I don't mean to imply by any of this that the Coens are cynical and that Kieslowski isn't. One thing that probably makes Kieslowski more controversial in Europe than in the U.S., and the Coens more controversial in the U.S. than in Europe, is that their commercial calculations are more easily perceived at home than elsewhere, without the window dressing of subtitles. Above all The Decalogue is a packaging idea, successfully designed to give Kieslowski an international reputation and made in part for export — which is why, by his own admission, Polish politics, queues in front of shops, and ration cards were all pointedly excluded and the all-purpose symbolic "silent witness" was slipped in as an afterthought.

Yet Kieslowski seemed anything but cynical when it came to television. As he put it in the book Kieslowski on Kieslowski: "I don't think the television viewer is less intelligent than the cinema audience. The reason why television is the way it is, isn't because the viewers are slow-witted but because editors think they are....This doesn't apply so much to British television which isn't as stupid as German, French or Polish television. British television is a little more predisposed to education, on the one hand, and, on the other, to presenting opinions and matters connected with culture...and this is done through their precise, broad, and exact documentary films and films about individuals. Whereas television in most countries — including America — is as idiotic as it is because the editors think people are idiots."

That's what the Coen brothers seem to think too; if one considers all the laughs found in Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Fargo, there are very few that aren't predicated on some version of the notion that people are idiots — the people on-screen, that is; those in the audience laughing at the idiots are hip aficionados, just like the Coens. In Fargo one way to gauge the degree of idiocy of the characters is by observing what they're watching on TV. After the kidnappers have sex with bimbo prostitutes on twin beds in a roadhouse, all four of them are seen watching the Tonight Show together, which merits a sizable guffaw; then we cut to Marge beside her sleeping husband in their bedroom watching a nature documentary about insects, which produces only a titter. (If Marge were watching the Tonight Show and the kidnappers and prostitutes were watching the nature documentary, the scale of the relative derision would doubtless be reversed.) Later on the sullen, silent kidnapper (Peter Stormare) is seen watching a daytime soap on a set with poor reception while he distractedly scarfs down junk food, which is considered more worthy of our interest than the kidnapped woman who lies dead in a corner of the same room; precisely when and how she died is made to seem a trivial matter — a passing detail, lost (as it were) between commercial breaks. Granted, this emphasis may be a commentary on the callousness of the kidnappers; but isn't it also a commentary on the callousness of the Coens and their audience?

This may seem to mark the Coens as smart-alecky opportunists, but if one looks more closely at their filmmaking practice as opposed to their gags and put-ons, they're clearly interested in being artists, not simply in making a killing at the box office. The complex web of paranoid misapprehensions that form the noirish plot of Blood Simple should be perceived as an artistic statement about the period we're living in — as the opening narration comparing Texans to Russian communists suggests — and not merely as a set of heartless genre mechanisms, though it's also that.

As a further indication of this, let me cite what I regard as the key scene in Fargo — a disturbing interlude that strikes many others as wrong or dubious because it has nothing to do with the story proper. Late one night Marge gets a phone call from a guy she knew in high school, Mike Yanagita (Steve Park), who's now based in the Twin Cities; it's strongly hinted that they used to be a couple. (Marge is now married to a wildlife painter named Norm who works mainly at home.) Mike had seen Marge on TV in connection with her murder investigation, and the next day they wind up meeting in the bar of her hotel. Frantically trying to reestablish some intimacy with her by sitting next to her in their booth (she firmly but politely asks him to move back to the other side), Mike tells her he was married to an acquaintance of hers named Linda, who died of leukemia; he adds that he's been working as an engineer, then breaks down in convulsive sobs and speaks forlornly about his loneliness.

The next morning, chatting on the phone to another old friend, Marge discovers Mike was never married to Linda (who's still very much alive), has "psychiatric problems," and lives with his parents — and this is the last we hear of him.

