Be a good boy

The meaning of stories about meaningless suffering

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

The 2000s were not a great decade for Hollywood. Many major filmmakers had a wobble, or worse, they entered a terminal decline, as though the whole of American culture was shook. (What shook it? Rhymes with final heaven.)

Even, or especially, the Coen brothers. Empire magazine’s recurring encomium used to be they’d never made a bad film. Till the 2000s their only real flop with mixed reviews was The Hudsucker Proxy — now highly reappraised: it “looks better and smarter every year.” In fact the late 90s was their critical moment in the sun, with the one-two of Fargo and The Big Lebowski, each a culmination of a mode from their previous work: regional noir and the silly sublime. Then, starting with 2003’s Intolerable Cruelty, the sun dims.

True, No Country for Old Men won them Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars in 2007. But coming after The Ladykillers and before Burn After Reading, it’s like the esteem for No Country is the droplet heaved into the air by the troughs in the water either side. (I myself think Burn After Reading is by no means a gurn too far but a ripe send-up of national-security pretension; and as for No Country I can still remember the…