Goodness – AI | Narrative – AIII | Lasciviousness – AII
Without much contest does No Country for Old Men stand in the realm of film, it is hardly challenged, and this was even so during 2007 when Paul Thomas Andersons magnus opus There Will Be Blood was also released. Nowhere else does one get the perfect amalgamation of the perceived complexities of an agnostic pessimism in the narrative guide, the marvelous Chiaroscurean cinematography of Roger Deakins, and of course a stellar lineup of actors fitting the Cormac McCarthy’s characters like a glove. If there can be a perfect adaptation of a novel in which nothing is left in want of, this is certainly it. Funnily enough, there is a certain kind of difficulty that goes with trying to describe and endorse the universally approved and loved, probably because it all seems redundant and cliché, although I’ll try my best to detail why it is that even though it might be ultimately a narrative from the outside, we can nevertheless consider it one of the best films of all time. And most certainly a paradigm for future films, should we ever have the opportunity to create them.
Goodness – AI
To describe the general goodness of the film is fairly straightforward. We get the excellence of what the medium grants us in terms of visuals, with the height of narrative which is the ultimate driving force. Every scene plays out as perfect as a rendition of the novel could be. Form the minute that Anton Chigurh is shown, the impending universal and unstoppable doom of his character translates into provocative and curious, yet disturbed viewing. The simplicity of Llewelyn Moss when he is first shown hunting is similarly captured in his essence, with a straightforward shot, a stern and stout representation from the muted colors of the picture, to the indispensable couple seconds of watching him save a brass casing after firing his rifle. If we are to judge based on the delivery of both the visual aspect and the narrative aspect, this is by far a practical perfection. The intricacies that go on about the capturing of emotion in real time, the translation of this from film to viewer is daunting without a doubt. Something so difficult, to be put up in a fight against itself, trying to stay consistent, trying to cease the want to show too much or too little, is really what this medium is all about. If we really think about the reason why a scene almost flowing subconsciously as arbitrary, ultimately ties the room together, why it is that the events are depicted in a certain order, or time interval, why it is that the simple 20 second scene juxtaposes both the viewers expectations and the films directed momentum, then we see the marvel that No Country For Old Men is.
| Narrative – AIII|
The narrative is where as Catholics we can dissect certain issues in the plot, nevertheless somewhat of a certain phenomenon in general contemporary thought. For all those who don’t know Cormac, he is a sort of pantheist, seemingly agnostic about monotheism, usually flat out antagonistic in my assessment of him, while he’s no ravenous positivist, he’s got these vague odors of an issue with a sadistic at worst and ambivalent at best demiurge. I’m fighting inclinations to treat the narrative in No Country in a wide scope context of all his other writings, especially his play, The Sunset Limited, but I’ll avoid it bleeding over too much, so I don’t abstract from what is not materialized in the film itself.
| Llewelyn Moss |
The movie revolves truly around three characters, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) and Ed Tom Bell (Tommy lee Jones) and is for the most part in the perspective of Ed Tom Bell, the sheriff of Terrell county that has older notions of what law is, in contradistinction to both Anton, who is a kind of lawful evil being, and Llewelyn, generally a standard utilitarian. When the film starts out we get a first hand look at the scourge of Anton Chigurh as he escapes an unexplained detainment from a rural cop. We aren’t shown why it was that he was detained prior to any event shown in the movie but it’s safe to assume that as a hired killer, he was easily up to no good. Shortly after, we see the typical life of Llewelyn who is a regular joe, a standard country bumpkin, and that of the more principled Ed Tom doing his duties as a small town sheriff. What sets off the fuse for the entire plot however is intriguing. While Llewelyn is out hunting, seemingly perfectly legal, he stumbles upon the graveyard of a drug deal gone wrong. Naturally, he is alarmed, but where this all takes another direction is what he chooses to do next. Instead of being the good samaritan anyone would expect from such a person, he decides to meddle in the graveyard, to play with fire. He believes he found a treasure trove of dead Cartel, guns, ammunition, drugs and most importantly a money bag. He, of course, naturally sets his aims on this money after he deduces that he did indeed stumble upon an conventional drug deal shootout and not some other less opportune event. He opens the door to one of the shot vehicles and asks a dying cartel member, “Where is the last man standing, ultimo hombre.” From there he takes it upon himself to treasure hunt this potential money bag, he doesn’t seem to question whether it’s wrong to do so or whether he might even get into material problems with the drug cartel itself. He eventually finds it, tracking the last man standing with appears to be his practical skill developed as a hunter and opens