This essay on the relationship between Guilt and Dread (and the at least double circular loops they inflict upon the other and us) was commissioned by P V. I chose to explore this topic through the filmography of the Coen Bros. There will be a few spoilers throughout, so feel free to judiciously skip over sections for movies you haven't seen. Many thanks to P V for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.
The problem is not that there is evil in the world, the problem is that there is good, because otherwise... who would care?
-V.M. Varga, Fargo season 3
Aw geez.
-Fargo, both the movie and the TV show, all the time, constantly
We tend to think of Guilt and Dread as simple symptoms with simple causes. If you are guilty, it means you have done something wrong. If you are feeling dread, you don't want to take responsibility for what is to come.
It's not so simple. The Coen Bros. have constructed a filmography of masterpieces exploring the endless complexities of Guilt and Dread. They use twisted genre conventions and stunning character work to show us what makes heroes, villains, and regular everyday people tick. We see characters who experience Guilt and Dread as a spiritual matter, a practical matter, a hindrance, an opportunity, and a curse; we also see how they are all deceived. For Guilt and Dread are mediators in the complex relationships between our various selves, ourselves and others, ourselves and our environments, ourselves and our trauma.
There is one universal truth in all of this: Like Jonah and the whale, the harder we try to escape ourselves, the more ensnared we become.
The Big Lebowski (1998)
The Dude abides.
The Big Lebowski settles us into the slippers of the Dude, an easygoing guy who is perpetually unemployed, slovenly, keeps questionable company, is late on his rent, drinks and smokes everywhere he goes, and generally doesn't do much of anything worthwhile. The Dude has no character arc. No drive for greatness. No investigative training or resources. He is a noir detective without the noir and without the detective. The truth swirls around him, begging to be unraveled, ready to dart out of reach the moment someone tries to grasp. But the Dude never grasps.
He is a hero precisely because he does not grasp. "The Dude abides," he intones, a tossed off catch phrase that becomes a skeleton key for understanding the Coens' intimidating filmography. To abide is not simply an excuse for laziness as it at first appears to be. The character arc of the film does not belong to the Dude but to us: we must come to understand all that it means for a Dude to abide. In a world where personality is compartmentalized, commerce is fetishized, and existence itself cannot exist unbothered... to abide is an act of rebellion.
The Dude's chosen name is a personal political maneuver. 'Dude' is a universal signifier that also carries connotations of masculinity and delinquency. By insisting that he be called the Dude (or Duder, El Duderino, His Dudeness...), he is forcing his conversation partner to take him less seriously, and by extension, chill out. Using his name tinges 'serious' situations with parody, and refusing to use his name forces the character to take a position of bad faith.
Everyone reacts differently to this request. The nihilists call him 'Lebowski' as a form of tough guy intimidation. The Big Lebowski calls him 'Mr. Lebowski' as a condescending formality meant to bully him into compliance. Maude calls him 'Jeffrey' to ironically telegraph their false companionship. Most delightfully, Brandt the butler calls him 'Dude' out of sheer forced professional courtesy, as if the only path to propriety is to pretend that Dude is a given first name.
Armored with his name, the Dude floats through situations of bizarro intrigue without batting an eye. He self-medicates with joints and White Russians every time he is about to have an important conversation. He does this because the Dude is not interested in who kidnapped whom and for what reason. His intoxication is a way to live his life on his terms. That is why the Dude is exceptional in his resistance to the forces of both guilt and dread. He cannot feel guilt if he has not exercised any agency, and he cannot feel dread if he does not care what is on the horizon. He refuses to let the Other make the Other's problems into his problems. Only Steve Buscemi's Donnie is as free from these shackles, and whereas Donnie's freedom comes from childlike ignorance, the Dude's freedom is that of a grown man who doesn't give a shit about the established order and all its manipulative tendrils.
Barton Fink (1991)
I'll show you the life of the mind!
Barton Fink is the closest a Coen film gets to a full-fledged fable. After making a splash in the New York theatre scene, Barton gets snatched up by Hollywood to pen a wrestling picture. The entire rest of the film is a spiraling out, from the nauseating sequences of Barton trying to write in a dank, claustrophobic hotel, to the frustrating obstacles he meets when seeking guidance from those who ought to know better than he.
