A Serious Man (2009)

directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

Katie Myers

It was 2020, a year that my roommate called her Book of Job year and would prove very weird for all of us. The details of her year are not mine to tell, but suffice to say that it had been heaped with mishap upon indignity upon tragedy, and the global pandemic seemed like a justified and almost hilarious icing on the cake. We would learn to laugh helplessly about it that spring, about the end of the world and the stupidity that came after it, especially where we live in the Mountain South, moving somewhere between east Tennessee and eastern Kentucky. In between trying and failing to work from home and taking little walks to breathe in the springtime air, my roommate, partner, and I went through the Coen Brothers filmography. For me, the objective was really to get to A Serious Man, my favorite movie, a story loosely based on the Book of Job and mired in the well-trodden anxieties of Jewish-American life. Mostly it’s about Larry Gopnick, a mathematics professor, husband, and father in suburban Minnesota, as his life falls apart.

Nobody loves this movie like downwardly mobile adult children of secular Jewish families, that is to say, me and a lot of my friends (as well as some ex-Catholics I know).  Larry’s life, like the lives of many assimilated, upper middle-class Jewish Americans, is baked into a heap of promises, most of which involve a loving wife, dutiful children, a good job, a nice house, and thousands of miles between himself and the problems of the Old World. That’s my family’s story, too. And for the most part, my ancestors prospered, even as the unlucky ones who’d stayed behind in Poland mostly perished. We got out, and we made it.

But Larry's wife, his children, his body, and nature turn against him, and the problems come knocking at his door again. Over and over, characters are seized by the sense that “Hashem hasn’t given me bupkis,” as Larry’s brother Arthur wails at one point.

I’m going to spoil the ending. The movie ends with a tornado. That’s the point, I think.

*

It’s Larry’s son Danny who gets caught in it. I identify with Danny in a way. He’s thirteen, he’s just had his bar mitzvah, he owes a kid named Fegel some money for weed. He is on the receiving end of 5,700-plus years of tradition and does what’s expected of him in a going-through-the-motions kind of way even though he’s not especially bright.

In the tornado, Danny’s caught outside the school with his classmates, and he doesn’t seem to register what is happening. He’s focused on getting the money back to Fegel, but Fegel doesn’t care about the money anymore. Fegel sees the whirlwind and Danny sees the whirlwind and we see the whirlwind. The trapdoor won’t open. Fegel turns around with his mouth open, he’s at a loss for words, there’s nothing to say.  We don’t see what happens next. Needle drop: “Somebody to Love.” The movie ends.

And it all sits for me on that ending, because of the curious hold on my mind that tornadoes have, the feeling of divine randomness and wrath that’s exhilarating and so, so scary. Like, for instance, I drove across the country by myself, and the whole time couldn’t stop reading about tornadoes. What would I do if I saw one? Throw myself in a ditch? Go to the gas station? Try to outrun it? I obsessively watched storm chaser videos and scrolled through pictures, familiarizing myself with every type of funnel cloud, the little skinny ones, the big fat ones. I learned the United States has the most tornadoes in the world. In the face of a changing climate, chaotic jet stream patterns and severe temperature shifts make them much more likely. In Arkansas, I pulled off the road multiple times during a rainstorm, fearing one would come out of the dark to get me.

The likelihood I would have died in a tornado then and there was slim, but I’m a bundle of fears and anxieties without much basis in the truth of my stable, secular life. They’re embodied in a general sense that the worst will always come to pass. I’ve always been told I'm a bit of a negative person, something that non-relations often struggle to understand. How can we explain that I feel as though if I am too happy and settled I will be punished? If I get too big and loud, if I stick out too far, something will come in and shear my head clean off?

Even as family members assure you that the good school, the good job is coming, their eyes are on some kind of awful horizon, where a storm is brewing. In my family history, immigrant great grandfathers stand by the door all night and worry grandmothers aren’t coming home when they’re out late. The same grandmothers in turn worry about fathers in the same way, even in the safe streets of suburban Washington, DC; fathers in turn pass their heavy hearts onto their daughters, without even meaning to. The worry pervades everything. The bump in your breast is cancer. The rain will make the roads slick and your car will flip. The cat who slipped out the door won’t come back. Everybody secretly hates you and maybe wants you dead. Keep your passport on you. Your life is nice now but you never know, maybe you’ll have to jump ship quick some day.

*

A Serious Man gives us these fears and toys with them.

Larry loses his wife to an intensely annoying man; he goes to the doctor to see about a health problem; a student bothers him for an undeserved grade change. He folds every time. He acquiesces to all of it, and instead of fighting back, goes to rabbi after rabbi for answers. They’re all very nice, but none of them give him the clarity he’s looking for. Finally, there’s one rabbi left to look for. “See Marshak,” he’s told. “See Marshak.” But when he looks for Marshak, the man is nowhere to be found.

I think of one time when I was depressed in Hebrew school, which, towards the end, I did the same thing, went to the rabbi for answers. I usually skipped Hebrew school to go walk around, usually towards one particular neighborhood dog I liked, and I would shut my mind off. Sometimes I would spend the whole Sunday morning locked in the synagogue bathroom. It was before I had a smartphone, so I either read a book or stared at the wall. Every time my parents gave me an opportunity to quit, though, I refused. I did go to the rabbi a couple of times. He mostly told me to do more community service. He was a nice man, but I always felt the things he had to say were platitudes.

