In my mind the scars on the land (although filled in) are more prominent — guess it’s time for a rewatch!

And yeah, I was thinking more in depiction than in thematic stuff (which Son of Griff takes on well) for O Brother. The effort put forward to make the setting largely benign and beautiful (although still a background) seems of a piece with the bucolic landscape of All Gold.

Thanks.

He tears up the land while he’s digging but it looks exactly the same when he leaves — just temporary, cosmetic effects. He cleans up after himself, so-to-speak.

I don’t think of the depiction of the rural South in O BROTHER as being very focused on nature, though? I mean, it’s rural, but nobody is exposed to the elements except at the very end, and that’s because of a TVA dam project, not natural processes.

Oh Brother is more about the making of Southern Culture in the face of modernity. The remaking of nature as a product of that is a metaphor for a cultural shift from community based understandings to regionalism. Elia Kazan’s Wild River extends this metaphor to nature and culture more provocatively

Yeah, and I think to Michael’s point life is taken more seriously too. Algodnes has the great punchline, but it also has the moment of Zen where Franco sees and appreciates the pretty girl before he dies (similar to the parable of the man and the strawberries, or strawberry Gatorade if you’re Hank Hill). It is a perfect moment of clarity and beauty before the darkness. Contrast that with the courtship of Kazan and Heck in Gal, which is a succession of moments that build on each other to create a deep connection between two people. And that is also snuffed out, a section of time that might as well be a glance when you take the long view. But does it mean more because the pain is deeper? Is that stretch of life worth the ending?

Well, kudos, because it’s a great observation.

It was.

In earlier iterations of the Western narrative template in the Coen-verse, landscape, if not nature, serves as a canvas for documenting the presence, and impact, of culture. This is particularly true in FARGO and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, which heavily focus on the role of reading changes on the land for clues as to the specific execution of violent act, though often to the exclusion of its ultimate cause, hinting at a larger mystery beyond the capacity for reason to explain. The brothers have an infinite capacity to grasp particular concepts of an American Enlightenment forged in the intersection of history and the imaginary, one of which is the interpretation of landscape in the making of a civilization that serves as an extension, not a reproduction, of European thought.