No Country for Old Men

We considered Oscar season the prime time to begin publishing to this site. It provided two practical benefits. One is that there is a general interest in films at this time. And rightly so, just as there is a general interest in basketball in March. The other is that the announcement of Oscar nominations would provide us with a focused set of films from this year's exciting batch of releases. Otherwise, we might have been lost in a sea of excellent movies to choose from. To kick us off, Jonathan Heaps has written this piece about the Coen Brother's most recent endeavor, "No Country for Old Men," which has garnered 8 nominations, including Best Director and Best Film.

No Man Above The Law

By Jonathan Heaps

Rousseau gives an example of how collaboration leads to conflict in the formation of society. Four primitive men come together in the woods to hunt a stag, which will provide more than enough food for all of them. One of the four, however, spots a hare. He dives after the hare, grasping it and breaking its neck. He has enough food for himself, but the stag was startled by his attack and now has escaped. The other three men are left in a lurch. One can assume what fate befell the renegade hunter. But this is a tale of the origins of order. What of the man who abandons collaboration and order into which he has been thrust without a choice? On his view, participation in the common good is purely accidental. His membership in the human order is as capricious as the flip of a coin. His name, in the Coen Brother’s film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country for Old Men, is Anton Chigurh.

The opening sequence of No Country expresses the precipice on which it seems humanity rests these days. The land is timeless, unchanging in its constant flux and erosion. The earth is as it always has been, only scarcely marked by the presence of human artifacts. The voice over of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, as portrayed with a captivating amalgam of fortitude, dismay and humor by Tommy Lee Jones, portrays a man who finds his identity and worth in his connection to a tradition of men working law enforcement. The tradition, though, has broken. Men seem to have not just violated, but also abandoned altogether the rules of ordered society. How can a man, who represents that order do his work in that world? How can he even be himself? If the world has left the story-that-gives-us-meaning behind, how can we be anything except a spectator, watching ourselves antiquate in a place more despicable than we can bear?

Enter Chigurh, a man who toys with human trust because he has chosen to disregard its value. When we first meet him, he murders a policemen who believes Chigurh is restrained and under control. Chigurh drives off in the policemen’s cruiser and uses its significance as an authoritative symbol to take the life of another trusting person. Chigurh’s second victim follows instructions to the bitter end, the victim deceived by the meaning he perceives in a police cruiser. It is a meaning we grant through our cooperation as a society. This is the great terror of Anton Chigurh. Not only can he not be trusted to join into the grand cooperation of culture and life together, but he also willingly manipulates our naïve submission to social norms against our best interest.

Llewelyn Moss too is an independent man, but he exerts his independence within the space provided by society. As a result, he is still responsive to the call of something like “the greater good.” Against what he knows is his own best interest, he heads out in the early hours of the morning to give water to a man dying from gunshot wounds acquired in a drug deal gone bad. We get the impression that Moss has lead an unconventional life, but his care for his wife is sincere and bordering on parental. In fact, it seems that Moss has taken the drug money primarily to provide for Carla Jean. One gets the impression he could have carried on hunting away the days in the hills and snuggling his remaining nights away in his trailer with his young bride. On the other hand, if she can profit from the ill fate of men driven to disaster by their avarice, what shame is there in that?

Chigurh is the hulking terror of the Ubermensch and Moss is the deluded notion of self-sufficient individuality our taciturn heroes of the “Western” film have embodied for nearly 100 years of cinema. I have heard not a few people criticize No Country for presenting one more irrational killer amongst a stale pile of genre films, such as 1991's Silence of the Lambs, including its prequels and sequel. But, unlike Hannibal Lector, Chigurh is not just an aesthete for whom killing is but one more luxury. Instead, for him killing is not imbued with any value, because his values are only self-given, indeed only self-willed. He wants the briefcase and no one will thwart his plan to get it. Indeed, promises made in pursuit of the money are kept even after its acquisition, as in the demise of Carla Jean Moss. He is the full fruition and incarnation of Sheriff Bell’s anxiety that the Texas lawman is a vestige of a world that no longer lives. That he himself is no longer meaningful against a kind of evil that is absolute, because its rejection of value is absolute.

