Tom Waits in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Despite being a fan and critic and reviewer of the Coen brothers for decades, I hadn’t sat down with them for an in-person interview before this piece for the December 2018 issue of Sight & Sound. It’s reproduced here with permission.
There’s a very sweet scene in Hail, Caesar! (2016), Joel and Ethan Coen’s ode to the classical Hollywood studio system, in which an amiable oater star takes a studio-appointed date to the premier of his new movie. “I don’t know if you like livestock,” he tells her, “but I think it’s got moments, I really do.”
The charms of livestock might be one of the Western’s less widely acknowledged pleasures but, as the Coens have long understood, the genre is more quirky and capacious than its status in recent decades – largely neglected, occasionally mobilised as a sombre vehicle for American civics – might suggest.
The Coens have often deployed Western elements in their own movies, from the bloody Texan braggadocio of Blood Simple (1984) and No Country for Old Men (2007) to the cartoony showdowns of Raising Arizona (1987) and cowboy narrator of The Big Lebowski (1997). In True Grit (2010), of course, they offered one of the new century’s most successful entries in the genre.
And, it turns out, that’s only part of an almost compulsive engagement with the genre that has paralleled the course of their career, even as Westerns themselves have lingered in the doldrums. “They’ve been kind of in eclipse, with a couple of big exceptions,” suggests Ethan when I meet the brothers in London. “Since we’re unfashionable, we of course raced toward them.”
As Joel admits, the brothers “really don’t know why” they’ve kept returning to the Western rather than, say, horror or fantasy or dog movies or wrestling pictures. But the result was a drawerful of short scripts that, with a couple of fresh additions, furnished the Coens’ latest feature, a 132-minute anthology of six “tales of the American frontier” called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Funded by Netflix (but never, early reports notwithstanding, planned as a television series – more on that later), it offers a playfully wide-ranging tour of the genre and, by extension, the people and geography of the Old West itself.
The title story, starring Tim Blake Nelson, is a disarmingly goofy hybrid of Gene Autry and Sam Peckinpah while ‘Near Algodones’ places James Franco’s aspiring bank robber in an arid setting evocative of both Sergio Leone and Tex Avery. ‘Meal Ticket’ is a cold and wintry Altmanesque number that Ethan wryly characterises as “musings on showbiz”, with Harry Melling and Liam Neeson as an unusual actor and his impresario.
In ‘All Gold Canyon’, based on a story by Jack London, Tom Waits prospects a verdant valley (with some lovely livestock) while, in ‘The Gal Who Got Rattled’, Zoe Kazan and Bill Heck court decorously and endearingly on a covered-wagon train to Oklahoma. The macabre last tale, ‘The Mortal Remains’, lets five passengers on a stagecoach expound on their philosophies of life against an expressionistic, almost monochromatic underworldly backdrop. This being a Coen movie, there’s room too for fun with names, hotels, blathering and dogs.
Beautifully photographed by Bruno Delbonnel (Inside Llewyn Davis, 2013) in locations ranging from New Mexico to Colorado to Nebraska, this collection of stories illustrates the intractable links in the Western between character, story and setting.
“It’s impossible, for us anyway, to separate those out as being different things,” Ethan says. “The Tom Waits one, in a very self-conscious way, is about a person dealing with his environment and to some extent they’re all like that, you know? Tim Nelson’s singing cowboy belongs in that dumb-ass Western town the same way the covered-wagon story belongs in that rolling prairie. You can’t swap the characters from one landscape to another and tell their respective stories in the alien landscape. It’s just — ech! It doesn’t work like that!”
Especially in recent decades, the Western has often felt like the quintessentially American genre, freighted with civic consequence for a still-young nation. “Oh, yeah, Heaven’s Gate,” says Joel. “The ultimate important movie,” says Ethan. This isn’t the Coens’ approach. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs showcases the form’s variety and versatility without making great claims for it.