Danny is the one who finally meets Marshak, after his bar mitzvah, which, once again, he spends high. His parents are so proud of him. Marshak, ancient, is asleep in his chair. He wakes for a moment, smiles, quotes a line from a Jefferson Airplane song, and says, “Be a good boy.” And then that’s it.

*

When I was a kid I loved the story of Pecos Bill, an all-American tall tale hero who performs feats of strength and changes the weather to make the country habitable for settlers, muscular and strong and butch, the opposite of the world’s Larry Gopnicks. He wrangled tornadoes with his bare hands, riding them like a rodeo star. When there was a drought in the Gulf of Texas he lassoed a cloud from California to bring the rain. I thought, up until I began to write this essay, that Pecos Bill was taken up in a tornado when he died, carried away and never seen again. Actually, he laughs himself to death outside a bar. It turned out I mistook his story for that of the prophet Elijah, who, after seeing a lifetime’s worth of many-eyed angels and wheels within wheels, asks God to take him up in a whirlwind, the better to leave an impression and inspire the next prophet to fill his shoes. I used to think to myself that that’s how I’d like to go, what a way to shed the boredom and drudgery of life and avoid an ignominious death, like a heart attack at my desk or some bullshit like that.

Jewish storytelling, religious and secular, is surprisingly given to tornado imagery. Even Steven Spielberg in his recent autobiographical movie, The Fabelmans, uses one, to depict the emotional unraveling of his mother, who drives three of her children into the eye of the storm out of some sort of death wish or maybe a desire for the storm to tell her something.

And yes, sometimes the storm speaks to you. God often appears, in the Old Testament, as a whirlwind. At the end of the Book of Job, when the poor man, having lost his wife and children and health in what amounts to a cosmic bet, is at the end of his rope. God descends in the whirlwind and calls him, in so many words, a dumb bitch for even asking.

“Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
    and a path for the thunderstorm….”

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
    Tell me, if you understand. 

Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!”

And so on.

That’s all Job gets—a big speech telling him to mind his own business and be happy with what he has. Which is rich considering it’s all a game anyway. It’s God and the unnamed adversary, the trickster who will eventually evolve into the Christian Devil but who for now is just kind of a jester, someone for God to smoke with in the alleyway while making a bet. In the end, after killing Job’s whole family, the creator, satisfied with the man’s piety, just decides to grow him a new one.

In A Serious Man, updated for today’s audience, we don’t get the Old Testament ending, perhaps because we know it’s not really a happy one. The final reckoning comes after a period of relative success in Larry’s life. After meekly enduring his trials, he gets his wife back; his son has a bar mitzvah and is received by the ancient tradition he barely understands; his career begins to look up again. But then he gets a frightening call from his doctor, asking him to come into the office to discuss his chest X-ray, and the tornado begins to bear down on Danny.

Danny, like Job’s children, is just collateral. Maybe the tornado takes him out, right on the cusp of adulthood. If he survives, maybe he’ll continue his journey as the third-generation-off-the-boat slacker. Maybe he won’t seek out or trust old wisdom in the way his father does. He saw the wisest rabbi for what he is: just an old man. Or maybe all he’ll trust is whatever the tornado told him. Even if it was just the sound of colliding dirt clods and grinding metal.

*

Watching this in the early pandemic, not long after bearing witness to a round of localized flooding, I watched Larry struggle and struggle to find wisdom and understanding, and wanted to shake him, to say, suffering has no lesson for you, it does not purify you, it does not necessarily make you a better person or a worse one, and there’s no one on earth who can explain it to you in a way that’ll make you satisfied. Suffering just gives your children and grandchildren the same maladaptive traits, or maybe survival skills, you have. Soon after, John Prine died and my mayor, who was at one point a WWE wrestler, began to dismantle my town’s board of health. I called my parents and heard them admit to me that the world as it was was not the one that had been promised, and I told them I’d known that for a long time. I told them this as the one who’d bought all the nonperishable goods at the grocery store two weeks before anybody else took the pandemic seriously, who pissed off some of my job’s funders by telling them we were not gonna get out of the situation by June, thank you very much.

This past summer, I got another taste of wrath. Maybe divine or maybe not. We flooded again. Training thunderstorms, the weather man said, pointing to the writhing green blobs on the radar as they dissolved and reformed. I went out there and sat on the porch and let the wind blow me this way and that. “Aren’t you grateful,” blew the storm, “that the sun rises and sets and the crops grow in the summertime?” In the nighttime the creeks all around me flooded and would ruin thousands of lives in the place where I live, but before that I laughed in the storm’s face as I watched it take away the future. I felt a weird sense of calm and purpose as a lifetime of anxiety was again confirmed. Like Danny and Fegel, like Larry, I had a chance to watch it come. It didn’t even make sense to agonize at that point over “why me?” and “why us?” None of it makes sense!! There’s freedom in that. The storm on the horizon is no longer brewing— it’s here. Maybe I’ll put my ear to it and listen to what it tells me. Maybe it has more wisdom to offer than any patriarch does. And the sun still rises and sets. So big thanks to whoever makes that happen.

Katie Myers is a writer and audio producer living between eastern Kentucky and Knoxville, Tennessee. More of their work can be found at caitlinmyers.net.