclaimed, the plot—though much less than that of James Joyce'southward Ulysses—is based on events of the starting time and greatest road saga, the Odyssey. John Goodman plays Cyclops, a one-eyed Bible salesman; three washerwomen singing by a stream are the Sirens; joyful southern evangelicals getting baptized in a river are the Lotus Eaters; and McGill struggles to accomplish his married woman, Penny, in fictional Ithaca, Mississippi. Yet more circuitous cinematic and literary allusions abound besides. The trip the light fantastic of the Klansmen is lifted from the Wizard of Oz. The title is taken from Sturges's nighttime satire nigh the relation between the literally unwashed masses (represented in the Coens' moving-picture show by any number of Mississippians) and the mass media they consume (represented here by radio, which incumbent governor Pappy O'Daniel calls "mass communicatin"). Most film'south terminate, McGill floats on a coffin à la Herman Melville's Ishmael.

Yet despite the film's superficially comic tone, McGill's endmost prophecy that rural electrification volition mean "out with the onetime spiritual mumbo-colossal, the superstitions, and the backward ways" and the appearance in the South of "a veritable Age of Reason—like the i they had in France" employs a dramatic irony so heavy that in 2000 information technology verged on pathos. Though the low setting softens the satire of the South, the film nods as much to contemporary events as to literature and motion picture. At least since Barton Fink (1991), the Coen brothers take dramatized tensions and complicities between intellectuals and a mindless mob portrayed with a touch of Nazi imagery. Raised in an observant Jewish habitation, the Coens wrote the screenplay immediately after the Southern Baptist Convention (the Lotus Eaters) had called for the conversion of the Jews. The chief Klan graphic symbol disparages Jews and lauds "heritage" and the Confederate flag, which were sources of contend in several southern states—including Mississippi—at the fourth dimension of the moving-picture show'due south limerick and remain and so today. McGill'south representative rural southern sidekicks, Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson), are two of the stupidest characters ever put on moving picture, and the frontwards-looking McGill repeatedly explodes when confronted by other characters' torpor and stubborn backwardness. Clooney delivers his lines in a fast-talking Kentucky accent based on his uncle'south, while Turturro, Nelson, and near of the other supporting actors strive for more than Mississippian cadences and inflections.

This contrast is most evident in the picture's music. The escapees' ring, the Soggy Bottom Boys (a nod to Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs's Foggy Mountain Boys), makes its name bringing Appalachian "hillbilly" music to notoriously unmountainous Mississippi. The Coens have called the film "a valentine to the music"—merely none of it comes from Mississippi. Even the lone real-life bluesman who appears in the film, Chris Thomas King, hails from Billy Rouge. The bulk of the picture show's old-timey soundtrack is performed past bluegrass and alt-country musicians and the blackness Nashville gospel group the Fairfield Iv. If the film satirizes the mores of the Lower South, its soundtrack unambivalently lauds the music of the Upper. Effectively launched by a concert at the Ryman Auditorium in May 2000—before the film was released in the U.s.—the soundtrack went on to sell about eight million copies by 2015. Famously, information technology did so without the benefit of airplay on mainstream country music radio. Down from the Mountain, D. A. Pennebaker's documentary film of the Ryman concert, was released in theaters and on DVD in 2001. The documentary'due south soundtrack became some other recording, its musicians toured nationally, and dozens more spinoff records were released. Bluegrass acts saw increased music sales and concert omnipresence as the genre succeeded the Cuban music of 1997'due south Buena Vista Lodge as the nation'southward "authentic" culling music du jour.

  • Written by

Further Reading

  • Hugh Ruppersburg, Southern Cultures (Winter 2003)