I thought I’d post my thoughts on the movie No Country for Old Men after I forgot to list it on a list of favorite movies on Facebook this morning.
I found a copy of the original script, and one of the things that struck me about it was that the director had made cuts to the original script, making it a much more bleak and stark film than I believe they had originally intended. The first of these cuts comes when the narrator, Ed Tom Bell, begins speaking. The script is changed from a snow covered landscape—indicating the orderly passage of seasons—to a twilight landscape—indicating the time in between day and night.
Anyway, here is the first scene:
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuZBw3wUIQk
Ed Tom tells us that he comes from a family of lawmen:
Grandfather was a lawman. Father too. Me and him was sheriff at the same time, him in Plano and me here. I think he was pretty proud of that. I know I was.
So he has established himself in a long line of people dedicated to keeping order. “I always liked to hear about the old-timers. Never missed a chance to do so.” And yet the measure of history fails him as he thinks about his father in his day and him in ours. “You can’t help but compare yourself against the old timers,” and he wonders “how they would’ve operated these times.” In the old days, “Some of the old-time sheriffs never even wore a gun,” and he adds, “A lot of folks find that hard to believe.” That’s because in the modern day, violence is grown all out of proportion. He recalls an arrest he had made “a while back.”
There was this boy I sent to Huntsville here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killed a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion.
So the paper, the public record of the event, assigns a cause to the event on which they are reporting. Likewise, Ed Tom has been thinking about memory in terms of his ancestral past. It’s part of what makes him human. Both are very public acts. Both are in the sense lies that people tell themselves when they have to confront human nature head on. After all, it’s not like his grandfather did not confront crime. Ed Tom is merely romancing the past.
But the reality of this crime was not a public act at all: it was a private act, conceived in a lone individual’s brain. Moreover, it was guided by far darker, far more insidious motives.
He told me there wasn’t any passion to it. Told me that he’d been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. Be there in about fifteen minutes.
“I don’t know what to make of that. I surely don’t,” Ed Tom says. And that opens the point the entire film will pivot on. We are drawn out of the ordinary world of everyday experience into a world of absolutes.
The ordinary man in his ordinary day can measure his ordinary life. People think that their lives have value, even if they are not always exactly sure what that value is or where it resides. The lawman is there to protect the autonomy of those individuals in society. But as we travel out of the ordinary and into the world of absolutes, we lose the yardsticks on which we measure our life on earth: “The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure.”
“It’s not that I’m afraid of it,” he adds. It’s just that he does not have a measure on the violence that he confronts in his job.
I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand.
And with that, we get to an enigma: the deputy, who has led Anton Chigurh—even the name doesn’t make sense—into the squad car, puts something on the front seat. And at this point we do not know when it is. And neither, apparently, does the deputy.
“A man would have to put his soul at hazard,” says Ed Tom unknowingly commenting of the action.
It is precisely what Ed Tom has done. He has placed himself at the service of the public, a public which is willing to lie to itself about the inner nature of human experience for a false, collective notion that is more designed to make us feel good than it is to plumb the dark depths of our psyche.
“He would have to say, okay, I’ll be part of this world.” What does he mean? Part of this world of relative, ordinary experience? It becomes apparent that this is exactly what he meant to sign up for when he became a sheriff. And thus he is utterly unprepared when it comes to Chigurh’s absolute evil; no category can contain his evil. He is rendered helpless, for how can he hope to confront the merciless killer who has no respect for human life or human institutions if he insists on knowing why people do what they do.
This is a bleak portrait of intrusion of evil into the quiet landscape of ordinary experience. It is carried by individuals live outside the social fabric, individuals who live by their own private code.
In this sense, it’s appropriate to have the film set in the west. In the Western, communities were struggling to carve out communities in the universe of the unknown. The community is surrounded by lone individual, who have not yet been fully integrated into the community. They can be could be the savior, as Shane protects the sodbusters in the movie of the same name. Or they could be the greedy individuals who break apart the social fabric, or corrupt it by pushing people out of their communal existence into their own schemes for grabbing land or money (or both).
But not even the classic motives of money and land motivate Anton Chigurh. But that doesn’t mean he is purely an instrument of random chance. He can be kind, as when he allows the storeowner to live after he has flipped a coin without telling him “what I’m flipping for.” He is driven to kill driven on by own principles, principles that he makes no attempts to integrate into the larger social community. This is perhaps most apparent when, after he has killed Josh Brolin’s character (Llewelyn Moss), he goes to the house of Llewelyn’s young bride and calmly tells her “I made a promise” before killing her too.
//www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrC7KRDy3w8
The movie ends with another great speech Ed Tom, the sole survivor of the chaos brought about by Chigurh, is sitting at breakfast—where the day is now fully distinguished from night. Outside there is a lone and crooked tree. He has had a dream.
“How’d you sleep?” asks Mr. Ed Tom.
“I don’t know” says Ed Tom. “Had dreams.”
“Well you got time for ’em now. Anything interesting?”
“Well they always is to the party concerned.” In other words,Ed Tom, I’ll be polite.” And so, after being assured that his nighttime experiences will be treated with the respect that they are due in the daylight, he recounts what he has seen.
Okay. Two of ’em. Both had my father. It’s peculiar. I’m older now’n he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he’s the younger man.
Okay, the first dream reverses the ordinary experience of daylight. Sons become age of fathers, and fathers the age of sons. This experience can only be found in imaginative experience of dreaming. And perhaps it is no surprise that Ed Tom, who’s been coaxed into revealing his inner psyche, “don’t remember so well.” All he can remember is that “it was about money [the measure by which we calculate things in daylight experience] and I think I lost it.”
Ed Tom is more sure of his second dream, which also features his father and which takes place “back in older times.” In other words, he still has not learn to deal with his own mind on its own terms. He must travel through experience of forgetting his mind as it for the communal experience of our minds as he would like it to be.
I was on horseback goin’ through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and snowin, hard ridin. Hard country. He rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin goin by. He just rode on past and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon.
In his dream, then, he populates his symbolic representation of his life with symbols from the public sphere: horns that have (or used to have) meaning. And the light is not coming from the light of day, but is instead “about the color of the moon.” But not everything is apparent to him. His father is wrapped in a blanket, a symbol for obscurity, and his head is down.
And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that 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 would be there. And then I woke up.
The dream is symbolic of what the movie has been telling us: that we build our communities on earth but that ultimately we are alone when we travel to the world of death. For the last two hours, world of death has been visited upon the community of the living, and ultimately disposed of.
But the dream that Ed Tom tells Mrs. Ed Tom is one of confusion. He does not really understand his father’s position in the universe after death. In life, we tend to elevate beyond their scope after they have died; and we do not necessarily face the experience of their death—and of course our individual death—on its own terms. Rather, we put them into the experience of ritual. This has its place in the social and communal universe. But placing the truth into social and communal rituals bends the truth as much as it illuminates it.
Once again, the direction of the script strips out many of the details. In the script, we visit Ed Tom in his dreams, but as it was filmed, we are at a remove from the experience, as Mrs. Ed Tom is. We cannot see whether or not the scene reveals more than Ed Tom knows.
