The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, 2018) (Patreon)

When I first attempted to sum up the latest film by the Coen Brothers, my overall takeaway (with which I am no longer satisfied) was that the world is filled with horrible people (or "assholes," as I had it in my corresponding tweet), and that they were winning the day. Now, I would be dishonest if I didn't admit that in the back of my mind, I felt that perhaps Buster Scruggs might be the Coens' philosophical response to the Trump era, when it is pretty clear that we are being led straight to hell by our world's most venal and cowardly demagogues. But like I said, I'm not satisfied with this in toto explanation. It's too simple, and doesn't account for the richness that one finds across the anthology as a whole.

If one were really dead-set on identifying a common theme across the six stories that comprise Buster Scruggs, however, I fear you wouldn't come up with anything all that more penetrating. Yes, all the stories have to do with mortality in some way, but as any halfway alert English major could tell you, mortality is a theme that you can find in most any text if you've got a mind to. Everything dies, and this simple fact can always lend a note of futility to any and every human pursuit. (This is perhaps why some critics have quite wrongly called Buster Scruggs a nihilistic film. That, I think, we can certainly rule out. This is a film that cares about the characters who people its tales, and although that in itself is no ultimate value -- humanism is not preferable to nihilism in every situation -- it is a raw descriptor of the film the Coens have made.)

If anything can be said to unite these tales, it's that there are always a multitude of factors in play in any given situation, and the results of any affair are therefore unforeseeable. If you have a mind to, you can call this "fate" or "luck," but if we place Buster Scruggs into the Coen corpus, alongside entries like The Man Who Wasn't There (which explicitly calls on Heisenberg), Burn After Reading (whose only point of certainty is that there exists a "league of idiots"), or A Serious Man (which plays the chaos of the universe against the tenets of Judaism and comes out a draw), it's fairly clear that fate or luck are only human designations for the ultimate lack of order in things, and whether or not you come out ahead.

This being a Western, several times we see Native tribes come over the ridge as a force of sheer chaos. But the Coens know that we no longer believe this. They are really just an equal and opposite force that the Americans don't understand (as clarified in the story in the final section, when the trapper talks about his common-law marriage to a Hunkpapa woman despite their lack of a shared language). So within this realm of misunderstanding and "random" behavior, you may end up getting lynched twice. Young hot-shots won't honor the codes of the West, and will shoot you in the back. You will die on the Oregon Trail, although not necessarily of dysentery. And you might in fact already be dead.