No Country For Old Men

In an interview with Megan Abbott, Joel and Ethan Coen mentioned one of the deciding factors to adapt No Country For Old Men was just how cinematic it was for a book. The book starting out as a screenplay and filled out into a full-length novel is what lends itself to being adapted for the screen so well. It takes place in the heart of America through hotels, gas stations and diners. Common places where common people mingle. These transitory places are given spatial relationships through Deakin's beautifully photographed Texas horizons. 

The fates of the three characters in the novel and the film conclude fairly similarly. Though the book adds depth to each of them. 

ED TOM BELL

In the opening monologue, Ed Tom Bell tells us his moral principle. You gotta put your soul at hazard to be a part of this world. He then says he is not willing to do this. He is a man who is always running. This gives him sympathy for Llewlyn Moss who too is on the run. During World War II, he abandoned his troop and they all died while he got a medal. Coming off this, he became "sheriff of this town when I was 24 years old." 

There is an idea of Ars Moriendi or "the good death." In the case of Bell, he should have stayed with his troop in France as the Germans were advancing on his position and died. In the book, Llewelyn Moss achieves "the good death" by dying to protect an innocent girl. Bell knows what he is supposed to do but he ends up choosing to save himself. 

Bell is a great detective because of his intuition. He is able to put together a story better than anybody. So when his intuition says "hey man you better not stick around this place too much longer or you will die," he listens. This intuition undermines the archetype of 'the brave lawman who fights the bad guy and achieves a noble death.' 

Ed Tom Bell's unraveling is the quiet heart of the novel's devastation. McCarthy methodically strips him of every illusion, like pealing back the layers of sun- bleached paint to reveal the rot underneath. His use of language shifts- from folksy, rambling monologues full of homespun wisdom to fractured, hesitant confessions, as if each word is a stone he's forced to carry. 

What chills me to the bone is how Bell's resignation mirrors our own complicity. We want him to fight, to be the hero. But McCarthy denies us that catharsis. Instead, we're left with his dreams- those fragmented, haunting visions of his father carrying fire in the dark. He is a man who continues to finger the wound until he dies. Those repetitive, circular passages where Bell is agonizing over the 'why' of it all- we're trapped in his mind, choking on the same questions. His visit with Ellis can be seen as a microcosm of his role in the book in terms of theme. Though he doesn't dwell on his time in the war in the movie, in both mediums he talks about 'being outmatched.'

There are three things Bell does at the end which shows his obsessiveness. The first is his returning to the scene of the crime. He finds spent shell casings on the desert floor. The second is to question a kid named David De Marco at a diner. The kid being one of three who went over to Chigurh after he had been in the car accident. David lies to Bell about there being other people with him and Bell sees right through him. He goes to find the other kid who was with him at his school and ends up causing him to cry at the principal's office. Something he "wishes he could have done differently." The information gleaned from the kid providing as much as what David told him. No real leads on the whereabout of Chigurh. Just a vague description. The third thing Bell does is seek out the brother of Llewlyn Moss. "People will tell you Vietnam brought this country to its knees. But I never believed that. It was already in bad shape. Vietnam was just the icing on the cake." he tells Ed Tom. 

Finally, Ed Tom visits a Mexican man in jail who has been convicted of murdering a man and setting his car on fire. His interest in it being that on his way to the motel where Llewlyn Moss is murdered, Bell spots a car on fire. Bell believes this was act done by Chigurh. When he confronts the Mexican, he tells him he did the best he could by him and didn't think he did it. To which the Mexican laughs at him and tells him "he shot the man right between the eyes and drug him back to his car by the hair of his head and set the care on fire and burned him to grease." 

The revelation speaks to a larger haunting of Bell's mind. The resignation isn't just in the action, but in the prose itself, the way the sentences grow shorter, like a man pruning his own hope branch by branch. 

LLEWELYN MOSS

Llewyn Moss is unchanging. He is the same at the end as he was at the beginning. He is not a very reflective person but this allows him to survive as long as he did. This isn't to say he is entirely non contemplative. There is a scene in a book, right after he checks into the first motel, where he goes into town and uses some of the cash he found to go to a restaurant and order steak and wine. "He thought about his life" McCarthy writes. I don't think many writers could get away with writing so sparse and minimal a line. 

Let's look at the scene where he is in the hotel. He sits listening to the door, shotgun in one hand. He goes into the bathroom and turns the shower on. He then goes back to the door and listens again. "He realized the phone might ring and he took the receiver from the cradle and laid it on the table. He pulled back the covers and rumpled the pillows on the bed. He looked at the clock. Four forty-three. He looked at the phone lying there on the table. He picked it up and pulled the cord out of it and put it back in the cradle. Then he went over and stood at the door, his thumb on the hammer of the shotgun. He dropped to his stomach and put his ear to the space under the door. A cool wind. As if a door had opened somewhere. What have you done. What have you failed to do." The last line gives us access to Moss' subconscious. A couple lines later, McCarthy writes this, "Heart beating against the dusty carpet." He goes to the body's physiological state in his descriptions of fear. The passage prior also points to how Moss managed to survive as long as he did. He turns the shower on as a decoy to fool Chigurh. He gets the drop on him and tells Chigurh to drop the shotgun. Now at that moment, he should have shot him. This scene is a microcosm of Moss' narrative trajectory. This is the world Moss has entered into. Moss, being a Vietnam vet, knows what it is to kill a man. The principle he lives by doesn't allow him to kill an unarmed man. The way he handles this situation mimics his choosing to go back into the desert with that jug of water for the narco. 

