Coen Brothers Final Day Five: Uncertainty

6. The theme of uncertainty or unreliability of human knowledge is central to the Coen Brothers' films. It is articulated prominently in The Man Who Wasn't There and A Serious Man by invoking concepts of theoretical physics - The Heisenberg Principle and Schrodinger's Cat. Explain these concepts and show how the Coens integrate them with the larger theme of uncertainty - not only in A Serious Man and The Man Who Wasn't There, but in their other films as well.

Despite introducing the concepts of uncertainty and Schrödinger’s Cat scientifically late into their careers, it is possible to trace the application of these theoretical models into their earlier work. In fact, uncertainty figures so prominently into the Coen brothers’ body of work that it is slightly surprising they waited until The Man Who Wasn’t There to comment on the theory and A Serious Man to introduce the exercise.

Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle was developed in 1927 while he was studying ability to measure the movement of atoms. In Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, the discovery is described as such:

What Heisenberg conceived that night came to be called the uncertainty principle, and it meant the end of strict determinism in physics: because if atomic events are inherently blurred, if it is impossible to assemble complete information about the location of individual particles in time and space, then predictions of their future behavior can only be statistical. (130)

Heisenberg realized that in attempting to examine the movement of a particle by shining a light on it, the light affected the particle and vice versa, changing both. Accordingly, it would be impossible to empirically observe something without changing both the observer and the observed. The Uncertainty Principle has been appropriated by philosophers in order to suggest that we cannot ever understand what is happening in the world because our engagement with the world changes us and the object of observation. To a much more simplistic degree, Freddy Riedenschneider applies it to law in The Man Who Wasn’t There in order to construct a legal defense that confuses the jury into reasonable doubt.

Schrödinger’s Cat, a thought exercise developed by Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, expanding the ideas of the observer and the observed from Heisenberg. The exercise involves sealing a cat into a box with a Geiger counter, a vial of poison, and a radioactive source. When the Geiger counter registers an increased radiation level, a mechanism attached to the counter breaks the vial, killing the cat. Based on theory, it should be impossible for a being to be in two states at the same time (the exercise’s ability to theoretically disprove this is the basis for Quantum theory), so the cat must be dead. However, until an observer opens the box and sees the dead cat (and hence changes the state of the cat by observance); it must be possible that the cat is both dead and alive simultaneously. This paradoxical state reinforces the idea that we can never quite be sure of the status of unobservable phenomena / data / et al.

The theme of uncertainty figures prominently – albeit in a broader sense – throughout the Coen brothers cinematic output. In Raising Arizona, it is not until H.I. and Ed encounter Leonard Smalls that they mutually influence (and change) each other. Up until that point, Smalls impact on their lives is minimal as a character. After their confrontation – which ends fatally for Smalls – H.I. and Ed have a change of heart and return Nathan Jr. to the Arizona’s home. The film ends ambiguously, with H.I. explaining a dream that may or may not be the future of each character in Raising Arizona, including his own hazy future.

Uncertainty in motives is prevalent throughout films like Barton Fink, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and even The Big Lebowski. The Coen brothers rarely end their films definitively, preferring ambiguity over explanations, but beyond that, character arcs are seldom brought to completion. The relationship between Tom Reagan and Leo, or why Tom behaved the way he did at any point during Miller’s Crossing remains uncertain at the end of the film, and perhaps the question is whether knowing Tom’s scheme was even the purpose of the film. While the story of The Dude that The Stranger is relaying to us ends during The Big Lebowski, it is clear that life goes on for Walter, The Dude, Maude, Jackie Treehorn, Bunny, and Jeffrey Lebowski that we cannot and will not know. Why or how the Big Lebowski’s kidnapping scheme came to be remains nebulous, despite Walter’s theories.

Which brings us back to The Man Who Wasn’t There, where the nature of Ed Crane remains uncertain; is Crane telling the truth about any of his dry cleaning murder scheme? If Crane is writing this story of The Man Who Wasn’t There for a men’s magazine, there is no guarantee that any part of Ed Crane reflects the man in prison. The Coen brothers present a film predicated on mistruths and uncertainty, only to add the final layer of subterfuge near the end; our narrator is potentially unreliable, rendering the plot uncertain, let alone the dream sequence that follows or Crane’s subsequent execution.

A Serious Man poses uncertainty as the only possible knowledge; from the opening parable, which introduces an Old World Jewish couple to a man that may or may not be a Dybbuk. The consequences of the wife’s actions (stabbing Treitle Groshkover) are unclear, and the parable’s bearing on the story of Lawrence Gopnik are comparably uncertain. While Gopnik stresses uncertainty to his students, his insistence that mathematics are reliable and can be counted on fail him repeatedly – including in answering the questions surround his doppelganger / brother Arthur, creator of the Mentaculus.

At the end of A Serious Man, Larry’s predicament is no clearer, and in fact closes with the implication that his “sin” of changing Clive’s grade is somehow causally linked to a call from his doctor regarding something serious. Nothing is resolved in A Serious Man; only uncertainty looms, a potent expansion of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, made all the more appropriate by Gopnik’s demonstration of Schrödinger’s Cat as the means by which to fully understand the uncertainty of the universe.