“Westerns used to be free to be not important,” as Ethan says, and that’s what they’re seeking to reanimate. Indeed, if a running theme emerges from these tales, it might be that grand claims and plans should be taken with a pinch of salt. Manifest destiny and individualistic self-determination are repeatedly supplanted here by dumb luck or cruel fate, with less heroic valour on show than itinerant opportunism and indeed jokey warbling.
Is it fair, then, to call this a revisionist work? “We’re not revisionists, we’re just practitioners, you know?” Ethan says. “We’re not commenting on the genre, we’re going, ‘Let’s do a singing cowboy movie!’” Joel continues: “It’s interesting, isn’t it? Whoever made the first singing cowboy movie – was that revisionist? No, they just decided to give the cowboy a guitar and that it might jazz it up to introduce a little music. So where’s the line between being revisionist and just going, ‘This sounds like a fun idea’?”
All the same, from a viewer’s perspective, there are certain ways in which The Ballad of Buster Scruggs goes against the grain of conventional expectations of the genre and certain ways in which it remains aligned with them. In terms of the former, for instance, notions of masculinity are vigorously interrogated, as throughout the Coens’ work; in terms of the latter, meanwhile, the film reproduces characterisations of Native Americans as occasional alien figures of violence.
Given the proliferation of conversations about the politics of minority representation, and the brothers’ interest in challenging complacent entitlement in other contexts, had they considered other ways of telling stories involving Native American characters?
“Well, that wasn’t the impulse of the story,” Joel says. “I mean, that’s not what the story was about. I guess the politically correct way of telling those stories right now, if you want to talk about those, is they will have all the same elements but they will balance it by having other Indian or Native American characters [constructed as ‘good’].”
Indeed, that’s one approach but artists can also consider stories that give access to the subjectivity of such figures in their own right. “Yeah,” Joel grants. “Then you’re telling a story about them. And this isn’t a story about them.” And such stories just weren’t of interest? “No, just like we didn’t tell the story of the sheep men and the cattle men, right? We didn’t tell one of those stories but that’s also a Western thing and you could explore it. You make your choice.”
Ethan adds: “Isn’t it an equivalent question to ‘Why weren’t there any stories about Serbians?’ Because we could have done that too.” I suggest the difference is that there isn’t a huge corpus of work in the genre already presenting Serbians as hostile two-dimensional figures. “Right,” Ethan nods. “That’s true.”
If the overall intimation of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is that individual agency is of limited consequence against nature and fate, one vital register of human subjectivity and, perhaps, an attempted bulwark against fatalism, is music. Steered by the Coens’ longtime musical collaborator Carter Burwell, the film heaves with songs, most of them traditional demotic and folk tunes from the Old West or the countries whose people moved there. Each individual story has its own variation on the theme, from Scruggs’s own “pleasing baritone” to Waits’s industrious crooning. “The only verbal thing Liam [Neeson] does in his story is sing two songs,” Ethan notes, “which were Liam’s. They’re old songs but Liam came up with them.” Each story also has its own distinctive musical score.
“In a way it was a parallel discussion [to the one] we had with Bruno about the look of each movie,” Joel says. “How do you play this? Do you score the individual stories and play that or do you want to find something that plays all of them or do you want to do variations on something? And back and forth with every kind of permutation of that. But, like all of these things, when it ceases to be theoretical and you actually have to start doing it, you discover the only way it can work pretty fast! This wants this kind of sound, this wants that kind of sound and the way we linked them together was more by giving the opening credits a very familiar tune, ‘The Streets of Laredo’, and then reprise it at the end in a different version. And, in between, that frees you up to do the twangy guitar stuff on the one hand and the big orchestral stuff on the other hand.”
