The problem is that when he takes life seriously, life doesn't seem to take him seriously. Suddenly, "everything that I thought was something like this turned into another look": a Korean student tried to bribe him to get credits, and the student's parents threatened to prosecute; someone regularly wrote anonymous letters to the school's tenure Hiring a committee to slander him secretly; a record club kept calling him to pay for records that he hadn’t purchased at all; at home, his wife suddenly asked for a divorce. In order to marry "one of his best friends," the children kept talking to each other. After a quarrel, a neighbor forcibly occupied the lawn land, while the hostess of the other family tried to seduce him. The brother who lived in his house was spotted by the police for suspected gambling!
These are common big and small events in life, but when so many events happen at the same time, Larry feels that the foundation of his life is shaken. The problem is not how difficult these things are to deal with, but that he thinks these things happened to him unreasonable. He is a serious man, shouldn't he be taken seriously? Why are these things like God playing him like a clown? Shouldn’t the premise of serious life be that the world itself is also logical: good people deserve rewards, and those who live earnestly and diligently deserve happiness? Why did things that I was sure of suddenly become uncertain? In class, Larry explained to students Schrodinger’s cat paradox and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, using a blackboard full of formulas and reasoning to prove that we can’t exactly know the life and death of the cat in the paradox and the same time. The position and energy of the particle. But the understanding of uncertainty in the theoretical world and the understanding of uncertainty in life are two different things. Larry's understanding of the latter is even worse than that of the Korean student who bribed him: when he found the envelope containing cash, he found that When the Korean student reprimanded and planned to let the school deal with the student in the name of bribing the teacher, the student calmly answered "mere surmise, sir (just guess, sir)": Did I leave this letter only I know, and you are just a guess, so you have no definite evidence to hold me legally responsible.
What is certain in this world? In other words, this world is unreasonable, is there any logic at all? This is a question of a theological nature, related to justice in the world and people's happiness. Larry's expertise (physics) cannot be answered, so can religion answer it?
The battered Larry turned to the rabbis of Judaism to find the answer. There were three rabbis in the movie. The first told him that everything is just a matter of vision. Day after day life wears away people's perception. As long as you can look at things from a different perspective, you can discover new things even from the parking lot you see every day. This is a typical textbook-like answer. The funny thing is that this young rabbi seems to look at this answer with this "new vision", so he seems to be immersed in the ecstasy of discovering the new world; The second rabbi’s answer is a typical mysticism. It is possible for God to imprint the revelation on the back of people’s teeth, but we still don’t know why he did this, so what’s uncertain is what’s uncertain. Our doubts should end in moderation. The third rabbi whom Larry did not see is the spiritual leader of the community. He is already old and immersed in "thinking" every day. He may know the answer to the question, but judging from his performance, even if he ever knew the answer, amnesia It also made him forget everything. The Coen brothers' films did not take these three rabbis "seriously". They were not so much prophets and spiritual leaders as some kind of joking cartoon characters.
Perhaps due to the Jewish community background of the film, many foreign film critics compared Larry's experience in the film with Job's experience in the Old Testament "Job". The protagonists in the two stories did nothing wrong, but bad luck fell on them frequently, and everything that God had given them was now taken away one by one. But I think the difference between the two is still great. In the movie, Larry is not so much respecting God like Job, but rather just adhering to a moral duty. The answer he seeks is not to question God like Job, but to question the logic and rationality of the existence of the world.
The logic and rationality of the world is almost a theme that runs through all the films of the Coen Brothers. In fact, logic and rationality are far from the same thing in the real world. In their acclaimed debut work "Blood Labyrinth", all the characters’ actions have a certain logic and are rational behaviors under certain motives, but the final result is absurd, terrifying, and unreasonable. It can be said that the subsequent works such as "Amazing Cream Bizarre Murder", "Murder of Green Toe", "The Absent Man" and other works continued this theme. Although the story often starts from a bizarre event, the characters' subsequent behavior is always in accordance with A certain logic proceeded, and the final result was almost a tenfold magnification of the original bizarre event, which became greatly unreasonable and extremely absurd. One of the great charms of the Cohen Brothers films lies in this kind of logic and bizarre dialectics.
Unfortunately, in "Serious Man", this charm is greatly diminished. Larry encountered a series of troubles, which shaken his belief in life. However, we don't know why all these things happened to him all of a sudden. The occurrence of a bizarre event is understandable to the audience. However, the gathering of so many unexpected events makes people inexplicable. The most important thing is that the audience cannot feel the mysterious power behind these events. It is at their best. In those movies, this mysterious power may be the greedy animal nature of humans and the underlying rules of the universe. These forces promote the development of events, break through human control, and ultimately lead to the absurdity of the world. In "Serious Man", the outbreak of these events seems like the man's middle-aged crisis: he was only successful on the surface, but life was a mess, but suddenly he realized it one day. At the same time, the American suburban background set in the film in the 1960s makes people suspect that the theme of the film is the critique of middle-class life, and it is connected with third-rate movies like "American Beauty". This is the failure of the Cohen brothers.
If in the previous films of the Coen brothers, the superficial logic and the absurdity behind are hidden behind the events and characters, then in "Serious Man", whether the world is logical or not, what is certain. These two issues are almost directly presented as ideas. In the prologue of the movie, the question of certainty and uncertainty is directly raised: can you be sure that the person who helped you is your friend or just a body occupied by evil spirits? Even when you stabbed him, he still laughed and disappeared into the wind and snow outdoors. Can you be sure that his body will be found on the road tomorrow or that he will come back some night? can not. All the characters in the movie and all the events that happened did not tell you the answer, but the Coen brothers wrote the answer directly at the beginning and the end of the movie. Through the last tornado in the movie, the Coen brothers seem to say that life may have its own laws, but life may still encounter many unreasonable and unreasonable things, just like a tornado in the weather, so people (and movies) (Larry in) How should we face it? The Coen brothers answered this question with the words of the famous Jewish rabbi Rashi with the subtitles at the beginning of the movie: receive with simplicity everything that happens to you (receive with simplicity everything that happens to you)!
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