The scene depicting Tom and Verna’s second romantic encounter moves smoothly into one of the most memorable sequences in the film. Armed men sent by Caspar invade Leo’s home, and he defends himself brilliantly with a tommy gun to the strains of “Danny Boy.” Leo has escaped this time, but the attack reveals weakness. The power of the tyrant/boss is a matter of perception, as Tom affirms: “You don’t hold elected office in this town. You run it because people think you run it. Once they stop thinking it, you stop running it.”
So what should Leo do? Once again, Tom recommends giving Bernie up, kicking back, and waiting for Caspar “to show a weakness.” Leo hesitates again—and then reveals his plan to marry Verna. His obligation to Bernie now has become all the more intense. Tom can’t stand to see sentiment blind his boss any longer. He accuses Verna of killing Rug Daniels and then explains why: “Rug knew something she didn’t like him knowing. . . . He knew where she was sleeping, and who with.” “Maybes don’t make it so,” Leo says, but this is no “maybe.” Tom confesses to Leo that Verna was at his place the night that Rug was killed, the night that Leo came by, looking for advice from his trusted adviser.
Tom’s willingness to come clean manifests a dichotomy in the outlook of this character. On the one hand, Tom lays bare his violation of the trust between the two men, revealing that he is in fact a “son of a bitch,” not only in his relationship with Verna but also in his friendship with Leo. Because he has broken this covenant, he is subject to a vigorous response. Leo gives Tom another beating and then banishes him. “It’s the kiss-off,” he proclaims. “If I never see him again it’ll be soon enough.” At the same time, Tom has made a persuasive point by sleeping with Verna; he has shown empirically that she is receptive to advances from men besides Leo. Perhaps she is not worth his trust and should be guarded against. In this sense, Tom’s disclosure maintains a fundamental obligation to protect Leo, even against Verna, and even against himself. In response, Leo does take forthright action, suppress- ing his “big heart” in favor of realism: he also banishes Verna.
Tom and Verna are now out in the cold, and it appears that this “kiss-off” drives our hero into full-blown cynicism and amorality. After first tricking
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Verna into telling him where Bernie is, Tom goes to Caspar to offer his services—and the first piece of information he serves up is Bernie’s where- abouts. Tom thinks that this will be enough to get him in with Caspar, but a further test is demanded. Tom must kill Bernie himself, out in the woods, at a place called Miller’s Crossing.
What ensues is one of the most striking scenes in the film and, indeed, within the entire Coen brothers corpus. Frankie and Tic-Tac drive Bernie and Tom out to a deserted spot in the woods; Tom receives a gun and is instructed to “put one in his brain.” As the two of them wander deep into the trees, Bernie, played brilliantly by John Turturro, begs for his life:
Tommy, you can’t do this. You don’t bump guys. You’re not like those animals back there. It’s not right, Tom. They can’t make us do this. It’s a wrong situation. They can’t make us different people than we are. We’re not muscle, Tom. I never killed anybody. I used a little information for a chisel, that’s all. It’s in my nature, Tom, I couldn’t help it. Somebody hands me an angle, I play it. I don’t deserve to die for that. Do you think I do? . . . [now weeping] I’m praying to you! I can’t die! Out here in the woods! Like a dumb animal! I’m praying to you! Look in your heart!
Turturro improvises and repeats these last few lines to great effect, yet the cuts to Tom reveal a stoic demeanor, eyes barely visible beneath the brim of his hat, gun mechanically pointed at the pleading con man. In the end, however, the appeal works: Tom fires two shots—but not into Bernie. Tom instructs him to disappear, to leave town and never show his face again.
Why does Tom refrain from eliminating Bernie, something he has been advocating for the entire film? What makes Bernie’s appeal so powerful? Perhaps because it includes some rationally persuasive arguments. Bernie first speaks to Tom’s sense of character and identity. In undertaking this action, Bernie asks him to consider who he is and whether this self-concept is compatible with executing other human beings. If it is not, Bernie argues implicitly, Tom should not perform this act. If Tom subscribes to the char- acter-based theory of ethics that grounds this argument, Bernie has a point; Tom is an adviser, not “muscle.”12 In fact, when it comes to his own dealings,
Tom rarely harms anyone himself—but he is subject to beating after beating. In a world that trades on thuggery, Tom has always been a “thinker,” so why would he start resorting to violence now?
134 Bradley L. Herling
Bernie also argues that his own character and actions should mitigate the response. On the one hand, “chiseling” is a fixed disposition in his char- acter, to use Aristotelian language, because he simply can’t help “playing an angle” if it is presented to him. To his mind, this makes him less culpable for his violations of others. While this is an unconvincing attempt to shirk responsibility, it does represent a substantive response to Caspar’s vendetta against him.13 If everyone knows that “ethically speaking, he’s kind of shaky,”
and that he’s a “horse of a different color, ethics-wise,” as Caspar argues at the beginning of the film, then why did Caspar lay bets with Bernie in the first place? In light of Bernie’s “nature,” doesn’t Caspar also implicate himself? Bernie makes an even stronger claim, now about his actions. Does grift- ing—skimming a little extra off the top—warrant a death sentence? Here, as a simple matter of retributive justice, the punishment does not seem to fit the crime.
Bernie quickly abandons these arguments because Tom remains un- moved, and the death march continues; it seems that reason will not win the day. The register of Bernie’s voice changes once again, and he slumps to his knees. He identifies the incongruity of the scene: Tom is a man in a hat, suit, and overcoat, standing in the woods, and he is about to shoot Bernie “like an animal.” The connection with Caspar’s opening argument, which proposed that behavior like Bernie’s could lead down a slippery slope to “the state of nature,” is transparent. “Ethics,” it was claimed, was what separated us from the animals, but at Miller’s Crossing, Bernie presents a counterappeal.
Caspar’s ethical vision, the dominant system of ethics in this world, is actu-
ally the one that leads to barbarity and subhuman behavior. This emotional appeal is meant to repel Tom from the action he is about to undertake.
But Tom’s capacity for deliberation still resists. In the realm of binding agreements and contracts, benefits to friends and harm to enemies, might makes right, and cool calculation, “whacking” Bernie makes sense, or, at worst, it is a matter of relative indifference. So what should Tom rely on to guide his actions, in lieu of these conventions? Bernie’s proposal: “Look in your heart. I’m praying to you.” This final, desperate call for mercy forces Tom to confront both the vulnerable humanity of the man before him and his own basic moral intuitions, which do not turn out to be rationally calculable, as Hume famously argued.14 Even if Tom refrains from killing
Bernie because in this moment he thinks of Verna, he still has recourse only to his “heart,” not to any sensible, realistic, deliberate foundation for this (lack of) action.
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Tom’s decision is a “bad play.” He knows that it will come back to bite him, and we can well imagine that he has surprised himself with this sudden rush of sympathy.15 Bernie is also surprised—and a bit embarrassed—by his
pathetic appeal, as he later admits. It represents, after all, the interruption of a very different kind of ethics from the one that constitutes the premise of the film (and so many others that it emulates), for it suggests that genuine sympathy is an option in the midst of gangsterism.
Out in the woods, this heartfelt moral orientation is in radical surplus, right up front, pressing the issue, almost uncomfortably so. It is, the Coen brothers seemingly admit, too much, for they quickly allow this aperture into the “heart” of the two characters to be closed as their film heads toward its conclusion.