![]() The Ballad of Buster Scruggs presents “The West Texas Twit” and “The Herald of Demise” as a live-action Roadrunner, a goofy and charming figure capable of incredible acts of violence.Įarly in the film, Buster stops at an outpost for some whiskey to help his singing voice. The juxtaposition in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is not between Buster and the world, it is between the image that Buster projects (or which the audience has projected upon him) and the kind of person that he needs to be in order to survive on the lawless frontier. Instead, the joke is on the audience for believing that a character like Buster could be anything but a relentless unstoppable killing machine. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs makes a point to stress that the eponymous character is never really out of his depth. However, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs works so well because the joke isn’t on Buster. It’s an effective juxtaposition, even if it might have been a struggle to adapt the joke to a feature-length story. So, naturally, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs has a great deal of fun throwing this cartoonish caricature of the era into increasingly violent and chaotic surroundings, as if to juxtapose this idealised concept with the brutal reality. ![]() That charming musical figure provided a good natured and earnest depiction of what life was like in “the good old days.” Although later takes on the genre like Paint Your Wagon turned the figure into a punchline, the singing cowboy was an important part of the cultural history of the Old West. These wholesome figures populated the b-movies that were casually pumped out by major studios to fill the cinema chains that they owned. ![]() Of course, as strange as it might seem to contemporary audiences, singing cowboys were a genre unto themselves during the thirties and forties. An upbeat dandy cowboy with a guitar in his hand and a tune in his heart, Buster Scruggs is the sort of charming outlaw that Hobie Doyle might have played in Hail, Caesar! Indeed, it is Buster Scruggs who immediately establishes The Ballad of Buster Scruggs as a story about stories, feeling like the lead character of a film produced by Capitol Pictures. Buster Scruggs is a fascinating creation, but one who arguably serves as a piece of connective tissue between the Coen Brothers’ last film and this one. This is perhaps most obvious in the movie’s first segment, starring Tim Blake Nelson as the eponymous cowboy. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs essentially offers six differing perspectives on what the frontier was to America, flicking between them in such a way as to invite the audience to identify the unifying essence of the west that connects these very disparate visions of what life in nineteenth century America might have been like. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs essentially charts a history of the idea of the frontier in popular American culture, the ever-evolving myth of life in the Old West, filtered through an ever-evolving lens. However, they are connected by a series of recurring preoccupations about life of the frontier and man’s awkward relationship to both that wilderness and his fellow man. The Coen Brothers very cannily and very astutely ensure a great variety in tone across the six installments, which range from gleefully nihilistic, to sombre and withdrawn, to eerie and uncanny. That said, the quality is high enough (and the stories disparate enough) that it’s easy to imagine that each story of the six might be someone‘s favourite. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is decidedly uneven, as anthology films tend to be. ![]() In particular, a story about certain types of stories. So long as the people in the stories are us… but not us.” In its own weird way, positioned at the tail end of the narrative, Thigpen seems to offer something of a thesis statement for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a story about stories. “Because people connect the stories to themselves, I suppose. “People can’t get enough of them,” he assures his audience. In the film’s final segment, The Mortal Remains, the self-described “distractor” Thigpen explains that he distracts his quarry through stories.
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