No More Mr. Nice Guy

To my one reader,

Please pardon the long blog, but I felt inspired to write after recently viewing No Country for Old Men, then reading the book by Cormac McCarthy:

“I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”
- Cormac McCarthy, author of No Country for Old Men

The sparse, often unnervingly silent landscape of the Coen brother’s latest film, No Country For Old Men, is, truly no country for old men; or for any man, in fact.  From the desolate wind-swept panoramas of the West Texas borderlands at the opening of the film to the equally desolate panoramas of human depravity and violence, the Coen brothers present an unflagging and unsparing examination of just how dark human hearts can become, and just how dark and hopeless the world can appear to those caught in the ensuing maelstrom. The result is a gorgeous, unsettling and provoking film that has rightly earned considerable praise and consideration as of late. The cinematography is magnificent, the acting top-notch, but most importantly, the film has something to say, and what it has to say is worth listening to and thinking about. 

Before I examine some aspects of the film in further detail, I must warn against spoilers.  If you haven’t seen the film, but intend to, you’d best not read further.

The novel on which the movie is based takes inspiration from W.B. Yeats’ poem, Sailing to Byzantium. Here it is below:

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

The movie deals more with the first stanza of the poem, the nature of this world that is “no country for old men”. It is a world teeming with life, but those that try to swim up stream, like the salmon, are in a futile struggle, and everyone is begotten, born, and dies. Yeats goes on in the next few stanzas to introduce the idea of a transcendent beyond the world of the temporal.  He synthesized the eternal with the present in the last stanza by imagining that he could be in Byzantium, or “eternity,” and yet sing about temporal events, “past, passing or to come.”  This film, however, does not seem to make it to Byzantium, content to explore this world, reducing any hope of escape to a faint hint.

No Country for Old Men tells the story of a young Texan, Llewelyn Moss, who stumbles upon two million dollars left when a drug deal goes wrong in the middle of the Rio Grande desert. Once he takes the money from the body of a dead drug trafficker, Llewelyn enters into a series of events that are as unstoppable as they are horrific. After sending his wife out of state, Llewelyn spends most of the film trying to stay ahead of the drug dealers and the otherworldly assassin they sent after him, Anton Chigurh. The violence that follows Llewelyn, personified in the deep-voiced and stoic Chigurh, lacks the Hollywood polish that allows us to enjoy most violent action films – death is no exhilarating thrill here. Tommy Lee Jones plays Sheriff Bell, a small town sheriff who is obsessed with what he sees as humanity’s collapse into bloodshed and concerned for Llewelyn’s safety.

The film is set physically in 1980’s West Texas, at the border with Mexico. The central landscape of the film, however, is the morally desolate country that lies like a cloud upon every part of the film’s physical landscape. The two landscapes, the spiritual and the physical, blend into each other, such as when Llewynn Moss peers through his binoculars at the circled pick-ups and prostrate bodies. The circled pick-up trucks, the drug job gone bad, also opens up another important symbol: the evil and the violent operating upon each other, and spilling out into the entire world around. No one is safe in this country. The highways, the arteries of any modern nation, are pervaded by the killer Chigurh, who moves like a disease from one automobile to another, sending the rejected host up in flames.

Yet Chigurh is not an anomaly; he does not represent an exception. He is only the apex, the ubermensch who has emerged from the nexus of violence and evil, wielding his own inner logic and rationality as singular as his physical weapon, yet clearly related to the broader, chaotic and violent landscape he is a part of. While he seeks to create his own world, having rejected all other systems, he is not immune to the world, perhaps some small measure of hope. Moss wounds him with his shotgun, and he is badly injured in the startlingly random car crash. He too is, ultimately, a part of the same “dying generation” as the rest. As a symbol, Chigurh stands for death, death not as a pseudo-spiritual “part of life,” but death as the result of the Fall, death with all its satanic, destructive overtones.

Indeed, Chigurh as symbol of death is a very apt demonstration of what is meant by death being “the enemy.” Evil is not, as we would like to believe, merely some entirely random, impersonalized force “out there.” Rather evil, while truly chaotic and random, has its own internal illogical logic, its own irrational rationality, and is extremely personal, even while ultimately destructive of personality. Hence Chigurh has no real purpose beyond his drive to destroy, to be the will-to-power for the sake of that power and nothing more. He does not care about money, or drugs, or sex, or any of those things. He has principles, but they are self-created principles.

Herein lies another reality that we post-moderns are uncomfortable with: Chigurh is not evil because of drugs or money or guns, as a fellow law officer suggests to Sheriff Bell. Certainly, he reflects and embodies the violent world he is a part of, but the suggested things do not drive him, and are not the “cause” of his evil. They are the external manifestations of internal realities.

