THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:
The Comic Faith of O Brother, Where Art Thou? (Coby Dolloff, 2/02/26, Christ and Pop Culture)
Returning to Everett’s farm, not to find the treasure they sought, but to retrieve his wedding ring, they are met by the bespectacled lawman who has dogged their trail all along. He has prepared nooses, graves—and even a haunting troupe of gravedigging singers.
“But we’s been pardoned! They announced it on the radio!” the three protest. The policeman replies with haunting simplicity: “We don’t have a radio.”
Faced with the impending reality of death, Everett puts up an earnest prayer for salvation. There are no atheists in foxholes.
And, like clockwork, the deus ex-es the machina. Floodwaters come streaming down that engulf both the just and the unjust in a torrent of household furniture and Dapper Dan pomade. Safely afloat a coffin Moby-Dick style, Delmar attempts to point out to Everett that his prayer worked.
But on the other side of peril, Everett is back to rationalizing. The valley was, of course, already scheduled to be flooded by local bureaucrats. It is not God, but modern technology that has saved them. Everett smugly concludes, “Yessir, we’re gonna have us a veritable age of reason.” But then something floats by which leaves both protagonist and viewer with the furrowed brow of recall.
The other cow just dropped. Memory has spoken. It has all come to pass, just as the old prophet Tiresias predicted.
The Coens’ comic masterpiece fits comfortably into the “Christ-haunted American South” of Flannery O’Connor. It muses, alongside Hamlet, “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy!”