Except perhaps for its ending, it is the tone of No Country For Old Men, the new film from Joel and Ethan Coen, that is most striking. On a shelf by itself, it would have this quality, but alongside the rest of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, it is particularly menacing. Unlike all their previous films to date, which seem to reek (for better or worse) of the brothers’ now trademark self-conscious irony, there is no “get it?” to No Country. In fact, there is no pandering to the audience at all, for there is about as much irony here as one usually finds in the unforgiving west Texas badlands where the story takes place. As is the case with such harsh country, the tone is stark and reflective as it takes us on a trip into the recent American past, summoning up ghosts that have now become institutionalized in the fabric of our equally menacing market-driven utopia—a utopia whose germ, like the germs of most religions, flowers poetically in the desert.
Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy of the same name, No Country tells the story of three men searching for each other. Interestingly, none finds what he is after. The adaptation comes replete with all the violence of the novel, but it smartly disregards much of McCarthy’s sentimentalism. There is Llewllyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a welder and Vietnam veteran who, while out hunting antelope in the Texas wastelands, chances upon the aftermath of a drug-deal gone wrong. Not one to waste an opportunity, Moss hounds down the two-million in cash that he knows intuitively must have been left behind. Here is where the stalking triangle begins. On his tail is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a depraved yet oddly robot-like, homicidal maniac who is impelled by a tantalizing Kantian sense of responsibility to recover the lost loot now in Moss’ possession. Thrown into this mix a little too late to be of any effectiveness is Sheriff Ed Bell, portrayed in a wonderfully subdued and stoical manner by Tommy Lee Jones. Although not the key figure in the Coen brothers’ meticulously crafted cat-and-mouse game between Moss and Chigurh, Sheriff Bell is the character that most fully realizes the Coens’ not so easy to find social message hidden under this extremely entertaining noir drama.
The acting is as striking as the tone of the story. Josh Brolin’s Moss appears simultaneously confident and bewildered as he hopes to stretch an ill-begotten economic opportunity into early retirement, while all the time being unknowingly in way over his head. Bardem’s Chigurh fills the screen with a chilling other-worldly presence akin to a computer-programmed avenging angel. The understatedness of his character is effective in illustrating a man who lives by a moral code beyond the mundane comprehension of civil society. Tommy Lee Jones plays, well, Tommy Lee Jones, but in the Coen brothers' hands he becomes a sad sage without answers rather than simply the grizzled cynic he has come to caricature.
It is thus the character of Sheriff Bell who provides the viewer with ruminations on the larger moral and social significance of the chase between Moss and Chigurh. From his point of view, the world has moved beyond both his comprehension and his ability to police his small corner of it. Here men kill each other over the fleeting treasure of narcotic profits, without passion and without remorse. The prevalence of drug wealth also has the power to pull seemingly law-abiding, although desperate, men into a world riddled with violence and doom. And that is the point of the film: something has changed in our social fabric. Criminals are different—beyond the reach of legal comprehension. Citizens are different—more opportunistic and more desperate. The old rules, prejudices, and sentiments no longer apply. It has ceased to be a country where an old man has a place. Yet, in an interesting scene between Bell and his crippled brother, we find out that this country has in a fundamental sense always been this harsh. But for some reason, we have forgotten this stinging truth. The Coen brothers have spun this tale in order to remind us of this fact.
Interestingly, No Country takes place in the recent past of 1980, in West Texas. The change in the universe of cops and robbers is then situated historically amidst a similar change in the American landscape itself. 1980 was, of course, the year in which the Reagan revolution commenced, complete with all the free-market euphoria that inaugurated the dismantling of the New Deal Welfare state. Allegorically, then, Chigurh can be seen as the very embodiment of Capital shorn of its ethical and social responsibilities that “crippled” its free movement prior to Reagan. It is not merely that he is a socio-path that calmly kills only for the money; what is crucial is that his mechanical actions are performed in strict accordance with his own inscrutable moral code. Thus, he embodies most fully the underside of the Neo-conservative ideological fantasy of the moral quality of capital—a quality that must be unleashed if we are to enjoy its ultimate fruits. At one point, Sheriff Bell refers to Chigurh as a “ghost”, as something that is beyond our detection, something that forces the world to move in a manner that we can no longer master socially. And his injured escape at the end establishes the guarantee of his continual return, forever intent on wreaking more havoc on the social fabric no matter how often we seek to rein him in with our abysmal political restraints.
If we follow this line, Moss appears as an emblem of the white working-class, the Reagan Democrat if you will, who shifted electoral allegiances in the lottery-induced hope that tax cuts would lead to a financial windfall. Moss is the hunter when we first meet him, but he becomes the desperately hunted once he envisions the possibility of a get-rich-quick scheme. In the end, his cynical go-it-alone mentality secures not only his demise, but that of his family as well. (This must be the pathetic creature qua listener that pundits for the wealthy such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly cynically have on the brain when they preach out in mock anger at such seemingly demonic forces as “socialized” medicine).
It is interesting that we follow Moss on his journey into Reagan country, but never actually witness his murder. We have seen America’s industrial workforce in steady decline, but we too have failed to witness its death. And as the direction of the film invites viewers to become absorbed in Sheriff Bell as he looks for the old, now obsolete, rules of the game to fix things, the murder occurrs without his—and our—detection (It might be too much to say that the Mexican gang that kills him is some kind of embodiment of the cruel irony of NAFTA). The point is that Moss dies attempting to obtain something that rightfully belongs to capital and to those who truly benefit from tax cuts, and not to someone from his social class.