When the Coens were looking to cast an actor to play the part of Moss, they wanted to find someone who 'looked good doing things silently'. We see Llewyn cut off the barrel of a shotgun, use the blinds and wire hangers as a means to hide the money in the vent and pull it out the other end. He is a smart and resourceful person. One of the pleasures of both the book and film is following Moss' methods of survival in a particular scene. 

In the podcast Method and Madness, Brad Kelly mentions how, in a way, by dying 'a senseless death, he prevented himself from ruining his life. Let's say he outsmarts the cartel and keeps the money. Then what? His soul is now fair game to be corrupted. Gambling, prostitutes, alcohol are all vices that befall people who luck into large sums of money. When Carla Jean finds out about him dying to protect an innocent girl at a motel, she believes Moss is cheating on her. His image through her eyes may be tainted. And yet, he dies the good death Ed Tom Bell is supposed to have died. Ed Tom is supposed to 'put his soul at hazard'. Yet he knows through intuition were he to confront the ultimate evil in the form of Chigurh, he will not survive. He retreats and all he is left with is dreams of his dead father. 

ANTON CHIGURH

When the narrative starts, Chigurh is already in custody by law enforcement. What we find out later, what is not in the movie, is why he is in custody. When he is talking to Carson in the motel, he confesses to him that he got arrested to "see if I could extricate myself by an act of will. Because I believe such a thing is possible." He explains to Carson he was at a diner and some guy asks him something "pretty hard to ignore." The text all but pointing out him asking if Chigurh was queer. Chigurh goes out into the parking lot and kills the man in front of his friends. The deputy shows up and he allows himself to be arrested. This is a reckless act.

When we see Chigurh go into the office and shoot the man who sent Carson Wells after him, he loads his gun with birdshot so he doesn't hit the glass behind him and have it rain down on the people below. He was never this concerned about collateral damage before. 

Anton Chigurh doesn't just become stronger, he is elemental. The more Bell retreats, the more Chigurh expands, until he's less a man and more a manifestation of the universe's indifference. If a man were to be measured by principle, then Chigurh becomes a better person. Now when I say better person, I mean insofar as his nature. Let's be clear, Anton Chigurh is a psychopath. His principles however transcend things like money. The whole scene with Carla Jean makes this abundantly clear. He is a man of his word. 

After he recovers the money, he brings it back to its owner, the action showing his character turn from psychopath to sociopath. He sees himself as being a larger part of something. The next time we see him, it shows how he keeps his word to Moss that he is going to kill his wife. This scene between him and Carla Jean plays out. 

"Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning." 

She sat sobbing. Shook her head. 

"Yet even though I could have told you how all of this would end I thought it not too much to ask that you have a final glimpse of hope in the world to lift your heart before the shroud drops, the darkness. Do you see?" 

"Oh God," she said. "Oh God."

"I'm sorry."

She looked at him a final time. "You don't have to," she said. "You don't. You don't."

He shook his head. "You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesn't allow for special cases. A coin toss perhaps. In this case to small purpose. Most people don't believe there can be such a person. You can see what a problem that must be for them. How to prevail over that which you refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Do you understand? When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way. You're asking that I second say the world. Do you see?

"Yes," she said, sobbing. "I do. I truly do."

"Good," he said. "That's good." Then he shot her. 

McCarthy starts off the next paragraph with "The car that hit Chigurh in the intersection three blocks from the house was a ten year old Buick that had run a stop sign." He breaks his arm in two places and broke some ribs. The immediate follow up to a scene demonstrating a man who lives by a code is that same man being injured by a force outside of his control. In this case, a truck driven by three high teenagers who are not paying attention. Chaos interrupts order, something even a man like Chigurh cannot overcome. 

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

The title of the book derives from a line of the Yeats poem 'Sailing to Byzantium.'

That is no country for old men. The young

In another's arms, birds in the trees,

Those dying generations-at their song,

The salmon-falls

It's a poem that explores the speaker's desire the escape the limitations of old age and physical decay by seeking spiritual transcendence in the idealized world of Byzantium. In the world set up my McCarthy, there is no Byzantium. After Ed Tom Bell visits the Mexican in jail, he monologues about this:

"These old people I talk to, if you could of told em that there would be people on the streets of our Texas towns with green hair and bones in their noses speakin a language they couldn't understand, well, they just flat out wouldn't of believed you. But what if you'd told em it was their own grandchilden? Well, all that is signs and wonders but it don't tell you how it got that way. And it don't tell you nothin' about how it's fixin' to get neither. Part of it was I always thought I could at least someway put things right and I guess I just don't feel that way no more. I don't know what I do feel like. I feel like them old people I was talkin about. Which ain't goin to get better neither. I'm bein asked to stand for somethin that I don't have the same belief in it I once did. Asked to believe in somethin I might not hold with the way I once did. That's the problem. I failed at it even when I did. Now I've seen it held to the light. Seen any number of believers fall away. I've been forced to look at it again and I've been forced to look at myself."

A good old boy named Llewyn Moss brings a jug of water to a dying Narco. He finds a satchel of money he knows belongs to the cartel but takes it anyway. A trooper deserts his buddies in the war and becomes sheriff of a town. Only to end up retreating because he is haunted by an overwhelming force of evil he can't understand or doesn't want to. What keeps me coming back to this book and this film is that out of the three characters, Anton Chigurh comes out the best. It immediately calls into question the lines that separate good and evil.