The Coens have a career-long theme of fatalism in their work (I love A.O. Scott’s remark, that they treat “whimsy and fatalism like two sides of the same coin”) – that despite the frenzied preoccupations of their protagonists, something larger than them is always at work, always guiding their stars, so that whatever their wants or desires or actions or negligences, they will find themselves someplace they did not intend to be, and probably didn’t anticipate. It will be the massive tornado closing out A Serious Man. It will be the invulnerable death march of the killer in No Country for Old Men. It will be the inefficacy of every laid plan to disrupt the moral order in Fargo. It will be, even, The Dude doing everything he can to fuck up the case, and arriving inevitably at its solution.
So, in Buster Scruggs, I think the anthology film works so well for them, because part of what’s at work in an anthology is the audience’s search for a hidden thread between the stories. It helps, obviously, that death is waiting in every story to overtake the protagonist or his rival, pounding home a theme at the micro level. It helps, obviously, that there’s an element of the supernatural or the fated in so many of the stories, individually. But what comes from seeing these works in anthology is how the audience searches for the thread between these characters who never meet each other. Which is to say, we suspect that some larger force is at work not just in, but between the stories. And maybe that work feels like The West, or maybe it feels like Death, or maybe it feels like Nihilism, but one thing’s for certain, it’s not a character. It’s not an individual whose actions/wants/desires are actually central to the story. It’s a setting, or it’s a climate, or it’s a moral (dis)order, or it’s something in the water that must make all of these stories cohere, and it’s searching for that something that guides the viewer above/beyond/between the stories, and closer to the sense of fatalism that the Coens are always preoccupied with. It’s using the form to advance the theme.
And, since the pieces assembled organically without conscious design as an anthology piece until they were almost all assembled, I suppose it’s fair to say the Coens were also a little bound up in fate.