The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Reflection on Fiction and Reality (Patreon)

Hi Everyone. We’re doing Coen Brothers again today, as we will be, by my calculations, until the end of time. Today we’re looking at a funny little project called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. If this were a straightforward narrative I’d feel pretty comfortable just talking about this without feeling the need to synopsize, because synopsising is boring as hell. However, as this is an anthology piece, I feel like it’s pretty necessary to talk through the points that I think are relevant in each story, so I can ruthlessly cherry-pick and convince you all that my reading of this movie is correct and nobody else’s interpretation is worth a damn. Nonetheless I will try to be brief, and try to offer my thoughts as I go through them so that if you are severely allergic to synopses you will at least get a little rest between each part.
In The Ballad of Buster Scruggs we meet a happy-go-lucky cowboy named Buster Scruggs who likes to sing, play cards and shoot guns. At first, stopping to try to get a drink, he is mistaken for a cop and ends up in a violent confrontation, where he shows off his skills by eliminating several men before they can fire a shot. Next he arrives at a town where he plays some cards, but his opponent in the game, unhappy that he won, tries to kill him but Buster kills him instead and then sings a happy song with the whole bar about him being dead. As they are singing the man’s brother comes in, challenges Buster to a duel and promptly loses and dies. Immediately after, another man challenges Buster to a duel but wins, and Buster dies.

Here, a really interesting thing happens. Although Buster is dead, he keeps being a character. We just saw him get shot and die, but now he’s singing us a song about how good cowboys go to heaven where they can sing and drink and play cards all day. Then, the story just sort of, ends.

In Near Algodones a young cowboy played by James Franco robs a bank, but as he is trying to flee, the bank teller comes out in what I can best describe as a Wild West kitchenware Iron Man suit. The young cowboy is captured and sentenced to hang, but his hanging is interrupted by a raiding party of Native Americans, and he is left hanging, and then eventually rescued by a passerby. The passerby, we quickly discover, is herding stolen cattle, which is of course a hanging offence. The young cowboy is captured again although the actual cattle-thief gets away, and now the young cowboy is hanged for real. As he is about to be hanged, he says to the crying man next to him “First time?” and then he looks at a pretty girl in the crowd and he dies.
At this point, we’ve seen two stories where the protagonist dies at the end. In fact, we’ve seen two stories in which the protagonist has close scrapes with death and then dies at the end. What is odd about Near Algodones is that it feels like the whole story was building up to this moment where the young cowboy says “First time?” to a man being hanged next to him. It feels like the whole story was an excuse to execute this perfect piece of gallows humour. So maybe at this point in the film we are starting to get the sense that the movie has a preoccupation with death and mortality.

In Meal Ticket, Harry Melling plays an actor called Harrison who has no arms or legs and is taken from place to place to recite prose and poetry for crowds by an older man, played by Liam Neeson. In one scene, the old man takes Harrison to a brothel where the sex worker asks if Harrison has ever had sex, to which the old man replies “once”. This seems to be a grim allusion to some sort of history between the old man and Harrison but we never find out anything more than that. 

As Harrison starts to draw in less and less money, the old man notices a competing act, a chicken that ostensibly does sums, and buys the chicken. Pausing on their next journey the old man examines a river, and then we are shown the caravan travelling on without Harrison.
Here, we are, fairly certain of what has happened. Harrison is dead. This story is incredibly grim and again, really builds only to a character’s death, but also, once again this ending makes us reflect a little on the previous stories. In Buster Scruggs, Buster is shot dead on screen, but keeps being active in the story and sings us a song. In Near Algodones, we might now realise, we don’t actually see the young cowboy die. Instead we just know he is dead because the story is over. Similarly, in Meal Ticket, we know Harrison is dead because he is not shown on screen any more. 

There is a direct causality that suggests something to us, sure, but the story is over, and we know what that means. In Near Algodones the gasp from the crowd might have been because the young cowboy suddenly turned into the Incredible Hulk and escaped, or been magically replaced by a pile of beans, but we understand it to mean that he was successfully hanged because the story is now over, and so functionally the character is dead.

Harrison, who only ever speaks in the story when he is performing, exists to serve a purpose, and when the old man no longer needs him for that purpose, he disposes of him. However for us, the audience, Harrison also serves a purpose as a character in a story, and when his story is over, we don’t have any need for him any more. We might think that the story ends because Harrison dies, but really, he dies because the story ends.

