A Key for Understanding "A Serious Man"

I have heard two kinds of responses to the latest Coen movie.  1) misunderstanding of the film and attempting an interpretation which is off base and 2) confession of total befuddlement.

Here it is. The point of the movie is Uncertainty, from beginning to end. I am certain of it. Any theological talk is just more stuff that we are uncertain about. We are uncertain about virtually everything in the movie, and the Coens are showing the frustration that comes from uncertainty, not trying to answer any questions, not relieving the tension, not resolving the story. They are just letting us stew in uncertainty in an entertaining, movie-world, story. A Jewish sort-of response to uncertainty is, "just accept it", and that's all we are left with.


Here are some of the ways that this theme is presented.

1. Larry Gopnick is a physics teacher. In the two classroom scenes, he is describing first the so-called Schrodinger's Cat experiment and then later Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. These are well known problems in physics that rest on uncertainty.
2. His brother Arthur's "Mentaculus" is a probability map of the universe. It apparently works because Arthur uses it to win at gambling, but he is caught and, combined with a sodomy charge, gets in trouble with the law.
3. I probably should start with this: the opening scene with the couple speaking Yiddish and the old man said to be a ghost (dybbuk). At the end of this scene, the viewer is left with the question - was the old man a dybbuk or not? It was never resolved. Has God cursed them (as the woman said), or not? It seems at the end, that yes, whether he was a dybbuk or not, God has cursed them because either they are visited by the dead, or she has stabbed and possibly killed a great man in their community. Either way, they are ruined. The movie never comes back to it. You the viewer are left uncertain about it.
4. The opening quote by Rashi, even before the scene with the Yiddish couple, says "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you."
5. Words to the song that shows up a few times: "When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, dont you want somebody to love..." Larry says "...a bolt from the blue...everything I thought was one way turns out to be another." Uncertainty again.
6. In his argument with Clive over the bribe money we first hear that actions have consequences - not just physics. Morally. Clive says, "mere surmiser. Very uncertain." There it is again.
7. Clive's father confronts Larry in the driveway with a humorous no-win lawsuit situation that ends with "accept the mystery."
8. There is talk of morality, yet the phrase is mentioned in various contexts "but I didn't do anything."
9. None of the three rabbis are able to help him, though the first two at least offer mild "be positive" advice similar to the quote from Rashi above.  But the point is that theologians don't have answers, and no longer ask the questions themselves, and encourage people not to get uptight about the questions.
10. Arthur "never complains" we hear early in the film. Larry wonders if its wrong to complain about paying for Sy Ableman's funeral. Toward the end, Arthur can hold it no longer, and bursts into a torrent of complaining that Hashem has never given him anything. This is a motif, but doesn't really illuminate uncertainty.
11. The frustrating story of the Goy's Teeth - there is no point. These questions are like a toothache - you feel it for a while, then it goes away. This is the second rabbi. Larry wants answers definitively but he's told God doesn't owe us answers. The rabbi is OK with this, but Larry is not. Perhaps his own study of uncertainty should inform him.
12. Can any one doubt that the Coen's smoke pot?
13. The tenure committee "doesn't make moral judgments".
14. Even at the end, though you may strongly suspect things, you dont actually know what happens:
• dont know if the tornado killed everybody
• dont know if the teacher got the door unlocked before the tornado came
• dont know if Fagel ever got his money back
• dont know what the doctor found - he just wanted Larry to come in to talk about it
• dont know who was sending the anonymous letters to the tenure committee (they continued to come in after Sy died)
• dont know if Arthur was really guilty of sodomy
• dont know where the property line actually is on Larry's yard (the attorney who was going to illuminate it died of a heart attack before he could tell what he found)

I think the Coen's are full of questions and dont pretend to have any answers.

Afraid

• I am not afraid to think differently than everyone else outside my own community, and occasionally than those within my community
• I am not afraid to seem old fashioned, quirky, out-of-step or mixed up, though I value my community enough to adjust if those I respect the most tell me I should
• I am not afraid to assert that it is modern sensibilities that are wrong, not my old-fashioned ways
• I am not afraid to make my dog stay outside during the afternoon or overnight, or to throw a shoe at the cat if it wont stop yowling.
• I am not afraid to have a counter-cultural home where the TV is rarely on, where we sit down to dinner together many nights of the week, where famous paintings are on the walls and we sometimes read the Bible at the dinner table
• I am not afraid to drive an older car and be perceived as one of those guys that just does not smell right in the nostrils of SUV drivers
• I am not afraid to tell my children No on occasion to sleepovers, late nights out, immoderate expenditures, too-sloppy clothing, leisure time on the computer, carousing at the mall, certain movies

• I am afraid of appearing to be a dotard, a profligate or a buffoon before my kids, or just out of touch, too set in his ways, unable to consider new ideas
• I am afraid of standing firm so long that I alienate those I love
• I am afraid that my car will break down on the side of the road because I waited too long to get the transmission fluid changed
• I am afraid of the Beast.  By that I mean the vast political/economic system that eats those critters who wander or straggle out into daylight too far behind the rest - those who run afoul of the powerful or have too much financial exposure and miss one payment or fail to fill out some required form and find themselves unable to reenter because of perceived delinquency and a record with a red flag in some computer marking him a risk.
• I am afraid of seductive influences that lure my kids away into sensuality, self-seeking, cynicism, permissiveness, relativism, mammon

Man, the human

Things that demonstrate that man is still human:

1. using utensils to eat real food. Or using tools of any sort
2. handwriting and arithmetic, and using them to write a letter to your mother or a friend, or calculate the perimeter of your backyard
3. locomotion by any organic medium
4. making pies
5. making music with hands, feet or breath, music that does not involve programming
6. reading words on a page
7. getting a hair cut
8. elimination
9. looking at a piece of good art, waiting there patiently until you begin to get it, having the lights come on, noticing things you didn't see at first, feeling thanks in your bosom toward the artist, coming away with something new in your mind about human existence.
10. throwing a ball with a dog in an open field, even if the dog doesn't bring the ball back, or throwing a shoe at a cat
11. drinking water. Or other real drinks like beer.
12. burning a candle, or burning anything for that matter
13. crying, trembling, hiding, greeting strangers on the sidewalk, wishing there was someone around, 
14. becoming familiar with the stars and trying to get your mind around them in a kind of embrace but ultimately finding you are unable to do so, yet feeling their greatness and your earth-boundedness
15. finding the harmony in your head to a note played by strange tone you hear somewhere but cant tell where its coming from; humming the note out loud, like the two-notes in a train whistle
16. drying off with a nice towel after a shower and shaving with some kind, any kind, of razor, it doesn't matter what kind, and combing your hair into a nice part and facing others having tended your own garden, not just wandering into public like an animal
17. I'm sure there are others. Why not leave a 'comment' with your own additions? 

The cage

Below is a link to a new story. It may be the best thing I have written: I only say that to get you to read it.

The Cage - a Faulknerian exercise.