Reading the Coens "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs"
You know the story, but people can't get enough of them, like little children. Because, well, they connect the stories to themselves, I suppose, and we all love hearing about ourselves, so long as the people in the stories are us, but not us. Not us in the end, especially. If True Grit was the Coen Brothers’ most straightforward take on the Western, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is their most philosophical. This six-part anthology film takes the tropes of the Western—outlaws, pioneers, prospectors, gunfights, and frontier justice—and distills them into meditations on fate, mortality, the moral ambiguity of the American mythos, and… death. Each story, though distinct in tone and subject, contributes to an overarching vision: a world where human striving, cruelty, and dreams of control are ultimately met with an unyielding reality. The film opens with the titular story, a darkly comic and almost cartoonish tale of a singing gunslinger (Tim Blake Nelson) who navigates the violent We...
