Movie Response
At the recommendation of a colleague who teaches a cinema class, I finally watched No Country for Old Men. It's one I know I'll have to watch over and over. Yes, it's violent, probably one of the most violent I've ever seen, but there is almost no profanity or sexual violence, and even though women are killed, we don't really see that. It was an amazing movie that can be studied at several levels and defies genre-pigeonholing. I have only read one Cormac McCarthy novel, All the Pretty Horses. After I read it I despaired of my own writing; McCarthy is better, in my opinion, than Faulkner, but I'm probably not in a position to say that. Anyway, I felt like I didn't have any business trying to write literary fiction after reading Horses. The first ten minutes of No Country had all the feeling of Cormac McCarthy's writing for me.
Two observations: I'm not sure how to interpret Chigurh, but one scene says a lot more than I think people take it for. After he kills Stephen Root (the man in the office building), another man who has watched it asks "Are you going to kill me?" and Chigurh says, "Did you see me?" He kills because he is seen. He doesn't kill Tommy Lee Jones (I know it's more appropriate to use the character names) even when he can. Why? Jones doesn't see him. But Carla Jean does. And her dialogue is important. Chigurh wants to do a coin toss with her, and she refuses. He wants to pass off the responsibility of his crimes to someone else, and she won't let him. "It's your choice whether you kill me or not, not the coin's," she says essentially. She is killed anyway, but she's not fooled by all this fate nonsense.
Which opens up a discussion of evil. I don't believe evil is some disembodied anti-life force that floats around and overtakes us or that we fight against without knowing where it is. Evil happens by us, we choose it when we disobey natural and special revelation. Evil exists when we hold to anti-God and anti-life and anti-constructive ideas and act upon them. Is there a devil? Yes, but we can't hide behind him. We can't pass off our responsibility. I have little patience for discussions of evil in the world. We bring the evil in, we let it continue, we sustain it. By we I mean the human race. Conflicts of good and evil make for nice stories, but if the stories blind us to the reality of choices and history, we are living in fairy tales.
Back to the movie. Chigurh is a mythic embodiment of evil, maybe; he could also be a character who is the end result of choices, or mentally ill, a true psychopath. Of course, every narrative has moments when we have to willingly suspend disbelief; that he is able to just not be seen wherever he goes is a bit much, and perhaps why viewers think he's a ghost, which clearly he's not. He also has no back story and just walks off at the end.
Here is a good analysis of the movie: http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2007/11/no_country_for_old_men_out_in.html
Two observations: I'm not sure how to interpret Chigurh, but one scene says a lot more than I think people take it for. After he kills Stephen Root (the man in the office building), another man who has watched it asks "Are you going to kill me?" and Chigurh says, "Did you see me?" He kills because he is seen. He doesn't kill Tommy Lee Jones (I know it's more appropriate to use the character names) even when he can. Why? Jones doesn't see him. But Carla Jean does. And her dialogue is important. Chigurh wants to do a coin toss with her, and she refuses. He wants to pass off the responsibility of his crimes to someone else, and she won't let him. "It's your choice whether you kill me or not, not the coin's," she says essentially. She is killed anyway, but she's not fooled by all this fate nonsense.
Which opens up a discussion of evil. I don't believe evil is some disembodied anti-life force that floats around and overtakes us or that we fight against without knowing where it is. Evil happens by us, we choose it when we disobey natural and special revelation. Evil exists when we hold to anti-God and anti-life and anti-constructive ideas and act upon them. Is there a devil? Yes, but we can't hide behind him. We can't pass off our responsibility. I have little patience for discussions of evil in the world. We bring the evil in, we let it continue, we sustain it. By we I mean the human race. Conflicts of good and evil make for nice stories, but if the stories blind us to the reality of choices and history, we are living in fairy tales.
Back to the movie. Chigurh is a mythic embodiment of evil, maybe; he could also be a character who is the end result of choices, or mentally ill, a true psychopath. Of course, every narrative has moments when we have to willingly suspend disbelief; that he is able to just not be seen wherever he goes is a bit much, and perhaps why viewers think he's a ghost, which clearly he's not. He also has no back story and just walks off at the end.
Here is a good analysis of the movie: http://blogs.suntimes.com/scanners/2007/11/no_country_for_old_men_out_in.html
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