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that despite all this movement they are not moving away from the site of their downfall.”⁹ Men scurrying about hopelessly trying to save themselves would not on the surface seem funny, other than in a sadistic way. But for Kierkegaard it represents the contradiction that is intrinsic to comedy and to life. This is expressed in Kierkegaard's joke as the contradiction between freedom and necessity, between our infinite aspirations and the finite realities that confront those aspirations.¹⁰ The crew on the ship, striving to keep itself afloat and yet helpless in its attempt, illustrates the contradiction between our need to take action and the ultimate meaninglessness of that action. It is the existential conundrum of the human condition.

      The three convicts attempting to climb aboard the moving train fall neatly into Kierkegaard's comic scenario. They struggle for release and freedom but are bound to one another and in a sense bound to the earth. They reflect our innate belief in the need for action and the ultimate meaninglessness of action. Such a scene generates despair if one focuses on the frustration, but a comic understanding focuses on the absurdity of the moment. The utopian fantasy sung over the opening credits, “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” expresses the human need to imagine the possibility of redemption, and its lyrics hover over the attempted escape. The incongruity between the fanciful dream of a place where “bulldogs all have rubber teeth” and the frustrated cartoon characters of the film is precisely what Kierkegaard understood as comic. Perhaps Wylie Sypher best describes the dynamic at work in the scene: “Essentially our enjoyment of physical mishap or deformity springs from our surprise and delight that man's actions are often absurd, his energies often misdirected.”¹¹ In O Brother, Where Art Thou? a host of characters are seeking freedom. That their attempts are more often than not cast as “absurd” and “misdirected” does not diminish their sincerity and expressiveness.

      The opening set piece of O Brother depicting McGill and his cohorts failing in their attempt to board the train that would take them to freedom is a multifaceted comic staging and previews the complex and overlapping subtleties of the comic gestures that inform the film.

      Challenging Postmodern Aesthetics

      Although the climax of O Brother occurs with the Tennessee Valley Authority flooding the McGill ancestral “homeland,” the picaresque set of adventures turns toward its conclusion at the Klan rally that McGill and his fellow escapees have infiltrated in order to rescue Tommy (Chris Thomas King), the African American blues musician they had met and befriended earlier in the film. But more importantly, through its rich collection of allusions to other texts, the scene provides its audience with the most striking and most unsettling set of comic incongruities in the film. These incongruities not only satirize the hooded Klansmen but also challenge the audience to move beyond the aesthetic pleasure of the film's postmodern wit. What has been called the “engaged reinvention” of popular mythologies that the Coen brothers demonstrate in The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) here takes on the form of a set of radical and disturbing contradictions.¹²

      Allusions to The Odyssey, Busby Berkeley, Leni Riefenstahl, the Three Stooges, Robert Johnson, and The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939) all appear in the episode. Although these references play off one another in both obvious and subtle ways, the scene is grounded in a particular moment in American history: the activities of the Ku Klux Klan in the South in the 1930s. This is, of course, a particularly dark episode in the history of the republic and one that taken in isolation would generate some combination of outrage and guilt in the typically liberal audiences that the films of the Coen brothers might attract. The rich array of allusions, in short, cannot be separated from a historical context that elicits moral condemnation.

      It is this historical grounding that undermines a postmodern reading of the episode. The assemblage of popular mythologies, pop culture references, and classical allusions does not, in this case, constitute what Fredric Jameson and others term “pastiche.” Unlike parody and satire, pastiche, according to Jameson, is “the cannibalization of all styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion[,]” and thus constitutes a “neutral practice,” an artistic and cultural form that has been emptied of any ethical perspective and “amputated of satiric impulse.”¹³ The postmodern pleasure of pastiche is the pleasure of recognizing references, so that engaging a text becomes a game of identification. Moreover, through this consumption of cultural signs, there emerges in the audience a sense of belonging to an “exclusive community,” one detached from both traditional socioeconomic classifications and conventional ethical codes.¹⁴ Membership in this sophisticated coterie group, which many in the audience of a Coen brothers film might expect, is sabotaged, I think intentionally, by the context of a Klan lynching of an African American. There is quite simply no possibility of avoiding the historical setting of the episode and the ethical response that that setting demands. Although the scene in question does expose the audience to a heterogeneous grouping of aesthetic styles and allusions, these do not occupy a neutral space devoid of normative values and of what Jameson refers to in this context as “real history.”¹⁵

      The most obvious consequence of this grounding is that the engaged and directed point of view of satire replaces the neutrality of postmodern wit. The scene opens with McGill and his two fellow travelers looking down from under cover at a Klan ceremony, which they soon learn is a lynching. The members of the Klan are marching in synchronized patterns that immediately call to mind a Busby Berkeley set piece. The Klansmen are, therefore, being mocked as silly men, in silly outfits, and in silly dance formations. Like Satan's band of devils in Paradise Lost who are compared to a swarm of insects, the self-importance of the Klansmen is deflated through a visual simile. The satire is reinforced through a Homeric parallel. The charlatan Bible salesman (John Goodman) who has robbed and beaten McGill and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) now shows up at the rally. His role as the uncultured and violent Cyclops of The Odyssey mocks the office of Grand Cyclops of the Klan.

      The set of allusions taken together suggests, however, something more sophisticated than satire, something that relies on irreconcilable comic incongruities within that set of allusions. Perhaps the most outrageous and resonant reference in the set piece is to The Wizard of Oz. The rescue of Tommy from the hands of the Klan visually evokes the rescue of Dorothy from the Wicked Witch of the West. The three escapees take the parts of the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. The Klan becomes the army of the Wicked Witch. This creates a jarring incongruity, one that is intensified by the contextualization of the allusion outside its original historical setting. Although The Wizard of Oz was made in the final years of the Depression and is in some sense a typical thirties “road” picture, its presence in the film will resonate with most of the audience in the context of the fifties, sixties, and seventies. For many years before the advent of home video technology, the film was annually shown on television and became an anticipated event, an almost ritualized staging in the living rooms of American families. An allusion to the film generates not simply a memory but nostalgia for “a privileged lost object of desire.”¹⁶ In an impish and insidious manner, the Coens have uprooted this warm memory and relocated it to a 1930s Klan rally and execution.

      The effect of the allusion on the audience is threefold. First, there is the pleasure in simply identifying the allusion, the sense of belonging to the sophisticated coterie group I mention above. Secondly, there is the pleasure in witnessing a childhood fantasy defeat evil. It is the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion who rescue Tommy from the clutches of the Klan and flatten its Cyclops. The innocence of a childhood fantasy proves stronger than racism. But thirdly, the allusion creates a disturbing and ironic incongruity: that between the dark recess of Mississippi in the 1930s and the living rooms of postwar baby boomers and their children.

      Kierkegaard is instructive in understanding the effect if not the purpose of this irony. He asserts in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript that “irony is the confinium [boundary] between the aesthetic and the ethical.”¹⁷ The relationship between these two stages and the role that irony plays in the advancement from the former to the latter is treated extensively by Kierkegaard in Either/Or. In part I, a young man argues for the aesthetic point of view in a series of heterogeneous papers on topics as diverse as music, drama, crop rotation, and eroticism. In discussing these subjects, he asserts that one must distance oneself from commitment to any

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