“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” and Many Types of Dark Storytelling

Like much of Joel and Ethan Coen’s repertoire, the anthology film “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” is masterfully crafted but devoid of a soul.

The Coens dabble in a lot of tragedy and their joy is in inverting the familiar notion that tragedy has to have a larger point. If the point of tragedy is to absorb a deeper truth about human nature, the Coens often delight in having you learn as little as possible.

Four of the vignettes of the film end in tragedy and each of them are dark in a way that could take away one’s enjoyment of the episode as a whole. What I find most interesting is how this is based on differing views of what one views as tragedy.

The vignette “Meal Ticket” has been cited as the darkest. A scruffy entrepeneuer played by Liam Neeson peddles around a limbless orator (Harry Helping) as entertainment and reaps the monetary rewards. As the crowds dwindle, the limbless man is eventually discarded into a river and replaced by a chicken.

This one wasn’t as dark because the entertainer didn’t have much to live for in the first place. He had no free agency in a very literal sense but in a broader sense, he was treated as nothing more than property. In that sense, he was put out of his misery.

The titular and first vignette, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” , personally negatively resonated the most with me. Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) is a simpleton of a caricature who roams the West…