Morgan Meis interprets the philosophy of the Coen brothers through their latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which he likens to “a light brush with evil, a stroll through the outermost circle of hell”:
The problem of having nowhere to be is actually the problem of evil. That sounds extreme, but it is something the Coen Brothers have always understood. The plot structure of Inside Llewyn Davis is the structure of an endless loop. Davis sings “Oh Hang Me” in the first scene of the movie. He is back singing the same song in the same place at the end of the movie. The same thing happens to him each time. His life is repeating itself. It is not hard to understand why. Llewyn Davis is trying to connect space and time in ways that don’t fit. He is trying to fit old wine into new wineskins. There is no traction. And so his life spins on its own axis. …
The theologian Stanley Hauerwas once wrote about Augustine and the problem of evil. Hauerwas wrote that, in his Confessions:
Augustine finally came to understand, paradoxical though it may sound, that evil does not exist because “existence” names all that is created and everything created is good. He observes that there are separate parts of God’s creation, which we think of as evil because they are at variance with other things.
The idea is that evil is not a force in and of itself, but a side effect of disconnection, of things being put together in a way that doesn’t fit. Evil isn’t some thing that opposes another thing: the good. Evil is when good things are rubbed up against one another in such a way that they produce nothing. Evil is reduction for the sake of reduction, nothing for the sake of nothing. It is thus hard to get your arms around evil, to understand it or even to see it for what it is.
The Dish 