up a suitcase with what looks to be a couple million dollars. He takes the dead Mexicans gun and with the suitcase he heads straight home. So begins No Country For Old Men, the simple man who commits evil but is by no means a cartel member decides to do the thing which made him fly too close to the sun. It is a kind of expression of how small sin or evil when it is freely acquiesced to and most likely habitual, leads you to greater and greater ones until it totally ruins you. How different is Llewelyn from a general American today, one that lives by the “Categorical imperative” of which ends up mostly resembling a gross utilitarian egoism. If they aren’t directly harming someone, if they aren’t directly robbing, is it theft?1 To Llewelyn, of course, he didn’t think it was theft, he didn’t see it as a wrong since it was an object from an illegal activity, the fruit of evil was up for grabs and he though himself a proper claimant. And a question that comes up is what about the consequences of meddling with a beast? Why didn’t he consider that while he might not believe in sin, or at least this sin, he does believe in revenge and violence from human interactions, especially in this case. Is it then a sort of delusion on his part? A sort of blindness, that this money that came from terrible roots is now totally without conditions to take?2 I believe the key to this is his ultimate demise, the final exemplification of what he really was. A simple man, with practical skills allowing him to prance around on what was thin ice right from the start. After the grand altercations between Llewelyn and Chigurh leads him to concoct an offensive, we are left totally disappointed. With all the experience he had with eluding and battling the Mexicans and this rogue agent, the vengeful spirit from the violence brought to him by Chigurh, Llewelyn is ensnared by a lowly motel whore and killed by Mexicans. How easily could Chigurh have captured him right from the beginning if he thought to employ a cheap hooker instead of a shotgun.3 Perhaps it’s a type of warring spirit that turns one into a dog, using teeth instead of the mind.
Llewelyn, being this kind of stereotype, a working class American living in a trailer park, is lead from a life of mundanity to persistent strife and death and all essentially because he took what did not belong to him. However, with Cormac, his aim was clearly not Llewelyn’s lack of complexity or questionable judgement on moral matters but the assessment of a kind of inevitability in the triumph of evil. And this assessment is that of Ed Tom where by the end of the narrative he’s left with a bleak subconscious conclusion.
| Ed Tom|
“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 heart of the matter is definitively Ed Tom, although the personification of the matter is Anton Chigurh. When we first see Ed Tom, we get the simple and lawful good nature of his character. A simple small time sheriff doing what he can to uphold justice and morality as “values” to be cherished whether it be from historical precedent bordering on oral tradition and some sort of American Confucianism. He too is apt and experienced in the duties of a small time sheriff, he knows crime well, he knows it from his unraveling of it, but he cannot make anything of it. He cannot properly assess the why of it’s existence after that of the prime motive. Why is it that a man can kill without a want of anything, not for any material good, and not even for pleasure? Why are there men in the world that seemingly encompass evil itself as if they utterly lack all humanity, men that even with sound principles and causes cannot fathom the reason for an act? In this way Ed Tom leads inquiry into a simple mans metaphysics, although he is too troubled to penetrate further. He stops where one should never, the despair of believing there is a never ending battle of which the evil must necessarily win. We all know that in many cases evil does triumph, the good are truly against the spirit of the world, they are principled in matters which supersede the workings of man. It is why the greatest saints were destroyed on earth suffering the greatest pains and toils while the evil men laughed and surfeited in luxury. We of course know this to be a necessary condition, for without evil, we wouldn’t have the option to even discuss it. The kind of tranquility in this uneasiness, is a hallmark of our religion. Even protestants should know about this, although as we see with Ed Tom, he just isn’t quite Protestant either. In spite of his shaky foundations which uphold his “values” in justice and morality, Ed Tom throughout has a genuine conviction to save Llewelyn in spite of what tremendous difficulties presented, on top of the serious danger Ed acknowledges which come with the case. In this there is a sense of guardianship also perhaps not just from his duties and vocation as a sheriff but the personal involvement in the case after speaking to Llewelyns exceedingly innocent and anxious wife. We know of course that she ultimately is murdered by Chigurh due to his evil principles and so all of Ed’s experience and effort were materially futile. We don’t get another word from Ed Tom after Llewelyns wife is killed, maybe because he retired shortly after Llewelyns death. Although it’s clear that it would have simply added to his dilemma. We get the most of his predicament shown by the means of a dream at the very end of the film where Ed tells his wife a dream he had about his father.