In All Gold Canyon an old man played by Tom Waites searches for a pocket of gold in the ground he affectionately calls “Mr. Pocket”. He pans for gold in the water and then digs up from the stream until he finds the pocket. However, just when he finds the gold, he is shot dead by a young mercenary - the proverbial and literal black-hat gunslinger. The villain. The antagonist. The mercenary smokes a cigar and waits to see that the old man is actually dead and then drops down into the hole where it turns out the old man is not actually dead. The old man manages to kill the mercenary and eventually after making sure he will survive, he digs up his gold, and walks off back into the trees and the story ends.
Now, with our understanding of the examination of how characters die in these stories, we are given another story where the protagonist has a brush with death once and then dies later, except this time he doesn’t die at the end of the story. He dies some time long after the end. We know, watching the old man walk off into the trees that what he will do is sell his gold and retire, and one day die peacefully in his sleep. By ending the story at his departure, the Coen Brothers have essentially told us that nothing else interesting happens to him ever again. This story is about more, of course, than simply the old man though. In this story, as signified by him talking to the mountain and the elusive “Mr. Pocket”, nature itself is a character. The animals that live in the valley watch him carefully, and when, early on, he climbs a tree to pilfer some eggs from a nest, he spots an owl watching him intently. Realising the owl could attack him and knock him out of the tree to his doom, he puts some of the eggs back, only taking as much as he needs.
In this way, the conflict of this story is between the old man who only wants to take as much from the natural world as he needs so he can live out his days in relative comfort, and the young man who has many years to come back and exploit the mountains for their gold over and over. Maybe the mercenary even works for a mining company that will come and tear the valley apart in search of gold.
In this way, the long quiet shots of the lush and verdant valley are there to show us that character, nature, and in some sense when the old man in nearly killed, it signifies how this untouched peaceful valley is nearly killed as well, but when the old man walks away and the story ends, we know that this paradise will eventually die too.

In The Gal Who Got Rattled Alice Longabaugh is travelling to Oregon with her brother, who has made plans to wed her to his new business partner. Alice doesn’t seem particularly thrilled about this plan but hasn’t much other choice. Shortly after they depart her brother dies of cholera, which leaves Alice in the lurch because he had promised to pay a young man called Matt to help them with their travel, and Alice suspects that her brother’s money was buried with him. 

Billy Knapp, one of the wagon train guards who buried Alice’s brother consults with her about how to deal with her predicament. He also has to help her out when other travellers complain about her brother’s loud dog, President Pierce. At Alice’s request Billy tries to put the dog down but misses and ends up just scaring him off.
After growing fond of each other Billy and Alice end up engaged, Billy assuming her brother’s debt to pay off Matt and the couple planning to settle down when the reach Oregon and start a homestead. However, shortly afterwards, Alice parts from the wagon train after hearing President Pierce barking. The older wagon train guard Mr. Arthur finds her and is about to escort her back when they are attacked by a group of Native Americans. Mr. Arthur gives her a gun and tells her to kill herself if he is killed because of what might happen to her otherwise. He manages to fend off the attackers but he finds that she killed herself anyway fearing the worst.

This story, at first glance, is the most complicated one. Padded out a little it could easily be the second and third acts of a full-length feature. The way to look at this story, I think, is through the eyes of Alice, anxious and constantly anticipating. She is thinking, all the time, about her future, and so we as the audience of her story should also be thinking constantly about how she expects her story to end. It is, after all right there in the title: The Gal Who Got Rattled. She at first expects a miserable future married to her incompetent brother’s business partner. Then she thinks she could be happy with Billy Knapp. Then, fearing a worse ending to her story, she kills herself.

In The Mortal Remains, the last story in the film, five characters - an Englishman, an Irishman, a French man called René, a widow an Older Lady and a Fur Trapper - depart in a carriage towards their destination. As their converse they learn things about each other. It is revealed that the Englishman and the Irishman are actually professional bounty hunters, and that the lady, Ms. Betjeman, is travelling out to be with her husband. At one point as Ms. Betjeman becomes worked up, René calls out the window to the grim reaper the coach-driver who does not stop and shows no signs of even hearing him.
At their destination the characters all disembark and the two assassins carry the corpse of the man they killed into a hotel and up the stairs into a blinding light. The double door to the foyer of the hotel has one door displaying a cherub and one door displaying a goat head. The coach-driver, turns around to immediately drive his empty coach back to where they came from, not taking any passengers with him, and the characters waiting at the door seem extremely apprehensive about going into the hotel, seeming almost to have clocked at this point, as we the audience inevitably must have, that they are all dead, and have been driven to the afterlife. 

The framing of this metaphor in this story is so delightfully on the nose that it really feels like the Coen Brothers are driving at a different point, a more developed one than simply, these characters are all dead. I think they are trying to get at the question:

In what sense are those other characters in the previous stories all alive, and these characters all dead?

After all, Buster Scruggs gets shot in the head and still sings us a song. The young cowboy in Near Algodones miraculously survives a hanging only to be hanged later the same day. The old man in All Gold Canyon gets shot in the back and seems extremely dead, but apparently isn’t.

In my opinion, this film is an exploration of how characters live and die on screen. The film is set up to make us reflect on the fact that characters, as rich, and as real as you can make them, are only alive for the moments that they exist in the story, and then, when the story ends, they die. The framing device of the book constantly reminds us that these are all fictional characters in stories.

Each story in its relative simplicity and small cast of characters says here is a tool in understanding the mortality of fictional characters. That’s what I like about this film - it was in theatres for a week in November before going onto Netflix, and while I haven’t seen tonnes of people hyped about it, I don’t think it needs that. I think it stands incredibly solidly as a small piece that simply makes you appreciate itself, and gives you a little bit to think about.