People and Events, Real and Fictional, that Inspired Joel and Ethan Coen’s O

Brother, Where Art Thou? (2001)

By Ian K. Judge-Lord
University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point Joseph P. Collins College of Letters and Sciences
Department of Political Science
May 2015

The history of the works of literature from which screenwriters Joel and Ethan

Coen drew in writing the screenplay for their December 22, 2000 adventure comedy Oh

Brother, Where Art Thou? Begins with the oldest known work of literature in the

recorded history of Western civilization, The Odyssey by the 8th Century BCE Ancient

Greek poet Homer.

The first parallel between Homer’s Odyssey and the Coen Brothers’ O Brother is,

of course, the most obvious. The primary protagonist of Oh Brother is Ulysses Everett

McGill, played by actor George Clooney. “Ulysses” is the Latin form of the name Homer

gives to the protagonist of his Odyssey: “Odysseus”, king of the Ionian Island of Ithaca.

The character of the governor of Mississippi, played by the late actor Charles Durning, is

named Menelaus O’Daniel. Menelaus was a king of the Greek city-state of Sparta, who

features prominently in the works of Homer. The wife of Clooney’s protagonist, played

by actress Holly Hunter, is named Penny. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’s wife, the

Queen of Ithaca, is named Penelope.

The second parallel between Homer’s poem and the Coen brothers’ film comes

before the first line of dialogue is spoken. While the scene is still black, words appear

onscreen:

“O Muse! Sing in me, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all the
ways of contending. A wanderer, harried for years on end.”

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 In his 2007 article Homer in Tishomingo, Doctor John Cant of the University of

Essex Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies notes [Cant 70] how closely

this follows the first lines of Book I of Homer’s Odyssey:

“Tell me, O muse, of the man of many devices, who wandered full many ways
after he had sacked the sacred citadel of Troy. Many were the men whose cities he
saw, and many were the nations with whose manners and customs he was
acquainted; and many were the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea while
seeking to win his own life and to achieve the safe homecoming of his comrades.
Yet even so he saved not his comrades, though he desired it sore.” [Homer,
Murray 1.1]
Oglethorpe University Professor of English Douglas McFarland supports this

view in Marymount Manhattan College Associate Professor of Philosophy Mark

Conard’s book The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. [McFarland 50]

Another parallel comes in the form of the blind seer, played by actor Lee Weaver,

as is noted by University of Utah Department of Languages and Literature Associate

Professor of Classics and Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies Margaret Toscano

in her 2009 article Homer Meets the Coen Brothers. In one of the opening scenes of the

movie, the character of Delmar O’Donnell, played by actor Tim Nelson, asks the blind

man if he works for the railroad, to which the blind man replies: “I work for no man”.

Toscano writes that this is a reference to Book IX of Homer’s Odyssey, wherein the hero

Odysseus introduces himself to the Cyclops Polyphemus with the pseudonym “Outis”,

which in Greek translates as “Noman”. The character of Pete Hogwallop, played by actor

John Turturro, then asks the blind man if he has a name, to which the blind man replies:

“I have no name.” Toscano writes that this is an allusion to Book X of Homer’s Odyssey,

in which Odysseus refuses to give his name to the enchantress and sorceress Circe, the

Ancient Greek goddess of magic. [Toscano 49]

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 In his 2003 article History, Race and Myth in O Brother Where Art Thou?

University of Georgia Department of Comparative Literature Professor of English Hugh

Ruppersburg writes that Weaver’s blind seer is an avatar of Tiresias, the blind prophet of

Apollo, Greek god of knowledge, music oracles, poetry, and prophecy, in that he gives

the film’s protagonists a prophecy that Ruppersburg likens to those of Pythia, the Oracle

of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi:

“You seek a great fortune, you three who are now in chains. And you will find a
fortune—though it will not be the fortune you seek. But first you must travel a
long and difficult road—a road fraught with peril and pregnant with adventure.
You shall see things wonderful to tell…and oh, so many Startlements. I cannot say
how long this road shall be. But fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has
vouchsafed your reward. And though the road may wind and your hearts grow
weary, still shall you follow the way, even unto your salvation.” [Ruppersburg 10]
This view is supported by University of Copenhagen associate professor

Doctor Pernille Flensted-Jensen in her article The Odyssey and O Brother, Where Art

Thou? In the Danish Journal of Philology and History. [Flensted-Jensen 18] Tiresias

appears to the hero Odysseus in Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey, as is noted by Columbia

College Chicago Associate Professor Susan Kerns in her article O Homer, Where Art

Thou?

