O Brother Where Art Thou? is unique and politically complicated. It portrays an American South plagued by the racial tensions of the Civil War, but it deals with race relations in a fabulist and revisionist way (as it does with most everything in the film). While the film maintains a critical perspective on overt American racism, staging a scene in which the protagonists save a black character from getting lynched by the Ku Klux Klan, it also employs tropes that some have noted are in line with racially insensitive Hollywood archetypes.
Firstly, there are hardly any black characters, and the ones that exist have virtually no subjectivity in the script or are positioned as racist tropes. As Matthew W. Hughes writes in his article, “Cinethetic Racism: White Redemption and Black Stereotypes in “Magical Negro” Films,” “In O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), the only two black men in the film are both MN (magical Negro) characters: The first is “Tommy Johnson” (Chris Thomas King), a young, out-of-work hitchhiker whose magical prowess with a guitar is due to a pact with the devil, and the second is the “Blind Seer” (Lee Weaver), who is a blind and tattered railroad push-car operator who offers spiritual and sage advice.” The “Magical Negro”—a term popularized by filmmaker Spike Lee—is a stock black character in American film that comes to the aid of the central white characters and is endowed with mystical capacities. While the trope is not explicitly anti-black, it devalues black subjectivity and character in favor of white projection and a kind of marginalizing idealization, which has its basis in racist logic.
Further complicating the marginalization of black experience in O Brother Where Art Thou? is the fact that the film seeks to baldly portray the racism of the South, but filters this portrayal through the experience of its white protagonists, its own kind of revisionism. Indeed, the trio of escaped convicts are all white, yet are often treated as though they were black. When we first meet them, they are positioned within a chain gang of singing black railroad workers. After they have escaped, the authorities continually seek to burn them out of barns, and they face a kind of arbitrary prejudice along their journey which has to do with their status as criminals. Then, when Pete doesn’t speak up against Everett and Delmar, the lawmen throw a noose over the branch of a tree, intending to lynch him without a fair trial. Historically, lynching is associated with racially motivated violence against black Southerners, but here, it is used against Pete, a white man.
The film seeks to portray marginalized white men in the American South, yet instead of ascribing particular political dimensions to their marginalization, it associates their struggle with the common signifiers of blackness. This blurring of racial lines is even alluded to when Everett lies (for seemingly no reason) to the recording engineer, telling him that he and his companions are black. Furthermore, when Dan pulls off their hoods at the Klan rally, the Klansmen mistake their dirty faces for evidence of their blackness. The film’s conflation of whiteness and blackness reveals the messiness of its politics and is perhaps its most mythic gesture. In an article about the film, Hugh Ruppersburg wonders, “In essence, the film creates its own myth of the American South in the 1920s and 1930s, a myth that is as much a tall tale as are the exploits of Everett, Pete, and Delmar. The point of the myth is to celebrate that which is worth celebrating—the folk culture, the music, the history, the life of a time different from our own, a time just before the modern world when rural electrification dawned. But is the myth so selective that it lacks relevance?”
