The Coen Brothers

The Coens have moved from the film-noir stylings of Blood Simple through the cartoon comedy of Raising Arizona, the gangster genre of Miller's Crossing, the Hollywood satire/horror film cross of Barton Fink, the antic 1940s-style comedy of The Hudsucker Proxy, the realistic thriller mode of Fargo, and on to the mystery/pothead combination of The Big Lebowski. [...] For the most part, though, they gave the script a kind of omniscient point of view, which allows the audience to know more of the truth than any of the characters. [...] And some of the incidental speech, such as the evangelist on the radio while Ray drives through the night with the supposedly dead Marty in the backseat (". [...] This sequence, perhaps the most talked-about part of the film, uses some of the hor- ror tropes that Joel learned from Sam Raimi and others; the dead that will not stay dead, the hand that suddenly reaches out to grasp the hero, the burial of the still-moving body. [...] And the very last moment, envisioned in the script and fulfilled later in the shooting, is an odd little joke, as the dying Visser, sprawled beneath the bathroom sink, watches a single drop of water gather on the pipes above his head and start to fall.