So, in some ways, the trajectory of the story is already present to us if we are thoughtful about its themes from the beginning. Moss has to die, because the kind of man he is rages all too insufficiently, too cooperatively. Carla Jean’s innocence is defined precisely against an inherited moral framework; so she is not immune to Chigurh’s wrath-less violence. Sheriff Bell can only watch and it is no coincidence that he is always a step behind the action. What could he even do? Sheriff Bell has seen enough and he plans to retire. He visits his uncle, who, we are to understand, was paralyzed while working as a sheriff. Bell shares his grief at the emergence of a world he doesn’t understand and a God who seems so absent. He feels ashamed at quitting and indeed thinks God is ashamed of him. His uncle reminds him of the reality of things; you can’t know what God thinks of you and the world is as evil as it ever was. Bell’s grandfather was gunned down in a cold and mindless murder, back when these parts were a geographic, as well as spiritual, frontier. “It's no different,” Ellis reminds his nephew.

Perhaps though, Chigurh is not the bold and terrific pioneer of human strength that we suppose him to be from the beginning. While I appreciate that the horror of the Nietzschean hero is shown unflinchingly in this film, I delight even more in the idea that the great and evil man has misunderstood both morality and chance. Every man finds himself in the sublime chasm between both, even the supposed “Over-Man.” Despite the appearance of being an unstoppable force, Chigurh has been thwarted with greater and greater frequency as the film goes on. After all, it is the Mexican drug dealers who take Moss’s life, not Chigurh. His merciless and ostensibly amoral and instrumental control of human lives is profoundly imperfect. Increasingly, people fall victim to the tyranny of his failures.

Carla Jean, though, conquers him most completely. When he offers her the chance of survival, her fate hanging in the result of a coin toss, she refuses. She demands he take responsibility for the reality of his moral agency. He replies that his moral agency is itself a product of chance. It is the petulant response of a child; “I never asked to be born!” Chigurh’s resentiment is showing. She trumps his objection performatively. By refusing to acquiesce her will to chance, she demonstrates the will’s power in the face of it. However, she still has to die, as Hegel predicts, because her willingness unto death is her victory.

Ultimately, chance takes its fickle revenge upon Chigurh, nearly killing him in a car accident. The final scenes of Chigurh’s tale remind us that no man, no matter how forceful his will, is above morality or chance. That dialectic perhaps most defines our nature. The Nietzschean hero is the dream of those who resent their nature. It is the manifestation of their aspiration to godhood; to the pride of Lucifer’s sin. So where does that leave us? Chigurh is not above the law or the fray, which we find comforting, but the world still seems to hold us “overmatched.” Bell’s dream at the end is as much an Aesop-ian moral as a Coen Brother’s film will offer. We live in a world of grand, simultaneous moral demand and turpitude, but we are likewise subject to those careening turn-of-events we call “fortune.” Both 1996’s Fargo and No Country end with a picture of domestic, familial peace. The message of the visual is that though the world contains great evil, for which few answers seem available, we face it not alone.

In No Country's final scene, we also get the dream imagery of a father going on ahead into the darkness, carrying the fire. This imagery is two-fold. Firstly, for the novel’s author, Cormac McCarthy, "carrying the fire" is language used in his book The Road for a kind of human dignity and goodness. It is safe to assume a similar meaning here, as Bell’s recounting of his dream is taken directly from the novel’s text. Beyond that, however, is the idea that our community extends over not just lateral geography or vertical spirituality, but it is temporally transcenden as well. Our position within a tradition of men and women who have gone before and faced the sublimity of human living is what defends our courage from accusations of naïve optimism or foolhardy brashness. This is why we venerate the Saints, because they have carried the fire into the dark.

The genealogist will dismiss Christian morality for being the product of a particular tradition. The fundamentalist will dismiss tradition for obscuring the universal, cosmological Christian moral realities. The genealogist never escapes his or her own particularity, because perspectivalism is itself a perspective. The fundamentalist excuses him or her self from the authentic moral life, because they are all too willing to choose some perspective to statically suppose as universal. The fundamentalist is destroyed by the genealogist, but the genealogist is destroyed by himself. The Tradition of the Church is not obscuring us from the moral realities. Neither is the Tradition of the Church capriciously asserting its will. Instead, we are creatively participating in God’s orchestration of history. The essence of morality and “fortune” are felt only in the particular, so we ought not fear being “this people of God.” The juggernauts of our age might take our lives, but they will not have victory over us, because we have chosen God and God is good.