Still from A Serious Man, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009.
An Open-Ended Question From An Open-Ended Film:
Imagine, for a moment, that you are Larry Gopnick, the “Serious Man” in the Coen Brothers’ new film by the same name. The time is the 1960’s, and you are a family man and tenure-track physics professor living in an affluent Jewish neighborhood in the suburbs of Minneapolis. You, the Serious Man, believe that you are doing everything right until pretty much everything in your life starts going egregiously wrong: your wife decides to leave you for a family friend, your brother runs into trouble with the law, your 13-year-old son starts stealing from you to buy weed, and a student offers you an exorbitant amount of money for a passing grade (while threatening to sue you) the same week you are up for tenure.
Like Gopnick, you sink into the existential crisis that arises when unexpected external circumstances shatter your faith in self-determination, the belief that it is possible to live the life you want to live DESPITE the maddening chaos of the universe–or at least make that chaos bend gently to your will. Because you can’t even trust science to give you any solid answers (the answer to the mile-long physics equation in the photo above, Gopnick tells his students, is indeterminate), you return to religion seeking some consolation from all this confusion. And religion leaves you feeling even more confused.
The first rabbi you visit is too young to relate to the experience of divorce, and cannot offer any advice. The second ignores your questions completely and rattles off an unrelated tale about a Jewish dentist who discovers some words written in Hebrew on the inside of a non-Jewish patient’s bottom incisors–concluding, unfortunately, that the man never discovered the meaning of this “miracle.” Fed up with all of this nonsense, you succeed in securing an appointment with the oldest and wisest Rabbi of them all–the retired Rabbi Marshak, who is notoriously impossible to get a hold of. After catching a glimpse of the grizzled old sage sitting idly in his study, you are told that “the rabbi is busy.” “He didn’t look busy!” you plead. “He’s thinking,” snaps the Rabbi’s equally curmudgeonly secretary.
Basically, you are living a classic case of Coen Brothers absurdity.
A couple weeks later, your 13-year-old son smokes a giant joint, stumbles into the family synagogue, and–before a crowd of loving onlookers–somehow manages to croak his way through the Torah passage assigned to him for his Bar Mitzvah. Following tears of pride all around, this most undeserving of young men finds himself in the coveted sanctuary of Rabbi Marshak’s personal study, prepared to receive the old man’s post-Bar Mitzvah blessing. Marshak, seen now for the first time by anyone in your family, slips him the cassette player that was confiscated from him in Hebrew School, clears his ancient throat, and utters a few words of wisdom from these guys:
Rabbi Marshak:
When the truth is found. To be lies.
And all the hope. Within you dies.
Then what?
Grace Slick. Marty Balin. Paul Kanta. Jorma…
somethin. These are the membas of the Airplane.
Interesting.
You probably have more important things to worry about following this incident–you are a “serious man,” after all, with a marriage, a brother, and a career to save–but what would you conclude if you were Larry?