Thursday, December 20, 2018

Easter Eggs in Coen Bros. "Ballad of Buster Scruggs"

Netflix has released a new full length Coen Brothers movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.   I'm not a Coen Brothers groupie - I can remember when Blood Simple came out in the mid-80s, and I loved Fargo (and Raising Arizona and Barton Fink), but other films like Miller's Crossing I could take or leave.

Buster Scruggs has grown on me.  I wasn't impressed by the idea when I first head it.  Or by the trailer.  I kind of dully downloaded it for an airplane trip, and even on first viewing I thought it was a lot of clever-and-craft but maybe not that enjoyable.

Best Ten Lists

Along the way, I've now seen most of the film several times and I find it fascinating now.  National Board of Review named it one of the Ten Best Films of 2018.

Six Chapters, Six Genres

The movie contains six chapters, all set in the Old West and with styles varying from comedy to fantasy to realism to ghost story.   The six Western genres are:
  1. The singing cowboy.
  2. The bank robbery.
  3. The traveling entertainment show.
  4. The lone prospector.
  5. The pioneers on a wagon train west.
  6. Stagecoach, bringing together unexpected travelers.
Easter Eggs and Tidbits

Below I've pulled together some callbacks and Easter Eggs, including from Entertainment Weekly and Reddit, here and here.  Note - not much plot is here, but I haven't avoided spoilers.
  • The opening theme music is Streets of Laredo; in the last segment, a character sings a funereal song to the same melody. 
    • Streets of Laredo is also the closing-credits music.
  • Both the first chapter and sixth chapter contain characters breaking into song.
  • The well known historical lyrics of the song Cool Clear Water include a horse named Dan.  
    • Buster Scruggs opens the movie by singing Cool Clear Water, and his horse is named Dan.
    • In Chapter 2, we have the opposite character, a bank robber dressed in black head to toe; his horse is named...Timmy.
  • The French card player in the first chapter - whom the camera focuses on several times for no clear reason - is a younger man who will be seen again at 70 years old in the final chapter, the stagecoach.  But you might not realize this on first viewing.
  • When Buster shoots the gambler in the second saloon, after the three shots, we hear a coin spinning down to a stop.   After a couple seconds, the gambler tumbles to the floor, and we once again hear...a coin spinning down to a stop.
  • The third segment contains a counting chicken; in the fourth segment, a character asks, "How high can a bird count?"   
  • Having a legless man recount the Ozymandias poem (about a legless statue; in the third segment, the entertainer), is one of the most bizarre images in recent film.
  • There are fine details hidden in the set design.  
    • The six filmed stories are presented like the coming-to-life of chapters in a book.  Intercut we momentarily see the first and last page of each chapter; only readable on freeze-frame, the text pages can add interesting color.
    • In the first chapter, Buster is dealt "The Dead Man's Hand," supposedly the same set of cards that were the last dealt to Wild Bill Hickok.   
    • In the Stagecoach segment, or ghost story, the travelers arrive at a hotel which has an angel left of the door and a devil right of the door.  But they're glimpsed only for a moment.
    • When the stagecoach arrives at the Hotel, the twilight buildings opposite are "clearly just shells" although you have to watch several times to be convinced.  
  • Actors from where?  Brendan Gleeson, a bounty hunter in the sixth chapter, was a lead in "In Bruges."  The jibbering banker, played for laughs in Chapter 2, is Stephen Root, revered as goofy Milton in "Office Space."  (Root also plays Michael Hader's low-rent crime boss in HBO's Barry and a Harvard Law prof in On the Basis of Sex.)  The grizzled Trapper in Chapter 6, Chelcie Ross, has a long resume' including Basic Instinct, Major League, and Hoosiers.  Zoe Kazan (as Brave Pioneer Woman) is granddaughter of legendary director Elia Kazan.
  • By far the biggest star in the cast, with the grandest stage voice, is Liam Neeson, who is given a fifteen minute nearly non-speaking role.
  • Four different characters are shot in the middle of the forehead.  
    • Two gunslingers and the Singing Cowboy in Chapter 1; the heroine in Chapter 5.
  • Both a saloon hooligan in Chapter 1 and the prospector in Chapter 4 are shot through, but "the bullet doesn't hit nothin' vital" in either case.
  • In the ghost story, the woman several times reverses her speech in describing her husband as "is" or "was."  Also in the ghost story, a metaphysical debate on human nature circles three or four times to rest on the same debate point:  "People are like ferrets."  "People are not like ferrets."
  • As the film closes, the stagecoach driver rides off with the characters' luggage, at high speed in the direction he'd come from, but the characters have other things to worry about by that time.  The Frenchman, the last to enter the ghostly hotel, does so finally with shoulders up, confidence, and a sharp tap on his hat.


____

Part Two - Tidbits That Didn't Make The List Above

Buster Numerology
  • There are four references to France:
    • French card player in Chapter 1
    • Frenchman's Gulch western town in Chapter 1
    • Story about prior bank robber "from France" in Chapter 2
    • Recurrent French card player (now older) in Chapter 6
  • There are two references to Greek mathematics:
    • Buster's methods "might be downright Archimedean" in Chapter 1
    • Chicken is "Peckin' Pythagorean" in Chapter 3
Chapter Timing...


To Learn More...
  • Wikipedia here.  
    • IMDB here.   
    • Reviews are easy to find via Google; an especially interesting one by John Podhoretz at Weekly Standard, here.
  • Buster - Tim Blake Nelson - on Marc Moran WTF, December 3, 2018, here.  
    • Tim enjoys Hebrew and Latin and majored Phi Beta Kappa in Classics at Brown (1986). 
  • Joel and Ethan Coen on Terri Gross Fresh Air, November 19, 2018, here.
  • Two articles on the photography and CGI - Variety here, Art of VFX here.
  • Youtube review, from Discarded Imaging - MUBI, see it here.
Closing Tidbits

German Dub of Old West Language.  I'm a lifelong German hobbyist; the soundtrack is dubbed in a number of languages including German.  In Chapter 6 you can learn the German word for bounty hunter is "Kopfgeldjaeger" - head-money-hunter.  Also tricky when you think about it, they have to try to convey the elevated, odd, quasi-Shakespearean speech across all the dubbed translations.

Radio Play.  If you've seen the video once, one chapter, the sixth or Stagecoach chapter, is interesting to listen to as audio-only, like a radio play.

Midnight Caller.  Chapter 6 we hear the beginning of a ghost story, The Midnight Caller.  In the earlier Coen Brothers movie, True Grit, a character offers to tell the Midnight Caller story, but never gets started.  I've seen Buster commenters cite to a Midnight Caller described at Luke 11:5-13, but it seems irrelevant to me.  (in Luke: Man asks his friend for bread at midnight; asked to go away; asks again; gets the bread, hence, "Ask and you shall receive.")

Callbacks Across Films: Shot in the Middle of the Forehead.  Miller's Crossing ends with John Turturro shot in the middle of the forehead; this happens four times in Buster Scruggs, as noted earlier.    Character names are shared between True Grit and Chapter 5, The Girl Who Got Rattled.

Little Callbacks:  Dead or Alive.  In Chapter 1, Buster holds up a poster that he's wanted, "Dead or Alive."  The bounty hunter repeats this phrase in the Stagecoach, Chapter 6.

Art of Minor Characters.  For a short Youtube video on the Coens' art of creating the finest minor characters, including those in Buster Scruggs, here.

Professor Betjeman.  In the final chapter, the woman is married to a Dr. Betjeman, a noted Chataqua speaker on morals.  The 1970s Poet Laureate of the U.K. was John Betjeman.  See a statue of him at Paddington Station.


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