Summary
The men drive down the road. Suddenly Pete hears something through the trees outside and begins to get anxious, howling in excitement for Everett to pull over. Everett does so and Pete goes running into the woods. Everett and Delmar follow, confused. Bursting through a clearing, Pete comes upon a trio of women sitting in the middle of a river and singing, “Go to Sleep You Little Baby.” They are washing clothes in the river, and Pete runs over and introduces himself. The women don’t speak to the men, but continue singing and dipping their clothes in the river. Everett, Delmar, and Pete stare at the three women, intoxicated and seduced by their song. The women walk towards them, holding their faces and giving them strange drinks. As the women continue to sing and stroke the faces of the men, the scene fades.
Delmar wakes up later lying in the mud. As he becomes conscious, he looks around, noticing that Everett is lying on the ground nearby, but that Pete’s clothes are laid out next to them, no Pete in sight. Delmar becomes anxious about Pete’s absence, and whispers to Everett to wake up. Everett wakes up with a start, looks at Pete’s clothes, and begins calling for Pete. Suddenly, Delmar notices that something seems to be palpitating in Pete’s shirt. “They left his heart!” Delmar gasps. The palpitation is not a heart at all, however, but a toad, which hops out of Pete’s clothes. Delmar screams, convinced that the women—“those Sirens”—turned Pete into a horny toad. As the toad jumps into the river, Delmar tries to grab it, thinking he’s saving his friend, Pete. He grabs the toad and speaks to him as though he’s Pete.
They get back in the car, Delmar still holding Pete, the toad. Everett isn’t so convinced that the toad is Pete, but Delmar is sure of it. We see Everett and Delmar in a fine restaurant; Delmar has put Pete in a shoebox, but Everett insists that they put a lid on the box, and the two friends argue about the fact that they shouldn’t have set their eyes on the singing women in the first place. Nearby, a man with an eye patch turns around and looks at Delmar and Everett with a scowl on his face. He goes over to Delmar and Everett’s table and introduces himself as “Big Dan T.” Dan is a Bible salesman and shares with Everett a “gift for gab.” Everett and Delmar tell Dan that they are “adventurers,” and Dan invites them to have a picnic with him and discuss working as Bible salesmen.
Nearby Governor Menelaus—“Pappy O’Daniel,” the governor they met outside the recording studio—beats his table with a fist, frustrated with campaigning. His assistants look defeated, as he rails against his competition, Homer Stokes. “He’s the reform candidate, daddy…People like that reform,” Menelaus’ son says, witheringly. Menelaus gets even angrier, as he yells at his assistants. Outside, Delmar examines a butterfly as they eat lunch with Dan. Dan pitches the idea that they sell Bibles, and the two convicts listen intently, eager to make a little extra cash. Dan breaks a branch off a nearby tree and uses it to hit Delmar across the face. Everett is unfazed at first, but Dan hits him across the face with the stick and takes Everett’s money out of his overalls pocket. Delmar jumps on Dan’s back, fighting him, as Everett lies back on the ground, woozy from the blow of the stick.
Having thrown Delmar off his back, Dan opens the shoebox and takes the toad out. Bloodied and battered, Delmar tries to protect the toad, Pete, but Dan squishes the amphibian in his fist and throws it against the tree. Dan walks away, laughing to himself, gets in his car and drives away. Delmar is horrified that Dan killed the toad version of his friend.
The scene shifts and we see Pete being hung up by a man with a torch, who is questioning him. Another man whips him in the back. “Where are they at?” the men ask as Pete squeals in pain. A man in sunglasses approaches and says, “Your two friends have abandoned you, Pete. They don’t seem to care about your hide.” It begins to thunder and someone throws a noose over the branch of a tree, implying that they intend to hang Pete for his silence. As thunder roars, they put the noose around Pete’s neck.
The next day, we see Delmar and Everett riding in the back of a hay truck. They both look depressed and Everett tries to cheer Delmar up about the loss of Pete. “It just don’t seem right digging up that treasure without him,” Delmar says, sadly. Everett tries to maintain his optimism, but he seems discouraged as well, especially as the truck passes a chain gang. Everett looks at the convicts working on the road, and is surprised to see Pete in the line-up, scowling at him. “Pete got a brother?” Everett asks Delmar, who responds, “Not that I’m aware.” As the truck continues down the road, Everett attributes his seeing Pete to the sweltering heat.