Barring a couple of conspicuously fantastical touches – a pair of angel wings comes to mind – The Ballad of Buster Scruggs isn’t an obviously FX-heavy movie. I’m surprised to learn, then, that it contains around 800 digital effect shots. “A lot of them are familiar to what everyone does now,” Ethan says. “Clean-up stuff. You don’t spend a day covering up something up that’s not period appropriate if you can just clean it up.” Joel adds: “If you have a distant radio tower, it’s not like you don’t shoot there if you like everything else about the shot. And the last story is shot all on a stage so everything outside the windows is a visual effect shot because you’re compositing.”
Ethan continues: “The other thing that everyone does now is bullet hits, which used to be all practical and you almost never bother now.” Joel: “Any blood stuff people don’t do on the set any more. It takes hours, which costs huge amounts of money, but is kind of child’s play digitally.” Clearly, this alone will account for many dozens of shots in a film as full of, well, shots, as this one.
The issue of digital imaging brings out both the pragmatic and romantic sides of the Coens as practitioners. “It’s just a reality of filmmaking now,” Joel says. “It’s as baked into it as any other part of the process. It is a shame in a way because lots of problems that you used to solve on the set you just don’t solve that way any more and that was a lot of fun in certain cases to do. For instance, there’s that shot at the beginning of Miller’s Crossing [1990] where you see a hat [rolling through a forest]. That’s all practical. You see a hat on monofilament and these people [out of shot are] sort of puppeteering the hat up into the air. It’s kind of fantastic doing those effects in front of a camera and there’s no way that you would do that shot that way now. You would animate that hat.” Ethan ruefully adds: “It seems like cheating now. We used to have a lot more anxiety but it was correspondingly satisfying when it worked and now it’s all cheating.”
We discuss audiences’ capacities, perhaps sometimes subconscious, to distinguish digitally generated objects from photographed material objects. Ethan invokes Jules Dassin’s film noir Thieves’ Highway (1949). “There’s a shot with a produce-hauling truck and the truck flips over and all this fucking fruit rolls out over the field. It’s both offhand, ’cause people look at it and they go, ‘Right, the truck crashed’, but also you look at it and you go, ‘That’s fantastic!’ It’s just, like, absolutely fantastic!”
For Joel, it brings to mind the ingenuity of classical studio practices of the kind so lovingly celebrated in Hail, Caesar! “You can do so much digitally now in terms of just combining imagery within a frame to make things simultaneous, to tighten things up. You look at old Hollywood movies and he walks in the door and at exactly that instant something happens and then something happens [and then] something happens. They did it until it worked in the camera and it’s staggering. Now, if those things weren’t perfectly timed in takes one through four, you would take one through four and combine them and make them perfectly timed. But it’s not the same, you know?”
Before such digital enhancement became standard practice, I suggest, every feature film was also a documentary of its own making, giving it a particular claim to the real. “That’s essentially what it is. Every movie now is an animated movie. Every movie now is an animated movie.”
The changes to the moving-image landscape of course stretch farther than that. On the industrial side, the position of the classical studios is increasingly occupied by digital behemoths such as Netflix, funder of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Notwithstanding the association of Netflix with TV production (House of Cards, Stranger Things, The Crown), the Coens’ latest was, they insist, always planned as an anthology feature film rather than a miniseries.
It was initially reported as the latter because, in Joel’s words, publicists “didn’t know how to describe it because it was such a strange animal – six unrelated stories. But I said to Ethan when I read [the coverage], before we even started production, ‘If this is a miniseries, it’s the shortest miniseries in the history of television’. But we made what we told them we were going to make. Whatever you want to call it, it was always the same.”
The Coens have some arms-length experience in television as producers of the successful small-screen spin-off of their 1996 feature Fargo. They are not, however, at all interested in making a TV show of their own. “Television series are predicated on a different way of thinking about stories,” Joel says. “We think about them as a beginning, middle and end and, with series, there’s a beginning and then you do it until it’s exhausted and then it goes off the air, which is a different way of thinking about a story. So it’s hard for us to think about things that way.” The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a far cry from that: six beginnings, six middles and six endings, all taking place once upon a time in the West.
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is available to view on Netflix.
