Is it me, or are the Coen Brothers more present than usual in this film? It's not uncommon watching one of their films for me to notice, "oh that line of dialogue sounds like something written by a screenwriter" or "hey that camera composition looks like a carefully storyboarded shot". But this time around I felt like that was happening with practically every single line and every composition!

It somehow seems appropriate, however, for a film that explicitly is "about" the fate of human existence in a (seemingly) pre-ordained universe.

Physics majors report?

J. Robert, I also wish we'd have mentioned the movie's most inspired metaphor: the Columbia House Record Club. Do nothing and a new record will be sent to you. You must act to prevent a purchase. Insert this into our remarks about Man's default state of guilt.

A footnote about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle mentioned in the Coen movie: From my memory of basic physics classes, which I attended an alarming 15 years ago, the principle says not that you can't know anything but that you can't know everything. That is, you can't know both the location and the velocity of a particle, because the act of measuring it — which would likely involve slamming it with a particle of known location and velocity — will change one or both of those values. (Memory is hazy. I can't be bothered to Google this at the moment.)

I mention this because I was going to say that the Coens probably don't know or care about the details of the physics their character teaches — liberal arts majors, I bet, or just too tired, like me — until I realized how nicely the principle fits with the dialogue in the second rabbi's office: "Well, you can't know everything." "It seems like you don't know anything!"