“I refuse to send off to another world, as the first example of earth’s intelligence, a man who wants to go and set up a McDonalds franchise,” Paul Schrader is said to have told Steven Spielberg, during the making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Coens may have had the Hollywood of the 1940s in their satirical crosshairs, but their diagnosis of the messianic strain lurking within Hollywood populism still holds firm. "The hopes and dreams of the common man are as noble as those of any king.” The great joke, of course, being that when Fink found himself next door to one such common man, he ran screaming from the room. “Who cares about the fifth Earl of Bathsdrop and Lady Higgenbottom and who killed Nigel Grinchgibbons?” railed Barton Fink. Shakespeare’s lowest ranking tragic hero was a general (Othello).
“Within the action there must be nothing irrational.” Tragedy consisted of the spectacle “highly renowned and prosperous men” brought low by “some great error or frailty” and it has been one long, slow march down the social rankings ever since. “The unraveling of the plot, no less than the complication, must arise out of the plot itself, it must not be brought about by the Deus ex Machina,” he wrote. In the Poetics, he laid down his famous injunction against deity-induced plot happenings. S hould God be in movies? Aristotle thought not.
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