The Age-Old Tale of the Beleaguered White Guy Gets Scrutinized

I finally realized why I was so bored during the latest Coen brothers film, A Serious Man: it's yet another version of the Beleaguered White Guy Narrative.  Whether it's Jim Halpert from The Office or Larry Gopnick from A Serious Man, the story goes something like this:  a well-meaning, more or less attractive, more or less competent, decently heterosexually masculine and in all other respects completely normal White Guy navigates the complex and irrational world of work, dating, family, and social life.  All of these things somehow conspire to ruin his otherwise harmless existence and noble-in-its-simplicity normal guy happiness.  The lamentably Beleaguered White Guy gets along as well as he can and is the understated yet sympathetic hero of the story.

Of course, the White Guy Protagonist is nothing new.  What's changed is that he is Beleaguered (rather than, say, Homicidal, like Michael Douglas in the 1993 angry white man film, Falling Down).  The lesson, however, is the same - the White Guy is undeservedly beaten down by people (usually women and people of color, but also undeserving superiors and arrogant colleagues) or forces (the chain of command at work, anonymous bureaucracies that fail to recognize his personal worth-think Office Space here) that unwittingly conspire to make his life uniquely and unjustly miserable. 

Ron Livingston in Office Space

Larry Gopnick is the Beleaguered White Guy.  A well-meaning professor on the verge of tenure, the bulk of the film consists of an endless parade of people and forces that collude to render his life unlivable.  There is his unfaithful, money-grubbing wife who asks him for a divorce.  There are his bickering children, a pothead son obsessed with TV and a superficial teenage daughter who cares only about washing her hair and - you vey, they do indeed invoke this utmost of clichés about Jewish girls - getting a nose job.  There is his burdensome and mentally slow brother, Arthur, who spends his time draining a large cyst on the back of his neck and getting arrested for gambling and sodomy.  There is his Korean student, Clive, who tries to bribe Gopnick for a passing grade in his class.  Finally (and I am only listing the major sources of Gopnick's despair), there is the series of moronic and empty rabbis who dispense nonsense in the guise of wisdom when Gopnick seeks their counsel to help navigate his despair.

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