The opening scene of Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man has baffled many.Footnote ¹ What does an unsettling tale of an encounter with what may or may not be a dybbuk, set in the mid-nineteenth century in a Polish shtetl, and played out entirely in Yiddish, have to do with the story of a Jewish professor of physics and his family in suburban Minnesota in the summer of 1967, related in English? Is the scene to be viewed as a warm-up of sorts before the main attraction, akin, if you will, to the short-subject films—newsreels, animated cartoons, and live-action comedies and documentaries—that movie houses of old used to play before the main feature? If so, what is the significance of presenting an odd Yiddish scene to an American audience notorious for turning a cold shoulder to non-English-speaking cinema? Or is the scene to be viewed as a prologue to the movie? If so, in what sense could it be said to impart to the audience either the “state of suspense of the plot produced by the previous history” or, alternatively, the argument of the drama?Footnote ²

Not unexpectedly, the Coen brothers appear to be keen on adding to the mystification of the opening scene. Commenting on this prologue in the production notes for the film, Ethan Coen says: “We thought a little self-contained story would be an appropriate introduction for this movie. Since we didn't know any suitable Yiddish folktales, we made one up.” Joel Coen adds: “It doesn't have any relationship to what follows, but it helped us get started thinking about the movie.”Footnote ³ Both remain reticent, however, as to how exactly one is to view the film as a whole from the perspective of this ersatz “folktale.”

In what follows, I shall suggest that the opening scene is indeed an integral part of the film. In defying our expectations for a prologue, that is, in the bewildering absence of perceptible narrative, thematic, or stylistic continuities or indeed in the apparent lack of clear links of argumentation between this prologue of sorts and the “featured” story, the film dramatizes one of its main arguments, namely, the problem of interpretation or, rather more precisely, the film sets interpretation as a problem. Simultaneously, however, appearance notwithstanding, the scene also introduces a theme central to the narrative as a whole and thus foreshadows, in effect, the rest of the film.

The Coens’ “folktale” has to be viewed, I submit, from the perspective of the narrative element that seems most alien to it, namely, from the perspective of modern physics and, more precisely, of quantum mechanics, the subject matter that Larry Gopnik, the film's protagonist, endeavors to teach his students. Early in the film, Erwin Schrödinger's famous thought experiment, often referred to simply as Schrödinger's Cat, is introduced: We see Larry in a lecture hall where he has just finished putting a long series of mathematical equations on the blackboard. “Is that right?” he exclaims, “Isn't that right? And that's Schrödinger's paradox, right? Is the cat dead or is the cat not dead? Okay?”Footnote ⁴ Toward the end of the film, we find Larry in the classroom again, this time putting Werner Heisenberg's equations of the uncertainty principle on the board. “The Uncertainty Principle,” he says. “It proves we can't ever really know . . . what's going on. So it shouldn't bother you. Not being able to figure anything out. Although you will be responsible for this on the midterm.”Footnote ⁵ These two iconic moments in the development of modern physics thus bracket the “featured” story of A Serious Man.

Larry's engagement with modern physics and, more specifically, with quantum mechanics, is neither arbitrary nor insignificant. Still, inasmuch as critics note it at all (for many it is merely a marginal element in Larry's characterization), they rarely note its significance not only for the “metaphysical conception” of A Serious Man, but also for the very structure of its narrative. Two examples of the way in which the role of quantum mechanics in the film is figured in reviews must suffice here. A. O. Scott of the New York Times portrays it thus: “complex and esoteric ideas that can be summarized by the layman, more or less, as ‘God knows.’ Because we can't.”Footnote ⁶ Lost here is the sense in which quantum mechanics formulates the limitations on human knowledge as radically different from the godlike perspective of classical physics that believed the universe could actually be known with absolute certainty. Similarly, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times briefly notes Larry's academic engagement and contends that the equations he puts on the blackboard present “mathematical proofs approaching certainty.”Footnote ⁷ What certainty the formulation of our inherent uncertainty in knowing the world could be, Ebert fails to consider. In contrast, I shall suggest that alongside the story of the biblical Job, quantum mechanics forms the most important intertext for the film. Since discussions of the film commonly center on the allusions to the former, I shall not consider it further here, and shall focus exclusively on the latter.Footnote ⁸

In effect, the film visually conflates Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Schrödinger's thought experiment. Both are similarly introduced in the only two scenes that take place at a college classroom as Larry writes their mathematical representations on the blackboard for his students. Indeed, the two are closely linked in the history of the development of quantum mechanics, but their conflation elides their radical dissimilarity, for the two represent opposing views in the debate that formed and shaped quantum mechanics in the years in which its principles were formulated.Footnote ⁹ Schrödinger introduced the experiment in his 1935 article “Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik” (On the Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics) as a commentary on an article by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete,” better known as the EPR article.Footnote ¹⁰ The latter was a response to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, to which Werner Heisenberg's paper of 1927, “Über den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik” (On the Perceptible Content of Quantum Theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics) laid the foundation; in this paper, Heisenberg formulates the uncertainty principle.Footnote ¹¹ And Heisenberg's essay itself was a response to Schrödinger's wave mechanics.

