Joel and Ethan Coen are no strangers to using acerbic, deadpan comedy in their films, but one of their most darkly comic features to date has to be A Serious Man (2009). Telling the story of physics professor Larry Gopnik, A Serious Man examines the contradictions that exist between the Jewish American and the non-Jewish American experience. It accomplishes this through astute, and at times awkward, comedy that serves as a tonal dissonance between seriousness, as the film’s title implies, and absurdity. 

A key metaphor in the film is Schrödinger’s Cat, which Larry attempts to explain to his college physics class. At a basic level, Schrödinger’s Cat (named for physicist Erwin Schrödinger) is a thought experiment that deals with the concept of superposition. That is, the idea that quantum particles can exist in multiple states simultaneously. The metaphorical cat from Schrödinger’s experiment is sealed in a box. Until that box is opened, the cat can be assumed to be both alive and dead simultaneously, as superpositioning suggests. When the box is opened, however, and the cat is observed, only then does a definitive outcome occur: either alive or dead. It is the act of observation itself that determines the outcome of the scenario. 

In a conversation with one of his students, Larry admits that ”even I don’t understand the dead cat. The math is how it really works.” What this gives us then is the notion that Larry, despite teaching quantum physics and dealing with high-concept[SG1]  theoretical positions, still attempts to explain everything with mathematics, something that, by and large, can only be conceived of in a linear fashion.

Where the humor of the film fits into this quantum concept is in the liminality of Larry’s own position in his life. Liminal spaces, or liminal experiences, can be defined as the moment or moments when “the so-called inner and so-called outer worlds come together, collide, collapse, merge, flow into one another, and in the process change each other forever” (Zemmelman 17). In other words, we can argue that liminality is itself a kind of Schrödinger's cat where something or someone exists between two states simultaneously. For example, the concept of middle age is liminal insofar as one is in-between “young” and “old” simultaneously.

It is no accident then that Larry himself is middle-aged[SG2]  in the film. Moreover, the comedy of the film leans into the more absurdist aspects of liminality. Consider Larry’s marriage at the start of the film. Rather than the usual knockdown, drag-out fights that are associated with divorce, both in film and real life, Larry’s divorce comes seemingly out of nowhere for him. His wife, Judith, comments that they had talked about their problems before, but Larry is bewildered all the same. To make matters more confusing, Judith admits that neither one of them has done anything, leaving Larry in a state of utter confusion. In this way, then, we can argue that Larry has not been observing his own life, and so by extension, his marriage exists in the liminal space, where it is both active and divorcing at the same time. 

With its darkly comic and absurdist humor, A Serious Man manages to make liminal a whole host of issues from the intersection of faith and secularity, marriage and divorce, life and death, and what it means to be a man in the changing cultural climate of the late 1960s. By examining the film as a liminal text and using ideas of liminality, and by extension, quantum physics, audiences can pierce the veil between worlds, and observe both a hilarious and tragic narrative at the same time. 

Works Cited

Coen, Joel, and Ethan Coen, directors. A Serious Man. Working Title Films, 2009.

Zemmelman, Steve. “The Tempest Speaks.” Jung Journal, vol. 7, no. 3, Aug. 2013, pp. 16–24.       https://doi.org/10.1080/19342039.2013.813342.