The Soggy Bottom Boys – O Brother Where Art Thou
The 10th film from the Coen brothers hall of fame may not be quite as sharp or as sleek as many of their other productions, but it is arguably their most charming. All sepia tones and flowery language, and almost single-handedly causing a bluegrass folk music revival with its eye-wateringly gorgeous soundtrack, O Brother Where Art Thou skips along with a tone that doesn’t take anything too seriously. Which is exactly what can be said for the three main protagonists, Ulysses Everett McGill, Pete Hogwallop and Delmar O’Donnell, who we meet just as they are escaping a chain gang in 1930s rural Mississippi, still in their uniforms – and still chained together.
Despite McGill’s efforts at self-assurance and leadership, the boys stumble haplessly from wild situation to wild situation in their constant bid to avoid the authorities, all the while exuding a gentle sense of the slightly dim and the extremely unlucky. They cause a fire in the first barn they hide out in, but manage to rescue the pig; they meet George ‘Baby-face’ Nelson, and inadvertently join a bank robbery; Pete and Delmar get baptized and then fall for a group of sirens. Oh, and they get banned from Woolworths.
Their becoming heroes is also a complete accident. While singing on stage at a town campaign dinner, the crowd recognizes them as The Soggy Bottom Boys – the mystery singers of the record I am a Man of Constant Sorrow, which they recorded at a radio station sometime back on their journey and which unbeknown to them has since taken the country by storm. The governor candidate – Stokes – furious with the boys for causing him some disruption earlier on, tries to publicly expose and denounce them, but the crowd are having none of it. The sitting Governor sees his chance to win the crowd’s favour, grants the boys a full pardon, and voila – they go from zero to hero by essentially doing nothing but singing along to a guitar (which incidentally also accounts for about every second male solo act in The X Factor).
Except for actually, this isn’t how they become heroes – at least not for the movie’s audience. Let’s go back for a moment to Stokes’ little tirade against the boys for the ‘disturbance’ they caused him. He starts off by informing the crowd that the boys interrupted “a lynch mob, in the performance of its duties.” No reaction. He continues, tittering into the silence, “You see, I’m a member of a little secret society, I don’t believe I gotta mention its name…” and is greeted by more silence. Awkward. Eventually he plays his trump card – “they desecrated a fiery cross!” And finally the crowd react, not to this news, but to the fact that Stokes wants to arrest The Soggy Bottom Boys, and to the reason that he gives for doing it. Because that “little secret society” is of course the Ku Klux Klan, from which Everett, Delmar and Pete rescued Tommy a few hours earlier, having happened across one of their vile (and oh God so chilling) rallies and broken in.
Really, the crowd are more interested in keeping their new musical heroes out of prison than they are in supporting the fact that they interrupted a KKK rally (although I doubt even this would work for Justin Bieber), but it doesn’t really matter. The Soggy Bottom Boys are heroes twice over here, whether it is for their singing or for their saving of a fellow human being from a terrible death. What is particularly lovely is that to the boys themselves both times were accidental – because both were equally simple.