Pin Dudeism: A Serious Dude

Its 3AM at the Duder Bar. Ron and Nancy asked me to close up, so I'm sitting here alone in the back corner booth making some notes about a movie I saw recently...the Coen Bros. (as in Ringling Bros. ?) latest...A Serious Man . I am also expecting a knock on the door. Two old friends, Diego and Lucia, asked if they could stop by after closing and use the Duder dance floor for tango practice...big contest coming up. They are not practicing at home because she kicked him out the other night. Should make for an interesting session...

...anyhow...some Pin Dudeist thoughts on the movie...

As I mentioned in an review I wrote of Cathleen Falsani's The Dude Abides, I sometimes think the Coen brothers should be named the Koan brothers. Their movies, or at least parts of their movies have always seemed like zen koans to me.

This is especially true of A Serious Man. Our hero, Larry Gopnik, a physics professor, is first seen, giving a lecture on Schrodinger's Paradox...the notorious alive/dead cat...presented, as is his proof of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, on an immense blackboard filled with scrawled equations. Riddles "clarified"...right? "Proofs"...right? Hilarious...visually overwhelming and baffling to most in the audience (and classroom) I think...at least to me...

I hear Diego and Lucia screaming at each other as they approach the rear door of the bar. There is not a knock on the door...there is a banging. I open the door. They both greet me in a perfunctory fashion, place a boom box on a table near the dance floor, turn it on...still engrossed in their arguing...and proceed to tango. As they move, the arguing becomes bickering, then ceases completely, replaced by intense looks into each others angry eyes. If they dance like this in the contest, how can they lose?

Back to the movie...let the cognitive dissonance work its magic...

Larry Gopnik is introduced "explaining" a famous paradox. Then he goes home to another set of riddles. Larry's wife wants to leave him for an unctuous, weasel-tongued new ("Is his poor wife cold yet? Three years?") widower and Larry has no idea why.

His son Danny (a true Dude in the making, as we will see)...days away from his bar mitzvah, is lost in a pot fog. Larry's unemployed and very twisted brother, Arthur, is crashing on his couch. And...his next door neighbor, Mrs. Samsky, whose husband travels, is tormenting him with her nude backyard sunbathing...which he discovers while on the roof adjusting his TV antenna so that Danny can watch F Troop with clarity...the prelude to the devolution...

Are these the baroque machinations of a trickster God? A latter day replay of Job's soap opera? A bad, carnivalesque secondary theater production staged by Larry David and art directed by Diane Arbus?

Odd twists and turns...a lot of ins and outs and what-have-yous...crop up at Larry's university as things move along on down the road. He's up for tenure and the tenure committee is receiving letter after anonymous letter questioning Larry's moral turpitude. On top of that (here comes a dash of Asian thought to flavor the stew folks), one of his students, a Korean young man named Clive Park, apparently leaves an unmarked envelope containing three grand on Larry's desk in an attempt to bribe Larry not to fail him. When Larry questions this, Clive's father shows up at his house and threatens to sue...(from the screenplay)...

Larry turns to Mr. Park.
Larry:...I, uh...See, if it were defamation there would have to be someone I was defaming him to, or I...All right, I...let's keep it simple. I could pretend the money never appeared. That's not defaming anyone.
Mr. Park: Yes. And passing grade.
Larry: Passing grade.
Mr. Park: Yes.
Larry: Or you'll sue me.
Mr. Park: For taking money.
Larry: So...he did leave the money.
Mr. Park: This is defamation
Larry stares at him.
Larry: Look. It doesn't make sense. Either he left the money or he didn't...
Mr. Park: Please. Accept mystery.

Yes Larry...the mystery, indeed. Seeking answers to all of these doings, which are getting "curiouser and curiouser", as Wavy Gravy would say, Larry seeks the advice of his rabbi and winds up having to consult with the junior rabbi instead, who admonishes Larry to..."Look at the parking lot, Larry"...a phrase which may work its way into our lexicon in much the same way as...well...shush...listen to me going on...better not go there just yet...

Anyhow...what the rabbi means is that Larry is looking at his life, as he would the mundane parking lot outside, with tired, world weary eyes. He asks Larry to imagine himself a visitor (from a primitive tribe?), someone who isn't familiar with autos and such, "somebody still with a capacity to wonder, someone with a fresh perspective...Things aren't so bad. Look at the parking lot, Larry."

Larry finally gets to talk with a higher level rabbi who tells him the tale of a dentist's weird discovery in a patient's mouth...the letters spelling "help me" in Hebrew engraved on the inside of the patient's lower teeth...and its aftermath...after awhile the dentist stopped worrying about what it meant...shaggy dogs continue to bark. Still not satisfied with the answers he is getting to his "What the fuck is happening here?" question, he tries to talk to the wisest rabbi in town who refuses to see him because...as his snide, puffy and aged secretary informs him...the rabbi is busy...thinking.

Not wanting to be left out of the party, synchronicity now comes stumbling down the road in the form of simultaneous car crashes...one involving Larry, one involving his wife's lover. The other guy is killed and Larry's wife insists that Larry pay for the funeral. Onward...

Bar mitzvah day arrives and Larry's son, Danny, is stoned. He makes it through the ceremony and is escorted away for the final step in the process...an audience with the oldest and wisest of the rabbis...the one who refused to see Larry. The boy trembles as the old man looks up at him and speaks slowly...

"When the truth is found to be lies/And all the joy within you dies/Don't you want somebody to love."...then turns on the portable tape recorder that had been confiscated from the boy in class at Hebrew school. Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane...Danny's favorite band (the young Dude's Creedence?)...fill the room and the old rabbi smiles. Wisdom has been passed, once again, from old to young...

And so...is the young, new Dude able to chill? Not quite over yet folks. Back at the university, Larry finds out that he probably has been granted tenure. He also decides to do things the Korean way and take the money Clive left...to pay a criminal attorney now needed to keep his brother out of jail, actually...but that's a part of the story I won't divulge. Don't want to ruin every surprise for those of you who haven't seen the movie yet. Things seem to be looking up. The phone rings. It is Larry's doctor telling him that he has gotten the X-rays back...another detail I left out...and can Larry come in for a personal consultation immediately. No, it cannot be dealt with over the phone. Larry stumbles out of his office...

In the meantime at young Dude's school a storm approaches. The teacher gets a tornado warning and is told to take the students to the storm shelter next door. Outside, we watch as the teacher cannot get the door to the storm shelter unlocked. The tornado bears down as Danny, oblivious, tries to pay off an old pot debt...

Fade to black...and more black? Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear eats you pardner. Take comfort in knowing that young Danny, the designated new Dude, will probably be bounced around a little, but just as probably will roll on out of this OK...to eat the bear another day. And abide...