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From Boys to Men: Gender Politics and Jewish Identity in A Serious Man
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2011
Extract
Like many of their films, the Coen brothers' A Serious Man at once portrays a society dominated by men and calls into question what it is to be a man, especially but not exclusively a Jewish man. Indeed, while Larry Gopnik's wife is the source of much of his trouble, she, like her unmanageable daughter and the seductress-neighbor—the only women characters in the film—occupies minimal space in the narrative. But the role of the female, or the characteristics that differentiate men from women, occupy maximal space in the narrative: They are incorporated throughout the film in Gopnik's behaviors, in parodies of those behaviors, and in stereotypes of Jewish men, and non-Jewish men for that matter, that have a lengthy history in American television and film and in Western, Christian culture more generally. And so we find the central irony of A Serious Man, which is the presence of the female restricted to an indirect “male” presence that articulates the problem of male Jewish identity as it is construed and challenged in the context of American suburban life.
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- Symposium: A Serious Man
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- Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2011
References
1. Coen, Joel and Coen, Ethan, A Serious Man [script] (2007)Google Scholar, www.coenbrothers.net/scripts/aseriousman.pdf, p. 27.
2. Ibid.
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10. One review of A Serious Man addressed the issue of Asian stereotypes as a larger subject for discussion in Ethan and Joel Coen's films: “One of the untalked about scandals in recent cinema has been the Coen brothers' perpetuation of negative Asian stereotypes: In The Big Lebowski, a “chinaman” peed on the Dude's rug, Fargo's most pathetic character was Mike Yanagita, and now A Serious Man portrays South Koreans as corrupt bullies.” While this issue lies outside the bounds of the current discussion, it points to the more general and very conscious act of stereotyping on the part of the filmmakers. See http://npinopunintended.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/oscarpalooza-a-serious-look-at-a-serious-man/.
11. Coen and Coen, www.coenbrothers.net/scripts/aseriousman.pdf, p. 50.
12. As Boyarin suggests in his essay “Tricksters, Martyrs, and Collaborators,” “renunciation of the phallus was a means by which diasporic Jewish men could construct an identity for themselves that was different from that of the Christian communities in which they lived: “such a renunciation does not imply an exit from male sexuality entirely. It was the condition of not being imperial, of being diasporic . . . of demystifying the ‘phallus’ for what it is, a violent and destructive ideological construct,” Powers of Diaspora, 45–46.
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