What is at stake in these lingering debates is the status of quantum mechanics as an explanatory tool of physical reality, for what quantum mechanics pushes to the fore is the breach between the extraordinary predictive power of modern physics and the difficulty of reconciling its conception of the atomic realm—perhaps even the incommensurability of this conception—with the way the world is commonly experienced (an experience shaped by the emergence of classical physics, at least in the “West” and in regions and fields of knowledge under its impact since the European Renaissance, one must add). Quantum mechanics, that is, points to a breach between the symbolic (i.e., the mathematical) and the verbal articulations of its principles—the former follows clear laws of derivation whereas the latter appear paradoxical—and thus turns the physical interpretation of the physical world into a problem. Heisenberg, on the one hand, and Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, and Schrödinger, on the other, endeavored to tackle this problem.

Indeed, the very title of Heisenberg's essay suggests that what is at stake here is the relationship between what can be perceived (or known) and our ability to account for it theoretically.Footnote ¹² Heisenberg states as much in the opening sentence of his article: “We believe we understand a physical theory clearly, if in all simple cases, we can think the experimental consequences qualitatively and, at the same time, have seen [erkannt haben] that the application of the theory never entails any inherent contradictions.”Footnote ¹³ Heisenberg effectively evacuates the notion of observation (which is troped here as experiment) from its concrete reference to “reality” so as to subject the observable to theoretical procedures and to logical consideration, that is, to “qualitative” thought and logics. It is as if he turns to the consistency and coherence of the logical mind to compensate for the paradoxes that haunt the endeavor to verbally clad the quantum domain, and perhaps masks an anxiety in the face of such paradoxes. What came to be popularly known as the uncertainty principle—namely, that a “definite experiment . . . cannot give exact information about all quantum theoretical quantities—rather it divides the physical quantities into ‘known’ and ‘unknown’”—is the expression (both as a verbal statement and as the symbolic expression of physical quantities) of that turn.Footnote ¹⁴

It is not surprising, then, that in their critique of the Copenhagen interpretation, the EPR article appears first to tackle Heisenberg's initial assertion:

The statement flatly disputes Heisenberg's 1927 assertion. It distinguishes between theory and reality, asserts the existence of reality as independent of its observation, and argues that theory should portray the world as we experience it. The EPR article then moves on to confront the main source of anxiety in Heisenberg's paper, namely, uncertainty. The uncertainty principle betrays, as the very title of the EPR article suggests, the failure of quantum mechanics to provide a complete account of reality. As Heisenberg argued, since observation disturbs what is observed, one could not observe and determine simultaneously both the position and the momentum of a given particle; the conflation of observation and thought (or logics) in Heisenberg's paper suggests that this uncertainty does not mark the limitation of our ability to know the world but, rather, pertains to the very nature of reality itself. EPR puts forward, on the contrary, a way to measure both the position and the velocity of a particle indirectly and so to avoid the uncertainty produced by the disturbance that is inherent to all and any direct observation. It concludes that both position and momentum of a given particle could exist simultaneously, and hence, the failure of quantum mechanics to account for this simultaneity points at its incompleteness.Footnote ¹⁶

Schrödinger developed his “Cat” thought experiment in his 1935 paper, “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics,” as a further discussion of the EPR article.Footnote ¹⁷ “One can even set up quite ridiculous cases,” Schrödinger writes:

Schrödinger's paradox plays on the translation of the uncertainty principle from the micro- to the macroscopic domain, from atoms to cats. That translation points at the inapplicability of these principles to the latter, and hence to the incompleteness of quantum mechanics, the incompleteness that Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen set to prove in their original article. Like them before him, Schrödinger underscores the distinction between reality and its observation, and censures the proponents of the Copenhagen interpretation for confusing the out-of-focus shot of reality produced by quantum mechanics for reality itself. It should be noted that although in popular culture the paradox is often taken as an apt parable of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger did not wish to promote the idea of dead-and-alive cats as a serious possibility; quite the reverse, the paradox is a classic reductio ad absurdum. As Einstein wrote Schrödinger in a letter that instigated the latter's thought experiment: “Through no art of interpretation can this psi-function be turned into an adequate description of a real state of affairs.”Footnote ²⁰ To read Schrödinger's paradox at face value rather than as an ironic retort to the Copenhagen interpretation, to read it as a possible portrayal of a real state of affairs, would therefore appear to instigate a crisis of interpretation.

