Few directors have referenced the history of American socialism in their films as consistently as Joel and Ethan Coen. In a Coen brothers movie, it’s not unusual to hear passing references to a Trotskyist faction like the Shachtmanites, as in Inside Llewyn Davis, or a casual mention, as in The Big Lebowski, of a character claiming to have been one of the authors of the 1962 Students for a Democratic Society manifesto — or, as the Dude clarifies, “The original Port Huron Statement. Not the compromised second draft.”

The Coens make films about American failure — botched crimes; floundering careers; hopelessly incompetent government, police, and legal operations; disastrous family relationships; and imploding love lives. The failure of American socialists and communists to make lasting inroads in the nation’s entrenched conservatism is a phenomenon that’s naturally going to draw them like a magnet — we are, after all, unique in the Western world for never getting a labor party off the ground.

The two Coen brothers films that focus most explicitly on this particular failure are Barton Fink (1991), set just before America’s entry into World War II, and Hail, Caesar! (2016), set in the early 1950s, at the height of McCarthyism. In each, the Coens show us the impasse that blocks intelligent political endeavor. Both films even use the same symbolic image — giant rocks that withstand the pounding of ocean waves.