Movie "Serious Man"
The film A Serious Man is a 2009 film of deeply ironic black humor by the brothers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. Although the film shows the life of a middle-aged American Jewish man in an absurd and even a little bizarre way, the life of a middle-aged American Jewish man who is frustrated and chicken feathered, under the absurd and bizarre plot and humorous irony, reveals a vague state of existence that is both dead and alive and plausible for modern people. In order to capture and represent this very common but particularly delicate and fragile state, the Coen brothers used a series of less common ways to integrate the plot of the film, such as story associations, scientific theorems, and word implications, and these methods—in addition to scientific theorems—actually came from the Jewish tradition, which led many to think that the film was only a film about Jews. This conclusion, yes and no, should fall within the category of "Schrödinger's subject". Although this paradoxical, ambiguous, not-then-present state is difficult to describe in exact language, this article attempts to make it clear how the Coen brothers and ghosts describe poorly described subjects.
Evil spirits, professors, lawyers and rabbis
The movie "Serious Man" is divided into two very different parts, and the two parts have nothing to do with each other in terms of content alone. The first part is short, only seven or eight minutes, and probably takes place in a Jewish town in Poland in the 19th century. On a snowy night, her husband Vivi came home selling geese and said that he had met Treto Groshkovell on the road, the same Mr. Groshkov who was studying in Krakow. When his wife heard that it was this person, her eyes changed and she immediately said, "We are cursed." That Groshkovell died of typhoid fever three years ago! Husband Vivi said, "How is it possible!" I saw the man with my own eyes and spoke to him. How could he have died? Dora said, "You've met Dybbuk!" ”
I once introduced what dybbuk is in the article "Sister Ida". In short, dybbuk, which can be translated as "evil spirit", is an evil spirit that exists in Eastern European Jewish legends. Generally speaking, evil spirits are the most evil people in life, and after death, their souls cannot go to heaven, and even hell refuses to take them in, so they can only wander painfully in the world. Sometimes it is attached to the living person, causing the living person to suddenly change his behavior, and sometimes he speaks a foreign language. If evil spirits are not expelled from the living, the living will not live long, so it is necessary to ask the rabbi (the head of legal and religious affairs in the Jewish ghettos) to exorcise the demons. So, from this description, the Coen brothers made a mistake here, because the evil spirit is just a human soul, there is no substance, but in the movie, the Coen brothers let the dead man appear-
Back to the movie. Just as Vivi was explaining to Dora that Mr. Groshkovell was clearly a living man, there was a sudden knock on the door of their house, and as soon as he opened the door, Mr. Groshkovell was standing outside the door—vivi had invited him to the house for a bowl of hot soup. Although Dora let Mr. Groshkovel into the house, she was extremely unkind to him. Mr. Groshkovell, who did not know whether it was a ghost, said that he did not drink soup, so he came to see it, and Dora replied to him: "Evil spirits do not eat!" After several verifications, Dora decided that Mr. Groshkovell was a demon, so he inserted the ice pick in his hand into Mr. Groshkovil's body. Mr. Groszkovel fled into the wilderness and disappeared into the snowy night.
I don't know if he is dead or alive, Mr. Groshkovell
This concludes the first part. If you think the film is a horror film, you're sorely mistaken, because the second part doesn't have any horror or supernatural elements from the start. Larry, a lecturer in the university's physics department, is Jewish, has a Jewish wife and has two children. Recently, his younger brother (and possibly older brother) Arthur was also crowded in their house. Larry worked hard and dutifully toward his family, thinking he had a pious and harmonious family in accordance with Jewish law, but his wife cheated on a Jewish widower named Sergeman Eberman. Not only that, but because Sei Eberman was devoutly Jewish, if he was to marry Larry's wife, he would not only need Larry to divorce his wife legally, but also a religious divorce certificate (called get in Hebrew) signed by the rabbi and having performed the divorce ceremony. So, in order to divorce his wife, Larry not only had to go to a lawyer, but also had to find a rabbi in his community to solve the matter. Neither the lawyer nor the rabbi seems to have taken Larry's affairs to heart, and neither side has provided Larry with a proven solution to the problem.
