Not us in the end, especially.” We’re all guilty of confirmation bias, and yet that will not save us. As long as the people in the stories are us, but not us. We’re extremely confident in that point of view, and as the Englishman notes, “We love hearing about ourselves. What these kinds of conversations point out is that we struggle to put everything together, but we can only do the best through our own point of view. The Trapper thinks he had a relationship with a Sioux woman but they literally didn’t even speak the same language. The Lady views her relationship with her husband as deep and abiding while The Frenchman sees it as a joke. Furthermore, the relationships these people have are all through their perspective, and fleeting as such. The Frenchman looks at the world and sees either the lucky or the unlucky. The Lady sees people as either “Upright or sinning”. The Trapper believes everyone is the same (“like ferrets”). The members of the stagecoach all have different philosophies. The reapers are the ones who are correct that only two kinds of people are “dead or alive”, but that’s not to say they’re the only ones in the stagecoach who are right. Buster Scruggs ( Tim Blake Nelson) will die in a gunfight the cowboy ( James Franco) in “Near Algodones” will be hanged Alice Longabaugh ( Zoe Kazan) will take her own life. Of course, in the other shorts, most of the characters are dead-they just don’t know it yet. Finally, when they arrive at the hotel, the Frenchman, Lady, and Trapper are nervous to enter (since it’s the waypoint in the afterlife and not a normal hotel as they originally assumed) and on the inside there’s a stairway going up to a bright, unseen light. Thorpe, the body on top of the stagecoach, is also crossing over, but he’s not afforded the gentleness of the journey. Additionally, as the segment goes on, the lighting goes from a warm glow (life) to cold and blue (death) as the souls of the Frenchmen, Lady, and Trapper cross over. The Stagecoach driver, clad in black, is Death (“He won’t stop,” says the Englishman), the Englishman and the Irishman admit to being “Harvesters of Souls”, and the Englishman becomes offended when they’re called “Bounty Hunters” as the Trapper tries to put them back into a context he can understand.

They start out with a normal Western set up-a stagecoach ride-and then slowly reveal what’s actually happening.

It’s pretty clear that this is what the Coens are going for. It’s a parable that wants you to know it’s a parable, and while people die in all the other Buster Scruggs shorts, “Mortal Remains” is the only one where the characters are already dead. “Mortal Remains” is incredibly playful as it begins looking like a normal stagecoach ride that slowly reveals itself to be a trip to the afterlife for the Frenchman ( Saul Rubinek), Lady ( Tyne Daly), and Trapper ( Chelcie Ross), whose souls are being harvested by the Englishman ( Jonjo O’Neill) and the Irishman ( Brendan Gleeson).

The ballad of buster scruggs