A Serious Man (2 page)

Blessed man. I thought to relate this story, actually, at Dickie’s funeral, but on second thoughts decided I myself figured in it too prominently, and I worried also that it required more description than might suit the solemn proceedings of the workings of a Moviola. Instead I recited another reminiscence, slight and meaningless though it might have struck some. I remembered for some arbitrary reason (that is to say, for no reason), the occasion of Dickie’s twenty-eighth birthday, whereupon I treated him to lunch at a Lyons Corner House. Pleasant meal, cornish hen; joking comments—the standard ones, perhaps—comparing effort expended to reward earned when separating the flesh of that compact bird from its bones; and meal’s end, celebratory. Memory can still replay the Lyons orchestra rendition of “Happy Birthday” whilst the staff trots out a small cake, to Dickie’s mingled pleasure and embarrassment. “My my, this is something,” he says, and then, blushing, “Thank you so very much, sir, very gratifying.”

That is all. Not an important moment; perhaps one that Dickie’s own memory did not long preserve. Why, then, has mine? I don’t know; I only know it undoes me. I mist up even now (o reader, let it pass—what needs you I confess to more than “mist”!), mourning not just Dickie, but those bits of our past that he has taken with him. The repository for half our collective memories—now sealed. Very well. Those bits whose custodian
I
am, I shall cherish all the more.

Dickie’s funeral was on a weekday and was during, as has been mentioned, the
editing of this movie. When I told the Coens that a funeral necessitated my taking a day from work, Ethan said, “Who died?” Your assistant editor, I huffed, of a quarter century. This drew momentary blank looks, and then Ethan’s eyes focused: “Oh—the guy who sat there?” Joel looked at the chair indicated, frowned, and said, “Jim died?”

It is in one sense fitting, and in one sense unfortunate, that this little remembrance should compose an introduction to this particular screenplay. Fitting: the story you are about to read is about mortality, not just because of its ending but because all memoir is—tacitly—about mortality. And not fitting: the Coens’ memoir, as you are about to discover, is that of a self-involved boob (or dual memoir, brace of boobs). Sadly fo the office of the Great Headmaster, where we shall have ouor the Coens, self-regard does not strengthen one’s vision, and the esteemed brothers have no more insight into their own history than they have interest in other people. “The guy who sat there,” indeed. Dickie Hill’s life has run its sprockets through the chattering gears of this world, and has rolled out; the Coens saw nothing. Their own lives, as this screenplay proves, are in process of doing same. Well, we are all born to roll out (myself excepted, it begins to seem). Time frogmarches us all tr shortcomings read out to us and a verdict rendered as to where we shall spend the eternal form. On the evidence, the Coens shan’t much understand that final reckoning, having failed to understand the run-up. They should have looked out; it would have helped them see in. Ah, Dickie.

Roderick Jaynes

Hayward’s Heath

September 2009

Fade in:

SNOWFLAKES FALLING IN BLACK

The flakes drift lazily down toward us. Our angle looks straight up.

Now an angle looking steeply down: the snow falls not quite dead away to collect on a foreground chimney pot and on the little shtetl street that lies maplike below us.

It is night, and quiet, and the street is deserted except for one man who
walks away from us, his valenki squeaking in the fresh snow. He leads
a horse and cart.

We cut down to street level. The man walks toward us, bearded, and
bundled against the cold. Smiling, he mutters in Yiddish – the dialogue
subtitled.

HOUSE INTERIOR

The man enters
.

The man crosses to the stove with a bundle of wood. Dora’s voice
continues:

The man dumps the wood into a box by the stove as his wife enters
with an ice pick.

His wife stares at him as he beams. He takes the stare as a sign that
she can’t place the name.

Still she stares. Then, quietly:

Laughter erupts from the man but, as his wife continues to stare at
him, he strangles on it
.

Quiet
.

Wind whistles under the eaves
.

The man says quietly:

They stare at each other. Outside, the wind quickens
.

A rap at the door
.

Neither husband nor wife immediately respond.

Finally, to her husband:

The wind moans
.

We are looking in from the outside as the door unlatches and creaks
in, opened by the husband in the foreground, who has arranged his
face into a strained look of greeting. In the background the wife stares,
hollow-eyed
.

Reverse on Reb Groshkover: a short, merry-looking fellow with a
bifurcated beard. He gives a little squeal of delight
.

He steps into the house and sees the wife staring at him.

The husband chuckles nervously
. 

Reb Groshkover laughs
. 

