A Serious Man

a couple of nights ago, my yin and i watched the latest offering from the Coen brothers:

Joel and Ethan Coen, no relation to my yin

A Serious Man opens inside the ear canal of a teenage boy, and presents a mundanely bizarre (as opposed to bizarrely mundane) take on 1960s suburban America as seen through the eyes of a Jewish physics professor awaiting tenure. it is a world populated solely by stereotypes: his domineering Jewish wife, her Jewish psychoanalyst lover, and the (presumably) uncircumcised goyim next door. things do not go well, but this is beside the point.

the point is that the story ends ambiguously, with a tornado bearing down on the man's (post-bar mitzvah) son and a telephone call from his doctor. on a superficial level, the events leading up to this moment imply that these coming calamities are some manner of divine retribution. this notion is undercut, however, by the fact that misfortune has permeated the film from its beginning, forcing the spectator to consider that bad things happen not because of an angry G-d, but simply because they do.

it's not the size of the equation, it's how you use it

the subtle implication is that, whatever omnipresence g-d may possess, it is not matched by his potency. instead, Hashem seems to have little more than the power to leave vague messages on the backside of gentile teeth:

another reason to avoid the dentist