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THE COEN BROTHERS: INTERVIEWS William Rodney Allen, editor. University Press of Mississippi, 2006. 208 pages; $20.00
AMUSE THEMSELVES
Critics are wont to see a great deal of coded meaning in Ethan and Joel Coen's meticulously framed films. In The Big Lebowski (1998), The Guardian took the madcap troupe of German pornographers in black trench coats as a comment on fascism. In Miller's Crossing (1990), the hat blowing in the wind signified a deep recurrent theme for Positif, whose interviewer pressed the Coen brothers for an explanation. They readily assented that the image represents a hat blown by the wind. That it obliged their aesthetic sensibilities explains any deeper significance. Nothing more.
The Coens are decidedly not purveyors of political commentary or hidden meaning. They simply seek to amuse themselves. They made Fargo (1996) thinking that "about three people will end up seeing it, but it'll be fun for us," said Joel. As The Coen Brothers: Interviews makes plain, fun, for the Coens, means never making the same picture twice as they allude to their favorite writers and movies in outlandishly idiosyncratic ways. For Miller's Crossing, which they termed a "shameless rip-off of Dashiell Hammett, they created the "Thompson jitterbug" montage, a danse macabre propelled by...