If there weren't, what are all the songs about?

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs — 3.5/5

I revisited this because a friend loves it, and thinks everything in it is a unique take on death. But despite going in with that lens, I had a different view of each episode. Likely because of my love for 'Hail, Caesar!'—which is about the disconnect between the pain of creation and the joy of the creation—I couldn't help but to see each segment as a view on the creative process. The titular ballad is about making a name for yourself and standing out, only to be outdone by the next thing that comes along (fitting that this is their first movie for Netflix... spending a career understanding the world they're in until sudddenly—they don't.). No matter how good you get, you'll build a reputation that is misunderstood and misrepresented and ultimately shortlived, as eventually always a new creative power comes along that seems even more natural, even more powerful."Near Algodones" is about criticism ("Pan shot!"), and how each failure feels like a public hanging, while each successive hanging feels less and less important—"First time?" And often creatives are hanged for the wrong crime—say, their last movie was unduly loved, so their next movie has to suffer accordingly. "Meal Ticket" is about being thrown away once your creativity is used up. You are loved because you are new, but newness never lasts. "All Gold Canyon" is about working hard to find your own unique creative "pocket," only for someone else to come and rip it off without the effort of finding it. It's the ego wound of the creative soul. "The Gal Who Got Rattled" is about the creative process being much like crossing the desert. You have to trust people, you have to bargain with people. It's hard and you don't exactly know what you'll find when you get there. And not everyone is built for it nor can survive it. "Uncertainty. That is appropriate for matters of this world." And "The Mortal Remains" is obviously about death, and all of these movies are about death, yes, to the point of the re-watching, but also this short makes me feel less crazy for thinking everything is about creativity. The man asks — "Did they succeed? How would I know. I'm only watching." You can't know if a director has successfully told the story they want to tell because you can only see it through your eyes. And the storyteller will never know how the story will be perceived. You can't play poker with someone else's hand reminds me of the "you can't wake up if you're not asleep" line from "Asteroid City," which is to me another movie about the creative process. The characters in the ferry tell tedious stories, self-righteous stories, entertaining stories, and moral stories, and that's reflected throughout the movie. Is the story boring because it's boring—or was it told boring? Or was it received as boring? "They connect the stories to themselves, I suppose, and we all love hearing about ourselves, so long as the people in the stories are us, but not us." The movie is all about what stories we tell, how we tell them, and how they reflect us, or don't, and how we'll talk about them when we walk out of the theater. All art is a mirror, reflecting you back onto yourself. Hard then for a director to tell you a story that reflects them.

Maybe fitting that this, "Hail, Caesar!," and "Inside Llewyn Davis" were their last three movies together. The brothers keep talking about the discontent of the creative process. Is creating joy worth the pain of creation? Maybe fitting that the brother dies in "The Gal Who Got Rattled" and she, too, dies in a similarly abrupt way. Maybe they're saying goodbye to each other, while also being afraid of what this world is like without each other. But whatever it takes to create that sense of new adventure. Anyway. I'm a Coen Brothers conspiracy theorist. Forgive me.