He settles, chuckling, into his chair, but Dora remains sober
.

Reb Groshkover stares at her, shocked
.

The wife holds his look, giving no ground
.

The husband looks from wife to Reb Groshkover, apprehensive
.

A heavy silence
.

Reb Groshkover bursts into pealing laughter
.

He wipes away tears of merriment; the husband relaxes, even begins
to smile
.

Reb Groshkover is still chuckling
.

He thumps his chest.

She breaks off to spit at the mention of the Evil One
.

Reb Groshkover is terribly amused:

She steps forward to the reb, who looks enquiringly up at her.

As his eyes roll down to look at her hand, she draws it across his
smooth right cheek.

She reaches across to the other cheek, Reb Groshkover’s eyes following
her hand –

– and drags her fingers across. A bristly sound
.

Reb Groshkover laughs
.

He appeals to the husband:

The wife steps back
.

Reb Groshkover looks slowly down at his own chest in which the wife
has just planted an ice pick
.

Reb Groshkover stares at the ice pick
.

The wife stares
.

The husband stares
.

Reb Groshkover bursts out laughing:

The husband can manage only a shocked whisper:

Reb Groshkover looks down again at the ice pick in his chest, the sight
refreshing his laughter. He shakes his head
.

He looks at the husband
.

And indeed, blood has begun to soak through his vest
.

He chuckles with less energy
.

He rises to his feet but totters.

He smiles weakly at Dora
.

He walks unsteadily to the door, opens it with effort, and staggers out
into the moaning wind and snow to be swallowed by the night
.

The wife and husband stare at the door banging in the wind
.

Finally:

She walks to the door …

… and shuts it against the wind
.

A drumbeat thumps in black
.

Music: Jefferson Airplane. Grace Slick’s voice enters:

An image fades in slowly, but even full up it is dim: a round, dull
white shape with a black pinhole center. This white half-globe is a plug
set in a flesh-toned field. The flesh tone glows translucently, backlit.
We are drifting toward the white plug and, as we do so, the music
grows louder still
.

A pull back – a reverse of the preceding push in – from the white
plastic earpiece of a transistor radio. The Jefferson Airplane continues
over the cut but becomes extremely compressed. The pull back reveals
that the earpiece, lodged in someone’s ear, trails a white cord
.

We drift down the cord to find the radio at its other end. As we do so
we hear, live in the room, many voices speaking a foreign language in
unison. A classroom, apparently
.

The radio, on a desktop, is hidden from in front by a book held open
before it. The book is written in non-Roman characters
.

We are in Hebrew school
.

The boy who is listening to the transistor radio – Danny Gopnik – sits
at a hinge-topped desk in a cinder block classroom whose rows of desks
are occupied by other boys and girls of about twelve years of age. It is
dusk and the room is fluorescent-lit
.

At the front of the room an elderly teacher performs a soporific verb
conjugation
.

Danny straightens one leg so that he may dig into a pocket. With an
eye on the teacher to make sure he isn’t being watched, he eases
something out:

A twenty-dollar bill
.

The light resolves into a flared image of a blinking eye
.

Reverse: the inside of a human ear – fleshy whorls finely veined, a
cavity receding to dark
.

Objective on the doctor’s office: the doctor is peering through a
lightscope into the ear of an early-
middle-aged man, Larry Gopnik
.

Close on Hebrew characters being scribbled onto the blackboard as the
teacher talks
.

The teacher, talking
.

A bored child, staring off
.

His point-
of-
view: a blacktopped parking lot with a few orange school
buses; beyond it a marshy field and distant suburban tract housing
.

Close on another child staring through drooping eyelids
.

His point-
of-
view: very close on the face of a classroom clock. We hear
its electrical hum. Its red sweep second hand crawls around the dial
very, very slowly
.

Danny Gopnik hisses:

The teacher drones on, writing on the blackboard. Danny’s eyes flit
from the teacher to the student sitting kitty-corner in front of him –
a husky youth with shaggy hair. He hasn’t heard Danny.

The teacher turns from the blackboard and Danny leans back, eyes
front, folding the twenty up small behind his book
.

The teacher, not finding the source of the noise, turns back to the board
and resumes the droning lesson
.

The clock-watching child, eyelids sinking, is beginning to drool out of
one side of his mouth
.

The light again flares.

Reverse: looking into a pupil.

Objective: the doctor looking through his scope into Larry’s eye
.

The teacher drones on at the blackboard
.

A bored child excavates a booger from his nose
.