50 years later and still repping the Coens

During routine testing of the Rube Goldberg team's 2011 challenge to create a time machine with as many steps possible to run the device, I was accidentally transported to St. Olaf in the year 2060.

Besides the additions of an android as college president and the fact that the entire campus now hovers above the Hill, not much has changed in the course of 50 years. In particular, the college is still endlessly bragging about the fact that the Coen brothers once filmed a two-minute clip of their movie, "A Serious Man," on our campus in a building that has since been completely transformed.

I tagged along on a tour prospective students admitted to the class of 2061, and the tour guide marched us immediately to the film site.

"This place, formerly the O.J. Simpson Center, formerly the Old Science Center,  now the Joel and Ethan Coen Memorial Parking Lot, marks the greatest moment in St. Olaf history," the guide said, wiping away a tear, as she gazed wondrously at the expanse of asphalt. "It happened in 2008, but it lives on in every Ole's heart."

And live on it does. The college website has consistently written four to five articles a month for the last 50 years on the apparently timeless subject of the Coens' visit.

Memorabilia from the film, including bits of blackboard and chalk from the classroom site and a wad of gum rumored to have been chewed by Joel Coen, are preserved in Boe Chapel as venerated relics.

Weekly mandatory viewings of "A Serious Man" as well as other Coen film gems are now mandatory to every Ole's liberal arts education.

"The whole thing is just like those stories your grandparents tell you over and over again," a current St. Olaf student who wished to remain anonymous said. "Most of us just nod and smile when communications starts waxing poetic about the Coens again."

The student added that this obsession does have one benefit. "It makes a really good drinking game to see how many times they'll mention the Coens at a college-sponsored event or reading the school website,"  he said. "This is, of course, strictly off-campus drinking and involving only students who are 21."

I also managed to briefly contact the Coen estate  for a comment before I was sucked back through the time vortex to 2010.

 "We're seriously considering a cease and desist order," a representative said in rather exasperated tones. "It's great that St. Olaf loves the film, but really, hasn't anything else interesting happened there in the last 50 years?"

"Editor's note: this article appeared in the April 30, 2010 satire issue of the Messenger."