Coen - by Elijah Siegler (Paperback)

About the Book

Coen teaches its readers something new about religion, about film, and about the kind of world-making that each claims to be.

Book Synopsis

Raising Arizona, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, True Grit--Joel and Ethan Coen make movies. They make movies that matter. But do these movies matter for religion?

Coen is a masterful response to this question of religious significance that neither imposes alien orthodoxy nor consigns the Coens to religious insignificance. The Coen movies discussed each receive a chapter-length investigation of the specific film's relation to the religious. Far more than just documenting religion in all Coen films--from blink-and you'll-miss-them biblical references to gospel tunes framing the soundtrack--the volume, cumulatively, mounts a compelling case for the Coens' consistent religious outlook with an original argument about precisely what constitutes religion. The volume reveals how Coen films emerge as morality tales, set in a mythological American landscape, that critique greed and self-interest. Coen heroes often confront apocalyptic and unredeemable evil, face human limitation and the banality of violence, and force audiences to wrestle with redemption and grace within the stark moral worlds portrayed on screen. This is religion on Coen terms.

Coen teaches its readers something new about religion, about film, and about the kind of world-making that each claims to be.

Review Quotes

Structured in three 'acts', the collection presents three different ways in which the films of Joel and Ethan Coen view the study of religion. The Coens' own religiosity is not the central object of the study, but the light which each of the films in the Coens' canon shed on both the tasks and categories of religious inquiry.

--Myles Werntz "Perspectives in Religious Studies"

A work that sets out in search of the Coens' cinematic soul and returns with a raft of compelling insights

--Richard Goodwin "Journal of Religion and Film"

Taken as a whole, the essays in Coen offer a lively conversation (indeed, the contributors edited one another's essays, and several of the published texts contain helpful intertextual comments) about the ways in which filmmakers, audiences, and scholars all imagine interactions between film and religion. As a compilation of criticism on the Coen filmography, the collection organizes and reframes an expansive bibliography. As works of scholarship on religion, its essays imaginatively connect critical theory of religion with cinema studies scholarship, applied in clever and illuminating readings of the Coens' oeuvre.

--Geoffrey Pollick "The Revealer"

This immensely readable work is a stunning success of eloquent writers tackling riveting topics. Each of the Coen brothers' movies, the hilarious and the harrowing treated in chronological order, receives careful critical analysis that sheds blazing light on the dark genius of these filmmakers.

--Terry Lindvall "Journal of the American Academy of Religion"

...[ Coen] offers an unexpected number of insights beyond the Coens and their films.

--Christian Wessely, Journal for Religion, Film and Media

About the Author

Elijah Siegler is Associate Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at The College of Charleston.