In a darkened cinema two escaped convicts seek a few minutes of respite from the hijinks of recent days. Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney) and Delmar O’Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson) are just settling in to the screening of the 1933 musical comedy Myrt and Marge when the bottom door of the cinema opens, a whistle blows, and a line of men in chains marches in. The chain gang sit a couple of rows behind them. As Everett and Delmar shrink into their seats to hide from their bosses, they hear someone whispering behind them.
It turns out to be Pete Hogwallop (John Tuturro), their friend and accomplice, who was caught on the run and returned to the chain gang. After torture and the threat of hanging, Pete confesses that the three escapees had been trying to reach the cabin where Everett had supposedly buried a treasure of $1.2 million. Pete whispers an urgent message to his friends, over and over, until they pay attention:
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“Do not seek the treasure.”
This line, from O Brother, Where Art Thou?, released 25 years ago, captures the anti-capitalist sentiment at the heart of some of the Coen Brothers’ most iconic movies: Fargo (1996) The Big Lebowski (1998), No Country For Old Men (2007) and Burn After Reading (2008). In each of these movies the pursuit of treasure, usually in the form of stolen, blackmailed or imaginary money, leads to a trail of chaos, death and destruction for their, mostly likeable, protagonists.
Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) has his wife kidnapped so he can use the ransom to pay off unspecified debts. The Dude (Jeff Bridges) seeks compensation for his soiled rug. Everett lies about the existence of treasure to break free from his chain gang. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) retrieves a suitcase of drug money abandoned in the desert. Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) and Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) stumble upon what they think is a classified CD and use it to bribe a retired CIA agent. All believe the “treasure” will make their lives better, but few make it through the hunt unscathed. The implicit, and often very explicit, message of the Coen Brothers is: there’s no such thing as easy money and if there was it would fuck you up.
“What you got ain’t nothin’ new. This country’s hard on people,” says Ellis (Barry Corbin) to his nephew Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), in one of the final scenes from No Country. Ellis counsels Bell, who tries to make sense of the trail of carnage that started as a shoot-out between narcos but spiralled out to the largest body count of any Coen Brothers movie: 35. But Ellis could be speaking to any of the protagonists from these five movies.
As we journey from Depression-era Mississippi through 1980s Texas, to the post-cold war optimism of LA and Minnesota, and end up in a prosperous 2007 Washington just before the bubble bursts, all our protagonists face similar financial woes: Jerry Lundegard has accrued an astronomical debt of unknown origin; Bunny Lebowski owes unspecified sums to a “known pornographer”, and both Pete and Delmar’s family have lost their land to the “foreclosing sons of bitches” at The Bank. Meanwhile Vietnam veteran Llewelyn is barely scraping by as a welder, and The Dude doesn’t seem to have a job at all.
The Coens’ movies are populated by people on the margins: dropouts, petty criminals or wageworkers in low-paid, low prestige jobs. These are small time people with small-time ambitions, needs and desires that the regular viewer can easily identify with. They’re subject to the same pressures many of us face in this doomsday era of late capitalism.
When they stumble onto the possibility of ‘getting rich quick’, these folk begin to believe the hypothetical treasure will solve all their problems. A windfall would allow Jerry to pay off his mysterious debts (and likely accrue more). The Dude could get his own place with plenty of rugs that tie the room together. Everett, Pete and Delmar could realise their own respective ambitions of buying back the family farm and opening a restaurant. Llewelyn and his wife Carla Jean would be able to quit their welding and Walmart jobs and move out of their trailer. Linda could get her cosmetic surgeries.
The familiarity of the protagonists to ourselves, or people we know, invites us to ask: what would we do if a mysterious briefcase full of $1 million landed in our laps? Would we be able to walk away? How far would we go, how much would we harm ourselves and others, in order to hold on to money that was never ours to begin with?
In O Brother, Everett convinces Pete and Delmar to break free of the chain gang – even though Pete had only two weeks left on his sentence – by offering them $400,000 each. They only find out the treasure was a fiction after a cross-country odyssey which involves many more crimes, including theft and armed robbery. Up in Fargo, Jerry Lundegaard is already neck deep in debt and his ever more desperate attempts to find ways to pay it off include lying to his father-in-law, taking out fraudulent bank loans and orchestrating the fake kidnapping of his wife. This plan goes wrong from the very beginning, resulting in the deaths of at least six people including his wife and father-in-law.
Meanwhile, Llewelyn Moss stumbles across a briefcase of drug money containing $2 million dollars after the massacre has already been committed. It would appear that taking the money is a victimless crime. The moment he opens the briefcase in the middle of the desert and sees the money, the wind picks up around him in warning or portent. We can almost hear the $2 million dollar question passing through his mind: Can he get away with it?
Neither The Dude nor Linda Litzke have any particular inclination to profit from the “kidnapping” of Bunny Lebowski or the discovery of the CIA disc, but after a nudge from Walter and Chad respectively, both become committed to securing the money, even as the pursuit of the treasure leads to escalating chaos and violence. Linda becomes convinced that their “good Samaritan scheme” – the blackmail of Osbourne Cox followed by the attempted sale of state secrets to the Russians – is the answer to her personal project of “reinvention.” She has, apparently, no savings and the “Mickey Mouse” health insurance policy that comes with her job at Hardbodies gym will not cover the four cosmetic surgery procedures she so desperately desires.
Even a drop-out like The Dude, who has largely rejected the trappings of professional and monetary gain, can be tempted to dramatically alter a seemingly contented existence by the promise of treasure. The more The Dude chases after the fortune – as well as the various finder’s fees he’s been offered – the more he, his house and his car experience material damage.