“Two of ’em. Both had my father in ’em. 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 too well but it was about meeting him in town somewhere, he’s gonna give me some money. 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 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…”
Ed’s dream is the culmination of what he believes is the teleological framework of all his work, of all his fight against insatiable and chaotic flux of evil. His father who was a policeman just as he passes by him in the cold of night, the torch he holds, the color of the moon, is his humanity, his light that tells him apart from the others. As a lawman and a kind of champion, he takes this light which is to mean a vague goodness in contrast to the dark of night, and traverses the frigid and unrelenting cold to set this goodness down. All Ed knows about the end is that his father would be wherever Ed was going. When his father passes right by him it shows that Ed is going in the same direction, why he is missing a horn of fire is peculiar, perhaps a sense of self-critique or lack of self worth, a light of goodness he saw his father carry throughout his life as a policeman pushing through the mire of evil, while Ed traverses the same path and in the same conditions but totally in the dark. It’s fascinating in a way to see this type of end, where it is a seeming unknowable symbolic good of which one must almost pamper or protect as if it’s a weak or scarce entity. The value of it totally implied of course. We never see concrete metaphysics, we don’t see the questioning of what is the base and the noble, why it ultimately even matters. To Ed, it’s just something acknowledged, a kind of existential fact. You have goodness, and this goodness is in opposition to the undecipherable and unconquerable evil, the only thing that one can do is make the journey with this fire, this beam of goodness, perhaps even humanity itself, to end where all the other champions of this goodness have arrived.
| Anton Chigurh |
Anton Chigurh is purposely an enigma. What is evil? This is essentially the character. Sometimes this man seems lawful though he kills unlawfully. He is shown to kill arbitrarily, against his own material interests and yet again does so from a personal offense he perceives. This is to say, Chigurh then certainly can be said to work by certain principles and these are referenced by another killer as transcendent. How transcendent? Well, certainly not materialistic outwardly so, although in reality they end at death. What we know for sure is that he believes in a kind of fate, like a cartoon grim reaper, something subject to what appears to be a certain destiny identified with the flip of a particular coin. I don’t believe he is meant to portray anything further than what would appear to be an unstoppable force of evil, one that seems to get wounded, but ultimately triumphant. If we take the final scene of the movie as a kind of parallel for how the fate which affects evil is in a way forgiving, then we arrive at somewhat of a cohesive statement from otherwise vague notions and hints. Llewelyn was met with embarrassment and death from either the mother laws big mouth or the motel whore being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When Chigurh is met with fates blow of suffering, he is assisted by good-intended children in contradistinction to Llewelyns awkward and exploitative interaction with the teens at the border to Mexico. In other words, evil is favored by some unknowable greater mystery that is that thing associated with time and destiny, although not predestination, it seems to be not anything too discernable besides what we experience in life.