It is this paradoxical view, this inherent state of crisis (both to the cat and to interpretation) that underlies A Serious Man. As Larry introduces Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to his students in the scene noted above, he underscores both the threat it poses to our comprehension of the world and the anxiety produced by our inability to “ever really know . . . what's going on.” Appropriately enough, that existential anxiety is translated tongue in cheek into an exam anxiety, as Larry insists on reminding his students, just as the bell announcing the end of the class sounds, that their failure to figure anything out does not exempt them from being responsible for the material just covered on their midterms. The film complicates things further in turning the scene into a dream, whose uncertain status does not allow Larry to dismiss it as unreal. The question thus persists: Can one derive a moral from quantum mechanics and apply it equally to Larry's students and to his crumbling life? Can one translate Heisenberg's symbolic formulation to the verbal formulation of an ethics, from the micro level of quantum mechanics to the macro level of human life, as some have suggested?Footnote ²¹

Schrödinger's thought experiment would suggest that to attempt such a translation is paradoxical. A Serious Man suggests as much. In the scene that immediately follows the one in which Larry presents his class with the equations of that thought experiment, Clive Park, a Korean student whom Larry has granted a failing grade, comes to talk to him in his office. “I understand the physics. I understand the dead cat,” he tells Larry. Yet the latter is skeptical:

Larry insists that there is a world of difference, as it were, between the understanding produced by the mathematical formulation of the principles of quantum mechanics and the bewilderment produced by the attempt to translate it into a verbal parable. The scene dramatizes the difficulty in accurately comprehending the verbal parable and its significance, as Larry himself mistranslates the parable and fails to maintain the uncertain status of the cat as both dead and alive. For Larry, this is a dead cat.Footnote ²²

Notwithstanding Larry's suspicion of the parable, however, the film itself appears to suggest that parables such as Schrödinger's are at least entertaining, probably even revealing, albeit that their significance continues to elude us. For what dramatic form would Schrödinger's thought experiment have taken were it a Jewish tale, whose protagonists were Jewish rather than feline? Let me suggest that—keeping in mind Schrödinger's warnings about the paradoxical outcomes of the attempt to move from the micro to a macro perspective—it would take the form of the mock Yiddish folktale that opens the Coens’ film. The box turns out to be the living space of a wretched Jewish shack in a snowy township. To remind the reader, the Jew Velvel enters the shack, tells his wife that on his way home he was helped by Reb Groshkover, and in return has invited him for soup. Dora, his wife, objects that Reb Groshkover has been dead for three years now, and that this current Reb Groshkover must be a dybbuk. When this possibly Reb Groshkover, possibly dybbuk finally arrives and is invited in, he laughs off the wife's accusation. Is the visitor dead or is he alive? Is he a dybbuk or is he not? Can we determine reality but by taking a stab at it? Which is exactly what Dora does: She plunges an ice pick into the visitor's chest. Did Dora commit a horrendous crime, breaking the laws of hospitality and murdering not only a guest, but also a distinguished and beloved rabbi, or did she cleverly uncover the demonic ruse of the Sitra aḥra, the Other Side, doing merely what she had to do to protect both her husband and herself? We never find out, for the bleeding visitor exits the shack and goes back out into the snowy night. As a Jewish tale, what is merely an absurd story about a tiny bit of radioactive substance, hydrocyanic acid, and a cat in an indeterminable state in the realm of physics turns into a horror story about the inscrutability and indeterminacy of the human psyche, an ice pick, and a horrendous demand to decide between life and death, in the Jewish realm. In this latter realm, after all, jokes often point at a painful reality.

What we thus have here is, in fact, a morality tale of life and death as inflected by the uncertainty principle of indeterminacy of quantum mechanics. For like Schrödinger's cat, the visitor is left both dead and alive, “mixed or smeared out in equal parts,” as it were, at least until one opens the box.Footnote ²³ Yet, this being a tale that takes place in the realm of Jews rather than in the realm of physics, the box remains locked, and all one can do is continue wondering and worrying. Neither the film's characters nor we ever gain access to the privileged divine perspective of Schrödinger's experimenter, from which he can open the black box to disentangle quantum entanglement and so determine that indeterminacy, even if only retrospectively. Characters and spectators alike have to continue wondering about the moral significance of the action enfolded in front of us.

Ultimately, A Serious Man as a whole presents us with a series of such black boxes, in which the film's characters, entangled as they are in uncertainty and without any means to interpret the world—both religion and physics fail them—are called to take action. They thus have to take a stab at reality while in their black box, hoping that what they do does not constitute murder but, on the contrary, defends them against the greater unknown evil that seems lurking outside.