Flensted-Jensen and Toscano note a parallel between the character of Sheriff

Cooley, played by actor Daniel Von Bargen, and the ancient Greek sea god Poseidon. In

Book XIII of Homer’s Odyssey, in his unrelenting lust for revenge against Odysseus,

Poseidon ignores the decree by his older brother Zeus, Ancient Greek god of justice, law

and order and the king of the Ancient Greek Pantheon of gods and goddesses, that

Odysseus will reach his home kingdom of Ithaca. In one of the last scenes in O Brother,

Where Art Thou? Sherriff Cooley likewise ignores the fact that Governor O’Daniel has

officially pardoned the film’s three protagonists with the words: “The law. Well the law

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is a human institution.” [Flensted-Jensen 22][Toscano 50] Though in the Sherriff’s case

his obstinacy is motivated not by any personal grudge against any of the heroes, like

Poseidon’s against Odysseus, but by an unflinching and dogmatic sense of justice for

their crimes.

Flensted-Jensen and Toscano further draw a parallel between the character of

Mister Lund, played by actor Stephen Root, and Homer himself, the author of The

Odyssey. Root’s Lund is the owner of a radio station who offers to pay each the film’s

protagonists ten dollars, the equivalent of more than a hundred and fifty dollars today, in

return for recording them singing. Lund is a blind man, and Homer’s name in Ancient

Greek, “Homerus”, translates as “blind”. [Flensted-Jensen 22] Toscano writes that the

Coen brothers’ blind radio station owner is “a promoter of oral poetry, the kind of poetry

that can be enjoyed be even the illiterate.” [Toscano 58] Half all of Homer’s writings are

in the form of speeches and four centuries after Homer’s Odyssey, in Book X of his

Socratic dialogue The Republic, the Classical Greek philosopher Plato described Homer

himself as the “first teacher” of the tragedians.

In Homer in Tishomingo, Cant interprets the character of George Nelson, played

by actor Michael Badalucco, as a stand-in for Homer’s mythical Greek hero Ajax the

Great. In one scene in the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? Nelson opens fire

from the window of a speeding car on a heard of cows, muttering to himself: “I hate cows

worse than coppers.” [Cant 70] In the play Ajax by the Ancient Greek tragedian

Sophocles, written nearly four hundred years after Homer, Athena, the ancient Greek

goddess of war strategy, prevents Ajax from killing Spartan king Menelaus and his

brother, Mycenaean king Agamemnon, by tricking him into believing that a herd of cattle

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are his enemies. Ajax slaughters some of the cattle, but takes a flock of sheep home to

torture them, believing one of them, a ram, to be his rival Odysseus himself, of whom

Ajax is jealous for winning the armor of the mythological Greek hero Achilles. This view

is supported by Ruppersburg, who notes that the real-life George Nelson, whose real

name was Lester Gillis, not only “never set foot in Mississippi”, but died three years

before O Brother, Where Art Thou? Takes place, in a November 27, 1934 shootout with

Federal Bureau of Investigation special agents Herman Hollis and Samuel Cowley in the

Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Illinois known as the “Battle of Barrington”. [Ruppersburg

13] Kerns notes the same.

Cant [70], Flensted-Jensen [19], Kerns, Ruppersburg [10-11] and Toscano [2, 4]

all take note of the fact that the three Sirens in the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art

Thou? Played by American actresses Christy Taylor and Mia Tate and South African

actress Musetta Vander, are avatars of the Sirens in Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey.

Flensted-Jensen, Kerns and Ruppersburg, however, deviate from the other two in

further noting that the Siren scene in the Coens’ O Brother, wherein the film’s

protagonists are led to believe that the Sirens have magically transformed one of their

number into a toad, can also be interpreted as an allusion to Book X of The Odyssey, in

which the sorceress and goddess of magic Circe likewise transforms all of Odysseus’s

crew into pigs save for Odysseus himself and his second-in command Eurylochus.

[Flensted-Jensen 19] [Ruppersburg 11]

Cant [70], Flensted-Jensen [20, 22], Kerns, McFarland [48], Ruppersburg [10-

11], and Toscano [2-4] likewise write that the character of Daniel Teague, played by

actor John Goodman, parallels the character of Polyphemus, king of the Cyclopses and

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son of the sea god Poseidon, in Book IX Homer’s Odyssey. Like the Cyclops

Polyphemus, Goodman’s character is a giant, known as “Big Dan” with one eye, the

other covered with an eye patch. [Toscano 57] When Odysseus and his crew first observe

Polyphemus, he is milking his sheep and goats, seeming harmless. [Flensted-Jensen 20]

Likewise, Ulysses McGill and his comrades first meet Daniel Teague as a Bible

salesman. [Flensted-Jensen 20][Toscano 2-3]

When Goodman’s character is later revealed to be a member of the Ku Klux Klan,

as he escorts the character of Tommy Johnson, played actor Chris King, to be lynched,

Tim Nelson’s Delmar throws the Confederate flag at Teague’s one good eye like a

javelin, mirroring the way in which Odysseus and his crew blind the Cyclops

Polyphemus with a wooden stake. Odysseus’s preparation of the staff of green olive

wood, which Polyphemus had intended to use as a club, by ordering his crew to file it

even is mirrored by Teague tearing a branch off a tree and stripping it of its branches in

preparation to use it as a club with which he assaults Ulysses McGill and his comrades.

