What is a “dybbuk” in the prologue of the Coen brothers’ ‘A Serious Man’?
The Coen brothers’ 2009 pseudo-biblical black comedy A Serious Man begins with a quote from the medieval French Rabbi Rashi: “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” This aphorism seems aimed principally at the film’s hapless protagonist, but it’d be just as likely to push him over the edge as to abate his sense of confusion and despair.
What follows Rashi’s words is a cryptic scene that appears entirely unrelated to the rest of the film. In this short prologue, a Jewish couple in 19th-century Eastern Europe entertains a guest who the wife is convinced has been dead for three years. She believes the guest is not the man he says he is at all but a “dybbuk”.
When she confronts the guest with this charge, he simply laughs in disbelief, forcing her husband to make a grovelling apology to him. But she persists, explaining that “the evil one” must have taken over the corpse of the dead man.
The scene ends with the wife stabbing the guest in his heart. Initially he appears unaffected, confirming her theory. Then, as blood slowly pours from his chest, he delivers a brutally macabre line of Coen brothers’ wit: “One knows when one isn’t wanted.” And proceeds to leave.
As the husband despondently goes over the scenario of him and his wife being charged with murder, she tells him “nonsense”, bids good riddance to evil, and closes the door.
So, what exactly is a “dybbuk”?
A dybbuk is an evil spirit of Jewish mythology, that is said to have been the soul of a dead person which has become dislocated from their body. It then inhabits another body and possesses it, as the wife believes has happened to the guest in the prologue of A Serious Man.
While the term has its source in the Hebrew verb “to cling to” and appeared in the writings of early Jewish scholars of the Roman Empire, such as Flavius Josephus, it was only popularised in the late medieval period. At that time, belief in witchcraft and evil-possessed spirits became commonplace among all religions, not least Christianity.
There are plenty of other films that have used the idea of possession by a malicious spirit for inspiration, the most famous being The Exorcist. However, the Coen brothers may also have found inspiration for this plot point in the 1920 Yiddish drama The Dybbuk, adapted into a film in 1937.
What is the meaning of A Serious Man’s prologue?
If you ask the scene’s writers, they’ll probably tell you they have no idea what it means. And maybe that’s the extent of its meaning.
Following this prologue, Larry Gopnik searches for meaning as terrible event after terrible event befalls him throughout the film. Turning to religion doesn’t seem to bring him closer to any answers.
As the wife of the Eastern European Jewish couple closes the door to her house, the filmmakers leave you stuck between two seemingly impossible choices. Go with her belief and accept the existence of evil spirits (at least within the world of the film). Or go with her husband, who calls himself a “rational man”, and accept that he is now an accessory to a murder his wife has committed.
Very much like Larry, you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. But that, according to the Coen brothers, is life. Life is portrayed bleakly but brilliantly in one of their finest pictures.
