“A Serious Man”: Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?
Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does anything happen to people who do not deserve it? The Coen brothers’ 2009 film A Serious Man poses this question and answers it just as Clint Eastwood did 17 years earlier in Unforgiven: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
A Serious Man is about a few tumultuous weeks in the life of Larry Gopnik, a physics professor living in an insular Jewish community in suburban Minneapolis in the spring of 1967. In Larry’s life, religion functions more practically than morally. It provides the culture and community in which the Gopniks operate. Larry and his family are nominally observant. His son Danny attends a Jewish day school in preparation for his bar mitzvah, and his wife Judith implores him to talk to the rabbi as she readies the divorce papers. But Larry leads a largely secular life.
Things start to go wrong for Larry. Judith is leaving him for a smugly superior spiritual guru, Sy Ableman. The head of the tenure committee at Larry’s university informs him that they have been receiving anonymous letters urging the committee to not grant Larry tenure for reasons of “moral turpitude.” The father of a student who Larry failed threatens to sue Larry when he does not accept a bribe.
As Larry’s world collapses around him, he repeatedly offers up the refrain, “I didn’t do anything.” Trying to find a cosmic explanation for his misfortune, he seeks a meeting with Rabbi Marshak, the octogenarian who presides over Minneapolis’s Jews. As Marshak is a very busy man (the Coens establish in one scene that he spends a lot of time thinking), Larry is only able to secure meetings with the two more junior rabbis. These rabbis offer Larry contrasting approaches to dealing with his issues.
The junior rabbi, Rabbi Scott, tells Larry that he needs to adjust his perspective. His problems may seem overwhelming, but he is ignoring the beauty with which God infuses everything. By rediscovering this sense of childlike wonder, Larry can tackle his problems with a heaven’s-eye view. When Larry kvetches about Judith’s infidelity, Scott meanders over to the window and gazes at the parking lot, one of God’s more mundane creations. “Just look at that parking lot!” This answer is not satisfying for Larry. I thought of the line from Neil Young’s “On the Beach,” released seven years after this meeting in the timeline of the film: “Though my problems are meaningless, that don’t make them go away.”
The more senior rabbi, Rabbi Nachtner, tells Larry a long-winded parable about a Jewish dentist who found the Hebrew words, “help me, save me” etched on the backside of a goy’s teeth. Driven mad for weeks by this message, the dentist approached Rabbi Nachtner and asked him what it meant. Nachtner told him God works in mysterious ways. Larry is incredulous at this answer. He asks Nachtner what happened to the goy, and Nachtner shrugs and replies, “does it matter?” This answer about the inability to understand God’s speech is also not satisfying to Larry. If God’s words are cloaked in enough mystery, the divine gibberish is indistinguishable from divine silence.
The Coens are calling for a religious reformation, a software upgrade to allow religion to help us navigate a complex modernity. It is telling that they set the film in the 1960s, in the throes of a cultural revolution in which religion played very little part. We literally see, through the bloodshot eyes of Danny, just how obsolete religious tradition seems to the new generation. On the day of his bar mitzvah, after smoking a joint in the bathroom, he stumbles to the bimah, passing on his way a sea of wrinkly white faces staring up at him. This image reinforces the notion of the young that Judaism is an anachronistic relic peddled by the soon-to-be dearly departed.
It is only after his bar mitzvah, when Danny meets with the elusive Rabbi Marshak, that we see a glimmer of hope. Marshak solemnly intones the lines from the centerpiece of the film’s soundtrack, “Somebody to Love” by Jefferson Airplane, “When the truth is found to be lies, and all the hope within you dies,” before handing Danny the portable radio that his Hebrew teacher confiscated from him earlier in the film. This sincere moment humanizes the Jewish tradition, which is an irrelevant, emotionless distraction to Danny and his peers.
It is in the context of this formalistic tradition in which the events of the film unfold. The film begins with a short story set in a 19th-century Ukrainian village in the home of a Yiddish-speaking couple. The husband has invited an old man, Reb Groshkover, to their home. The wife believes Groshkover is dead. She is convinced he is demonized by a dybbuk, a Jewish mythological spirit possessing the soul of a dead person. She stabs Groshkover in the heart with an ice pick. This is an action with extreme moral polarity. If Groshkover is possessed by a dybbuk, the wife will have virtuously driven an evil force from their home. If he is in fact alive, she will have committed the gravest of sins. Groshkover begins bleeding from the heart and leaves the home. The wife is untroubled by this sign of mortality. She exclaims, “Blessed is the Lord. Good riddance to evil.”
The rules of the game are clear here. There is virtue and there is sin, and there is God’s guidance directing the good, serious men towards virtue. This is not the reality in Larry’s world, but it is stories like this that build the moral foundation upon which Larry moves through life. At one point, Larry is confiding in a friend at the beach about his marital strife. She tells him, “We’re Jews, we have that well of tradition to draw on, to help us understand. When we’re puzzled we have all the stories that have been handed down from people who had the same problems.” The problem is that the stories from this tradition do not always help us function in a chaotic and uncertain world. The physics Larry proffers professionally assures him of this uncertainty, we see him teaching students Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but this is a lesson hard learned, even by the teacher.
The film ends as a massive tornado, a legal act of God, approaches Minneapolis. At the same time, Larry receives an inauspicious call from his doctor that he should come to his office immediately to discuss troubling X-ray results. Chaos and disorder assert themselves as the universe’s organizing forces. As destruction, whether through natural disaster or terminal illness, approaches the Gopniks, we cannot help but ask again, “why do bad things happen to good people?” This is only a valid question if there is an underlying reason for anything. In A Serious Man, we see that “why” is the wrong question to ask. The real question is how do we deal with it.
