No Country for Old Men (Spoiler Alert)

Why does the film quote Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium"? In the poem, the sensual world of the young is not for the old because it is at the same time the world of death. Seeking to transcend death, the speaker leaves that country for Byzantium, for "the artifice of eternity." While the brothers Coens' film is certainly concerned with human mortality, it is not impressed by the Yeatsian longing for artistic immortality. Yeats's dualism does not drive the film; the film, and the fates of its characters, are driven by the monochromatic force of chance.

If the film is not in dialogue with Yeats's poem, that is partly because it is a monologue. Before the first half hour is up, you get its thesis: chance decides our fate, and the hunter can easily become the hunted. For the first part of the thesis, you get the coin toss practised by the psychopathic hitman, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), to decide if his victim lives or dies; for the second part of the thesis, you get Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) hunting pronghorn antelope before he is hunted down by Chigurh for making away with drug money. Without a countervailing force (the resigned wisdom of the sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), is more choric than active) the movie moves, unresisted, and for far too long, to its anticipated climax. I don't object to unrelieved bleakness, but the lack of relief here, the lack of hope, is grimly gleeful.

Take the ending of the film. It tempts the audience with generic conclusions, only to take them away. Moss, the good guy, does not kill the psychopath, as would have happened in an action film, but is killed by him when he jumped into bed with a woman he happened to meet by a hotel pool. Moss's wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), refuses to call heads or tails, in order to teach Chigurh that he chooses to kill, and not the coin. Chigurh does not learn this humanist lesson, but checks his soles for blood before leaving Carla Jean's house. Then, a car running a red light crashes into Chigurh, and, here, we think, is poetic justice: the man who stands for fateful chance dies by fateful chance. However, Chigurh crawls out of his car, bone sticking out from his arm; he survives and wanders off, alive somewhere. In all these reversals of conventional endings, I sense a manifesto, a program, and so, while I was sickened by the blood and casual violence, I was never seriously shaken to the foundations of my being, the place I think the film is shooting for.

Comments

Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
3:39 PM
Anonymous said…
The denial of a moral ending is often disturbing. A sort of existential meaninglessness? I have not got as far as seeing the film, doubt that I will. I suspect the Yeats was just a good title. Poetry is good for that :).
3:40 PM
Jee Leong said…
Maybe the book deserves the title better; the film does not.
8:05 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more