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The 2021 film, The Tragedy of Macbeth, marks Joel Coen's first solo project after several decades of collaboration with his brother Ethan. A striking adaptation of Shakespeare's play, the film is also a potent engagement with themes and forms pertinent to naturalism. Such an interpretation derives both from the originating play-which engages at a complex level with notions of fate and fatalism-and from Coen's characteristic preoccupation with determinism, a perennially important component of naturalism. This article begins with a brief survey of the Coen brothers' oeuvre, emphasizing in particular their numerous earlier engagements with naturalistic themes and forms. Two sections then return to the source material, Shakespeare's play, assessing how existing scholarship has considered the complex interweaving of fate and determinism in the originating text and its various performances. A fourth section analyzes Joel Coen's adaptation specifically as an artefact of neonaturalism. A final section discusses the unusually strong emphasis placed on the role of the nobleman Ross in Coen's version and evaluates the particular significance of this for the film's naturalist attributes. Building on the scholarship of critics such as Klaus Schmidt, who has noted the pervasiveness of new naturalist tropes in contemporary visual culture, this article demonstrates the increasing complexity with which such ideas and forms manifest. In the particular case of Coen's Macbeth, I argue that there is a certain hybridity-a typical characteristic of both naturalism and the Coens' previous work-to the way in which naturalism interacts with forms such as noir and tragedy.
The Coens and Naturalism
Interpreting the films of the Coen brothers as naturalist would appear to require little justification. Even a superficial examination of their oeuvre reveals strongly deterministic plotting and a persistent theme of the individual-usually an ostensibly ineffectual white man-overwhelmed by events beyond their control. The brothers' first collaboration, Blood Simple (1984), is a low budget neo-noir, where the plot hinges on repeated misunderstandings between the four main characters, one of whom is played by Joel Coen's wife and frequent collaborator, Frances McDormand (who plays Lady Macbeth in the film under consideration).1 McDormand's Abby, in Blood Simple, is an unusual femme fatale in that while she is surrounded by male desire (and deaths), her agency and thus her responsibility for these events is limited. She is...