And it was at this time that Larry's work went wrong. As a college lecturer who is no longer young, Larry recently wanted to be named a tenured faculty member at the university. You know, in the American academic circles, the lifelong teaching position of the university is extremely important to the lecturer: without the teaching position, he is a temporary worker in the university, the living welfare and teaching work are not guaranteed, and the university can let him go at any time; but with the teaching position is the official employee of the university, all of the above is guaranteed. Therefore, people who generally teach at American universities want to be able to get a teaching position, and Larry is at the threshold between getting a teaching position and not being able to get a teaching position. At this critical juncture, someone wrote to the Faculty Selection Committee saying that there was something wrong with Larry's character. There was also a Korean student who failed the test and wanted to bribe Larry to modify his test results, and the student's father even went to Larry's house to warn him that he would have to give his son a decent grade no matter what, otherwise he would have to resort to legal procedures.
Larry lives a chicken feather
And Larry's troubles don't stop at marriage and career. His daughter had rhinoplasty on his back, his son was carrying a Columbia Records record he had been scheduling for months, and his brother was carrying out illegal gambling behind his back—Larry felt he was in control of his life, but he was ignorant of everything that happened in life. To make matters worse, his wife's affair, Seberman, died suddenly in a car accident, and at his funeral, the police came to arrest his brother, who organized illegal gambling, although he was not arrested because he heard that their family was holding a funeral.
Larry and Sai Aberman
Although Larry's relationship with his wife eased after The death of Sai Eberman, and their disobedient son performed a Jewish rite of passage, Larry received a $3,000 bill for meeting a lawyer while separating from his wife and preparing for divorce. He had always wanted to return the money to the Korean student who tried to bribe him, but he was shaken. He changed the student's grades from F to C, and then to C-, and wanted to pay the bill, but then he received a call from the hospital saying that there was a problem with his medical examination, and the hospital had to talk to him in detail. At this moment, the hurricane struck, and his son stood outside, watching the hurricane get closer and closer...
The hurricane is coming at the end of the film
Second, who are serious people?
The story ends abruptly. We don't know if Larry ended up with a tenured faculty at the university, what was wrong with his body, or even whether his son ended up dead or alive. The Coen brothers told us such a strange story, as if to ask a question that would never be solved. Indeed, whether Larry was given a teaching position, or seriously ill, or a further improvement or deterioration in his relationship with his wife, his specious life, like the one on the subject, was never supposed to be optimal. In order to express this state, the Coen brothers adopted the following method.
First, they added a Jewish legend to the front of the film that seemed to have nothing to do with the content of the film itself, which was the story about evil spirits told earlier. Because the Cohen brothers did not confess, we have no way of knowing whether Mr. Groszkoville was an evil spirit or not, but the evil spirit, a phenomenon that exists only in Jewish folklore, contains both the opposite of life and death—it is dead itself, but attached to the living, so we can neither say that it is dead nor alive—and that it is neither dead nor alive, and in some ways somewhat similar to Schrödinger's cat.
There's a scene in the movie where Larry is telling the students about Schrödinger's cat:
Keep a cat in a closed iron container and install the following instrument (it must be not directly disturbed by the cat in the container): a very small amount of radioactive material is built into a Geiger counter, and within an hour, the probability of at least one atom decaying is 50%, and the probability of it not having any atomic decay is also 50%; if a decay event occurs, the Geiger counting tube will discharge, and a hammer will be activated through a relay, and the hammer will break the flask containing hydrogen cyanide. After an hour, if no decay event occurs, the cat is still alive; otherwise, the decay occurs, the mechanism is triggered, and the hydrogen cyanide volatilizes, causing the cat to die immediately. The wave function used to describe the whole event actually expresses the state in which the live cat and the dead cat are half entangled together. (Description of Schrödinger's cat experiment from Wikipedia)
So, if the iron container is not opened, the cat is both alive and dead for those outside. This is similar to the evil spirit mentioned earlier (and similar to this is the microscopic particle measurement problem that Larry talked about in his dream). That is to say, in every way possible, Larry's life is like that of a cat locked in a tin container and the evil spirit of Mr. Groshkre, born and died, neither here nor there.
