From Spoof to Supernatural: Coen Brothers’ Eclectic Old West Anthology Film ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ (2018)
Netflix has released The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Western film by Coen brothers, based on the short stories mostly written by them 25 years ago. Their 2007 film, No Country for Old Men, although set in 1980, is considered as a Neo-Western as it has some of the themes and motifs of the Old West. True Grit (2010), starring Jeff Bridges and Matt Demon, was their first Classic Western but it was a remake of the 1969 film with the same name, starring John Wayne, adapted from a Charles Portis novel. Hence it is interesting to look at their new offering which is an anthology of six tales, shown to be from an old illustrated hard-covered book in green colour.
The first one, the title episode, is a parody of the “Singing Cowboy” genre starring Tim Blake Nelson in the role of Buster Scruggs who is wanted dead or alive. This “San Saba Songbird” strums his guitar, singing his ballad and riding on his favourite horse Dan across a land “where distances are great and the scenery monotonous”. It has been shot in New Mexico but the CGI backdrop is Monument Valley! Buster is affable, clean-shaven and clad in impeccable white. He disposes off the bad clad in black in a barroom brawl, slinging his gun. He arrives at “Medicine Hat, a town of many saloons and no churches, many bad men, no sheriff” where frontier rules still hold sway and there is no value for life. Inside the saloon named Frenchman’s Gulch, in a fight around a poker table with Curly Joe, Buster has him killed. He breaks into singing “Surly Joe” and dances to the accompaniment of raucous piano playing as the crowd repeats “Surly Joe” after him. In the eventual quick-draw duel with Joe’s brother, in the desolate main street of the frontier town, Buster wins although shooting Joe’s brother’s fingers is far too excessive even for this over the top episode. Soon Buster has to take on The Kid who enters the town playing a melancholy song on his harmonica. This parody, in general, distances us from the killings and abstracts them to the typical theme of the film, death in the old West. It works as a parody as well as an affirmation of this genre as the episode is a celebration of Buster’s ballad too. The song, “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings” is in the Best Original Song Shortlist for Oscar 2019.
“Near Algodones’, the next segment, also shot in the arid land of New Mexico, continues with the theme of death in the old West, featuring the bank robber (James Franco). It mixes bank robbery and cattle stealing genres with irony. In a setting straight from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, the robber’s attempt to run away with the money is foiled by the bank teller, armoured with pots and pans. Delivered frontier justice by the posse, the robber is shown on horseback below a hanging tree with a noose tied around his neck. Before his execution is carried out, the attack by Comanche warriors eliminates the posse. His horse moves further from the hanging tree to eat the grass on the ground. In a well-executed gag, the robber’s noose tightens as the horse keeps moving away from the tree. The robber is saved by a drover who turns out to be a rustler whose association ironically gets the robber caught for rustling. Discussing this shortest segment even with minimum details will disclose plot points: The robber catches a glimpse of a beauty even though he cannot escape from the noose around his neck this time.
The tone changes from parody and irony to melancholy in the third segment, “Meal Ticket” which is in the wagon genre. A travelling impresario (Liam Neeson) drives around an armless/ leg-less thespian/ orator Harrison (Harry Melling), “The Wingless Thrush”, in his wagon exhibiting his recitation skills in frontier towns. Harrison recites classics such as Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”, the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to dwindling crowds as they drive to remote mountain towns. The impresario replaces him by a hen that can perform basic math as culture doesn’t seem to have much of a place in the rugged West. The fourth segment, “All Gold Canyon”, is in the pioneer genre based on a Jack London story, shot in Colorado as the previous episode. The musician, Tom Waits, plays the gold prospector who hits the motherlode in a virgin valley. With its National Geographic look, this is a celebration of beauty unlike the first two episodes which are typical in stressing the harshness of the landscape. The idyll is disturbed by the prospector’s digging, a young man’s attempt to kill the aged prospector — after the latter has done all the hard work — to appropriate the gold, and its consequence. The prospector has some consideration for other beings when he puts all the eggs back in the nest after seeing the mother owl, taking just one saying how high can a bird count.
Wagon train is the genre of “The Gal Who Got Rattled” which is inspired by a story by Stewart Edward White. Alice Longabaugh (Zoe Kazan in the title role) travels in a wagon train that moves across the prairie along the Oregon trail. There is some prospect of getting married to her brother’s business partner at Oregon, but she loses her brother to cholera on the way. The wagon leaders Billy Knapp (Bill Heck) and Arthur (Grainger Haines) help her by burying the body. Billy starts liking Alice and proposes to her, offering to pay up Alice’s brother’s debt to Matt, the hired boy. This longest and fully realized segment with the tone changing to romantic lyricism is the best one in the film. The nomadic Billy wants to turn a settler in Oregon by marrying Alice and build a home upon the 640 acres which he can claim thanks to the Homestead Act. Shot in the vast landscape of Nebraska Panhandle, apart from the themes of beauty and death, it deals with uncertainty be it due to cholera or attack by native Americans, masculine wagon leaders with physical skills, perils of being a nomad, land ownership etc. Its portrayal of native Americans though is stereotypic.
