No Country for Old Men has impressed me and haunted me from the start, when I insisted upon its perfection in a LiveJournal post with my Oscars Predictions in 2008. Fourteen years from its release, I find that every time I watch it, I sit in awe of its timeless relevance. It’s like Hamlet in that way, revealing itself as the years tick on, age neither withering it nor custom staling its infinite variety.
I recently screened this Rorschach test of a film for a dear old friend and could not help but provide a “masterclass” lesson on it’s profundity, at least as I see it. The following is the essay I prepared, with additions, since I could not stop thinking about it even after seeing it for the billionth time.
The whole concept of genre is dependent on the audience accepting the previously agreed-upon conventions of film, or even the conventions of life itself. No Country for Old Men (2007), often described as a "contemporary western," is a quintessential anti-western. The classic Hollywood western (pre-1970s), which was the most popular film genre of the 20th century, has a simple formula. It includes a distinct and motivated good guy (the “white hat”) and bad guy. The good guy confronts the bad guy, and eventually the good guy destroys the bad guy. No Country delivers on none of these.
The white hat, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is stalwart, but finds himself thwarted by the evils he witnesses in the world he no longer recognizes as his own. The bad guy (who wears no hat, only an iconically bad haircut) is Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), and he has strange scruples. He appears to have no real motivation for his actions other than serving as the agent of fate: the grim reaper incarnate. He doesn’t take responsibility—the coin flipping is his detachment, allowing him to serve as a fabled courier of death rather than an actual human. The good guy and bad guy never actually meet; only in Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s darkest imagination do they even come close. And in the end, the bad guy presumably walks off into the sunset, if tattered by random consequence itself.
No Country is a lament and an acceptance that the classic western, with easily defined morals and boundaries, has no place in the new millennium. It is consequently classed as cynical and bleak and devoid of hope, which is not entirely true.
The film tangentially comments on how Manifest Destiny could literally get us across the continent and figuratively—through Hollywood entertainment—assuage the collective fears of America’s 20th century, culling so-called known enemies: wild animals, hostile natives and outlaws, disease, poverty, and Nature itself. No Country suggests that what Manifest Destiny did was rid the Wild West of its wildness, therefore stripping the land of its surface threats, leaving behind only the fittest, toughest evils that used to simply devour the lesser imps and demons to survive, but now exist in their purest, most terrifying form: human frailty, ignorance, and wrath.
Serious westerns that appeared post-9/11 have wrestled with themes that grow from these evils, touching the late repercussions of westward expansion and American culture e.g. Brokeback Mountain (2005), Los Tres Entierros de Melquiades Estrada (2005), There Will Be Blood (2007), Meek's Cutoff (2011), Django Unchained (2012), and The Homesman (2014). Such films bring to the fore the complex existential and self identity issues that have always dogged us: environmental exploitation, racism, religious zealotry, toxic masculinity, and ethnocentrism.
These are the crimes of which No Country's Sheriff Bell cannot take their measure, the crimes that give him pause before deciding whether or not he wants to confront them without understanding them. Perhaps he feels he cannot pass judgement if he hardly understands himself. Like many of us who feel overexposed to the millennial abundance of information and misinformation, he’d rather retreat, check out, be in the world but not of it. But one cannot truly escape; time and age are always marching us toward death, and the choices we make—even the ones as minute as a coin toss—bring us closer or further from it.
Llewelyn Moss courted, and then tried to stay ahead of death, to shake it off with his smarts, and perished. Bell followed in the wake of death, studying its bloody repercussions, and managed to survive. But all three principals end up on the same path somehow, like Chigurh’s coins, sharing a pocket after several decades of life’s journey. If we are all tokens for fate to flip, do we even have as much will as a coin? And if so, what is the moral implication of engaging with the world rather than stepping aside?
