No Country For Old Men

Warning: This Post Contains Book And Movie Spoilers

Okay - SERIOUSLY - BOOK AND MOVIE SPOILERS ARE BELOW!!!!!!

John 1: 1, 4-5 1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men. 5 And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

I did not like Child of God, the first Cormac McCarthy novel that I read, while I was reading it. It was too dark for me. Not too violent, but too bleak - two adjectives that are being used quite a bit in the discussion of Joel and Ethan Coen's film adaptation of McCarthy's No Country for Old Men.

I believe now that I was wrong to classify McCarthy as bleak. I also think that to call the film bleak or to focus on it as a meditation on violence/evil/loss of morality is to deny one of the most interesting questions of both the film and the novel: not of the nature of evil - but of the nature of God.

McCarthy's narrative follows three main characters: Llewelyn Moss, a Vietnam veteran who happens across the aftermath of a failed drug deal and decides to steal millions of dollars; Anton Chigurh, a complex killer who is pursuing Llewelyn; and Sherriff Bell, a man trying to make sense of what he percieves as an evil he is unprepared to deal with.

Chigurh is a man that appears to operate almost outside human boundaries, as an agent or representation of a wrathful and vengeful God who has randomly predestined those he encounters to life or death. His first murder, the only that he is shown committing with his hands, results in an expression of rapture on his otherwise largely stoic face. His weapon of choice is a cattle gun, and the murders with this weapon visually suggest a religious annointing of the foreheads of his victims. He flips a coin to decide whether or not people are killed, asking one man, "What's the most you ever saw lost in a coin toss?" For Cirgurh, salvation and death are preordained and he is merely an agent of the inevitable. There is no choice, no free will; there is only fate.

Chigurh's motive for the violent pursuit of Llewelyn is ambiguous because Chigurh never seems to be fueled by greed or interested in the money for his own personal use - but neither does he seem to be working for hire. All you really know is that Llewelyn stole it, and for whatever reason, Chigurh is attempting to recover it. (In the novel, Chigurh is a free agent who returns the money to its rightful (albeit drug dealing) owner and claims that he went after the money to show that he is "someone completely reliable and completely honest") He is not an amoral killer; on the contrary, he operates with the calculated confidence of someone motivated by vengeful righteousness.

Throughout the film, Anton Chigurh seems to be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. Visually, he is filmed as a towering figure. His violence is astonishing, and regardless of how Chigurh views himself, it's very easy for those that view the aftermath of such shocking and prolific violence to label him as the personification of evil.

Sherrif Bell is struggling to comprehend the force that could be to blame for the violent aftermath he encounters and investigates. Where Chigurh is omipotent, Bell is impotent. The idea that some people could have no possibility of redemption is deeply haunting, and Bell is hesitant to confront a reality that might lead him to conclude that the universe is in the hands of an uninvolved (or even worse, an angry and destructive) God. In spite of his earnest intentions, Sherriff Bell unwittingly finds himself buying into the mythology of Chigurh as a physical manifestation of a God of judgement and vengance.

At the beginning of both film and novel, Bell recalls the only criminal that he ever sent to the gas chamber: a boy who claimed to be predestined to kill. "He'd killed a fourteen year old girl...The papers said it was a crime of passion and he told me there wasnt no passion to it. He'd been datin this girl, young as she was. He was nineteen. And he told me he had been plannin to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he was goin to hell. Told me it right out of his own mouth. I don't know what to make of that. I surely dont."

Although Bell is faced with what he percieves to be a increasingly violent world, where killers torture people for their social security checks, drug dealers massacre each other, and mothers put babies in garbage disposals; he can't reconcile this with his worldview that there is a possibility for putting mistakes behind you, starting over, and finding redemption. He wants to believe that his own mistakes are not beyond redeption. He wants to believe that God is the kind of sherriff that he idealizes - the sort of sherriff that did not carry a gun. He wants to believe that Llewelyn is just a "good boy" that got mixed up, and that there is a chance he'll be saved.

