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WOF TV > Video Commentaries

Trackback URL: http://www.wordonfire.org/trackback/fa9274eb-f513-4e8c-8baf-59fca8f4823f/Fr--Barron-comments-on--A-Serious-Man--(SPOILERS).aspx

Comments

Tristan Macdonald

A very interesting review, Fr. Barron! I will have to watch the movie.

Speaking of the Book of Job, I was wondering if you watch the television show LOST. It is not a perfect show, and it has lost its coherence at times, but it is permeated by Catholic themes and images.

SPOILER ALERT for LOST!

The storyline of the character Benjamin Linus in particular is fascinating from a Catholic standpoint, since he is a clear Job figure. He loses his family, his land, and his health, and he does so in the name of the God figure Jacob. In the season 5 finale, a satanic figure who debates Jacob about human depravity tempts Ben into thinking that Jacob cannot be just. Ben eventually meets Jacob with all of his questions and doubts, and Jacob's interrogative response mirrors God's interrogative responses to Job. What transpires is a brilliantly written and acted scene that blends the Book of Job, the Passion, and overtones of Flannery O'Connor (one of whose books Jacob is seen to be reading in the episode). I think you would appreciate that storyline.

As a side-note, the sacrament of confession serves as a motif in the show. Several characters are Catholic and are seen confessing, and the satanic figure sometimes forces characters into an inverted ritual of confession. This figure even impersonates a priest to manipulate one character into confessing in the season 3 episode "The Cost of Living", and it later forces Ben to confess in the season 5 episode "Dead is Dead". Because the ritual's confessor is evil and has no moral authority, Ben's penance enslaves him further to his sin. However, in the most recent episode of LOST, season 6's "Dr. Linus", there is a profoundly moving scene of confession in which Ben confesses to a servant of Jacob (who therefore has authority) and receives grace. I highly recommend the show to anyone with Catholic sensibilities, and Michael Emerson's performance as Ben is one of the best on television (he has even won an Emmy and been nominated for a Golden Globe for it).

3/15/2010 8:15:50 PM

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Mark Waters

Response to Father Barron’s “Comments on A Serious Man”
Perhaps serendipity, perhaps coincidence. Last night my wife and I watched A Serious Man. Today I find Father Barron's commentary. It hadn't occurred to me to see it as a contemporary film interpretation of the Job story. But, as Fr. points out, the parallels are clear and, of course, the Coen brothers' penchant for such interpretations can be seen in their earlier movie Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou, an adaptation of Homer's Odyssey.

There was, however, one incongruent aspect between the film and commentary’s retelling of the story. It involves the pivotal scene where Rabbi Marshak returns the transistor radio to Larry’s newly bar mitzvahed son, Danny. As Father Barron indicates, The Rabbi quotes the opening two lines from "Somebody to Love": "When the truth is found to be lies/And all the hope within you dies." Conspicuously, however, the rabbi does not recite the chorus. (He also replaces the original "joy" with "hope"). Noticeably, at this moment, the song’s invocation of love is absent. What we're left with here is not hope, joy, truth, love—all things indicative of God—but their absence. In the words of Rabbi Marshak, “Then what?”

Consider the movie's ending. Larry has no marital, familial, financial, legal, or professional peace or even certainty. His dreams are not inspired but tortured. And as a final act, he compromises any remaining integrity by accepting a bribe from a student. When the film cuts next to the familiar Hebrew school. Nothing seems to have changed from the movie's outset. Though the son has ritualistically become a man (a ceremony he stumbled through while stoned on pot) and though he was told by the elder rabbi to "be a good boy," he is still doing precisely what he was doing before: ignoring his teacher, secretly listening to music during class, and trying to pay off his drug debt.

Given such cir*****stances, the movie doesn’t seem to recommend or prescribe God or love as antidote to a world poisoned with uncertainty and absurdity. Instead, it seems to be working in the negative by providing a repellent, dark portrait of a world without God, a world that through technological distraction and ideological delusion has grown so insulated from God that it can’t understand God even when he miraculously communicates in perfect Hebrew on the back of human teeth. Even when Larry deliberately seeks answers through his Jewish faith, he seems only to become more removed from God. He meets one rabbi whose idea of the divine is little more than a Hallmark card, another one who seems almost flippantly obtuse to Larry’s spiritual crisis, and a third who simply won’t be bothered with counseling anyone. Significantly, this last rabbi, Rabbi Marshak, is revered for his wisdom by Jews and gentiles alike but notorious for his reclusiveness. He speaks only with the newly bar mitzvahed boys. We see him for the first and last time when he meets with Danny immediately after the boy’s Torah reading. The meeting is private, deep within the rabbi’s cave-like office. But rather than a divine, prophetic announcement—one we anticipate, given the rabbi’s re*****tion—what he offers is mundane uncertainty: "When the truth is found to be lies/And all the hope within you dies? . . . Then what?"

I agree that the movie is a modern telling of the Job story, but it seems to be an ironic telling, one ending not with faith and redemption but with meaninglessness. If Job’s story conveys the primacy and constancy of God—his undeniable reality—then Larry’s story conveys God’s conspicuous absence. During Danny’s private interview with Marshak, the rabbi names all but one of the members of Jefferson Airplane. In this scene, the boy is not comforted by divine truth, by spiritual answers, but by the rabbi’s acknowledgment, even endorsement, of the aimless, confused secular world that he has embraced all along. During the bar-mitzvah ceremony, Rabbi Nachtner handed Danny a Kiddush cup to symbolize his acceptance into the community of faith, but in this final ceremony, this other initiation, he is given back his transistor radio, a symbolic act that seems to recant the earlier one. Where Danny awkwardly accepted the Kiddush cup, an emblem of sacred faith and community, he now comfortably embraces the radio, an emblem of secular disbelief and detachment. The interview with Rabbi Marshak symbolically sanctions a nihilistic life of mindless television programs and soulless uncertainty principles.

I too admire the Coen brothers, but perhaps their moviemaking has evolved. In Fargo, officer-mother Marge Gunderson brought order out of confusion. Evil was checked by good. There was a different moral vision in that much earlier film. Arguably, even a movie like The Big Lebowski projects a world where benign human affinity outweighs human greed and animosity. But movies like No Country for Old Men and Burn After Reading provide much bleaker views, ones that seem discouraged, ones where human greed and violence go unchecked and are portrayed literally and symbolically as unstoppable forces. But where these films can more clearly be understood as cautionary tales, A Serious Man resists such a reading. It does contain the demise of the central character, but unlike a cautionary tale, its protagonist’s plight seems arbitrary rather than punitive. Perhaps the point is to illustrate the degree of our detachment. Perhaps we are so separated from God and even from each other—family members, friends, and neighbors (all relationships in the movie seem stunted, distant)—that there is simply nothing we can do. The view of the film seems utterly bleak. Choices seem to have no consequence. Almost all news is bad. God is nowhere to be found. Larry is the ironic Job. For him there is only the final phone call announcing his mortal fate. There is no vindication from God. Like Danny and his classmates, we are left exposed to the vortex. There is no shelter in the basement of the synagogue. Whether this is all a warning or just a frank statement of meaninglessness, well, even this seems uncertain.

5/16/2010 9:24:34 PM

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