The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Gnosticism sees the material world as a fixed and fallen order that its inhabitants mistake for open possibility. The Coens make that architecture literal. Each tale is a page in a physical book, complete before it begins, and the characters move as figures whose fates are already printed. Buster Scruggs believes himself invincible and is a fool for believing it, because the book has already turned to the page where a faster man arrives. The illusion these characters share is that their lives are stories they are authoring. They are stories being read.

The final tale, "The Mortal Remains," is the Gnostic key stated plainly. Five passengers ride a coach at dusk, and two of them, a bounty hunter and his partner, cheerfully explain that their trade is collecting souls, that people are simply cargo to be delivered. The other three passengers grow uneasy as they realize they cannot be sure they are still alive. The coach does not stop for the driver's calls. It is the vehicle carrying the dead to the threshold, and the hotel glowing at the end of the road is the door out of the world. The Gnostic recognizes it at once: the coach was never local transit. It was always taking them home, whether they consented or not.

Buddhism holds that suffering comes from clinging to what cannot last, and the practice is to look at impermanence directly until the clinging loosens. The film is that practice in structure. It shows you death six times, in six registers, comic and cruel and tender, and by repetition it does something a single tragedy cannot: it wears down the reflex to look away. The prospector's tale is the clearest instruction. He digs the valley apart hunting gold, disturbing a perfect meadow, and when he leaves with his prize the land closes over the wound and the birds return as if he had never come. Nothing he did to that place lasted. The meadow did not need him and does not miss him.

That is the teaching under all six tales. Buster's speed, the girl's love, the impresario's earnings, the gold, all of it is held for a moment and let go. The film's serenity is earned rather than cold, the equanimity of a mind that has stopped expecting the pages not to turn. You are meant to leave lighter, not sadder, having watched the one appointment arrive so many times that it begins to look less like an ending and more like the weather.