"Yeah."
"Almost makes me wish I hadn't been saved. Jackin' up banks! I can see how a fella'd derive a whole lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of it." (36:33)
I can't even bring myself to call Delmar a hypocrite- he's just so much fun. The essence of Delmar is that he goes along with everything, and does it so cheerfully and good-naturedly that it never seems insincere. When Delmar and Pete rush so eagerly to get themselves baptized, they seem to do it for little more reason than that the congregation happens to have come by at that moment. One senses that, for all his religious enthusiasm, Delmar wouldn't have given the salvation of his soul a second thought if he and his friends hadn't stumbled onto a baptism ceremony. Yet in the scenes following his encounter with the congregation, Delmar takes his newfound faith quite seriously- this doesn't stop him, though, from being delighted by George's bank robbery. He observes the contradiction between this delight and the religious ideals he should be upholding, but brushes his doubts off without worry ("almost makes me wish I hadn't been saved"). One would be tempted to call it a parody of religious hypocrisy if Delmar weren't so earnest and bighearted about everything he did. He'll commit himself to Christian morality one minute and take pleasure in a bank robbery the next, and to him, there's nothing terribly problematic about that.
At the risk of reading too much into things, I think that the Coen brothers are painting a great portrait of the Southern Baptist faith here, with its odd balance of rigid morality and gleeful licentiousness. That's not a slight to Southern Baptism either, by the way- it has always struck me as one of the most complicated and interesting of Christian denominations.
Questions: What, if anything, does O Brother Where Art Thou say about Southern religious assumptions? How representative of Southern Baptist thinking is Delmar?
I agree with omar about the possible commentary on southern religious views. However i would like to assert that perhaps this commentary extends beyond just southern Baptists. Delmar does seem to portray a kind of religious duality but so do several other characters throughout the story: the cyclops, Everitt. Everyone in this movie seems to have a natural duality about them, (even though not all of them directly pertain to religion). But i think that it should be mentioned that this story is a re-telling of "The Odessey", which begins with Odysseus blaspheming against the gods. From there he suffers hardship after hardship, all in an attempt to return home and regain religious peace with his 'gods'. In much the same way, we see the central characters of "O' Brother, Where Art Thou?" struggle to reach their destination while battling with their spiritual standings. It is a given, (at this point in the course) that religious faith played an integral part in the evolution of the South. Churches and religious songs provided community strength and comfort in times of social and economic turbulence. But it seems to me that, (at least in this movie) faith and religion are merely common ideals that all of the characters agree on in general but when placed in situations that aren't necessarily conducive to a religious lifestyle, most of them succumb to the 'evils' of the world and temporarily abandon their convictions. Likewise, in desperate situations they do the opposite and call upon a higher power to intervene in their favor. I feel that this statement about religious duality can encompass more than just southern Baptists. Perhaps the Cohen brothers are making a comment about how this 'faithful hypocrisy' was more obvious in the South due to the conflicts developing there.
ReplyDeleteQuestion: Does this assumption make the characters in the story seem to be opportunists, and if so what does this say about people in the South?