Job and the Comedy of Suffering in A Serious Man (2009), by the Coen Brothers

Abstract

The movie A Serious Man (2009), by Joel and Ethan Coen, can be interpreted as an ingenious and irreverent parody of the Book of Job. In the light of exoliterary intertextuality and comparative studies, my objective is to establish similarities, differences and relations between the Biblical parable and this movie. I will analyze the categories of time and space, the protagonist, the main events, and the message. To do so, I resort to interviews granted by the Coen brothers, to essays written by cinephiles and theologists and to intertextuality theory.