The Coen brother's Netflix film, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, moves from the humorous to the profound, but also, as others have pointed out, from a romanticized version of passage to the afterlife to a chillingly serious one. **Spoiler warning** It is beautifully produced. All the scenes are splendidly shot and the acting is perfect. Despite being composed of six stories of varying lengths, the film coheres. The film could firstly be read as a somewhat cynical, albeit well-rounded tribute to the western genre in all its diversity, since the main characters are often anti-heros, and the stories are all haunted by tragedy: the normal order of things is often reversed. However, just as the book of Revelation refers to essentially every book of the Old Testament, but almost never with direct quotes and nearly always with modification and re-contextualization, so the Coen brothers do the same with Westerns, attempting a metareading of the genre. The effect of this technique is to rev