In a 10.7 posting, Vanity Fair.com’s John Lopez explains how the Coen brothers have been assembling a decade-by-decade cinematic portrait of this country that defines the American century. The 1920s in Miller’s Crossing, the 1930s in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the late 1930s (or early 1940s) in Barton Fink, the late ’40s in The Man Who Wasn’t There, the ’50s in Hudsucker Proxy, the ’60s in A Serious Man, the ’80s in a Coen trifecta of Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men and Fargo, the ’90s in The Big Lebowski, and the 21st Century with Intolerable Cruelty and Burn After Reading.