In terms of plot this episode is awkwardly extraneous, but in terms of theme — a lonely individual lying compulsively, trying without success to hide his desperation — it registers as central. Even the fact that Mike's ethnic background is Japanese while nearly everyone else, including Marge, is Swedish-American may be relevant; it seems that Swedish-Americans have nailed-down styles for articulating their emotional repression in social situations — grotesquely unfeeling in Jerry Lundegaard's case, especially when he's speaking to his wife or son, affable and easygoing in Marge's

Nobody could ever accuse Kieslowski of this kind of misanthropic, and, I would argue, TV-derived shorthand, no matter how sarcastic he gets. The most odious character I can think of in The Decalogue is a young, virtually motiveless killer (Miroslaw Baka) from the countryside who figures centrally in the fifth film ("Thou shalt not kill") — known as A Short Film About Killing in its expanded 85-minute version — but at no point does Kieslowski present him simply with disdain or a curt dismissal. Indeed, this character's eventual public execution is made to seem just as horrific as his own gratuitous murder of a cabdriver; both events are shown in real time, implicating the viewer in each process. We never learn very much about him, and no effort is made to make his victim likable or charismatic, but they're both worthier human beings than anyone the Coens have filmed — even worthier than Marge, their seeming favorite — because they have a wider, more varied, and less predictable pool of human traits. No one in Kieslowski's world is ever bigger than life; in the Coens' world you virtually have to be to get their form of validation and recognition.

"Rich fellas come up an' they die," Ma Joad says at the end of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, "an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But we keep a-comin'. We're the people that live. Can't nobody lick us. We'll go on forever, pa. We're the people." Perversely, I was reminded of this hokey speech during the last scene of Fargo, which features Marge and Norm (John Carroll Lynch) conversing in bed — the only characters toward whom the Coens can express any warmth. But if the Joads in 1940 stood for some sort of populist triumph over social injustice and adversity, the salt-of-the-earth Gundersons become expendable as soon as they serve their prescribed function — which is to validate our amused tolerance for good-hearted folks with funny accents and down-home truths surviving in an absurd universe. But the world they inhabit is devoid of other meaning, too grim to make their survival count for much more than first place in the Coens' hit parade of favorite hicks.

The regional flavor of Kieslowski's Warsaw in The Decalogue is only slightly less acrid, but its sourness is ultimately made to seem incidental rather than central to the ten tales being told. The fact that each film in the series lasts less than an hour might have something to do with this. (A Short Film About Killing makes room for more cruelty and violence, including a cat's body swinging from a rope and the killer crushing the cabdriver's dentures, but I'm not persuaded it has anything more to say about breaking the Fifth Commandment.)

One thing that's potentially exciting about movies that last about an hour is how much can be done within that format. Admittedly, a lot of Hollywood B-films of the 40s and 50s with comparable running times are strictly from hunger, but if one turns to masterpieces and near masterpieces, ranging from the Val Lewton horror classics, William Castle's When Strangers Marry, and Walt Disney's Dumbo and The Three Caballeros to Ousmane Sembene's Black Girl, Luis Buñuel's Simon of the Desert, and Christopher Munch's The Hours and Times — or even to just well-crafted jobs like most of the quickie thrillers done in the "Whistler" series in the 40s — it's surprising how rich and satisfying many of them are. (By comparison it's amazing how padded most current features are. If many short features, such as those from the 30s, tend to speed up narrative events unnaturally, the average 100-minute or two-hour feature of today tends to slow them down just as mechanically.)

Charting moral ambiguities among characters who are never as fixed or as finite as we initially suppose, the ten films of The Decalogue are brave enough to yield questions that demand further thought rather than elicit our self-applause for recognizing our superiority to — or even our affection for — the characters on-screen. The finely sculpted scripts of these films become suggestions about how we might think about these people, not directives about how we should judge them. This contemplative style doesn't prevent any of these films from being entertaining; some of Kieslowski's jokes can be downright raucous, like the Polish punk-rock invitation to break all the commandments that launches the tenth film, and I can't say that any of the films in The Decalogue ever bored me. But they're usually entertaining in a quiet way, without the stylistic grandstanding the Coens seem to require to function at all. As dark and sardonic as The Decalogue and Fargo are in their alternating sweetness and sourness — above all in their comic and despairing depictions of the multiple, complex secrets people keep from one another and sometimes from themselves as they try to place their lives in order — only The Decalogue sends me out of the theater with some measure of hope.

Jonathan ROSENBAUM
first published in

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/1996/03/the-human-touch-2/