The scene shifts and we see a woman singing “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life" and playing the guitar for a crowd of people in a town square. It’s a rally for Homer Stokes, the reform candidate for governor. Stokes takes the stage and makes a speech that Mississippi cannot afford 4 more years of “cronyism” under Pappy O’Daniel. Stokes positions himself as anti-institution, a “servant of the little man.” Stokes holds up a broom, a symbol of his intention to “sweep the state clean.” We see the truck carrying Everett and Delmar arriving in town and the two men walk over just as three little girls begin singing onstage. Everett seems to know the little girls and begins walking towards the stage. At the stage, Everett whispers to the girls, who rush over to him; he is their father.
Analysis
The men’s journey continues to take mythical turns in this section of the film. As they drive through the woods of the South, having recently broken off from the company of Babyface Nelson, Pete is disturbed and elated by the sound of music coming through the trees. This time, it is not the song of religious fanatics, but of a trio of sexy women washing their clothes in a river and singing in three-part harmony. These women are the stand-ins for the Sirens of Homer’s Odyssey, mythical mermaid-like creatures who sing so beautifully that they lure sailors towards the rocks. In an extended sequence, we watch as the Sirens sing and caress the men, giving them some kind of potion and seducing them with their song. The next thing the men know, they’ve passed out in the mud next to the river, victims of the Siren song.
After their run-in with the Sirens, the trio of men is transformed into a duo. Pete is nowhere to be found when Delmar and Everett awaken at the river. His clothes are left behind, and when a toad hops out of his shirt, the superstitious and somewhat dim-witted Delmar is convinced that the Sirens have turned Pete into a toad. Given the mythic quality of the Sirens’ arrival in the narrative—their silence, beauty, perfect singing voices, and apparent contextless-ness, as though they materialized out of thin air—the proposition that they turned Pete into a toad seems within the realm of possibility. Saddened by his friend’s transformation, Delmar puts the toad in a shoebox, hoping that they will encounter a wizard along the way who might be able to reverse the Sirens’ hex.
While the gentlemen do not find a wizard, Everett and Delmar do encounter another stand-in for one of Homer’s mythical creatures when they dine at a fine restaurant along the way. “Big Dan” the Bible salesman is a giant of sorts and is missing an eye. Thus, he stands in for the mythological creature, Cyclops, large men with only one eye in the middle of their forehead. The arrival of Big Dan marks yet another instance of a pleasant exterior masking an unsavory underbelly. While Dan seems friendly enough and wants to get Everett and Delmar in on the bible-selling business he runs, things take a left turn when Dan rips a branch off a tree and begins whacking his companions with it. Yet again, in O Brother Where Art Thou, smiles quickly fade and violence is always bubbling under the surface of any interaction.
The film feels all the more mythic because various elements of its plot seem folded neatly into one another. While the scope of the men’s journey is large, and we see them traversing great distances in very little time, the world of the film is actually quite contained. In the very same restaurant in which Delmar, Everett, and Dan are dining, Pappy O’Daniel, the governor of Mississippi who the Soggy Bottom Boys encountered coming out of the recording studio, is sitting nearby banging his fist on the table about the impending election. When Everett and Delmar’s truck drives past a chain gang, who is working among the prisoners but Pete. Then, when Everett and Delmar arrive in town, Everett’s daughters are up onstage singing at a Homer Stokes rally. Characters cross paths and encounter strange coincidence with great frequency, giving the film an even more dream-like and fantastical quality, as if everything is authored or presided over by some kind of divine force.
For the first time in the film, we see protagonist Everett discouraged. While he is a relentless optimist, dogged in his pursuit of pomade, escape, and the treasure waiting at the end of his journey, after their encounter with Dan, and what seems to them like the death of their toad friend, Pete, Everett is dejected and discouraged. He keeps up an optimistic front, as he insists to the deflated Delmar that they will reach the treasure and all will be well. But as he looks out over the fields of Mississippi, he wears a newfound fear and seriousness in his expression. His wackiness and joy are replaced with real doubt. Just when it seems that the film runs the risk of becoming too purely dramatic, however, Everett’s gaze meets that of a solemn Pete, who now works on a different chain gang. The moment of seriousness is quickly replaced with an absurd reunion of sorts.
