Oct 12th, 2009 at 10:01 am
A Serious Man
Went to see A Serious Man yesterday. It’s pretty good. It was also a rare example of a movie that I went into more or less “cold.” I knew it was a Coen Brothers movie, and I wanted to go to the movies. So there I went with no signal as to the topic. And, well, it turned out to be remarkably Jewish. There are, of course, lots of Jewish people working in the movie business. But despite (or perhaps because) of their prevalence, there seems to be a huge reluctance to depict Jews. Even when Jews do show up (normally in conjunction with Nazis) they don’t really do any Jewish stuff—chant funny prayers or whatnot.
This movie is really way out on the other end of the spectrum. I think the goyim in the audience will be lost at points.
45 Responses to “A Serious Man”
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October 12th, 2009 at 10:13 am
As with the “black folks having white ancestors” thing, many Americans may not know that Jewish people do Jewish things, even weird ones. Although I think that Christian people having seders, as some I know do, is weirder. I am none of the above, except white.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:36 am
I think the goyim in the audience will be lost at points.
Ironically, I’m live two minutes from where the movie was filmed, am seeing the movie this week, and I have no idea what this sentence means.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:39 am
Because most Jews that people know in life don’t do publicly Jewish things. And much Hollywood’s Jewish sensibility is about assimilation and a sense that Jewish religion in preserved in amber, rather than a living culture (the charedi communities notwithstanding).
When I was watching TV in the 70’s and 80’s, I would always lament that there were no Jewish characters actually married to other Jews on TV. Yes, we have a 50% intermarriage rate – but it was 100% on TV
October 12th, 2009 at 10:44 am
There are, of course, lots of Jewish people working in the movie business. But despite (or perhaps because) of their prevalence, there seems to be a huge reluctance to depict Jews. Even when Jews do show up (normally in conjunction with Nazis) they don’t really do any Jewish stuff—chant funny prayers or whatnot.
Ok, Matt, the vast majority of movie executives are concentrated not on expressing their faith, but on ensuring the widest possible audience for their films.
Remember that huge part of the country voting for McCain? All that Red? Remember how those guys listen to people like Beck or O’Reilly or Pat Robertson?
Do you really think people who got to a megachurch want to see Shabbat depicted in their movies?
I don’t, and I doubt the guys running the studios think so either. Not when Pat Robertson is telling his folks to reclaim Rosh Hashanah from the Jews
Not to mention that if you put a bunch of people in low light in some funny hats and clothes, speaking a semitic language, and half the people in the audience might think “Holy shit! They’re them terrorists!”
October 12th, 2009 at 10:57 am
I converted to Judaism in 2001 after a fairly long period of study. I grew up amongst a good number of Jewish friends in the ’50’s but was remarkably ignorant of the most basic practices and beliefs of Judaism. That had a lot to do with justifiable paranoia and the pressures of the time for conformity and assimilation. It is a great thing to move past that.
That said, the film follows pretty closely the Book of Job, which Christians as well as Jews acknowledge as a part of holy scripture. I suspect that Job is not a favorite of modern fundamentalists of any sort, but it is a profoundly important work. It counters the great temptation and threat to ethical monotheism to believe simplistically that ‘god is on our side’.
Much of the film follows the text — from the counselors (Rabbis) who provide little real help to Job, to the final whirlwind; and then throws in some other references to David on the Roof and other biblical stories that contain much more moral ambiguity and challenge than contemporary bible thumpers would dare to allow.
This is an important and serious work…. and it is also very funny. Go and study.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:05 am
The film only superficially uses Job. What it is actually about, and why Matt is correct to call it profoundly Jewish, is about the ambiguity of God in the Jewish religion.
The film wisely uses 20th Century physics, considered the field of science with the most Jewish thinkers, as its parallel. The Coens link the uncertainty principle of physics to the uncertainty principle of God in Jewish thought.
This is reflected through ambiguity of narrative.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:24 am
there seems to be a huge reluctance to depict Jews. Even when Jews do show up (normally in conjunction with Nazis) they don’t really do any Jewish stuff—chant funny prayers or whatnot.
If I recall correctly, it was Neal Gabler who provided a likely explanation for this in An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. The early studio moguls — all immigrant and first-generation Jews from Eastern Europe — presented a sort of super protestant, non-immigrant version of America onscreen because they a) were trying to fit in and b) were terrified of nativist anti-Semites attacking their new industry. The Tradition, Tradition! Tradition! carries on.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:35 am
“goyim” is Yiddish for “gentiles.”
.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:58 am
I just watched Bakshi’s Wizards on youtube the other day and there was a scene where a couple of long-bearded faeries or hobbits or whatever the hell they were said “We must pray,” and then did a sort of Bugs Bunny version of Jewish chanting. Funny as fuck. Then the evil human had them killed.
