Trager-comedy. posted by Richard Seymour

In the Coen Brothers' rendition of The Ladykillers, it transpires that the lady is not for turning. The lady in this case being the black widow, Marva Munson, who lives alone and rents a room to some crooks who plan to rip off some money from a riverboat casino office. The criminals are led by a slick Professor G H Dorr (Tom Hanks), a pompous classicist who nevertheless has immense reserves of charm and civility to draw upon as the situation dictates. He succeeds in wetting a few drawers around the town with his citation of Edgar Allan Poe, and has almost every angle of his caper covered - except that contingency, or what appears at first sight to be contingency, makes a fool of him.

Part of what makes this film funny is just how predictable it is. The cues come along right on time, and one knows to expect that one member of the crew after another, having plotted to murder Ms Munson, will end up meeting an undignified death. The film could proceed just as well with another bunch of 'characters', since what matters is the role they perform in the unfolding sequence rather than their petty idiosyncrasies. In fact, fate seems to be sealed by the morphing portrait of Ms Munson's late husband; it is he who sternly directs his wife from beyond the grave, altering the expression on his portrait with a deftness lost to modern art. It is he who smiles cruelly as one crook after the next meets his punishment. Of course, the late Mr Munson is a stand-in for the authors of the script, they who really do pull the strings.

The function-of-a-Trager in their script is to be filled by whatever caricature they have recently been nurturing in their estimable comic minds. Tom Hanks' character, for instance, is a re-working of George Clooney's 'Everett' in O Brother, Where Art Thou? Marlon Wayans, meanwhile, is on typical - nay, stereotypical - form as he cusses, lusts after this women, identifies that women with his mama, and generally resembles something from Good Times ("dy-no-mite"). The caricatures fulfil their roles in the usual way, and the end of it all is that the confluence of circumstances allows Ms Munson to invest millions of stolen dollars on Bob Jones University, a bible-bashing outfit she is particularly keen on.

There is no cosmic scriptwriter, but there are scripts which we are locked into. Eric Berne, the founder of an odd cult called 'transactional analysis', noted in The Games People Play (1964) how much of one's life is scripted, not by a self-conscious author but by the model of elders and events, dear boy, events. One learns certain routines and models for dealing with problems as a youngster, and they become, or form part of, the script for adult life. In a less individualistic analytical model, one would note how scripted day to day life is. Take Alphonse's neighbour , for instance:

I have this insane neighbor. He gets up at 7 o'clock every single morning, Monday to Friday, like a machine. He showers, shaves, and - every day now, you understand - puts on a suit. Out the door he comes carrying the same breifcase. Then he takes the metro - same line, every day - and gets off at the same stop, goes up to the same building, to the same floor, sits at the same desk, and stares at a computer for hours.

What could possibly motivate him to perform this compulsive ritual, daily?

Alphonse is right. It's all scripted, darling. Someone has to do it, so why not you? (Leave aside that, for Althusser, ideology is what prepares you for the role). Basically, one takes the role because it rewards well enough.