The Coens' relationship with genre is the most interesting ongoing formal project in American cinema and I want to argue that their genre films are not pastiches.

No Country for Old Men is not a Western pastiche. It's a Western that takes the genre's foundational myth — the lawman restoring order — and systematically destroys it. Chigurh isn't a Western villain. He's a philosophical argument that the Western villain framework cannot contain.

Fargo is not a crime film pastiche. It's a crime film in which the competent person wins — which is so against genre convention that it functions as a formal argument about what genre conventions are actually for.

Blood Simple is a noir pastiche, and the Coens knew it, which is why they never made another one.

What unites all of them is the Coens' relationship with fate: their characters are always being punished for category errors, for mistaking luck for competence, for failing to read the genre they're in. The films are comedies of determinism.