The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen Brothers' latest film is out; The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. It is an anthology of short Western tales.

This review from Forbes seems to be dominating the early search results: “The Absent Women of 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.'” It pans the movie because it does not feature enough female protagonists. It counts one, out of six stories. I count two, making it not so far off from strict sexual parity. Big deal. And this is hardly an aesthetic issue. Would one object to the Mona Lisa for a lack of male representation?

Featuring women any more prominently would also be a falsification of history. There was a general shortage of women on the frontier.

Moreover, the Western is a traditional male genre, just as romance is a women's genre. As the real West obviously appealed more to men than women, and for the same reasons, so does the fictional West. Men crave freedom; women crave security. The Old West and the cowboy life was all freedom and no security.

So why fake history and lessen the appeal of your movie to its natural audience to please people who will not go to see it?

The reviewer herself plainly does not like Westerns. She refers to them as “problematic.” But it makes no sense to write a review panning a Western film for being a Western film. Moreover, to write a movie review on that premise seems purely self-indulgent. Those who dislike Westerns do not need her review to know they dislike Westerns, and those who like Westerns get no value out of knowing she doesn't. So what's the point? She violates the first rule of good writing: write for the reader, not yourself.

The Coen Brothers like Westerns. They relish all traditional American culture, and the Western is the great American genre. Buster Scruggs is, among other things, an appreciation of the beauty of the Western landscape and of its Western culture: its stories, its songs, its style of dress, its style of architecture, everything.

The first tale in the anthology, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” proper, makes this appreciation of artistic beauty plain: its hero assumes the existence of heaven on the grounds that, otherwise, “what are all the songs about?” That is, art is our glimpse of heaven. 

Something like the same point is made in the final scene of the second piece in the anthology, “Near Algodones.” About to be hanged, as the hood is pulled over his head, the protagonist spots a pretty girl in the watching crowd, and is distracted from his own death by her beauty. Beauty, then, can be our escape from present troubles, no matter how grave.

The beauty of the arts is represented prominently in the third piece, “Meal Ticket,” by a quadruple amputee who recites to small crowds in Western towns while his companion “the impresario” passes the hat.

But it is not art for art's sake, either, or beauty for beauty's sake alone. That is not the message. “Meal Ticket,” for example, clearly has a moral agenda. One of the pieces Harrison, the amputee, recites in his stock performance is the story of Cain and Abel. A moral lesson. And his relationship with his manager acts it out. His manager murders him when he calculates he can make more money with a chicken that can do sums. Art and the artist are associated now with morality. Moreover, bad people are people who cannot appreciate the moral lessons of art: the impresario obviously never took to heart the lesson of the Cain and Abel recitation. To him, art is only entertainment, like the calculating chicken, and only his meal ticket.

And, despite first appearances that the film is a series of unrelated stories, they are all tied together in the final piece, “Mortal Remains.”

Five characters are riding in a stagecoach. And some of them look familiar. One, a trapper, physically resembles the prospector we encountered in an earlier segment, “All Gold Valley,” played by Tom Waits. He also resembles him in his way of life, living alone with nature. Like the Waits character, he seems to have a tendency to talk to himself.

Another, a Frenchman, looks like an older version of a Frenchman we saw playing poker in the first episode, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” And this latter Frenchman indeed refers to his background as a poker player.

Two more characters, sitting together, are bounty hunters, accompanying a corpse. One of them is strongly reminiscent of the impresario from “Meal Ticket”: both are members of a team of two, both are Irish, both sing Irish folk songs, and they seem to share the trait of ruthlessness: he is the one who kills the criminal prey.

The central figure in this episode, however, seems to be an older woman, who does not remind me at least of anyone in any of the previous segments.

The vignette begins with one of the bounty hunters singing a song, “Has Anybody Here Seen Molly?” as the camera plays on her disconcerted face. The song he sings is an old English music hall song; but the original lyric is “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?” It seems, therefore, to have been adapted to a feminine form for topical reasons, to refer to the woman present. In the song, “Molly” has gone missing.

During the trip, our “Molly” has some sort of an attack, in which she cannot breathe. The Frenchman beside her thrusts his head out the carriage window to ask the driver to stop. We see the driver's back, not his face. He will not turn around to show it. He is all in black, and keeps whipping the horses on to greater speed. The first bounty hunter explains knowingly that the driver never stops.

It seems apparent that the carriage ride is a metaphor for death; which relents for no one. “Fort Morgan,” their destination, is the afterlife, and the dark silent driver is the angel of death. The woman has died. Perhaps others in the carriage are also souls on their way to the afterlife, but she seems to have been pointed to in this regard. In the end, it is she specifically for whom the doors are opened.

Other passengers may then represent reflections on the meaning of life. The singing bounty hunter explains that, in his vast experience, at the time of death, the faces of the dying always suggest they are trying to figure it all out--trying to figure out what the point of their life was.

As soon as he finishes saying this, we see the woman's face, looking deeply concerned. As though she is trying to figure it out.

The journey ends at a hotel, seen in darkness, with no human forms visible either outside or within. When the characters open the door, there is a staircase visible, with bright light above: the afterlife.

And so each of the movie's episodes is presented in this final segment as a meditation on what life is all about. Their viewpoints are then recapped in the final episode by their representative characters; five characters, just as there were five episodes before this one.

The Frenchman gives the postmodern view, speaking for the first story, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs—postmodernism being, after all, a French concept. His idea is that life is a game. Everyone creates their own meaning, like a poker bluff, and nobody can know another's hand. One cannot judge nor draw any final conclusions. “We must each play our own hand.” A similar sentiment was expressed by the late Buster Scruggs himself.

Then there is the trapper, who holds that all people are alike--”people are like ferrets.” That is, life is all about satisfying our immediate animal desires, nothing more.

The impresario bounty hunter chimes in with the idea that there are two kinds of people: “hale and frail. Those difficult to knock to the floor, and those who wilt.” To him, then, life is a struggle for power over others. Very much the attitude of the impresario, it seems, in the “Meal Ticket” segment.

The woman herself expresses a religious view. For her too, there are two kinds of people: good and evil. This roughly echoes the attitude of the main characters in the segment “The Gal Who Got Rattled.” The protagonist is ultimately concerned with the morality of her own acts. When proposed to, her first question is whether her suitor is religious. In the original segment, the heroine is a deeply sympathetic character. Here, the Coens seem to be showing a less attractive side of religiousity, a sense of self-righteousness.

The bounty hunter who initially sang seems to represent the view of the pure aesthete, or the purely aesthetic appreciation of art. He loves to tell tales to entertain, but it is to distract so his partner can kill the listener. Not a flattering image of art. He makes no claim to truth, but only wants to observe for the thrill of it.

This does not seem to represent the Coens' own position on art. The figure is disturbingly amoral, and more than a little resembles the traditional portrait of Satan.

If there is a segment expressing the same point of view, it is “Near Algodones.” The protagonist in that story seems similarly purely aesthetic in his concerns, with no sense of any deeper morality. When, for example, about to be hanged for bank robbery, his final words are a complaint that the man who caught him was not playing fair in protecting himself with armour. When the hanging party is attacked by Indians, he ends up merely observing. About to be hanged a second time, he is distracted by a pretty face.

But the Coens do not seem to give us their own conclusion. Perhaps they do not have one.