Barton is different from the Dude in one key regard: He desperately wants to be an important writer, and he fears deeply that he is not. Barton never admits to his insecurities, maybe isn't even consciously aware of them. He only complains endlessly about writer's block and extenuating circumstances. We learn about his deepest anxieties not through his mouth, but through his environment. His transient hotel room home becomes a projection of his inner decay: wallpaper peeling off, sex and misery echoing through the pipes, nasty sweaty implacable heat.
Barton's neurosis is contrasted with his neighbor Charlie's companionable attitude. Charlie Meadows is an easygoing insurance salesman who is always looking to take the edge off any social situation. He also turns out to be a murderous agent of pure evil. So why is Charlie able to keep his genial composure whereas Barton cycles through perpetual conniption?
Charlie's answer is simple: "Because you DON'T LISTEN!" Barton's life as an artist requires him to be an empathetic study of human relationships. What's more, he must navigate the gladhanding of a Hollywood screenwriting contract. What's even more, he has a down home neighbor who is an eternal font of advice and material. Despite all this, Barton at no point truly listens to what anybody around him has to say. As much as he postures at communicating the real lives of the working class in his art, he is adrift from all meaningful human connection. He cannot be present because he is stuck belaboring the past or fretting about the future.
Barton's ambitions cause him to dissociate from reality. His insecurities take root in the cracks of those ambitions. He cannot write because he is unwilling to be anything but the best version of himself. He refuses to try and fail, because he is afraid to reveal his own emptiness. Thus the guilt of fraudulent identity and the dread of encroaching deadlines tear at Barton's ability to ground himself in the present and heed what scant wisdom can be found in his environment.
A Serious Man (2009)
This is not a frivolous request. This is a ser- I'm a ser- I'm, uh, I've tried to be a serious man, you know?
If Barton Fink's guilt and dread issue from a Lack that cannot be filled, Larry Gopnik's guilt and dread issue from a certainty that he has done everything right. He has gotten married, had kids, raised his family in the Jewish faith, cared for his community, kept a clean house, remained honest at his teaching job, and just generally been an upstanding member of the community. Essentially the opposite of the Dude. And yet, in this parable modeled after the Book of Job, Larry suffers trial after trial after trial. Something just feels wrong.
When the life promised by your culture and ideology does not align with the life you encounter, mental breakage and disillusionment are not far behind. Convinced that God is punishing him for being out of line in some way, Larry seeks counsel from a series of rabbis, each of whom fundamentally misunderstands his predicament. Larry misunderstands too. He thinks he is looking for a fix, but deep down he is grappling with the ungrappleable: Original Sin.
Kierkegaard argues that anxiety is the prerequisite for Original Sin. Adam and Eve didn't violate God's rule at random; when God set the boundary in place, the boundary itself generated an anxiety that could only be resolved by the enjoyment found in violating that boundary. What Adam and Eve didn't realize is that violating the boundary would propagate a hereditary nuclear blast of infinitely multiplying anxieties and boundaries to all future generations.
Original Sin is not just an unhappy accident... it is a mythic characterization of the fundamental Lack embedded in all humans that leads us to self-sabotage. The hole that motivates consumption precisely because it can never be filled.
Larry is experiencing Lack and projecting it as a personal failure, or in his most selfish moments, as a failure of his community to properly recognize his contributions. In Larry's moral universe, it is inconceivable that someone could do everything right and still be punished for it. His narrow worldview doesn't allow him to see how boring a flatly moral universe would be.
Fargo (1996) + (2014 - present)
The winters are cold, but I can't complain. My socks have holes, but again, do I complain? I do not. The oldest needs braces. The youngest once sneezed for three days straight. But who can complain? They're gifts. All of it. The cold, the holes.
Fargo, both the film and the spinoff TV series, are melancholy meditations on mortality and morality set in the snowy midwest. Fargo's chilliest villains share with Charlie Meadows a resistance to the wiles of Guilt and Dread. Peter Stormare's extortionist murderer is so far beyond social norms that he may as well be an apex predator, an archetype that Fargo season 1's Lorne Malvo would expound upon (see also: No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh). Malvo argues that the modern bureaucratic world is just as cutthroat as the world of apes, tigers, and wolves. Survival of the fittest. Power emerges from the realization that the rules don't apply to you. Malvo's aspirations toward animality allow him to slip through our social reality unencumbered by norms and values. Only when his alpha male mentality leads him to folly does the dread creep in, and only then does he allow himself to see that there is something fundamentally different between him and the creature he so admires: the wolf.
