tion or historiography might dismiss the past as casually as the mature
writer Richard Ford or the maturing athlete Clint Mathis. More often, post-
modernism engages and questions history with a wit and improvisation
resembling Mathis’s flamboyant play. Which brings me again to the bril-
liant work of a pair of Minnesotans and to a poetically imagined historical
southern landscape.
The brothers Coen, Ethan and Joel, have been making what I would call
comic regional films for years—for example, about the sentimental work-
ing classes of the Southwest inRaising Arizona, about southern California
slacker culture inThe Big Labowsky, and most famously, about maddeningly
bland yet redemptively persistent Nordic midwesterners (‘‘You betcha!’’) in
Fargo. Finally, early in , the Coens brought forth a southern version,
O Brother, Where Art Thou?which is more historical than their previous re-
gionals—and, one might add, allegorical, since the script is ‘‘inspired by
The Odyssey, by Homer.’’ The scene is the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta during the
s, high age of the ‘‘American Congo,’’^2 when tiny white minorities co-
erced enormous black majorities in cotton fields and on chain gangs; when
Dixie demagogues roused the rednecks with oratorical vacuity and fiddle
tunes; when the legendary Robert Johnson, having exchanged his soul for
virtuoso guitar licks at a Delta crossroads, riffed and yowled in smoky juke
joints; and when publicity-hungry rural outlaws roared over the country-
side in V- Fords, sticking up banks, exchanging heavy fusillades with the
cops, and providing witty summaries to the press.O Brotheroffers bits of
all this and more—a Klan ceremony, for instance, that resembles the over-
ture to ‘‘Springtime for Hitler’’ in Mel Brooks’sThe Producers. There is even
a public works project typical of the s: a new dam will flood a hidden
‘‘treasure’’ sought by the film’s three hapless protagonists. And the Delta’s
low, flat profile itself figures large throughout, conferring a sultry, danger-
ous verisimilitude. Except the summer outdoors does seem a bit yellower
and mellower than searing-white reality.
O Brother’s landscape is really amondo bizarroin which almost every-
thing is wrong. The film opens with a chain-gang scene of black men mak-
ing large rocks into small ones beside a dusty road. Then three white guys,
just escaping, pop up, and we follow their wacky odyssey thereafter. A
blind, elderly black man (The Oracle, a likely representative of Homer
himself ) appears memorably but briefly. Robert Johnson—here rendered
‘‘Tommy Johnson’’—accompanies the escapees’ vocal group, The Soggy
Bottom Boys, as the only persistent African American character in a very
Afro place and time. None of Johnson’s or his contemporaries’ blues are