22nd March 2019
The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a movie that takes a decidedly pessimistic look at modern America and, more broadly, mankind's place within the world.
In what follows, we will explore this theme through the juxtaposition of characters Ed Tom Bell and Anton Chigurh.
The film is introduced through shots of the merciless desert and a weary monologue from Bell. He tells us about his pride at being sheriff at the same time as his father and his fascination with “the old timers.” Bell then relates a haunting description of the execution of a man who killed a fourteen-year-old girl. He muses, “The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, ‘Okay, I'll be part of this world.’’
Contrary to his word, we are shown throughout the film that Bell is deeply afraid. As that last sentence implies, Bell's fear of the future leads to his rejection of life. I would argue that Bell’s arc is one of waking up the realities of the world; tragically, he only does so once it’s too late.
During Bell’s monologue, we get our first look at Anton Chigurh. In the opening of another Coen brothers’ film, The Big Lebowski, The Dude is described as “a man for his time and place.” Much the same could be said of Chigurh. Chigurh has taken the bleak realities that so disturb Bell and embraced them, sculpting them into new values. Despite his countless acts of wanton destruction, Chigurh is the only character other than Bell who’s not solely motivated by money. As Carson Wells succinctly puts it, “He's a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that.”
Specifically, Chigurh sees the same world Bell sees, a godless, indifferent, chaotic universe where the social structures that mask life’s horrors are rapidly crumbling. Rather than fleeing into an idealized past, Chigurh comes to terms with and adapts to his circumstances. One way he demonstrates this is through his relationship with chance. When Chigurh happens to want to kill the proprietor of the Texaco, he gives the man the opportunity to save himself through an act of luck. Chigurh has no reason to let the man live, but he’s motivated to give him a chance all the same. It’s noteworthy that at one-point Chigurh says, “You need to call it. I can’t call it for you. It wouldn’t be fair.” While it may not be “right” to wager a man’s life on a coin toss, it is important to Chigurh that it at least be “fair.” Chigurh simultaneously rejects any ideas of meaning in this practice; though he believes the man in the Texaco should be careful with his “lucky quarter,” he is quick to add that it’s, “just a coin.” When Carla Jean challenges Chigurh later in the film, saying that he is really responsible for his actions and that, “The Coin don’t have no say,” Chigurh replies “I got here the same way the coin did.” In other words, the arcs of their respective lives are a matter of blind chance, no different than the toss of a coin. It’s fitting that we last see Chigurh limping away from an improbable car wreck; a chaotic chance encounter is the only thing capable of even slowing him down.
Chigurh’s target, Llewelyn Moss, is quickly shown to be a very capable man. In the early scenes of the movie, we watch as Moss methodically susses out the location of the money after discovering the botched drug deal. Despite his competence, Moss is an everyman and ultimately unremarkable. Unlike Chigurh or Bell, Moss has no real ideology; his actions revolve around survival and trying to hang on to the money. Though he shares some of Chigurh’s fatalism (“things happen. I can’t take em back”) Moss isn’t uncaring; his troubles begin out of the desire to do an act of kindness. Despite that, as Carson Wells puts it to Moss in the hospital, “You’re not cut out for this. You’re just a guy who happened to find those vehicles.” In the very next scene, we see Carla Jean, optimistic of her husband’s chances, confronted by Bell who understands the hopeless situation Moss has been put in. The film misleads us into thinking that Moss is going to be our hero, before unceremoniously killing him off-screen. Bell views his inability to save Moss as his great failing, despite the fact that Moss was beyond saving. Nonetheless, the loss is the final straw for Bell and leads to his retirement as sheriff.
“Yeah it’s all the goddamn money, Ed Tom. Money and the drugs. It’s just goddamn beyond everything. What’s it mean? What’s it leading to?” The sheriff in El Paso poses these questions to Bell after Moss’s death. Bell doesn’t share his counterpart’s befuddlement. By now Bell has come to understand Chigurh and by extension the modern world. It’s telling that Bell doesn’t call Chigurh a lunatic; the two effectively share the same worldview after all. Earlier in the film are two mirrored shots of Bell and Chigurh staring at their dark reflections in Llewelyn’s TV set. At the same time, we get the line from Bell, “He’s seen the same things I’ve seen, and it certainly made an impression on me.” Bell is the only one making real progress in finding Chigurh, and he comes close to catching him after discovering Chigurh’s pattern of reentering crime scenes. Despite later claiming he “feels overmatched” Bell is really the only possible match for Chigurh. It’s only his nerve that fails him.
During Bell’s conversation with Elis near the end of the film, he says, “I always figured as I got older, God would sort of come into my life somehow. And he didn’t.” Elis, by way of reply, tells Bell a story of his great uncle who was killed in a senseless act of violence in 1909. As Elis puts it, “What you got ain’t nothin’ new. This country’s hard on people. You can’t stop what’s comin’. It ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.”
Though he’s been afraid for most of the movie, this is the first time we see Bell truly without hope. Elis is no great comfort to Bell or the viewer, living in squalor among half-wild cats, but he is accepting--I’m reminded of Chigurh’s statement earlier in the film, “You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it.” Elis is the only one to call out Bell on his reactionary response to modernity. In this way, Elis is a heroic figure, one able to look life in the face and be at peace with it.
In the closing scene we see Bell one last time, now retired. He’s unsure of how to spend his time. There’s a moment of uselessness when his wife, Loretta, rejects his offer to help around the house. Reluctantly he tells Loretta about two of his recent dreams, both featuring his father. Bell says he feels like the older man in this relationship, already being twenty years older than his father was when he died. The first dream is about his father giving him some money which Bell thinks he loses. In the second dream, Bell and his father are in “older times.” “And in the dream I knew that he was going on ahead and he was fixing 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. And then I woke up.” Bell wakes up to the fact that the world is not the place he believed it to be, and never was. His retirement from life out of fear, results in nothing less than a kind of spiritual death. These dreams signify Bell’s regret at not living up to his expectations for himself, his failure to bring some light into a desolate world, and his loss of faith.
Though No Country for Old Men is in part a film about nihilism, I claim it isn’t a nihilistic film. Rather, I think it stresses the importance in our dangerous times of creating new values. In Chigurh we see how adapting to the surrounding darkness results in us becoming monsters ourselves; In Bell, we see the futility of trying to resuscitate the dead values of the past. The film challenges us to live bravely in dismal times, but doesn’t offer easy answers as to what that might look like.
By Kyle Lewis