Artist or Chicken?

During lockdown, I finally caught up with the Coen brothers’ latest film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) a six-part anthology of the Wild West with each segment differing wildly from the last, ranging from outright ridiculous to genuinely unnerving. ‘Meal Ticket’ is a particularly telling segment following a young Artist (Harry Melling), a performer without arms or legs who recites canonical works from Shelley’s 'Ozymandius' to the 'Gettysburg Address', who is ferried from town to town by an Impresario (Liam Neeson) with dwindling success. In another nameless town, the  Impresario is drawn to a rapt crowd watching a chicken perform mathematical tricks. He purchases the chicken, dumps the Artist into a river, and sets off with his new act.  

Originally, I thought this morbid little tale was a shaming finger pointed squarely at audiences choosing Hollywood’s endless reboots, remakes, sequels and prequels over interesting, artistic movies. Watching it again, I think it is instead a personal question that the Coens have posed for themselves about their career-long balance between ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’.  

A foundation of Coen-brand ‘entertainment’ is comedy stemming from idiocy. Their movies cover almost every genre – Western, mystery, noir, screwball and so on, but few iconic filmmakers utilise idiots quite so often. For the duo, either the world is full of idiots – O Brother Where Art Thou, The Ladykillers, Burn After Reading – or a thinking man is surrounded by idiots – Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, A Serious Man. The Coens by no means have a monopoly on stupidity, idiots have been cinema’s funny bone since Buster Keaton, but they use idiots as an ‘entertainment’ Trojan Horse to sneak in ‘artistic’ ideas.  

Take Raising Arizona (1987) – it can be enjoyed purely for the high octane screwball comedy it is, or we can investigate further. Why do Leonard Smalls and the protagonist H.I. McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) share the same Woody Woodpecker tattoo? Were John Goodman and William Forsythe cast because they resemble giant babies? Why do they replicate a shot of the kidnapped baby crawling under a bed with H.I. crawling under a car? The Coens consistently inject a host of compelling visual motifs and mysterious symbolic choices, but coat this in a highly entertaining package that we can simply kick back and enjoy.  

‘Meal Ticket’ is unlike this. It is slow, lacking original dialogue (a huge choice for writers who love loquacious characters) and humourless; all entertaining facade is stripped so the usually coated meaning is laid bare. Read allegorically, the Coens are the Artist with talent to share but ultimately are reliant on the Impresario, in this case the studios, to tour them town to town to audiences (only to take most of the cash). With the money drying up, the studios may try to make the art more exciting, adding ‘thunderous’ sound effects, or dolling up the Artist. Ultimately, however, it can be that pure ‘entertainment’ (the Chicken) draws a larger crowd, putting the art (and the artist) at risk of being dropped altogether. 

The dichotomy at the heart of ‘Meal Ticket’ had been obliquely addressed before by one of the idiot trilogy films, O Brother Where Art Thou (2000). Again, the ‘entertaining’ outer layer is a screwball comedy  about chain gang escapees on the hunt for a fortune. This rests, however, on the ‘artistic’ foundation of a modern retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey (with ingenious symbolic references). This dichotomy between high and low culture, ‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ is addressed by the title. It is a nod to a movie within the movie Sullivan’s Travels (1941) by Preston Sturges. Sullivan’s Travels follows a comedy filmmaker who hits the road as a homeless man to understand depression-era America and make a sombre, state-of-the-nation movie called ‘O Brother Where Art Thou’. The filmmaker ends up in jail, desperate and broken like the convicts that surround him, but when he attends a prison film screening and sees the joy the inmates get from the animated short on the screen, he abandons his ideas of making a ‘serious’ film and decides to return to making comedies. 

With O Brother Where Art Thou, moreover, the Coens seemed to be saying, “sure, we are clever enough to make intelligent references, but what matters most is that we can entertain you.” This was in 2000, 18 years before The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Somewhere on the way, each segment of this six-part anthology was written, but I would bet that ‘Meal Ticket’ came last. It is a question asked by ‘entertaining’ filmmakers looking back over their career and asking one troubling question: "Have we survived because we are the Artist, or the Chicken?"

Jack Wightman is that film nerd who works in a bookshop. He loves writing screenplays and articles, but sweats over the simplest of paragraphs, this bio included. You can read more of his articles at https://www.justonemansopinion.org.uk/