Last night I saw the Coen Brothers’ new film, A Serious Man. It’s quite brilliant and thoughtful in a whole slew of ways, from the fact that it opens with a quote from Rashi and 10 minutes of perfect Yiddish to its incessant interrogation of faith, human behavior and the indeterminacy of both.
But this post is about a lampshade. A strategically placed lampshade. 
One of the most striking qualities of the film is its pitch-perfect reconstruction of Jewish material culture in the late 1960s-early 1970s. I recognized — viscerally recognized — so much of the film’s aesthetic from the rabbis’ tchochke-full offices to the vast modern terrain of the synagogue sanctuary to the awkward phrasing of a bar mitzvah boy’s Torah reading. Every element in this film was so well crafted, so thoughtful, so precise in its calibration, that this lampshade stood out.
The lampshade appears in a scene in which the main character goes to see his rabbi about his ongoing existential crisis, and has to see the junior rabbi, instead. On the wall of the junior rabbi’s office is a map of Israel. I grew up in synagogues and classrooms that had that pink-and-yellow Carta map of Israel on the wall. It — like so much else about this film — is unmistakable. But, the middle of this map, from about Haifa in the north to about Kibbutz Yotvata in the south, is obscured by a precisely well-placed lampshade.
The lampshade obscured the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the whole of the geography that has been at the center of so much contention since Israel began its occupation in 1967. A pre-1967 map would have depicted the State of Israel with the Green Line as its boundary, and with Gaza as part of Egypt and the West Bank as part of Jordan. The scene, which cuts back and forth between the characters in conversation, shows the map a whole bunch of times, and each time, there is the lampshade.
The lampshade is the Coen Brothers’ version of the blurring technology that covers other, similarly contentious… umm… parts when they appear on television. In this case the issue isn’t modesty — it’s politics. It’s history. It’s memory. It’s the ongoing reluctance of much of American Jewry to acknowledge the complicated history of the State of Israel, and the realities of historically contingent and shifting borders. Frankly, it’s a cop out that reveals that even the most scrupulous attention to historical detail will always reveal its present-orientation.
Instead of holding fast to their delicate, exquisite reconstruction of 1960s Jewish life, the Coen Brothers cave in to the demands and fears of early 21st century.
Even the past still has a present.
Perhaps the obfuscation was not a political statement, but an attempt to keep you focused on the feel and the story. Perhaps the Coens thought that introducing that detail would distract viewers from the impact of the scene. Or maybe it’s indicative of the generally unhelpfulness of the junior rabbi, who doesn’t present the entire picture, because he himself has little understanding of a middle-aged man’s relationship to Jewish life.
The map didn’t register with me like it did for you. But the past has a present. And the present certainly has a past. And there’s also the space-time continuum to consider. But absent a flux-capacitor, we can only see the past through our present eyes.
Agreed. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the unhelpful Jr. Rabbi. And maybe it was to keep me focused on the film. But I found it (or it’s absence) to be more distracting than it’s period-style presence. Also: why choose to
obscure that? Why not obscure the other, problematic aspects of Jewish life? Why take that moment to metaphorize things?
love this post. makes me want to see the movie. and have kept some of those great objects from your childhood. Or maybe not….
I just had another thought – the lampshade obscuring part of Israel could be (this is English major Esther speaking) a metaphor for the pall of the Holocaust that was cast over the founding of the State of Israel, and the fact that many view the Holocaust as a key enabler of Israel’s existence.
And obviously, in my previous comment, “generally unhelpfulness” should have been “general unhelpfulness.” Or something like that.
BTW, the super-old rabbi at the end has a photo of Golda Meir on his mantel. What up with that?