To Bell, Chigurh exists as a "ghost" - undeniable proof that unredeemable evil exists or proof that the world is at the merciless hands of a vengeful God of destruction. In the novel, Bell says "It has brought me to a place in my life I would not of thought I'd come to. Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he's real. I have seen his work." He explains his decision to not confront Bell as a decision "not to put his soul at hazard".

The irony in both film and novel is that both Chigurh and Bell are given an opportunity to accept or receive Grace, and both fail to comprehend it. After building up a mythology of Chigurh as a "living prophet of destruction" - a view that Bell, Chigurh, and, I believe, the audience come to accept, the final three scenes deconstruct this mythology and, as a result, are emotionally devastating.

Believing that he is acting as an agent of fate, Chigurh waits in the dark to kill Llewelyn's widow. As she sits in the light (with a cross reflected in the mirror behind her) he instructs her to choose a side before he flips a coin - thus reaffirming his role as an agent of predestination. Carla Jean refuses to call the coin, forcing Chigurh to accept culpability for her murder. "You dont have to do this", she tells him. (In the novel, she does call the coin, but not before asserting that she rejects Chigurh as an agent of God. Chigurh apologizes before killing her.)

Immediately after the murder of Carla Jean (the first one that Chigurh commits with an awareness of his free will), and in a moment like a shocking Deus Ex Machina, Chigurh's car is broadsided by another car at a crossroads. He emerges from the car broken and bloodied - a far cry from the intimidating, towering figure that dominated previous scenes. Two young boys look down at him from their bicycles. Chigurh asks one of the boys to sell him his shirt so that he can make a sling for the exposed bone that juts from his broken arm. "I'll give you my shirt", the boy says - but Chigurh refuses the possibility of Grace. He hands the boy a bloodied hundred-dollar bill, and wanders away broken and alone.

Anton Chigurh was not doomed to remain in the dark - but he could not comprend the light. It is a man - not a monster, not a prophet, and not an angel of destruction that limps away. If Sherriff Bell had not given up, he would have found simply a wounded human being when he found Chigurh - but in the end, Bell failed. Because of his fear and doubt, he was unable to claim the assurance of Grace - and could only frame the hope of light in terms of a "dream" he had but lost.

The final scene of the film is of a defeated Sherriff Bell telling his wife about two dreams he had about his father. "I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But 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 there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had 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 somehwere out there in all that dark and in all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up."

No Country For Old Men is an unsettling film, but it is not nihilistic or void of all hope. I don't believe that either McCarthy or the Coens attempt to portray a world (or a people) fatally doomed to remain in darkness. While the Coens excise most of the overt theological dialogue from the novel, this theme is narratively and visually explored in the film. In one poignant scene, Bell and Chigurh appear to be on both sides of a door. Light shines through a hole in the lock. Neither man, however, walks into that light: Chigurh dissappears into the shadows and Bell in unable to confront Chigurh. But there was light in the darkness, even though the darkness did not comprehend it and could not claim it. The final words of Sherrif Bell allude to the prophecy Zecharias made before the birth of Christ. It offers a glimpse of a merciful God that offers salvation and peace to those that walk in darkness. No Country for Old Men illustrates the moral and emotional devastation of not comprehending this light.

Luke 1: 68, 77-79

68 Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; for he hath visited and redeemed his people,

69 And hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David;

77 To give knowledge of salvation unto his people by the remission of their sins,

78 Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,

79 To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Comments

[mary]

I made sure I didn't read all of the post because R and I might go see this on Friday - with my MIL watching the baby. It will be my first trip anywhere since being in the hospital for two weeks! So, I hope your post means this movie is worth it!

[gretchen from lifenut]

Wow, what a fantastic review. I haven't read the book, and I haven't seen the movie. But now I want to. Nothing has been spoiled.

[amy]

mary - hope that you guys enjoyed your first date as parents - whatever you decided to do. hopefully, i can see that beautiful baby during winter break!

gretchen - i'm so glad you don't feel spoiled.

[thomas j. miller]

Amy, I enjoyed the bookand your review. You made me think of the book in a new way. Being an old man myself I could identify with Sherrif Bell. thanks