Fargo-ing Reality: The Coen Brothers’ Look at American Myth

From offbeat comedies to Oscar-winning dramas and postmodern westerns, Joel and Ethan Coen have created one of the most distinctive bodies of work in American cinema. Their stories of ordinary people whose lives spiral into extraordinary chaos have provided darkly comic explorations of fate, morality, and human folly in films. In this course, we focus on how the two brothers have deconstructed the American myth without ever fully escaping its pull, using inventive storytelling, genre pastiche, and metacinematic references to hold both impulses in tension. Films include: Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018).