As noted above, Sheriff Bell represents someone who lives by the old, pre-neocon rules, the embodiment of the social balance underlying the New Deal. He possesses all the intent and effectiveness in resolving the situation as the contemporary Democratic Party has in resolving ours. In fact, in a mysterious scene, when he comes close to confronting the social and moral problem embodied in Chigurh, he fails to see him at all. His senses are not what they used to be. One waits for the sheriff to save the day, but he never even comes close. Herein lies both the meaning of the Coen brothers’ vision and the significance of the ending of the story they tell.
The “old man” here is the New Deal and the majoritarian consensus that held it together. Represented by an impotent and ageing lawman, the consensus is now divided, turned in on itself, and lacking any ethical compass. This is no longer a country for it. The cruelty represented by Chigurh that is unleashed into our world with the loss of this old man’s skills is merely a return to a form of life that preceded the consensus. However, under the fantasies we have wrought concerning the reemergence of the free market and all its rugged individualist baggage, we have forgotten how harsh the past had been and, thus, do not realize it was something we used to control. Now we find ourselves in a new gilded age. This is where the confusion of Sheriff Bell comes in. He can no longer track a killer because he is living in his own fantasy that explains the past as a place that possessed some kind of moral order where, presumably, law men did not need to carry firearms. He can only dream of some vague reconciliation with a dead paternal figure. The brilliance of the end of No Country rests in its refusal to resolve the story. It is an abrupt end designed to be disappointing because it seeks to reveal that we have unleashed Chigurh, and only we, and not some dead father-figure (FDR?) or overly romanticized fantasy of the individual, can tame it. If only we could stop thinking of that satchel of money that awaits us under a tree just over the next hill.
Interestingly, No Country takes place in the recent past of 1980, in West Texas. The change in the universe of cops and robbers is then situated historically amidst a similar change in the American landscape itself. 1980 was, of course, the year in which the Reagan revolution commenced, complete with all the free-market euphoria that inaugurated the dismantling of the New Deal Welfare state. Allegorically, then, Chigurh can be seen as the very embodiment of Capital shorn of its ethical and social responsibilities that “crippled” its free movement prior to Reagan. It is not merely that he is a socio-path that calmly kills only for the money; what is crucial is that his mechanical actions are performed in strict accordance with his own inscrutable moral code. Thus, he embodies most fully the underside of the Neo-conservative ideological fantasy of the moral quality of capital—a quality that must be unleashed if we are to enjoy its ultimate fruits. At one point, Sheriff Bell refers to Chigurh as a “ghost”, as something that is beyond our detection, something that forces the world to move in a manner that we can no longer master socially. And his injured escape at the end establishes the guarantee of his continual return, forever intent on wreaking more havoc on the social fabric no matter how often we seek to rein him in with our abysmal political restraints.
If we follow this line, Moss appears as an emblem of the white working-class, the Reagan Democrat if you will, who shifted electoral allegiances in the lottery-induced hope that tax cuts would lead to a financial windfall. Moss is the hunter when we first meet him, but he becomes the desperately hunted once he envisions the possibility of a get-rich-quick scheme. In the end, his cynical go-it-alone mentality secures not only his demise, but that of his family as well. (This must be the pathetic creature qua listener that pundits for the wealthy such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly cynically have on the brain when they preach out in mock anger at such seemingly demonic forces as “socialized” medicine).
It is interesting that we follow Moss on his journey into Reagan country, but never actually witness his murder. We have seen America’s industrial workforce in steady decline, but we too have failed to witness its death. And as the direction of the film invites viewers to become absorbed in Sheriff Bell as he looks for the old, now obsolete, rules of the game to fix things, the murder occurrs without his—and our—detection (It might be too much to say that the Mexican gang that kills him is some kind of embodiment of the cruel irony of NAFTA). The point is that Moss dies attempting to obtain something that rightfully belongs to capital and to those who truly benefit from tax cuts, and not to someone from his social class.
As noted above, Sheriff Bell represents someone who lives by the old, pre-neocon rules, the embodiment of the social balance underlying the New Deal. He possesses all the intent and effectiveness in resolving the situation as the contemporary Democratic Party has in resolving ours. In fact, in a mysterious scene, when he comes close to confronting the social and moral problem embodied in Chigurh, he fails to see him at all. His senses are not what they used to be. One waits for the sheriff to save the day, but he never even comes close. Herein lies both the meaning of the Coen brothers’ vision and the significance of the ending of the story they tell.
The “old man” here is the New Deal and the majoritarian consensus that held it together. Represented by an impotent and ageing lawman, the consensus is now divided, turned in on itself, and lacking any ethical compass. This is no longer a country for it. The cruelty represented by Chigurh that is unleashed into our world with the loss of this old man’s skills is merely a return to a form of life that preceded the consensus. However, under the fantasies we have wrought concerning the reemergence of the free market and all its rugged individualist baggage, we have forgotten how harsh the past had been and, thus, do not realize it was something we used to control. Now we find ourselves in a new gilded age. This is where the confusion of Sheriff Bell comes in. He can no longer track a killer because he is living in his own fantasy that explains the past as a place that possessed some kind of moral order where, presumably, law men did not need to carry firearms. He can only dream of some vague reconciliation with a dead paternal figure. The brilliance of the end of No Country rests in its refusal to resolve the story. It is an abrupt end designed to be disappointing because it seeks to reveal that we have unleashed Chigurh, and only we, and not some dead father-figure (FDR?) or overly romanticized fantasy of the individual, can tame it. If only we could stop thinking of that satchel of money that awaits us under a tree just over the next hill.
