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Like many of their films, the Coen brothers' A Serious Man at once portrays a society dominated by men and calls into question what it is to be a man, especially but not exclusively a Jewish man. Indeed, while Larry Gopnik's wife is the source of much of his trouble, she, like her unmanageable daughter and the seductress-neighbor--the only women characters in the film--occupies minimal space in the narrative. But the role of the female, or the characteristics that differentiate men from women, occupy maximal space in the narrative: They are incorporated throughout the film in Gopnik's behaviors, in parodies of those behaviors, and in stereotypes of Jewish men, and non-Jewish men for that matter, that have a lengthy history in American television and film and in Western, Christian culture more generally. And so we find the central irony of A Serious Man, which is the presence of the female restricted to an indirect "maleâ[euro] presence that articulates the problem of male Jewish identity as it is construed and challenged in the context of American suburban life.
Ostensibly, the film hinges on the coming of age of a young man with the celebration of his bar mitzvah, the moment that marks the transition from boyhood to manhood in Jewish tradition and the age when a boy becomes responsible, both morally and religiously, for the obligations that are incumbent on all grown men in the Jewish faith. What happens, the film begs us to ask, when Jewish boys become men? While the boys in the film seem to be fairly conventional with their teenage malaise and disrespect toward their elders, the men surrounding them portray a much more complicated picture. How does Jewish identity and a traditionally patriarchal religion change when set in suburban, Midwestern America? The film thus sets up a series of important contrasts--the difference between youth and maturity; the difference between Jew and non-Jew; and most important for the present discussion, the transformation regarding masculine identity as it emerges across these categories. While the Coen brothers defy any definitive conclusions about Jewish male identity, they use issues of religion and gender to delineate and define moral identity; ultimately, the mix of male and female characteristics...