The Coens are satirists, and as Northrop Frye (among others) has noted, critics always confuse satirists with their persona, the Satirist, who is by definition someone who mocks and criticizes people, portrays them as grotesque, stupid and so on. This is a mask which you can actually see in museums -- the Greeks and romans both made physical masks you could put on and be the Satirist. Later it became a literary persona: Swift and Pope are not their personae, their professional masks as satirists. The persona is part of the genre, even though a propensity to satire can go with a certain temperament, whose traits are exaggerated grotesquely in the persona.There's a line of argument in a lot of literary/film criticism that suggests that it's a moral or ethical failing for an author to have contempt for his characters. That it is somehow "too easy" to make a fictional character look bad, and much more praiseworthy to embrace your characters, warts and all.
More Bill:
Satirists are always accused of hating people. It's simply a convention of the genre they work in. They are regularly described as mean misanthropes - and some of them are - but we should try to maintain some sense of history, particularly since we're in a period when satire is the dominant mythos, whether we like it or not.Taking that kind of stance - where the author and audience stands above the characters - is an aesthetic choice: one that is as valid as any other. To suggest otherwise strikes me as misplaced indignation and an attempt to play a game of moral one-upsmanship. But it seems strange to advocate against an author on the behalf of something that doesn't exist.
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