Then there are the evil incumbent characters, like Martin Freeman's Lester Nygaard and William H. Macy's Jerry Lundegaard. Fargo season 1's Lester is a bundle of guilt, a wreck of castrated male potency, whose first great success in life is to muster up enough wounded pride to kill his wife with a hammer. The dread of his wife's tyrannical nagging is washed away, replaced with the guilt of her murder and the dread of repercussion from the legal world (Deputy Solverson) or the illegal world (Lorne Malvo). This guilt/dread miasma is symbolized by the thumping of a defunct washing machine, a point of tension between him and his wife that led directly to her murder. The machine rumbles beneath the sound mix whenever Lester's trauma resurfaces. Lester's wife-anxiety is not gone after all, merely blended with his ever escalating bids for power and purpose.
The film portrays Jerry as a mess of guilt and dread too, but wounded masculinity is the least of his concerns. Jerry is a rat whose shallow greed causes him to connive at the expense of anybody close to him. He is venal beyond repair in a way that cannot be traced to backstory, or to one really bad day like we witness with Lester. Jerry's guilt is less focused on a single rupture point, and speaks more to the complete brokenness of humanity.
The Fargo moral universe is completed by the hero, generally a policewoman who would prefer to live a quiet life, but who is up to the task of staring into the abyss of evil. Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is, perhaps even more than the Dude, the character in the Coen filmography most dedicated to consciously fending off Guilt and Dread. She keeps a pleasant demeanor and cares for the little things precisely because she understands that the big things are so often out of her control. Even when they are under her control, like when she captures Peter Stormare's psychopath, the meaning of it all escapes her grasp. She delivers this monologue to Stormare's character as he sits listlessly in the back of her cop car:
So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it.
Marge can understand someone like Jerry, whose guilt and dread prevent him from being his best self, but she cannot understand this killer. His absence of guilt and dread signal that he is in fact following his truest desires, and they are what drive him to destruction.
We are driven to act. The world acts back. In this fundamental mismatch of expectation and reality is found both the pleasure of self-sabotage and the elated terror of what it means to truly follow one's desire. It could mean death, as we see with so many characters in Fargo, or it could mean a life of reprieve, as we see with the Dude. In any case, it is those who repress their desires who will find themselves in vicious cycles without recourse.
We tend to think of Guilt and Dread as simple symptoms with simple causes. If you are guilty, it means you have done something wrong. If you are feeling dread, you don't want to take responsibility for what is to come.
It's not so simple. The Coen Bros. have constructed a filmography of masterpieces exploring the endless complexities of Guilt and Dread. They use twisted genre conventions and stunning character work to show us what makes heroes, villains, and regular everyday people tick. We see characters who experience Guilt and Dread as a spiritual matter, a practical matter, a hindrance, an opportunity, and a curse; we also see how they are all deceived. For Guilt and Dread are mediators in the complex relationships between our various selves, ourselves and others, ourselves and our environments, ourselves and our trauma.
There is one universal truth in all of this: Like Jonah and the whale, the harder we try to escape ourselves, the more ensnared we become.
The Big Lebowski (1998)
The Dude abides.
The Big Lebowski settles us into the slippers of the Dude, an easygoing guy who is perpetually unemployed, slovenly, keeps questionable company, is late on his rent, drinks and smokes everywhere he goes, and generally doesn't do much of anything worthwhile. The Dude has no character arc. No drive for greatness. No investigative training or resources. He is a noir detective without the noir and without the detective. The truth swirls around him, begging to be unraveled, ready to dart out of reach the moment someone tries to grasp. But the Dude never grasps.
He is a hero precisely because he does not grasp. "The Dude abides," he intones, a tossed off catch phrase that becomes a skeleton key for understanding the Coens' intimidating filmography. To abide is not simply an excuse for laziness as it at first appears to be. The character arc of the film does not belong to the Dude but to us: we must come to understand all that it means for a Dude to abide. In a world where personality is compartmentalized, commerce is fetishized, and existence itself cannot exist unbothered... to abide is an act of rebellion.