But it’s not just the physical harm incurred by the protagonists in the pursuit of cash. The Coens are at pains to signal the kind of spiritual harm that can occur when greed becomes our principal motivation in life. This is nowhere more clear than in The Big Lebowski, where The Dude loses his sense of self and identity, becoming “very unDude”, the more he is embroiled in the square world. The plot comes full circle when The Dude, normally pacifistic and zen, turns into the person demanding the whereabouts of the $1 million ransom payment “Where’s the fucking money Lebowski?” he shouts at the “real” Jeffrey Lebowski who partly orchestrated the kidnapping hoax.
The treasure in question, oscillating between $1 million and $2 million, is enough to transform the lives of every one of the Coens’ protagonists, but is small beans compared to the astronomical wealth accumulated by our late-capitalist overlords like Bezos and Musk. Burn After Reading is the outlier with Chad and Linda’s paltry demand of $50,000 an indication of their middling ambitions.
While we are on the subject of outliers, the face-off between Llewelyn and hired assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in No Country, is the first time we see two characters with any level of competence in pursuit of the treasure. As the only direct adaptation, from the novel of the same name by the late Cormac McCarhty, No Country ups the stakes, the body count and offers the most pessimistic examination of human nature out of all the Coens’ movies. It is markedly absent of the music and picaresque humour which characterises their other offerings.
The rest, co-written between Joel and Ethan, feature characters who, as Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) would put it, are all a “bunch of amateurs.” In The Big Lebowski this appears deliberate as The Dude was contracted precisely because he was a loser and a deadbeat who would surely mess up the ransom payment, but we never find out how Jerry, a second hand car salesman of middling intelligence and competence, has managed to accrue such an astronomic debt. We do know that his attempts to pay off those debts are catastrophic for everyone caught up in his chaos spiral, especially his family.
In O Brother, Everett displays some evidence of intelligence, or at least cunning, but for every penny the trio of ex-cons gain during their cross country odyssey, they lose through gullibility, greed and Everett’s susceptibility to appearances. Chad and Linda are mere opportunists, who Osbourne rightly points out, “are way out of their league.”
Llewellyn’s downfall is not for lack of skill nor intelligence, rather arrogance that he’s clever and persistent enough to almost get away with it. But his mistaken return to the scene of the massacre, his failure to realise the drug money has a tracer and his underestimation of the reach and capacity of the people hunting him, mean he battles an inevitable demise. When Chigurh finally catches up with him they are both injured (but not killed) in their first and only face off. For the rest of the movie we are left to see which of the two trained killers will survive, and in surviving how much destruction they will leave in their wake. Death, when it finally reaches Llewellyn, happens off screen at the hands of the local cartel. Llewellyn becomes just another drug-related homicide in a generic motel on the Mexican border.
Marge Gunderson and Linda Litzke, iconic Frances McDormand roles, play two sides of the same competence/incompetence coin. Marge’s Sheriff in Fargo comes through as the voice of middle America, content with her small town beat and her husband’s modest ambitions for his ice-fishing and paintings of mallards. Linda Litzke feels like a harbinger of late-capitalist delusion, thoughtlessly spouting toxic positivity and prosperity gospel nonsense about manifesting wealth and happiness. She is convinced that reinventing herself through plastic surgery, which will lead her to the right man “one with a sense of humour”, will fill the emotional void produced by her late capitalist existence. They share one line of dialogue “for pete’s sake,” and both survive the violence that threatens to engulf them, Marge through skill and Linda through a combination of belligerence and ignorance. Marge reminds us, however, at the very end of Fargo, that pursuit of money never justifies violence. As she carts kidnapper Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) away from another crime scene, she asks, bemused, “There’s more to life than money, you know? Don’t you know that?”
For the protagonists of Fargo, No Country and Burn After Reading, this message arrives too late as they end up either dead, arrested or seriously injured. But things do begin to work out for both The Dude and the trio from O Brother once they finally stop pursuing the treasure. The Dude resumes his peaceful drop-out existence, no richer nor poorer than when he began. Everett, Pete and Delmar receive pardons and a promise of gainful and legitimate employment from the state governor.
Dialogue and recurring motifs leave more hints for the attentive viewer that each movie is part of a larger conversation about the perils of getting rich quick. Peter Storemare’s obsession with pancakes pops up in Fargo and The Big Lebowski. Bunny Lebowski is from Moorhead Minnesota, just across the river from Fargo, Dakota. The black briefcase full of money travels across space and time between the fences of 1980s Texas and 1990s Minnesota. A whole host of characters repeat some version of the refrains ‘Where’s the fucking money?’ and ‘Give us the fucking money.’
The tragedy of the Coens’ protagonists, the flaw that makes them all the more relatable, is the spark of hope that the promise of treasure ignites for them. The sense that after years of scraping by, middling along, eking out the only existence their country allows, the future could be different, things might actually get better, they might finally have some security, a safety net.
The Coens don’t exactly signal an alternative to the capitalist system that has largely failed their protagonists, and their viewers. Personal debt has become the norm, rather than the exception in the 21st century, and as the few remaining social safety nets left to us are undermined or eroded completely, we are left to wonder what alternative do we have other than stumbling across some treasure? They do, however, critique the unrestrained greed at the heart of the tech-bro oligarchy now running the world. Those bros would have us believe that bit-coin, cryptocurrencies or other mufti-level marketing schemes will solve our financial woes, if only we make the right investments at the right time and don’t mind scamming other people in the process.
If, however, the Coens taught us anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as easy money. Perhaps the energy we might be tempted to direct at getting rich quickly could be put into community collaboration, mutual aid initiatives, local and sustainable agriculture as alternatives to late-stage capitalism? These kinds of initiatives may not have the lure or glamour of crypto or bit-coin, but as the Coens frequently warn us: do not seek the treasure.