Chigurh, and by extension death, evil, and the whole destructive environment, can be opposed. Yet none of the film’s characters succeed in opposing him, not ultimately. Moss is weighted by his greed for wealth and his own hubris, caught in the “sensual music” for the most part. Having become caught in the self-devouring world of violence, he must ultimately succumb to it- not by Chigurh’s hand, but in a sudden, off-screen act of violence delivered by nameless characters. The well-meaning and insightful sheriff is ultimately out-matched and concedes defeat, retreats.

Indeed, the symbols of decency: Sheriff Bell, the various elderly victims of Chigurh, and Moss’s wife, are unable to stem the tide of evil. They are either oblivious to the dark world around them, or they are unable to find the means to confront it. Instead, the country is pervaded by drug-runners and the violence that swirls around them, respecting no borders at all. The two groups of young men in the film, the suggested heirs of the country in Yeat’s poem, are perhaps the saddest figures in the film. They are at once oblivious to the extent of the violent chaos around them, yet self-absorbed and nearly amoral. They stand staring at the destruction, responsive only to pleasure. The two boys who assist Chigurh have some level of decency left in them, yet it is obvious (more so in the book) that they too are self-absorbed, a part of the amoral landscape.

If we are left with what is ultimately an uninhabitable country, is there any hope? The film only offers glimpse and slight possibilities, nothing to give any great motivation. However, the pervading theme, the brute strength of evil, and the seemingly insurmountable difficulty faced in confronting it, should serve as a reminder that indeed, no man can truly vanquish evil. We require, not the wise old sage (as valuable as he may be), or a postmodern anti-hero, but a New Man who can fully defeat that very old enemy Death, in all its manifestations and across all countries.

The Coen brothers have crafted a film that is more than anything a meditation on chance, violence, and the ability of society to curb that violence. While we follow Llewelyn and Chigurh on their bloody game of cat and mouse, Bell calls the viewers attention to the implication of such violence. When he doesn’t come off as a cranky old man, the sheriff’s musings amount to the question of whether or not humanity has always been this violent or if something has changed; and if it has, whether or not mankind can do anything about it. He is particularly taken aback by the ghostlike Chigurh who murders without hesitation, or motivation in some cases, and evades punishment and judgment.

In No Country for Old Men, we find a movie that plays out with the presupposition of determinism and the inevitability of decline. The world is such that things are bound to get worse, and this is an unavoidable fact. Furthermore, as Sheriff Bell tells us in the voice over that opens the film, this is not something that we are able to understand. There are numerous references to human limitations in knowledge, ability and perspective, yet the one thing we can know, is that fate is not going to let us get away.

By the end of the film, Bell seems to come to the conclusion that the evil that he has witnessed is unstoppable, and so he retires from his job as sheriff. This hopelessness concerning man’s ability to confront evil leads Bell to comment to his uncle, “I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t.” The strikingly bleak cinematography, the lack of any music, the unrelenting violence, the absence of a show-down/confrontation between good and evil, and the sheriff’s retirement all lead the viewer to conclude that humans are ultimately and unchangeably evil. But the movie leave us with a glimmer of hope in the form of a dream Bell relates to his wife after having retired on account of feeling “over matched,” Chigurch having done all that he said he would do and still at large:

“Okay. Two of ‘em. Both had my father. It’s peculiar. I’m older now then he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he’s the younger man. Anyway, first one I don’t remember so well but it was about money and I think I lost it. The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin’ through the mountains of a night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and snowin’, hard ridin’. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. Out there up ahead. And then I woke up.”

After leading the audience to the conclusion that mankind is fundamentally evil and incapable of redeeming itself, McCarthy and the Coen’s leave us with a hope for mankind symbolized by Bell’s father riding ahead into the future, preparing a light in the midst of stifling darkness. While neither the original author nor the directors make the connection for their audience, the implication seems to be that if there is hope for humanity it is not to be found in ourselves, but from something else, something outside the evil that taints every human.

And here is where movie goers are at a distinct disadvantage. In McCarthy’s novel there are several chapters/sections, after the action of the plot between Llewelyn and Chigurh has ceased, where Bell seeks explanations for the violence he has encountered. In these sections Bell is constantly wrestling with God’s role in the world, particularly as it relates to humanity’s corruption. This preoccupation can help us understand the dream that ends both the novel and film as either symbolic of Christ’s work (Light of the World, “I go to prepare a place for you”) or symbolic of the way God’s chosen people (Bell’s father) are used to be lights in the world. The film edits most of Bell’s theological and philosophical musings down to a few esoteric and pithy statements.

With that said, No Country for Old Men still provides one of the most accurate portrayals of humanity’s fundamental inability to save itself.  It is a world without order, or hope of order, unless that order comes from some source outside of the evil of mankind. Violence is not glorious or invigorating here; it is brutal and petty, but serves the direct purpose of exposing humanity’s propensity towards evil. Going beyond nihilism, No Country for Old Men’s final scene gives viewers a hope for redemption outside of mankind.