One of Tommy Lee Jones’ favorite movies, The Angel and the Badman (1947), depicts John Wayne as a notorious gunman encountering a peaceful family of Quakers who take him in when they find him collapsing from exhaustion after being on the run. He falls for the beautiful daughter, who teaches him about the religious and moral ways of the “friends” in her community. Eventually he decides to change his colors. He drops his pistol on the ground at the end of the film, where it gets picked up by the local marshal, who famously quips “Only a man that carries a gun ever needs one.”
Only a man that carries a gun ever needs one. Only someone who confronts the world needs a weapon. The ultimate choice is then determined by whether or not we believe we owe anything to the world, society, or humanity itself, that we need to be part of it, and whether all the pressure to put our souls at hazard is worth all that free will to choose.
John Wayne’s character uses his God-given free will to marry a good Christian wife and ride off to be a farmer in remote Utah, leaving behind a world of revenge and senseless violence. She ultimately serves as his deliverer. In the novel No Country, Sheriff Bell laments that God has never entered his life, but in the same breath he admits that Loretta, his patient and loving wife, is very active in her church, and that she is one of the best women to ever live. He wonders if God truly only visits the people who need Him, and what that says about Loretta. For being such a pensive individual, it’s odd that Bell misses the boat on this one, since Loretta is clearly God’s means of guiding him toward morality and safety so he lives longer than his father ever did.
In the opening sequence of No Country, Bell states—with more than an ounce of envy—that some of the older sheriffs never carried a gun. This is given as implied proof that the old days of law enforcement didn’t require violence, that they lived in a kinder world. Considering that the “old timers” of his generation would be old enough to have heard stories if not had childhood memories of the brutal American West in the late 1800s, this is ironic indeed.
Near the end of the film, after Sheriff Bell admits to his Uncle Ellis that he's retiring because he feels "overmatched" and that he doesn't blame God for never coming into his life because "if I was him, I'd have the same opinion of me that he does." Ellis scoffs, positing: “What you [Bell] got ain't nothin' new. This country's hard on people. You can't stop what's coming. It ain't all waiting on you. That's vanity.”
The closing scene of the film presents that famously cryptic speech from Bell, wherein he discusses his dreams now that he's retired, which serves as a perfect bookend to the opening monologue about Bell's nightmares. He dreams of his father and recounts to Loretta:
...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, the first one I don’t remember too well but, it was about meetin’ him in town somewheres and he 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 – just rode on past. And he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down. When he rode past, I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do, and I-I could see the horn from the light inside of it – about 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’d be there. And then I woke up.
I've had over a decade to stew over this, but even early on, only upon a second or third viewing, I knew in my gut that the father in his dream was God, making Himself more obvious to poor old Bell.
The greatest beauty of this film is the unfinished feel, the deliberately open-ended "conclusion" that leaves many unsatisfied. They're unsatisfied because the genre conventions dissolved somewhere along the way—the genre contract wasn't fulfilled. The truth is that the film never signed a contract. It’s meant to convey a sense of real life, that these characters are still out there somewhere, carrying on as circumstance sees fit. Reality is never nicely framed or concluded. If life ever presented us with a contract, it’s penned in invisible ink and rewrites itself as we go along.
I trust Tommy Lee Jones’ assessment, who in all his wisdom as Cormac McCarthy’s buddy and as a bona fide philosopher cowboy, offers this analysis of the ending:
The last speech is a contemplation of hope, a dream about however dark and cold the world might be, however long the ride through it might be. That at the end you know that you will go to your father’s house and it will be warm, or to a fire that your father has carried and built for you. The last sentence of the movie is, “And then I woke up.” It’s a contemplation of the idea of hope. Is it an illusion? Is it just a dream? And if it is, is the dream real? I think it asks very good questions and I believe that an assumption by Cormac, by Ethan and Joel, and certainly by me, is that the very best questions are more important than anyone’s wide variety of answers.
Who needs conventions and ready answers when we have the best questions? McCarthy’s novel has this to say: “There’s two kinds of people that don’t ask questions. One is too dumb to and the other don’t need to.” I am more satisfied with the questions—and simply great movies—than I ever would be with the answers.