“You Must Pay for Everything in This World One Way or Another”: The Economics of Justice in True Grit

True Grit (2010) appears to be a remarkably “pure” Western, given the Coen brothers’ predilection for postmodern eclecticism in their treatment of genre.1 The Coens have often been criticized by the likes of Pauline Kael, Emanuel Levy and Jim Hoberman for their “exercise [s] in postmodern pointlessness, with [their] wacky mixture of genres and huge inventory of quotations both literary and cinematic not adding up to much” (Palmer 12). Instead of an “engagement with the ‘real’ or with ‘history,’ ” their films offer nothing more than “pointless deconstructions or hybridizations of familiar generic categories, art objects that become, in Hoberman’s phrase, ‘lost in a hall of mirrors’ ” (Palmer 45). Such a critique overlooks that genre deconstructions along the lines of the Coens can and do challenge the myths, values and beliefs that these genres promote. In the case of the Coens, this includes an emphasis on absurdity instead of rationality and failure instead of achievement, whereby their films, even at their most farcically postmodern, always retain a subversive political edge (cf. Palmer 60; Kriest 70).