No Country for Old Men

I’m spilling the beans, so look away if you find movie discussions irritating.

"No Country for Old Men." Above all, the movie is a story. It’s not a treatise dressed up in moving images, thank goodness, and it’s not merely a vehicle for a philosophy. It has a plot, and the plot is what carries the viewer through it. The pacing of the movie was perfect—deliberate but always advancing. You care about the characters and you want good for them, and it hurts, badly, when things do not go well for them.

Because they don’t.

The person who watched the film with me said something like, “well, that left everything unresolved.” To which I said, “No. No, it didn’t. It resolved everything. You just don’t like how it was resolved.” I was in a snotty mood. Because I didn’t like how it resolved, either. The film pissed me off because I agreed with its view of things.

Because it didn’t end with the ending we were hoping for, yearning for. Or emotionally banking on.

The plot was powerful and riveting, true, but the film was good in many ways as well. The acting and dialogue, excepting Woody Harrelson’s ridiculous attempt to chew up the scenery, was brilliant. The cinematography was as good as Fargo's. Those Coen boys love the open shot that practically slaps you in the face with existential despair and beauty. The spare and open spaces echoed the musical score, which was nonexistent apart from a background hum now and then. The quiet in the film underscored the loneliness that’s never more than a step or two from all of us.

Though the movie is first and foremost a story, it also suggests a “view of things” if not exactly a philosophy per se. My movie partner said something like, “the Coen brothers have such a negative view of life.” Well, I’m not so sure. When I think of a negative view of life what comes to my mind is a cynical view of life, a cynical view of love and friendship and the goodness of human beings, of their worth. My sense is that the Coen brothers champion love and friendship and connections. Though not cynical, their view is dark. They see these good things as fragile, as always threatened by forces bigger than individuals.

The movie explores (reveals?) our smallness in the face of forces bigger than ourselves. Random forces. Inexorable forces. Inexorable forces because they are random. Random not in the sense that they are not predictable when taken from a cosmic scheme, but random in the sense that one cannot predict their occurrence to any individual or their mode of occurring. That we will die is predictable, but that we will die in our dining room during breakfast when a massive sink hole swallows up our house is not so predictable. (By the way, that’s a true account I read on CNN about a California man just over two years ago. Okay, I embellished. I don’t know that he was eating breakfast. But he was in his dining room in the morning. It could have happened.)

The universe is simultaneously determined at the macro level but also freaking random from the perspective of our dreams and life chances. We are fragile. Our soft flesh gives way to sharp objects just about every time. Like those Twin Towers, sometimes it takes twenty minutes or less for worlds to collapse.

The bad guy in the movie, Anton Chigurh, is unironic and therefore he is both perfectly detached and engaged at the same time. He means what he says, and therefore what he says seems puzzling to us, we who are used to speaking in code to one another. His commitment is to the task at hand and to the task alone. In that sense he’s a little like the Orcs in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy (which were one of the few things in those awful movies that I found interesting. Well, the Orcs, the human dude, and Liv Tyler, who I found riveting for wholly different reasons.). The world becomes objectified in Chigurh’s task. Everything becomes objectified. And everyone. The things that set us humans apart from the gravel in the road—our wishes and yearnings and first loves and fears and secret shames and bodily itches and the hilariously painful memories of missing ten straight free throw shots in an 8th grade game—well, none of these things count for squat in determining our ultimate fate when we face Chigurh.

The bad guy doesn’t so much represent anyone as he just is. He’s not merely a “symbol,” but he reveals or stands in for the uncaring nature of the universe. And the universe may have a bias toward life, as Bishop Spong says, but Mother Nature can also be a remarkably rotten mother. And maybe there’s a great omniscient power pulling all the strings, a Great and Powerful Oz behind it all, but the universe that Oz manipulates, the one in which we live, doesn’t care a whit about us.