Monstrous Greed

               

The movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou” by the Coen Brothers is based on the book “The Odyssey” by Homer. This means that the movie should have a lot of similarities with the book. However, as I was watching the movie, I noticed a really big difference between the movie and the book. This big difference is in the monsters. Rather than the movie monsters trying to kill the main heroes, they decided to go after money.

              

  In “The Odyssey”, there are a bunch of monsters known as the Sirens. According to Homer, “The high, thrilling song of the Sirens will transfix him, lolling there in their meadow, round them heaps of corpse rotting away, rags of skin shriveling on their bones…” This shows that the Sirens in Homer’s epic are a bunch monsters who attract men to their deaths. However, the Sirens in “O Brother, Where Art Thou” are different. Instead of attracting the protagonists and killing them, the Sirens actually turn one of them over to the authorities for money. This shows that in the movie, the Sirens are motivated more by greed than a desire to kill.

               

Another example of the greed that the monsters have is the cyclops Polyphemus. In “The Odyssey” Homer depicts Polyphemus as a man eating monster. He writes that Polyphemus “Lunged out with his hands toward my men, and snatching two at once, rapping them on the ground he knocked them dead like pups- their brains gushed out all over, soaked the floor- and ripping them limb from limb to fix his mean he bolted them down like a mountain lion.” This is another example of one of Homer’s monsters being blood thirsty. Homer’s Polyphemus just murdered and ate two men. In contrast, the Coen brother’s Polyphemus isn’t so violent. Instead he is super greedy and desires money. Instead of murdering the Protagonists of the movie, he knocks them out and takes their money. This shows that the monsters in the film are more interested in monetary gain than killing.

               

Overall, I felt that this was an interesting difference between the film and the book. I felt that this is the Coen brother’s interpretation of what it means to be a monster in modern America. Perhaps, they based their monsters on what they felt reflected the time period they were in. In the end, this interesting difference does give a lot of material for the brain to think about and we may be able to analyze this further and be able to come up with a reason for why they did this.