But at the same time, Larry firmly believes that he is a serious person. What does seriousness mean? Generally speaking, it should refer to the pursuit of certainty in everything, and cannot be confused and brushed over. So, at Seberman's funeral, the rabbi said he was a serious man, after all, in order to be legally with Larry's wife, Judith, Seberman wanted not only a legal divorce for the two of them, but also a religious process for them, even though the person who fell in love with him was a married woman. Similar to Sai Eberman, Larry also feels that he is a serious person, meticulous about the work and family, but in the end he still does not know the big things and small things in the family, which seems to be serious, but in fact, the vague state is the irony of this film.
Deal with Larry's little rabbi
Redemption: The cat trying to escape from the tin container
Despite life's frustration, Larry still hopes to change it through some means. First of all, he always wanted to be a qualified Jew. He was enthusiastic about Jewish community affairs, obeyed the law, and particularly liked to use some Hebrew words in English, most notably the two words get (divorce certificate) and shiva (funeral + memorial service). The reason these two words are obvious is because whenever Larry says these two words, non-Jews always have to ask "What?" Then Larry explained it again in English. And the rabbis of the community are less reliable than chicken soup for the soul. Each time Larry hopelessly goes to the supposedly wise rabbi to solve a problem, but in the end he is either confused by the rabbi's inexplicable answer or sent away by the rabbi. Although he kept the law so religiously, his life did not get better because of it, but he fell into contradictions, so it can be seen that the Jewish tradition did not save him.
His second means of seeking help was work. He taught diligently and never slackened off in his sleep, but his work brought him endless troubles. First someone wrote a letter to the Faculty Selection Committee to beat his small report, then another student forced him to change his grades by bribery, and finally his faculty selection results were delayed again and again, and the nasty Jewish colleague stood in front of his office door every day and said something specious and inexplicable to him. For Larry, work is not a means of redemption, but rather a deeper immersion in this state of ambiguity.
And family may be Larry's third means of escaping the murky mire. However, his wife's relationship with him fell to a freezing point and he had to move to a cheap motel for temporary residence. The relationship between the son and daughter was very poor, and the two of them did things behind his back that he did not want them to do, and the son even showed great hesitation and doubt on the issue of continuing to be a Jew. Therefore, the family is not the solution to the problem, and Larry is also sinking deeper and deeper into the swamp of the family.
At the end of the film, Larry learns that he may be seriously ill, and at the same time, the doctor asks him to go to the hospital to discuss his so-called serious illness when the hurricane hits. Death may seem like a solution to the problem, but the film comes to an abrupt end in the future of the hurricane. This plot shows the Coen brothers' spirit of carrying this specious state of existence through to the end—even formally sparing Larry and the audience, forever hiding the answers to the two questions of whether he is ill and whether he has been given a teaching position.
epilogue
The film "Serious Man" is ironic in both form and content, although it is called "Serious Man" - but I prefer the translation of "Serious Man" - but in fact, no one in the film is conclusive, no one is serious, although everyone is seriously fooling life. Through a variety of artistic or scientific means of expression, the Coen brothers vividly display the subtle state of modern man, which is not in the present moment and is not in the present moment. Although the shell is absurd, the inside is a thorough and true expression of the spirit of the times. And this manifestation also corresponds to an Yiddish (Eastern European Jewish lingua franca) proverb – nisht ahin, nisht aher – neither here nor there.
If so, where am I?