Transcription
What's the most you ever lost on a coin toss?
Hi, I'm Matt, and this is Logos Made Flesh. Like most Coen brother films, No Country for Old Men is a compelling story with a rather ambiguous end. Then I woke up. What's the film trying to say thematically? It has much in common with this 1957 classic, in which a knight returning to his homeland is met by the finger of Death. A deal is proposed: as long as the Knight plays chess, Death will not take him, and if the Knight wins, Death will let him live.
No Country also has a symbol of Death offering reprieve through a contest. As with the classic depictions, the film's villain, Anton Chigur, wears contrasting black attire with a hood, his strange haircut, and employs the use of a harvester, a cattle gun, in place of a scythe. Chigur is a clinical automaton of destruction. He's clean and principled. He casually stalks his prey, killing anyone else who takes note of him. And as with Death, he operates by the invisible hand of chance. This is symbolized in the one reprieve he sometimes offers his victims.
"Yes, you're dead. You've been putting it up your whole life, you just didn't know it."
"Well, look, I need to know what I stand to win."
"You just tend to win everything."
"Call it all right. Heads."
"Then if they call it, he lets them live. And if they get it wrong, well, you know."
"But one thing they cannot do is refuse to play."
"I ain't gonna call it. The coin don't have no say. It's just you."
"Well, I got here the same way that Colin did."
A refusal to play is an instant loss. The coin toss's life-and-death stakes, coupled with the uncertainty of its outcome, are No Country's defining metaphor and theme.
Kevin, the Knight, uses his reprieve to search for meaning and certainty. He wants to know, not just to believe, God exists. He fears the silence of God means God isn't there, and his life lived mostly in Crusade was therefore meaningless. Likewise, uncertainty weighs on the aged Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, who longs for the promise of an earlier time.
"Our sheriff of this county when I was 25 years old. Hard to believe. Grandfather was a lawman, father too. Some of the old-time sheriffs never be more gone. You can't help but compare yourself against the old-timers. Couldn't help but wonder how they'd operate at these times."
The film's opening shots evoke the Peace of Eden, which it situates in repeated allusions to the classic Hollywood Western. Early Westerns were simple morality tales of white hat versus black hat, of justice versus corruption. In the end, though the odds may be against him, justice versus man, I was prevailed. But in evoking Hollywood's moral order, No Country breaks it.
"Yes sir, I got under control."
Some present our modern era as a past future dystopia. Bell also embodies this tragic shift. His occupation, southern accent, small-town location, goofy deputy, and his clear reluctance to use a gun evoke the sheriff from The Andy Griffith Show.
"So I don't carry a gun because I don't want the people of Mayberry to fear a gun. I'd rather they would respect me."
"You wanna drive out there like an aged Andy Taylor?"
Bell is an exile from the past, reluctantly patrolling the ruins of that bygone guarantee. And yet, he's forced to confront our modern vulnerability in trailing the young and daring Llewellyn Moss. From the beginning, Moss is the clear hero of the film, beginning when he stumbles upon the remains of a Mexican standoff and the two million dollars the dead left behind. Moss dares to take the money, becoming the target of both sides, in particular Anton Chigur. Time and again, Moss stays one step ahead. But when Chigur turns to threaten Moss's wife.
"You ain't gonna have to come look for me at all."
Moss promises a showdown, but the showdown never occurs. Bell finally catches up to Moss, dead. The film offers no window into Moss's death. He dies like everyone else. All right, significantly, Moss doesn't die for any moral failure. He's repeatedly depicted as a decent guy.
"No man, I, I know what beer leads to."
Bell's discovery of this standoff echoes Moss's earlier discovery. The similarities between the two unseen standoffs suggest that we, like Moss, are inheritors of forgotten dead and will soon be dead ourselves. Given life stakes and the uncertainty of the outcome, Bell has a clear aversion to risk.
"The crime you see now, it's hard, babe, and take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don't want to push my chips farther and go out and meet something I don't understand."
And yet, Bell does come to a moment of risk when he returns to the scene of the standoff and finds a knob punched out, evidence that Chigur has also returned. The shadow reflection of Chigur's head in the hole echoes the uncertainty of the coin: heads or tails? Is Chigur there or not? Bell calls it, and Chigur, it turns out, isn't there.
"Loretta tells me you're quitting."
"I feel overmatched. I always figured when I got older, God would sort of come into my life somehow. Me didn't."
Bell, in his crisis of faith, seeks wisdom from his cousin Ellis, who significantly lives near a windmill. The wind is omnipresent in the film. Shots of three windmills appear at the beginning. Because the film has no music, the wind is brought forward as the film's only consistent score. It's Ellis who provides the wind's meaning.
"What you got ain't nothing new."
Ellis reminds Bell of how their own uncle died, shot in the back by a band of Indians in 1909. In essence, a classic Hollywood Western. And yet, the uncle's death was an absurd tragedy. This is the world as it always been, not as we'd like to remember it.
"She buried him the next morning. You can't stop what's coming. That's vanity."
"Will you hold still?"
In the old still, like the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, No Country wrestles with the inevitability of death.
"Oh, hells bells, they even shot the dog."
A minute. Animals die alike in the film, which, according to the book, challenges our confidence that the fate of human souls will be better in the end. Nothing we do guarantees. Time and chance happen to us all. Chigur himself calls it in the dual disc of the traffic light and finds that uncertainty there applies equally to him. Dutifully obeying the law possesses no guarantee, which led Chigur earlier to rhetorically challenge, "If the rule you followed relative, what use was the rule?"
Such uncertainty leads Bell to a similar conclusion. In the end, he sits at home pondering the emptiness of his dreams.
"How do you sleep?"
"I don't know."
"Her dreams? Two of them. Both have my father in them. It's peculiar. I'm older now than he ever was by 20 years. So you can see us. He's the younger man. I'm in a dream. I knew that he was going on ahead and he's fixing to make a fire somewhere out there and all that dark and all that coal and I knew that whenever I got there he'd be there. Then I woke up."
Is Bell's conclusion the same as the film's? It would seem the film agrees with Bell's resignation. But this conclusion is missing a major part of the film. No Country is equally about risk, and it's only those who refuse to risk who ensure their end. Chigur's coin toss, interestingly, has much in common with the wager proposed by the philosopher Blaise Pascal.
"Is this the best I can do?"
Deciding for or against a belief in God is not unlike being forced to bet our lives on the uncertain outcome of a coin toss. Given the inevitability of loss, the only reasonable action is to bet on something we could win. Bell could be right. His father may not be waiting. Heaven may not exist. This world may never be put right. But given the certainty of death, the only sensible option is to risk for the possibility of reward, to fight the good fight, to call for life, and to live with the hope that we have something in store.
"Let them in hand. I can rule them. Bloated, ridden, soon York. Antonius Block, my dude."