A second pass: questions of Bildad the Shuhite

Our mutual friend Eliphaz was not overly impressed with Slothrop's answers to those first learned questions, but he was so delighted by the Dylan Christmas video that he's decided to spend the rest of his days watching it. He will play it for family and friends at Hanukah. Next to the plate is charming Bildad the Shuhite, known to his buds as Billy the Shoe.

Questions of Bildad the Shuhite:

The Satan of the Book of Job--the original Adversary--doesn't get it, really. He thinks he can make a man suffer by taking away his goats and camels and she-asses and kids (the human kind), and when that fails he thinks tormenting Job's body with boils and blisters will make him curse God, but it only makes Job curse at his wife. And then Satan vanishes, leaving Job to his complaints and his inscrutable God.

Now, it seems to me that the Coen brothers have sharpened all that was psychologically unpersuasive in that original "Bible story" (why won't Slothrop call it a poem, since it is one?), taking great care to stab their new Job with a much pointier bodkin. Let's start with satanic Sy, whose onomatopoeic name--"Sigh"--also makes him the embodiment of S. Y. Ansky, who wrote The Dybbuk (the play Slothrop hasn't read but should, as it lies behind the prologue he shouldn't dismiss but does).

1. Back in the primitive Land of Uz, a wife was a burden, a necessary evil, hence Job's Satan leaves her around to linger as a further plague to her husband, urging him to "Curse God and die!" And Larry's wife is likewise a bitch, but Sy knows that Larry's manhood is invested in her as much as in anything else; hence, he steals her from his victim, or as he tells it, he "fucked your wife." So the Coens have upended the story of Job, because who's the more fiendish, the guy who slaughters your camels, or the one who makes you a cuckold, the adversary who robs you, or the adversary who shames you, the thief who steals your wallet, or the bastard who cuts off your balls?

But there are degrees of cuckoldry; for instance, there's the finding-your-wife-in flagrante-with-the-golf-pro type; one shocking sucky instant and boom! the marriage is mercifully over. That would seem to me a low degree. Then there's the more insidious kind, that sneaks up on you while you're innocently grading a pile of blue books and tells you your home has been infiltrated and your wife penetrated all this time you were doing your level best. And penetrated by whom? By the golf pro? By one of the rabbis? No, by Sy Abelman (nobody can even believe it, and their incredulity amplifies Larry's shame). The Coens could've made their Satan sexy, stacked, smoov, along these lines:

Instead, they make him fat, unctuous, a close-talker, with a lolling tongue, more like this guy:

How would you feel if your wife told you she'd been givin' it to Jabba for years?

2. But Larry's wife is a mere appetizer for Sy. Sy insinuates himself into every aspect of Larry's life. He is the slanderer writing nasty letters about Larry to the tenure committee. He serves the eviction notice banishing Larry from his own house. He turns Larry's dreams into nightmares, scoffs at all Larry can do with math and physics--the whole universe as Larry knows it. He causes Larry's car accident, not in any physical sense, but in the metaphysical manner of a dybbuk. And Sy steals from Larry even in death, steals the Jewish community (Larry's community) at his funeral, steals the Rabbi's sermon (whereas Larry was dismissed with rote bullshit), steals the very title of the movie from Larry as the rabbi blesses not Larry but Sy as "a serious man." Insufferably, he embraces Larry--he's that close to his prey--holds Larry's hand, fills Larry's home with his giant body and fills Larry's office with his menacing voice and fills Larry's head with his disgusting omnipresence. And in that marvelous dream-sequence in which Larry fills the Big Board with all the useless equations of life, and the room clears as soon as the bell rings anyway (those students take off, unlike the congregation mourning Sy), it seems only Sy was listening to Larry, and then it turns out Sy wasn't listening after all; he's there to bounce Larry off his own blackboard with the brutal taunt "I fucked your wife! I fucked your wife! I fucked your wife!"

The Coen brothers' films are of course full of satanic figures--Visser, Gaear Grimsrud, Anton Chigurh--but I would claim that this latest devil Sy is the subtlest of them all. But Slothrop need not go that far, he need only answer the question honestly: as the Coens give their little Larry over to Sy, as God once gave Job over to Satan, do they not identify the most vulnerable spots of their little man's psyche, and wound him cruelly there, and through him, us?

3. Near the end of No Country for Old Men, when Chigurh runs the stop sign and gets in that horrible car accident, having murdered that beautiful and simple woman without cause, I permitted myself to hope he might be dead, or that the approaching sirens would finally catch up to him. Should've known better; no way Cormac McCarthy was going to let his devil die. So he didn't die.

But in the middle of A Serious Man, Sy does die in a car accident, and this time I didn't permit myself to be fooled. Satan wasn't going away that easily, and sure enough his blighting influence only seemed to grow for most of the rest of the movie. But then it waned, didn't it? Then Larry's life started to improve, didn't it? I was fooled after all, and maybe my pal Zophar will ask Slothful Slothrop tomorrow about the miraculous end of A Serious Man, though that's not my department--Sy/Satan is my concern. So how did the Coen brothers manage to fade him out of their film? How could that arch-enemy lose to Larry the Loser? After all, there was no second death-scene for Sy. It's not like Larry found any good answers to his foe's machinations: he didn't un-cuckold himself, he didn't publish a book in a few days to get tenure, he didn't sweep the leg like Daniel-son. Nor did Larry's lawyers, his rabbis, his family help him with his Sy-problem. No Jesus here, either, thank God. So let me ask you, Slothrop: have the Coen brothers exorcised their usual demons more carefully this time? Is Sy's reign of terror and its quiet failure not one of this film's great successes?