Sunday, December 13, 2009

No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture

Professor Murray Rothbard on the roof of his parallel universe home

If you get any spare time over Christmas, I recommend that you check out the Coen Brothers' latest film, A Serious Man, which is even better than Fargo, if that's possible.

This is a beautifully funny black comedic film, which had me laughing out loud most of the way through. Alas, only being partially rather than fully Jewish myself, I missed a few of the jokes which the more Yiddish members of my cinema audience got, but don't worry about that. If you're just a goy like me, you'll still get 90% of the references.

What's really strange, for an Austrian, is seeing a parallel universe opening up within the film. The lead character, Professor Larry Gopnik, could almost be the parallel universe twin of Professor Murray N. Rothbard, at his Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, especially if Uncle Murray had stuck with mathematics rather than branching into economics. This outer-body type experience is made even more surreal when Lew Rockwell appears at the door of Larry's home, dressed in the heavyweight appearance of the philandering Sy Ableman.

Honestly, go and see the film and you'll see what I mean.

To complete a trio of weird Austrian Jewish references, the film opens with a short Yiddish scene from the past in the vicinity of Lvov, which is of course the town Ludwig von Mises himself was born in.

Stranger and stranger.

It's a great film; go and see it!

(BTW, if you do, and you can figure out the meaning of the ending with the tornado scene, can you write in and let me know what that was all about?)

1 comment:

Paul said...

I saw the movie and it was great. I think the end means that everything that can go wrong will go wrong. Especially for jews. Need to see it again and look up all the jewish references.