**Article contains spoilers**
I n the last segment, “The Mortal Remains”, shot in studio, Coen brothers start off with the stagecoach genre and then up the ante by transforming the episode from the realistic mode to the supernatural. Reminiscent of John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), which has different kinds of characters travelling together in the stage, there are five travellers in this episode: the Englishman (Jonjo O’Neill), the Irishman (Brendan Gleeson), the Frenchman (Saul Rubinek), a lady (Tyne Daly) and a fur trapper (Chelcie Ross). After the foreboding song with the line, “Has anybody seen Molly”, sung by the Englishman, the clashing characters in the coach — the trapper, the lady and the Frenchman — break into a heated conversation which causes the lady to develop a fit. As she gasps for breath, the Frenchman tries to stop the coach but the Englishman says that as a policy the coachman will not stop. At this point the stagecoach turns out to be a “Phantom Carriage”, reminiscent of the one seen in the 1921 Swedish film of the same name made by Victor Sjöström. The Irishman too sings a foreboding song with the line “Get six pretty maidens to carry my coffin”. They are ferrying cargo, the Englishman says, referring to the corpse kept on top of the carriage. The duo claims to be reapers/ harvesters of souls as calling them as bounty hunters will be literal. The Englishman tells the group that their usual method is that he distracts people with his stories and then the Irishman “thumps” them. They “help people who have been adjudged to be ripe”. All this unsettles the other three who are unsure of what is in store for them as they arrive at the mysterious hotel in Fort Morgan. Shot in golden yellow, the colour of this segment changes to blue as the night falls giving an eerie effect.
It is rewarding to analyse this last episode in some depth as it is intriguing. Coen brothers might have got the inspiration for this part of the story from Victor Sjöström’s Phantom Carriage (1921), a major film in Swedish cinema. Chaplin called it “the best film I’ve ever seen” and it was supposed to be a major influence on the works of the legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Phantom carriage revolves around an alcoholic husband, David Holm, who is struck on his head with a bottle in a scuffle with his friends just before the clock turns 12 on the new year eve. Theirs is an attempt to take him to a dying Salvation Army sister Edit whose last wish is to speak to him. As the legend goes, the last person to die in a year has to be the coachman of Death’s carriage and collect the soul of everybody who dies the next year. David’s friend Georges, who was the last to die in the previous year, has come to collect David’s soul and hand over the coachman’s duty to him.
The treatment of the episode, “The Mortal Remains”, is subtle. In Victor Sjöström’s Phantom carriage (1921), the coachman is described in the following way: “It is no ordinary driver who holds the reins, for he’s in the service of a strict master named Death”. From this, we can understand that the coachman in the Coen Brothers’ film will not stop because he is in the service of Death! In Sjöström’s film, the coachman is also a reaper of souls apart from driving the carriage but he cannot interact with the travellers inside the coach. Hence Coen brothers might have come up with the idea of taking away the job of reaping of the souls from the coachman and giving it to the two bounty hunters, who are typical characters in Western films. The duo claim that they are ferrying cargo, referring to the corpse lying on top of the carriage. The Englishman says that it will be literal to call them as bounty hunters. They are reapers/ harvesters of souls. We can make out that they are agents of Death like the coachman. The Englishman says that he and the Irishman help people who have been adjudged to be ripe. It’s implied that the time has come for the trapper, the lady and the Frenchman. There is a line in Sjöström’s film: “No living soul rides in that carriage”. We can understand from this that the three are dead souls who are yet to be reaped like David Holm in the Victor Sjöström film although David Holm is aware of who has come to take him. The souls of the three of them will be reaped at Fort Morgan. We can make out this from the last paragraph we are allowed to see before the ‘book’, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is closed in the end: “The trapper, who had spoken so many words and for so long, no longer had use for them. He settled in for a long quiet.”
To sum up from the above discussion, the following ideas might have been inspired by the Sjöström movie:
• The idea of the Phantom carriage, the cart of death
• Coachman as agent of death (as he won’t stop)
• The idea of reaper of souls
• Carrying a dead body that has been reaped
• The implication that the three travellers are dead souls who are going to be reaped.
• Supernatural ambience/ atmosphere
• The blue color in which the evening/ night scenes are shot. In the Sjöström movie the exterior night scenes are tinted in blue. (The day shots are in golden yellow in the film whereas in the Sjöström movie they are tinted in brown.)
The theme of death runs through all the episodes in the film. At some point in the last episode it becomes apparent that there is no living character in it and it is all about death and afterlife.
Bruno Delbonnel, the Director of Photography, has shot the film with its plains and deserts magnificently in digital, evoking the myth of the American West. Delbonnel is known for his visual style in the French film Amelie (2001). Shooting this Western in film with all its effects would have cost much more. Coen brothers preferred Netflix funding as studios are focusing on Marvel comic movies or big action franchise movies. With Netflix funding, it might have been possible to make a revisionist Western in which some of the traditional elements of the Western are changed but this film is in the classic mould despite some variation to it. Yet, this Venice award winner for the Best Screenplay, harking back on Classic Western, is one of the best films of 2018 for its compelling story telling.