Also, Fritz the Cat, also by Bakshi, there was the scene where some Chassidim heard an announcement that Israel had gotten a bunch of money in military aid from the U.S. government, and started doing the hora.
Incidentally, in the youtube comments for Wizards, lots of people were asking, “WHO DID THE NARRATION???” The answer, it turns out, is SUSAN TYRELL!!!
October 12th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Hello? What’s more interesting — chanting prayers or nazis?? There’s a reason we have to bribe kids with a big party to sit in temple for even 13 years.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Also there was that Seinfeld episode with the bris.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
They stopped letting me do those, but it was a funny episode.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
Note: the Susan Tyrrell site is NOT APPROPRIATE FOR WORK. In fact, you should probably avoid clicking my links as a matter of general principle.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
Wow… I said it: chanting prayers is boring.
Do you hear that folks? What a load of my conscience it is, to finally admit the truth.
Praying and studying the Torah is boring. It’s boring.
What I do for a living — what I’ve dedicated years of work and devotion to — is BORING.
DO YOU HEAR THAT, WORLD?
IT’S BO – RIIIIIING!!!!!!!!
October 12th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
The most completely retarded instance of Jewish portrayal on TV that I’ve seen, was an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. The patient of the week was an Orthodox Jewish girl, who was so observant she couldn’t have a life saving operation that involved inserting a new heart valve, because it was from a pig! Until, of course, she had her female Reform rabbi recite a blessing over the operation. Oh, and I think she was a Zionist, naturally.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
The film only superficially uses Job. What it is actually about, and why Matt is correct to call it profoundly Jewish, is about the ambiguity of God in the Jewish religion.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ll just say that Job is about the ambiguity of God. And if you’re referring to God’s existence as ambiguous rather than the morality or otherwise of His acts, the Jewish religion isn’t ambiguous on the question of existence.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
“a huge reluctance to depict Jews”? That’s ridiculous. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen a Jewish wedding depicted in a Hollywood movie. If you feel that Jews, being 2% of the population, aren’t depicted enough, imagine how the 15% that are Hispanic feels.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Miguel, they’re somewhat limited in their depiction of even a Reform wedding. In other words, this means the only Jewish rituals that are depicted with any frequency are two that most Christians (ie. the rest of the country) probably find amusing and even ridiculous.
Specifically, the breaking of glass and the chair dance.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:40 pm
Even when Jews do show up (normally in conjunction with Nazis) they don’t really do any Jewish stuff—chant funny prayers or whatnot.
Uh, Woody Allen?
October 12th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ll just say that Job is about the ambiguity of God. And if you’re referring to God’s existence as ambiguous rather than the morality or otherwise of His acts, the Jewish religion isn’t ambiguous on the question of existence.
Probably best if you see the film first before responding. More specifically, it’s about the ambiguity of God’s acts, and the limitations of our ability to understand the divine on earth. Unlike the Christian path to God (act like Jesus), the Jewish path of interpretation of acts is far more ambiguous, and this is reflected in the journey of Larry Gopnik and his quest to understand events happening to him.
Yet, as with the Jewish religion itself, it is that very ambiguity that reasserts God’s existence. Unlike the nihilism of No Country for Old Men, this film may be the Coen’s first attempt to state, with certainty, their belief in something larger at work. In that way it is, as Matt says, a profoundly Jewish movie.
Non Jewish audiences will indeed be confused. There are no sinners becoming saints. No clear Christian redemption. No heaven and hell implications.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
it’s about the ambiguity of God’s acts, and the limitations of our ability to understand the divine on earth… it is that very ambiguity that reasserts God’s existence
Sounds a lot like Job to me, but as you say, I should see the movie. Why did you say it only superficially uses Job?
October 12th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
The goyim can go sit in the rain. We don’t owe them nearly as much as they think we do.
October 12th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
More proof, as if any were needed at this point, of the
vast Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christian social order and all morality.
October 12th, 2009 at 1:02 pm
The movie that broke the bank and was notable for its depiction of Jews was “The Passion Of The Christ“. Maybe that’s what people are clamoring for – not some haimishe dreck like “A Serious Man “. Nobody wants to see a movie like that. Not Jews, not Gentiles, nobody. A movie about aardvarks has more appeal.
October 12th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Well, I haven’t seen this film, but I’m yet to see a bad or confusing film by the Coen brothers, so I expect it to be good, as usual. What material they used to make it is not that important, this is not a documentary.
October 12th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
I liked the Informant and all, but the Coens were among the more prominent signatories urging the release of Roman “the child anal rapist” Polanski. So was Wes Anderson. Count me out. Another movie about Jews. Meh.