The Dude's chosen name is a personal political maneuver. 'Dude' is a universal signifier that also carries connotations of masculinity and delinquency. By insisting that he be called the Dude (or Duder, El Duderino, His Dudeness...), he is forcing his conversation partner to take him less seriously, and by extension, chill out. Using his name tinges 'serious' situations with parody, and refusing to use his name forces the character to take a position of bad faith.
Everyone reacts differently to this request. The nihilists call him 'Lebowski' as a form of tough guy intimidation. The Big Lebowski calls him 'Mr. Lebowski' as a condescending formality meant to bully him into compliance. Maude calls him 'Jeffrey' to ironically telegraph their false companionship. Most delightfully, Brandt the butler calls him 'Dude' out of sheer forced professional courtesy, as if the only path to propriety is to pretend that Dude is a given first name.
Armored with his name, the Dude floats through situations of bizarro intrigue without batting an eye. He self-medicates with joints and White Russians every time he is about to have an important conversation. He does this because the Dude is not interested in who kidnapped whom and for what reason. His intoxication is a way to live his life on his terms. That is why the Dude is exceptional in his resistance to the forces of both guilt and dread. He cannot feel guilt if he has not exercised any agency, and he cannot feel dread if he does not care what is on the horizon. He refuses to let the Other make the Other's problems into his problems. Only Steve Buscemi's Donnie is as free from these shackles, and whereas Donnie's freedom comes from childlike ignorance, the Dude's freedom is that of a grown man who doesn't give a shit about the established order and all its manipulative tendrils.
Barton Fink (1991)
I'll show you the life of the mind!
Barton Fink is the closest a Coen film gets to a full-fledged fable. After making a splash in the New York theatre scene, Barton gets snatched up by Hollywood to pen a wrestling picture. The entire rest of the film is a spiraling out, from the nauseating sequences of Barton trying to write in a dank, claustrophobic hotel, to the frustrating obstacles he meets when seeking guidance from those who ought to know better than he.
Barton is different from the Dude in one key regard: He desperately wants to be an important writer, and he fears deeply that he is not. Barton never admits to his insecurities, maybe isn't even consciously aware of them. He only complains endlessly about writer's block and extenuating circumstances. We learn about his deepest anxieties not through his mouth, but through his environment. His transient hotel room home becomes a projection of his inner decay: wallpaper peeling off, sex and misery echoing through the pipes, nasty sweaty implacable heat.
Barton's neurosis is contrasted with his neighbor Charlie's companionable attitude. Charlie Meadows is an easygoing insurance salesman who is always looking to take the edge off any social situation. He also turns out to be a murderous agent of pure evil. So why is Charlie able to keep his genial composure whereas Barton cycles through perpetual conniption?
Charlie's answer is simple: "Because you DON'T LISTEN!" Barton's life as an artist requires him to be an empathetic study of human relationships. What's more, he must navigate the gladhanding of a Hollywood screenwriting contract. What's even more, he has a down home neighbor who is an eternal font of advice and material. Despite all this, Barton at no point truly listens to what anybody around him has to say. As much as he postures at communicating the real lives of the working class in his art, he is adrift from all meaningful human connection. He cannot be present because he is stuck belaboring the past or fretting about the future.
Barton's ambitions cause him to dissociate from reality. His insecurities take root in the cracks of those ambitions. He cannot write because he is unwilling to be anything but the best version of himself. He refuses to try and fail, because he is afraid to reveal his own emptiness. Thus the guilt of fraudulent identity and the dread of encroaching deadlines tear at Barton's ability to ground himself in the present and heed what scant wisdom can be found in his environment.
A Serious Man (2009)
This is not a frivolous request. This is a ser- I'm a ser- I'm, uh, I've tried to be a serious man, you know?
If Barton Fink's guilt and dread issue from a Lack that cannot be filled, Larry Gopnik's guilt and dread issue from a certainty that he has done everything right. He has gotten married, had kids, raised his family in the Jewish faith, cared for his community, kept a clean house, remained honest at his teaching job, and just generally been an upstanding member of the community. Essentially the opposite of the Dude. And yet, in this parable modeled after the Book of Job, Larry suffers trial after trial after trial. Something just feels wrong.
When the life promised by your culture and ideology does not align with the life you encounter, mental breakage and disillusionment are not far behind. Convinced that God is punishing him for being out of line in some way, Larry seeks counsel from a series of rabbis, each of whom fundamentally misunderstands his predicament. Larry misunderstands too. He thinks he is looking for a fix, but deep down he is grappling with the ungrappleable: Original Sin.
