No Country For Old Men: America’s Cycle of Violence, And Cosmic Indifference
“And That’s That.”
-Ellis (Barry Corbin), ‘No Country For Old Men’
The same way a Scorsese film can make “It is what is” resonate with an audience as they come to understand that there is no undoing the barrage of nihilistic insanity they’ve just witnessed, The Coen Brothers’ magnum opus ‘No Country For Old Men’ does an equally affective job of showing how little the universe cares for the good intentions of men who no longer recognize or understand the stream of violent chaos unraveling before their delicate eyes. Our narrative lead Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) states “I always liked to hear about the old timers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself against the old timers. Can't help but wonder how they would have operated these times.” It’s a common thing to look back at the past. It doesn’t have to simply be your past when just the past itself can make you feel both nostalgic and equally sad every time you’re reminded of a bad or mediocre present that makes you wish you could venture back into those simpler ways of looking at the world.
No country for Old Men isn’t a film about the glorification of a more nostalgic era. If anything, it’s a metaphor for the present and with every manner of change introduced, the sense of confusion people feel as the very cycle of violence that leaves them dumbfounded and even cynically hopeless continues to a point where it makes one wonder how to live in a world where justice doesn’t exist in the black and white modicum we had at first convinced ourselves it did.
Adapted from the Cormac McCarthy Novel of the same name, No Country For Old Men is told through the somber and tragically depressing narration of Texas Terell County sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who has seen a good portion of violence throughout his career, and plenty of it has left him flabbergasted, dumbfounded, and even cynically crippled to a point where throughout most of the story, he remains evasive to the violent altercation that leaves several people dead and plenty of the witnesses even more lost and hopeless.
On the surface, it would be easy to label Bell a coward. It could be easy to say that throughout most of the narrative, the fact that he avoids fully confronting the violence that becomes the major driving force of No Country for Old Men is proof that he was not meant to be a sheriff. To some ironic extent, there could be some truth to that because the mental limbo Bell dwells in sees only the violence and the increasing rate it takes on to a point where he is left uncertain of any way to truly confront what he deems beyond his desired comprehension.
A drug deal gone bad triggers the whole plot of No Country For Old Men. It’s nothing different than what a lot of movies have to get the thrills going. It’s just another example of the cycle of violence men like Bell, Chigurh, and Lwllen Moss (Josh Brolin) participate in that it almost derives a type of absurdity that sees no end, almost like even if one were to survive the ordeal, it would merely be preparation for the next round, which would most likely come with even more ferocity in its nature. One of the themes No Country Old Men explores in its analysis of the cycle of violence, is the degeneration of morals and the culture older times felt familiar and at peace with.
“There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. "Be there in about fifteen minutes". I don't know what to make of that. I sure don't. 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, "O.K., I'll be part of this world.”
This is one of the many observations Tom Bell makes as he contemplates the severity of the evil he sees unfolding. The central crime of No Country For Old Men of a cartel drug deal gone bad spiraling into a violent man hunt between Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and Llewelyn Moss is merely the latest of horrors in a cycle of violence that has become so mindless that it makes men like Bell who started with a very simple and sincere view of humanity question as to whether there was a point. But as the novel in which this film was based on states, “The point is there ain't no point.”
Nihilistic as that statement is, it pretty much elaborates on the central ideas of No country For Old Men, and how our preconceived notions of justice and fairness are merely just conceptions rather than objective principles from which we live by. The perfect representation of this notion is embodied through that of the antagonist Anton Chigurh, who although malevolent, psychopathic, and even other worldly as the unstoppable force of nature the film portrays him to be, he still abides by a personal code of order that in some ways could be seen as moral in spite of the twisted logic that still gives it teeth every time he tosses a coin as a way of making a choice that can leave the person he gives the option dead or all the more grateful to be alive.
The first time this event occurs is displayed in the scene he has with the bumbling shopkeeper (Gene Jones), which since the release of the film has become nothing short of a master class in screenwriting. After being given enough reason to suspect that the shopkeeper’s curiosity as to where he may or not be headed is a threat, Chigurh takes out a quarter that he claims has been traveling for 22 years to meet the man he has decided to test. A simple coin flip takes place, and after Chigurh tells him to call it, the shopkeeper’s only response is nothing short of sheer bafflement as he goes onto ask what he stands to win. Chigurh then claims “You stand to win everything.” After that, it all becomes clear that the point of the flip is to determine whether he will live or die. This same tactic is made with Moss’s wife Carla Jean (Kelly McDonald) who Chigurh offered to spare if Moss returned the money he was hunting him for. On the surface, the idea of tossing a coin in order to determine someone’s life would be interpreted as nothing short as the kind of sick gimmick only an entity as dark as Chigurh could rationalize. But the moment Carla Jean refuses to call it, that’s when Anton’s true nature is unraveled. Instead of outright killing her after refusing to call it, he is consumed by a baffled sense of confusion that leaves him to continuously demand that she call it.
Even after Anton departs and a mere glance at the soles of his boots confirms that he did in fact honor his word and kill Carla Jean, we still don’t know whether she entertained the twisted principle he lived by. But the fact that they are principles of his own creation speak too a deeper degree about No Country For Old Men being more than just a thriller about a drug deal gone bad and greed getting the better of a good man so much so that his violent death leads the observer of these events, Tom Bell, psychologically scarred and left broken even after he retires to what seems like a peaceful life.
The notion of a peaceful retirement from what was clearly a violent profession is immediately dismantled the moment Bell tells his wife of two dreams he had involving his father. He states that he can’t remember the first one, while the second one has him state “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' 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. 'Bout the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and 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. And then I woke up…”
It is this stark realization that Tommy Lee Jones’s masterful performance speaks to through the subtle cringes his facial expressions convey as a man who despite having what seemed like a hopeful dream still recognizes that it was merely that, just a dream. The same could be said of the America the older generations looked to with a far more optimistic gaze than what the current generations see as the scale of violence continues to grow and escalate beyond any measurable control can allow for them to fathom in what seems like an incomprehensible force of nature, which in many ways is embodied in that of Chigurh.
Despite being human in some ways, the more inhuman elements of Anton represent a chaotic force of nature that is other worldly and even impossible to understand given the cold brutality that characterizes his violence as well as the ambiguity of his motives. It is this same ambiguity that paints the nature of the violence within No Country For Old Men because although Anton can easily be identified as the antagonist of this story, it would still detract from the larger chaotic and ultimately indifferent forces that offer no form of favoritism or discrimination towards men like Moss, Bell, or even Anton as they navigate and traverse a world that was never made for them in the first place.