I Watched Every Coen Brothers Movie. Here’s What I Learned

When I was 9 or 10, I watched Raising Arizona on VHS and thought it was one of the weirdest and funniest things I had ever seen. A frequently jailed stickup artist with surprisingly florid diction (Nicolas Cage) and his barren police officer wife (Holly Hunter) kidnap a loudmouth furniture magnate’s quintuplet and run into trouble with two escaped convicts and the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse. I didn’t get it, really, but I didn’t care: It was hilarious and strange, with amusingly quotable dialogue (“I’ll be taking these Huggies and, uh, whatever cash ya got”) and hummable music (the “Ode to Joy” on a banjo, yodeling) throughout. During my high-school years, I caught up with the rest of the Coens’ output and considered myself a fan; their best movie to that point, Fargo, came out just before I graduated and was the first I saw in a theater.