October 12th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
I agree with Chipper. He knows his anal rape.
October 12th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
One might think that in wake of Wall Street’s rape of the country, and the hijacking of US foreign policy in the interests of serving the racialist, apartheid state of Israel…that a movie extolling the passion and depth of Jews actually might be considered morally repugnant at this time, but I guess the attitude is Let them eat kreplach.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
Me, I’m still trying to wrap my head around Matthew Weiner trying to depict early 1960s Roman Catholics.
Talk about goyim not understanding Jews.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
In recent years, of course, there’s been a cottage industry of turning the Holocaust into kitsch. Getting killed is apparently a Jewish sacrament.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
There’s another important point here that’s gone unmentioned: Although the chances of an incipient American Kristallnacht are nil – most contemporary American Jews are not at all familiar with the cause and effect history of European and Russian pogroms. When times are bad – you don’t flaunt your wealth, you don’t become self-absorbed in your own little world, you just don’t. And, I don’t care how risible and unflattering the Coens take on Jewish-Americana is – when it’s Jews, Jews, Jews all the time – you’re playing with fire. Earlier Jewish generations understood that. Third generation filmmaker artiste wunderkinds like the Coens and our young, inspired VIP blogger MY here do not.
October 12th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Trevor – You’ve identified a problem, then horribly misidentified MY as part of it.
October 12th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
when it’s Jews, Jews, Jews all the time – you’re playing with fire.
Pardon? You might want to think that one through.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Just remember, if any Jews get laid this week it is because of Eric Bana in Munich.
October 12th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
Why is there a “huge reluctance to depict Jews”? Well, I just re-read AN EMPIRE OF THEIR OWN: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, a fabulous book. The main point is that the Jews who invented Hollywood — Louis B. Mayer, Adolph Zukor, William Fox et al. — were extreme assimilationists, believed deeply in the prevalent american mythography, and wanted not to attract attention for “being Jewish” — one of the reasons they ended up inventing Hollywood, since so many other industries were closed to them.
And even though virtually all industries are now open to Jews on some level (tho it will be a while before the head of ExxonMobil wears a yammulke), entertainment/news is probably still the “most Jewish” and Jews still get a lot of heat around the U.S. and around the world (tho not in the MSM) for that fact. So….I think Louis B. Mayer’s concerns are still operative.
That, and the fact that they must not think it’s a profitable topic–potential profit being the key reason why all general release movies are made.
October 12th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Is there any backing for the assertion that non-Jewish America only wants to see Jewish rituals that are amusing of silly? (no. 18 above at least) I’ve seen quite a few Jewish rituals over the last 45 years and found them to range from inspiritional (still taken by seeing my dad’s law partner reading at his daughter’s bat mitzvah) to interesting. Of course I’ve seen a few seders redone by Christians that were a little lacking, certainly in comparison to the one I was invited to by real Jews, but I tend to give them the same tolerance I give to Baptist Ash Wednesday services.
As to what’s boring, when my daughter went to day care for years at the JCC she always enjoyed Shabbat services, chanting, and the observance of the various holidays, whereas several of her Jewish classmates had to be dragged to the place. Of course when I was at my Catholic high school our one Jewish student enjoyed Gregorian chant while most of my idiot Catholic classmates reduced it to a bad joke.
October 12th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
People don’t want to see rituals — any rituals — because they’re non-dramatic. They’re rituals! Apart from crooks or virgins going to Confession, weddings, and funerals, the only ritual I can think of in a movie is the great baptism scene in The Godfather. “Do you renounce Satan?” “I do renounce him.” *blam* It’s the only one that I can remember where the drama is enhanced by the implications of the rite.
Bar mitzvahs? Not so dramatic.
October 12th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
#9″ Incidentally, in the youtube comments for Wizards, lots of people were asking, “WHO DID THE NARRATION???” The answer, it turns out, is SUSAN TYRELL!!!
I am afraid that I am at a loss as to why this should warrant an exclamation point. Is there something special about Susan Tyrell about which I am unaware?
#22: The goyim can go sit in the rain. We don’t owe them nearly as much as they think we do.
I don’t think that Matt’s claim that “I think the goyim in the audience will be lost at points” was intended as a put-down of the movie; he was just pointing out that if you don’t know a lot about Judaism, you should realize that this movie will confuse you before you go to it.
#31: And, I don’t care how risible and unflattering the Coens take on Jewish-Americana is – when it’s Jews, Jews, Jews all the time – you’re playing with fire.
One movie that is very Jewish, and that amounts to “Jews, Jews, Jews all the time?”
Playing with fire? What? Has someone ever become a Neo-Nazi because he saw too many Woody Allen movies?
