The Best of ‘The Ballad of Buster Scruggs’ (2018)
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a witty and provoking amalgam of six short stories set across sprawling narrative traditions of Wild West cliché. Any fan of Joel and Ethan Coen is no stranger to wild, disjointed black comedies which treat death with no greater reverence than, say, music — and with the same indifferent assumption of its inevitability — and at first glance Buster Scruggs seems to run in the same vein. The eponymous Scruggs opens the film with an episode which shares its title with the film and can only really be described with the word whimsical. He sings cheerfully to the tune of his guitar, riding on horseback between episodes of shooting up grisly villains in saloons, before turning to lecture the audience on his misanthropic philosophies. (My first thought was admittedly both redundant and uninsightful: ‘This is a Coen Brothers film.’ Nonetheless, this does speak volumes of the distinguished style of the Coens’ brand.)
After the first few episodes have passed, it becomes clear that this was little more than clever misdirection. Yes, the film as a whole is very witty — but it’s not a clear-cut comedy as the first episode might have you believe. Later episodes do take themselves — and death — very seriously, thus the opening comic episode really serves as a decoy, perhaps to make the tragic stories that much harder hitting when they do arrive.
In Meal Ticket, we follow a struggling quadriplegic performance artist and his business partner as they compete with starvation, extreme weather, and — to their humiliation — a crowd-winning ‘genius chicken’ apparently capable of calculating very simple arithmetic on demand. The episode’s strength is in its silence: almost all of the dialogue is in fact monologue in the form of the artist’s performances. The poems and speeches we hear him repeat over and over are not his own words, but those of Byron, Shelley, and other contemporary greats, and the rest of the story is told through watching his grim existence. These poems tell of human and supernatural justice; it is therefore fitting that a character who experiences little of either is granted no voice of his own. As an aside, it’s hard not to wonder if this section is partly an autobiographical allegory — the struggling artist forced to compete with duller forms of entertainment is straight out of Bradbury.
The film’s peak is The Gal Who Got Rattled, the story of Alice Longabaugh, a young woman travelling to Oregon, who finds herself at the mercy of her carriage driver when her brother dies en route without producing payment. Matters are further complicated when the caravan is attacked by a First Nation tribe, who feature previously in Near Algodones. These warblings ‘Injuns’ might be dismissed as just another overdone cliché, but I do think there is significance in their recurrence between episodes. None of the European-American characters feature in more than one short story, but the First Nations, flat and misrepresented as they may be, are a recurring force. There’s a sense of their omnipresence when they reappear — this is, after all, a land they have called home for millennia more than European-Americans. Longabaugh’s fate, meanwhile, is mirrored beautifully in the film’s most striking tidbit of imagery: a man dances with a life-size puppetess around a campfire, just as Longabaugh finds herself steered repeatedly through life by the wills of various men — from her brother, to her carriage driver, to a suitor who promises to bail her out, and to the tribe.
After such a strong tragedy, when the Coens’ comic wit returns in full form in the finalé it feels a little jarring. The Mortal Remains juxtaposes three opinionated characters with wildly differing moral ideals and demands they put their faith in their outspoken beliefs of a ‘moral life’ to the test when they find themselves face to face with two bounty hunters. The episode is almost all dialogue within one static scene, and is more about conflicting beliefs than it is about action. As for which character’s ideals are correct, and how the episode (and the film in totality) is meant to be received, The Mortal Remains ends, tellingly, inconclusively on both fronts. The Coens are never preachy, and Buster Scruggs is no exception: the decision of whether comedy outweighs tragedy in this kaleidoscope of the Wild West is left entirely in the hands of the audience.
