For much of their decadeslong career, filmmaker brothers Joel and Ethan Coen specialized in what might be called cartoon noir: Pictures like Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Fargo, and Burn After Reading mixed painterly riffs on shopworn Hollywood thriller tropes with a flat-out silly Merrie Melodies sensibility. These movies were murderous—and hilarious.
The duo also took regional specificity seriously, or at least with sharply observed comic depth: Their movies were set in highly exaggerated versions of specific places at specific times, with special attention paid to local customs and folkways, and the odd characters who bummed around America's amusing local scenes.
