All The Tropes

A Serious Man: Difference between revisions

Page Discussion

A Serious Man (view source)

Revision as of 04:57, 7 August 2017

17 bytes removed ,  6 years ago
m
→‎top: clean up, replaced: Big Lipped Alligator Moment → Non Sequitur Scene (2)
VisualWikitext
(defaultsort)
m (→‎top: clean up, replaced: Big Lipped Alligator Moment → Non Sequitur Scene (2))
Line 1:
{{work}}
[[File:a-serious-man-chalkboard_2433.jpg|frame|<small>We're Going To Be Fine...</small> ]]
 
{{quote|'''Rabbi Nachtner:''' We can't know everything.
'''Larry Gopnik:''' It sounds like you don't know anything! Why even tell me the story? }}
 
''[['''A Serious Man]]''''' is a 2009 film conceived by [[The Coen Brothers]], depicting a few crazy days in the life of a midwestern physics professor, Larry Gopnik. [[Info Dump]] a-go-go:
 
Larry's wife Judith astounds him with her announcement she intends to divorce him in favor of the more distinguished widower Sy Ableman; son Danny, whose Bar Mizvah approaches, smokes weed while he pretends to study; whiny daughter Sarah sneaks money from his wallet to save up for a nose job so she can look less Jewish. At the college, a student named Clive attempts to bribe him for a passing grade -- [[Blackmail|and the boy's father threatens to sue him for defamation should he go public]]. He is [[Exiled to the Couch|kicked out of his own house]] and forced to live in a crummy motel with his sickly and eccentric brother Arthur. Oh, and someone's been writing anonymous letters to his university warning them not to grant Larry tenure. Can things get any worse?
Line 80:
* [[Title Drop]]: At Sy's {{spoiler|funeral}}, and also when Larry tries to get an appointment with the third rabbi.
* [[Viewers Are Geniuses]]: ''"I don't want Santana's Abraxas! I don't need Santana's Abraxas! I'm not going to listen to Santana's [[wikipedia:Abraxas|Abraxas]]!"''
* [[The Walrus Was Paul]]: Any [[What Do You Mean It's Not Didactic?|attempt to analyze the film]] will reveal a tangle of mixed messages, [[BigNon LippedSequitur Alligator MomentScene|incongruous scenes]], and a generally incomprehensible mess. Given the subject matter of the film and the style of the creators, this is almost certainly intentional. Lampshaded to hell and back by The Second Rabbi. His story about The Goy's Teeth explicitly tells the audience that trying to decipher meaning and extract symbolism from this movie is a futile effort, and that many of the things we see were placed there for no other reason than to screw with your head if you think about them for too long. They don't have to mean anything, they're just there.
* [[What Happened to the Mouse?]]: Several questions that crop up throughout the film (What was up with that [[BigNon LippedSequitur Alligator MomentScene|opening sequence]]? How did the dentist's patient get those carvings on his teeth?) go unanswered by its end - almost certainly deliberately, given [[The Walrus Was Paul|the nature of the plot]].
* [[The World Is Just Awesome]]: The youngest rabbit tries to get Larry to see the world this way. Unfortunately he becomes fixated on using a ''parking lot'' as his example.
* [[Wham! Line]]: {{spoiler|"Oh, Sy Ableman died in a car crash".}} Especially funny in that the person delivering the line thinks of it wholly as an afterthought.
Gethbot
Bots
10,856

edits

Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Special:MobileDiff/1541553"