[Flensted-Jensen 20][McFarland 48]][Ruppersburg 11][Toscano 56] Flensted-Jensen

notes that the fact that Odysseus uses the Cyclops’s own fire to heat the staff until it is

“glowing with heat” [Homer, Butler, IX] before driving it into Polyphemus’ eye is

mirrored in the fact that Daniel Teague is ultimately killed by Ulysses McGill and his

comrades dropping the burning cross from Teague’s own Klan rally on top of his head.

[Flensted-Jensen 22]

In Homer in Tishomingo, Cant writes that in Chapter XXIII of Homer’s Odyssey,

Odysseus’s wife “Penelope regards the return of her Ulysses as an unmitigated

misfortune and accepts him back under strictly enforced conditions.” [Cant 70] In The

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Odyssey and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Flensted-Jensen draws an inverse parallel

between the scene in Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey in which Odysseus and his crew

beat the suitors vying for Penelope’s hand in marriage to death and the scene in the

Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? In which Penny’s suitor, Vernon

Waldrip, played by actor Ray McKinnon, beats up Ulysses McGill. However,

Flensted-Jensen also notes that the heroes’ wives recognition of them plays pivotal

role in the resolution of both The Odyssey and the Coen brothers’ film. [[Flensted-

Jensen 21] When Ulysses McGill first encounters his wife, Penny says: “He’s not my

husband. Just a drifter, I guess. Just some no-account drifter.” Odysseus first interacts

with his wife Penelope in Book XIX of Homer’s Odyssey disguised in the rags of a

beggar. [Flensted-Jensen 22] In Homer’s Odyssey, Penelope recognizes her husband

in Book XXIII by his knowledge of their bed, made from an olive tree still rooted to

the ground. In the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? Ulysses McGill gains

recognition from his wife Penny that he is not, as she earlier labeled him, “a drifter”,

when he reveals himself to be a member of the popular “Soggy Bottom Boys”.

[Flensted-Jensen 21]

Ruppersburg likens the scene in O Brother wherein Ulysses McGill and

Nelson’s Delmar discover in a movie theatre that the Circe-like Sirens did not, as

they believed, magically transform their comrade Hogwallop into a frog to Book XI

of Homer’s Odyssey wherein Odysseus visits the underworld to converse with

ghosts. Ruppersburg notes that the Coens’ script for O Brother describes

Hogwallop’s appearance in the movie theater as “haunted” and the manner in which

Ulysses McGill stares at him as being “as if at a ghost”. [Ruppersburg 8]

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 Toscano, however, likens Odysseus’s journey into the underworld to Ulysses

McGill’s visit to what she describes as a “fire and brimstone meeting” of the Ku Klux

Klan. [Toscano 49] Flensted-Jensen also likens the visit to the Klan rally to

Odysseus’s voyage to Hades. [Flensted-Jensen 22]

Conclusion:

That screenwriters Joel and Ethan based their Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? On

Ancient Greek poet Homer’s The Odyssey is well established.

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1. Cant, John. “Homer in Tishomingo: Eclecticism and Cultural Transformation in
the Cohen Brothers’ “O Brother Where Art Thou?” Comparative American
Studies. Volume 5, Issue 1. (March 2007): 63-79.
2. Chadwell, Sean. “Inventing that “Old Timey” Style: Southern Authenticity in O
Brother Where Art Thou?” Journal of Popular Film and Television. Volume 32,
Issue 1. (Spring 2004): 2-9.
3. Flensted-Jensen, Pernille. “Something Old, Something New, Something
Borrowed: The Odyssey and O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Danish Journal of
Philology and History. Volume 53. (2002): 13-30.
4. Homer. “The Odyssey”. Trans. A.T. Murray. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1919.
5. Homer. “The Odyssey”. Trans. Samuel Butler. Internet Classics Archive, 1994.
6. Kerns, Susan. “O Homer, Where Art Thou? A Greek Classic Becomes An
American Original”. Xchanges. Volume, Number 2. (March 2002)
7. Macfarland, Douglas “Philosophies of Comedy in O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Ed. Mark Conard. Lexington. University
Press of Kentucky, 2009. 41-54.
8. Ruppersburg, Hugh. “Oh So Many Startlements”: History, Race and Myth in O
Brother Where Art Thou?” Southern Cultures. Volume 9, Number 4. (Winter
2003): 5-26.
9. Toscano, Margaret. “Homer Meets the Coen Brothers: Memory as Artistic
Pastiche in O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Film and History: An Interdisciplinary
Journal of Film and Television Studies. Volume 39, Issue 2. (Fall 2009): 49-62.