The Coen Brothers' latest film is an anthology available on Netflix called the Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a series of Westerns that carry with them a great deal of humor but also maybe their most pronounced sense of existential dread since No Country for Old Men.
The eponymous character is a blend of these notions - a singing cowboy who seems like a total throwback to the sanitized west of TV westerns of the 1950s, complete with decidedly square duds and a goofy singing voice (which he employs regularly) all while being a gunslinger capable of unleashing Peckinpah-levels of violence upon his foes.
Cynicism runs through all the stories, which show a world and life ruled by brutality, selfishness, and a failure to connect with others on a meaningful level. At one point early on, Buster Scruggs shows a wanted poster of himself that calls him a "misanthrope," which he denies by saying that he would never blame humanity for being such wretches, as it is simply in their nature (you know, what a misanthrope would say.)
The stories range from the cartoonish (Buster Scruggs) to the nightmarishly surreal and, most devastating of all, pure tragedy. (I don't want to say which one it is, as the end is something of a twist, though not if you know what to expect from the movie at that point.)
The Coens have always had a sense of humor about their own dark worldview - the Nihilists in the Big Lebowski are often seen as self-skewering stand-ins for the directors, and A Serious Man manages to embody the dark, "some people get screwed for no reason" ethos while still being hilarious (in stark contrast with No Country for Old Men, which is about as funny as a heart attack, even with Anton Chigurh's ridiculous hair.)
Coincidence and bad luck seem to be a constant theme for them, certainly in this movie. It calls to mind the notion that something being a million-to-one chance means it actually happens all the time - there are billions of us on this planet, after all. Acts have unintended consequences, though it seems as if the cruel ones always achieve their purpose.
The final piece of the film is simultaneously the most mundane and yet also the most terrifyingly strange. Five passengers ride in a cramped stage coach to a town. They simply talk, comparing world views and beliefs about where they are going. In a real sense, very little happens in the last segment, there is nothing explicit to say that anything unusual is going on. And yet, watching it, I was 100% convinced that the passengers (at least three of the five) were all dead and on their way to the underworld. Yet this segment ends with the unnamed frenchman, one of the three, looking around the spooky-ass and dreamlike town and simply shrugging before he puts on his hat.
Perhaps, the Coen brothers seem to be saying, this is the only way we can really deal with the existential dread of existence - to shrug and move on with our lives as best we can. It's not the greatest pep talk, but it does suggest that we have some degree of control over how much we let the horrors of life affect us.
Art is, after all, a medium of catharsis. We can hope our fates will not be so dark as those in these stories, but channel our fears into these stories and then step away from them.