October 12th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
Trevor wrote:
One might think that in wake of Wall Street’s rape of the country, and the hijacking of US foreign policy in the interests of serving the racialist, apartheid state of Israel…that a movie extolling the passion and depth of Jews actually might be considered morally repugnant at this time, but I guess the attitude is Let them eat kreplach.
Have you ever actually seen a Coen brothers movie? I feel pretty certain that A Serious Man is not going to be religious propaganda “extolling the passion and depth of Jews” (from the description it sounds like the rabbis aren’t particular helpful to the main character). But in any case, even if some religious types wanted to make a movie propagandizing for the Jewish religion, while I wouldn’t want to watch it because it’d be boring, I’d say it’s pretty anti-semitic to say such a movie would be inherently “morally repugnant” because you think Jews everywhere deserve collective shame for the actions of Israel (when most American Jews are liberal and favor a two-state solution) or Wall Street (way to play into stereotypes of Jews as moneygrubbing shysters! Pretty sure most people on Wall Street are not Jews, and while Jews may be overrepresented there when compared to their numbers in the population as a whole, the same is true for many other intellectually specialized fields like theoretical physics). This would be analogous to saying that a movie extolling the passion and depth of Muslim people would be morally repugnant because of the actions of a small group of terrorists, or saying a movie extolling the passion and depth of the peoples of the African diaspora would be morally repugnant because African-Americans are overrepresented in violent crimes and some African dictatorships are pretty awful.
October 13th, 2009 at 12:13 am
Is there something special about Susan Tyrell about which I am unaware?
Aside from awesomeness, you mean?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdQpd4Q9kns
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W7gB9AMfec
etc.
October 13th, 2009 at 12:39 am
Further awesomeness:
http://www.laweekly.com/2000-11-09/news/my-so-called-rotten-life/2
“Spend any time with SuSu, and you fall into one of those endless rabbit holes of reminiscences that would be asterisked on anybody else’s life calendar, but that seem to have accrued to her as a function of who she is. Mention her Oscar nomination and the career opportunities it must have afforded, and she’ll relate in great detail how she instead fled to Morocco, where she lived in a black tent atop a Leyland Tiger double-decker bus surrounded by driftwood furniture and Moroccan rugs, fell in unrequited love with a Berber whose genitals had been deformed by syphilis, set out on a caravan up the Atlas Mountains, jamming pointed sticks into the rectums of the donkeys to edge the procession toward the top, where her fellow expatriates planned to process the recent hash harvest in the olive-oil presses, and where she contracted a hideous, wrenching illness that resulted in her being dragged on a mat of leaves behind one of the donkeys, until some Bedouin villagers fed her a tea brewed from the grass that was growing everywhere, which left her, miraculously, well again.”
October 13th, 2009 at 8:50 am
Perhaps that is because they are not orthodox? Because the number of nonreligious Jewish characters in film is stunningly out of proportion to other ethnicities.
October 13th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Remarkably Jewish is an understatement, Steve Sailer is going to have a field day with this movie. This may be the first non-assimilationist mainstream American Jewish film I’ve ever seen. The movie depicts a very closed Jewish world smack in the American heartland. The main characters in the film are all Jewish, and associate almost exclusively with other Jews while superficially living typical American suburban lives. It’s an invisible shtetl recreated in Minnesota. The goyim in the movie are depicted as kind of alien and weird – reflecting the viewpoint of the characters, not the Coens I assume. The whites are violent and threatening, the Asians devious and unprincipled. Even Woody Allen films always show Jews interacting with, and often aspiring to be, WASPS, and of course Woody is always chasing shiksas.
October 13th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
I’ve been reading Amos Elon’s The Pity of it All which deals with the various degrees of Jewish assimilation in Germany between the middle 18th century and 1935. I believe it was Karl Marx’s father (who converted) who said that the rate of conversions (and other methods of abandoning Judaism) was constant because otherwise there would be 100,000,000 Jews. (Early 19th century figure.) So, what’s the figure today? 20,000,000? 30,000,000? Marx’s father was perceptive. If culture worked the way the GOP imagined it, there’d be nothing left of Judaism except the extremely orthodox guys who look like refugees from 1820. And culture doesn’t work like that.
I imagine the Coen’s have simply chosen the theme for its singularity as a story. Plus, it’s something they’re familiar with the way they were familiar with film noir when they inverted it for Fargo. Those 2 guys seem as completely abstracted from life on Earth as a comet. The nihilism of No Country for Old Men carries the same weight as the silliness of Burn After Reading. I don’t imagine they’ve invested anything more of themselves in it than they ever have.
October 15th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
I don’t roll on shabbos!