By Diana Uhimov
The lyrics “when the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within
you dies, don’t you want somebody to love, don’t you need somebody to
love…” drown out a teenagers Hebrew lecture as he listens to the
Jefferson Airplane song, Somebody to Love, on his walkman during
class, in the Coen Brothers’ 2009 film A Serious Man. The film
centers around the protagonist, Larry’s search for answers about why,
despite always doing the “right thing,” his life suddenly seems to be
falling apart. Larry, a physics professor who had been living his
life as if everything was as certain as the mathematical equations he
taught to his students, fails to realize that his relationship with
his wife has disintegrated, and he barely knows his own children.
When his wife decides to leave him for another man, he goes to a
lawyer who, unequipped to acknowledge Larry’s true grief, suggests
that he go talk with a Rabbi. After seeing numerous Rabbis, Larry’s
questions are left unanswered. They tell him that maybe these are
expressions of God’s will and that he should gain a new perspective,
and learn about how things really are.
It turns out that after all this time while being a generally good
person and following the rules, Larry became a mediocre, mechanical,
uninspiring person. We can’t really blame him though. These traits
are exactly what our society promotes, as epitomized in the reasonable
man standard in the U.S. legal system. Our system judges a human
being’s conduct based on what the average, rational person would do.
The reasonable person test fails any moral criteria because it doesn’t
lead to virtue and is incapable of subjectivity, but instead judges
individuals based on external values of the majority. This type of
group thinking can be extremely dangerous as it prohibits individual
thinking. When there is no room for individual thought and dissent, a
permissive environment for atrocity is created. During The Holocaust,
Nazis took orders unquestioningly, and were able to detach from the
horror of their conduct and sleep at night because they were part of a
group where such conduct was acceptable.
By conforming to the reasonable man standard, Larry was detached from
the spiritual realm. Thus, he did not form meaningful connections
with his wife or his children. He avoided the truth—that his son was
a pothead, that his daughter had an unhealthy obsession with her
appearance, and that his wife was seeing someone else—in hopes that by
disacknowledging the truth, it will just disappear. Larry found out
the hard way that truths cannot be buried because they will eventually
come back in a worse way, like in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, where
burying the truth created a toxic society and once he found out the
truth, Oedipus could no longer bear to see the world and poked out his
own eyes as an acknowledgment of the horror of killing his own father.
This is what the Rabbis were telling him when they said that he must
learn how things really are. Regardless of whether or why God may
have willed for him to undergo these events, the only thing he can do
is to know the truth. The power of truth is symbolized by the South
African Truth and Reconciliation Committees where the blacks who had
been wronged sought historical justice over retributive justice
because they felt that if their story was told to the world, they
could move on. In a moral system, truth would be valued above
efficiency and procedural rules. We are choking our victims by
marginalizing their truth and this is reflected in peoples’ private
lives. A Serious Man portrays this perfectly when the property lawyer
comes in to give Larry the legal solution to his neighbor encroaching
on his property and then drops dead just before giving him the answer.
The Jefferson Airplane lyrics that we hear throughout the movie
remind us that no matter how hurtful the truth may be, the only way to
move on is to live a moral and spiritual life by acknowledging it.