| Article III – Indifferent |
I give this article in a somewhat conservative fashion. In the film we do not get any explicit treatment of religion, and while the meaning of the story can be deduced to be one from the perspective of an agnostic or pantheist, I don’t generally find it offensive enough to get branded antagonistic. We are in a peculiar situation for sure, post-Christian civilization puts narratives in circumstances where by principle things shouldn’t be given latitude like the pagans of old were. Where they were ignorant, we today are most definitively not. Cormac knows Christianity, there is no escaping its towering historical gigantism. The mark Christian civilization left on earth is inescapable. We have cities named after saints, we have in our very common English expressions that allude to a time past. So in this way, I don’t want to give too much latitude to these pantheistic writers, they don’t have much of an excuse in my book. The thing I do appreciate is the vagueness, where it eludes dogmatism, perhaps nearing skepticism. At the very least this allows for questioning even though it’s the most ancient fallacy4 of all, I find it a whole lot better than the dogmatism of positivists, since they are of course the most religious heathen alive. In the pessimism, I find some solidarity. At least they aren’t hedonists. Like Schopenhauer admits, we have a sense of suffering as the ideal.5 We have a view of the world not so different with that of the cold dark night in which we must traverse with great pain. All the suffering of Christ, the saints, our current conditions of subjection to natural catastrophe, unbearable illness, and abominations beyond comprehension are to us that of this world, a necessary condition of our present life. It just so happens that the pessimists are too rebellious to penetrate into soteriology, at most you might perhaps get a protestantized version of Buddhism.6 However, I must say, the narrative itself, independent of religion, is remarkable. The tripartite structure similar to the Good the Bad and the Ugly serve as a perfect basis to advance the narrative at large, whether it ultimately be indifferent to the Catholic end or not.
| Lasciviousness – AII |
I truly wanted to give No Country an A-I, considering there is no real issue showing immodest women. The only two real female characters are Llewelyn’s wife, who is by no means immodest in outward appearance and movement, and her geriatric cancer-struck mother. There is of course the motel whore that ends up destroying Llewelyn, and while she is immodestly dressed, it’s not particularly shown or accented enough to be a real cause for concern. In the context of it all, I believe that character still keeps the film in the suggestive article, considering there is no real explicit material which would require a skip or aversion. All in all there is suggestion in two instances, one is Llewelyn speaking immodestly to his wife in an effort to assert dominance, preventing her from prying further into his affairs. In this scene there is a euphemism about the conjugal debt in a crude form, though it’s vulgarity can be hardly said to step into the realm of true profanity. Nonetheless, it is crude and so I will objectively document and grade accordingly. In another instance, Llewelyn speaks to a motel whore, there are no real detailed words or direct profanity of any sort in this scene, but an air of suggestion as to his infidelity is apparent. Though it’s clear that his infidelity is supposed to be material cause for his ultimate demise. As I wrote above, her clothing is technically suggestive7, though not particularly dangerous in the context of it all.
- I find it interesting that Llewelyn’s action is perhaps seen as a morally trivial act in the grand scheme of the pagan worldview. The supposed fine line between whether something appears to be unappropriated is not is really clear in the case of the money satchel, 2 million left at the foot of a dead drug dealer from a cursed drug deal, easily presupposes ownership. “On like manner if the thing found appears to be unappropriated, and if the finder believes it to be so, although he keep it, he does not commit a theft [Inst. II, i, 47]. In any other case the sin of theft is committed [Dig. XLI, i, De acquirend, rerum dominio, 9: Inst. II, i, 48]: wherefore Augustine says in a homily (Serm. clxxviii; De Verb. Apost.): “If thou hast found a thing and not returned it, thou hast stolen it” (Dig. xiv, 5, can. Si quid invenisti). ST II-II, Q. 66, A. 5, ad. 2 ↩︎
- “Hence Gregory says (Moral. v, 45) that “zealous anger troubles the eye of reason, whereas sinful anger blinds it.” ST II-II, Q. 158, A. 1, ad. 2 ↩︎
- “Behold a woman meeteth him in harlot’s attire, prepared to deceive souls.” Proverbs 7:8 ↩︎
- “Hence there must be somewhere self-evident principles which are no mere assumptions, but which underlie the structure of human knowledge and are presupposed by the very nature of things.”(Metaph., 1005 b, 1006 a) ↩︎
- “The inmost kernel of Christianity is the truth that suffering—the Cross—is the real end and object of life.” Studies in Pessimism, On Suicide, Arthur Schopenhauer, ↩︎
- “Again, you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence. And, in any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably well, the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a disappointment, nay, a cheat.” Ibid ↩︎
- What can I say? Of course to dissect the articles, what she wears in the scene is indecent and trashy clothing, aimed at an intention to ensnare men like Llewelyn. And while the clothing worn as to be expected from a hillbilly motel whore is particular to a region and context, its still universal enough to be acknowledged as a harlots wardrobe. ↩︎
