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• Buster scruggs book movie#

Together they present an impressively comprehensive six-part taxonomy of the mythical Old West: the gunslinger, the bank robber, the traveling showman, the prospector, the wagon train, the stagecoach.

Tying them together is the conceit that they are “chapters” of the same “book,” complete with the device-shopworn? ironic? both?-of showing pages flipped every time one story segues to the next. This time around, the half-dozen tales the Coens wind up telling (of which Buster’s is the first) are separate narratives they conceived over the course of 25 years. In a sense, the Coens have been building toward Buster Scruggs for much of their career: with the neo-Westerns Blood Simple and No Country for Old Men, the neo-Western satire Raising Arizona, their remake of the genre classic True Grit, and the cowboy characters of The Big Lebowski and Hail, Caesar!. (“Your tactics gotta be downright Archimedean,” Buster explains after a particularly baroque bit of gunplay.) But then a younger quick-draw artist named “The Kid” arrives in town, as these types routinely do, and the yarn ends more or less the way it always does, only with more singing.

He engages in one bloody, slapstick shoot-out in a saloon, and then a second, a masterpiece of choreographed comic geometry.

Buster scruggs book movie#

Though it may provide the movie with its title, Buster’s ballad is short-lived. A dandified, singing gunfighter whom we first meet as he’s playing guitar on horseback-we’re treated to a cunning shot from inside the guitar, peering out through the sound hole at his strumming fingers-Buster refers to himself as the “San Saba Songbird.” Others, less generous, refer to him as the “West Texas Twit” or the “Runt of Rheardan Pass.” His WANTED poster, in what is presumably an inside joke on the Coens’ own reputation, is more succinct: “The Misanthrope.”īuster is correct in saying that things escalate: both quickly, over the course of his own story, and more gradually, over the course of the six individual tales that make up the Coens’ Western anthology, which Netflix has released for a small theatrical run before expanding to more theaters and streaming on November 16. So explains Buster Scruggs (Tim Blake Nelson) near the beginning of the Coen brothers’ new feature, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. “Things have a way of escalating out here in the West.”