One thing people in this discussion will need to come to grips with is the fact that the allusion, allegory, symbolism, and references aren't exactly particularly cohesive or carefully laid out. There's a lot of scattershot metaphor here, and much of it only has loose significance in a broader context. So Goodman was the Cyclops...the metaphor just kind of ends there. Homer Stokes shares a name with, well, Homer the bard...but that's pretty much the only connection between the two. The sheriff with the dog is the devil...but he's not some daemonic figure who can survive floods and knows more than he's been told (such as the fact that the quartet had been pardoned.) The sirens just turn Pete in for a reward, they didn't kill him (and Circe didn't turn him into that frog.) And so forth. Even the idea of this being a modern retelling of the Odyssey is fairly tenuous, given how little narrative concurrence actually takes place. Also important to keep in mind: while the biggest "influence" may be Homeric in nature, there are plenty of Judeo-Christian aspects too, and not just because of the setting. The Flood (Great Flood stories exist in many traditions, but the most obvious one in context here in the Biblical one.) The process of redemption. The devil. The themes of hypocrisy. And so forth. The fact that the movie plays so fast-and-loose with its references and metaphors means a lack of cohesion that allows for multiple bodies of tradition to be addressed.
I like the Coens quite a lot, and have never had a bad experience with one of their movies, but lets be honest about the fact that they can be guilty of just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks just as readily as the next filmmaker. This is a great movie, but it behooves us to be careful not to ascribe greater depth to it actually exists.
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Merrida
8 years ago
I'll bet you had something very interesting to say, but your writing in one big paragraph is too hard to read. But I like what I started to read, your style of writing, word choice, etc.
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Sic vis pacem para bellum.
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