Kierkegaard argues that anxiety is the prerequisite for Original Sin. Adam and Eve didn't violate God's rule at random; when God set the boundary in place, the boundary itself generated an anxiety that could only be resolved by the enjoyment found in violating that boundary. What Adam and Eve didn't realize is that violating the boundary would propagate a hereditary nuclear blast of infinitely multiplying anxieties and boundaries to all future generations.
Original Sin is not just an unhappy accident... it is a mythic characterization of the fundamental Lack embedded in all humans that leads us to self-sabotage. The hole that motivates consumption precisely because it can never be filled.
Larry is experiencing Lack and projecting it as a personal failure, or in his most selfish moments, as a failure of his community to properly recognize his contributions. In Larry's moral universe, it is inconceivable that someone could do everything right and still be punished for it. His narrow worldview doesn't allow him to see how boring a flatly moral universe would be.
Fargo (1996) + (2014 - present)
The winters are cold, but I can't complain. My socks have holes, but again, do I complain? I do not. The oldest needs braces. The youngest once sneezed for three days straight. But who can complain? They're gifts. All of it. The cold, the holes.
Fargo, both the film and the spinoff TV series, are melancholy meditations on mortality and morality set in the snowy midwest. Fargo's chilliest villains share with Charlie Meadows a resistance to the wiles of Guilt and Dread. Peter Stormare's extortionist murderer is so far beyond social norms that he may as well be an apex predator, an archetype that Fargo season 1's Lorne Malvo would expound upon (see also: No Country for Old Men's Anton Chigurh). Malvo argues that the modern bureaucratic world is just as cutthroat as the world of apes, tigers, and wolves. Survival of the fittest. Power emerges from the realization that the rules don't apply to you. Malvo's aspirations toward animality allow him to slip through our social reality unencumbered by norms and values. Only when his alpha male mentality leads him to folly does the dread creep in, and only then does he allow himself to see that there is something fundamentally different between him and the creature he so admires: the wolf.
Then there are the evil incumbent characters, like Martin Freeman's Lester Nygaard and William H. Macy's Jerry Lundegaard. Fargo season 1's Lester is a bundle of guilt, a wreck of castrated male potency, whose first great success in life is to muster up enough wounded pride to kill his wife with a hammer. The dread of his wife's tyrannical nagging is washed away, replaced with the guilt of her murder and the dread of repercussion from the legal world (Deputy Solverson) or the illegal world (Lorne Malvo). This guilt/dread miasma is symbolized by the thumping of a defunct washing machine, a point of tension between him and his wife that led directly to her murder. The machine rumbles beneath the sound mix whenever Lester's trauma resurfaces. Lester's wife-anxiety is not gone after all, merely blended with his ever escalating bids for power and purpose.
The film portrays Jerry as a mess of guilt and dread too, but wounded masculinity is the least of his concerns. Jerry is a rat whose shallow greed causes him to connive at the expense of anybody close to him. He is venal beyond repair in a way that cannot be traced to backstory, or to one really bad day like we witness with Lester. Jerry's guilt is less focused on a single rupture point, and speaks more to the complete brokenness of humanity.
The Fargo moral universe is completed by the hero, generally a policewoman who would prefer to live a quiet life, but who is up to the task of staring into the abyss of evil. Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is, perhaps even more than the Dude, the character in the Coen filmography most dedicated to consciously fending off Guilt and Dread. She keeps a pleasant demeanor and cares for the little things precisely because she understands that the big things are so often out of her control. Even when they are under her control, like when she captures Peter Stormare's psychopath, the meaning of it all escapes her grasp. She delivers this monologue to Stormare's character as he sits listlessly in the back of her cop car:
So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here ya are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it.
Marge can understand someone like Jerry, whose guilt and dread prevent him from being his best self, but she cannot understand this killer. His absence of guilt and dread signal that he is in fact following his truest desires, and they are what drive him to destruction.
We are driven to act. The world acts back. In this fundamental mismatch of expectation and reality is found both the pleasure of self-sabotage and the elated terror of what it means to truly follow one's desire. It could mean death, as we see with so many characters in Fargo, or it could mean a life of reprieve, as we see with the Dude. In any case, it is those who repress their desires who will find themselves in vicious cycles without recourse.
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