What To See Next

[EDITOR’S NOTE:
Sunday, 15 December 2007. After Caryl & Al’s recent savaging of “No Country for Old Men” — partially in rebuttal for the Coen Brothers’ savaging of them while they were in the audience — Al heard from another source who has a totally different take on the film. This source is one of Al’s oldest and dearest friends. He’s also a published poet and science-fiction author of world renown. Here’s what *he* had to say about “No Country for Old Men…]

(c) A.J. Malouin 2007, on behalf of the author

Some random musings on this film after hearing several contemptuous
dismissals of its merits.

Why I Loved “No Country For Old Men.”

The Coen’s have been reframing and rebutting the conventions of movie
genres since “Blood Simple” which was a take on “Double Indemnity” (Right?) Or think what they did with Chandler’s Marlowe in “The Big Lebowski”.

In “No Country…” it’s not just the genre that’s topsy turvey, it’s
the world. They are playing for much higher stakes.

The sheriff’s opening monologue bemoans a new type of criminal:
remorseless, insane, pure evil.

The implied rupture in the order of things and the befuddled mourning
of a western/cowboy code of moral order and justice is played in
voiceover against a routine traffic stop and arrest which turns to be
anything but ordinary.

The sociopathic hitman is a force of nature. You can’t reason with
him, appeal to him, bargain with him, any more than you can negotiate
with a tsunami. He is inevitable as death. He exists outside the law,
outside of human commerce.

But what created him? What made him, if you will, necessary?

Drugs. The ultimate triumph of Capitalism. A product so irresistible
is requires zero marketing, zero packaging, and instantly creates
Brand Loyalty. It instantly grows its own distribution network by turning everyone it touches into consumers and salespeople. The ultimate degradation
of the human soul. Unearned pleasure. Pleasure so irresistible it has
created a monstrous brutal economy. Know anybody whose life has been
touched by hard drugs? Then you know the awful consequences of
addiction. In short it steals everything human from everyone it
touches. (Hard drugs—I mean—though it can be argued that the toll of
alcohol and nicotine (the two socially accepted highs) are just as
brutal.

So what we have is a confrontation with a modern phenomenon: A
vicious economy that crunches everything it touches with betrayal,
exploitation, degradation, and death. The new anti-human. The
confronting party is everyone the hitman meets. No one is prepared to
deal with his coin toss. There is no justice, no victory—there is
only luck and escape. Or not.

The law of this territory is that there is no law. Enter into the
circle of the betrayal and you are swept into a hunt. The whole movie
is a hunt. One could say a chase scene. But it is the quietest (and
most disquieting) chase scene ever. Recall the first time we meet our
hero is when he is hunting deer. He misses a shot. This does not bode
well. This self-made man—who, we learn later, can weld anything—
cannot for all his dogged, willey survival skills, triumph. He cannot
put together a plan that can save him or his wife. He is Way out of
his league. As outclassed as that deer. Because, for all his rugged
individualism, like the deer, he is a still a member of a herd. He
becomes the hunted. By a man who uses the weapon of the slaughterhouse.

The carnage he stumbles upon is like a modern, grotesque retelling of
a famous western shootout. Only: nobody wins. They’re all dead or
dying. The loot and the booty are left for whoever can scavenge them.

I love that Lewellyn’s one stupid act of charity is what dooms him.
He knows it’s stupid yet he does it anyway—he brings water to a
thirsty dying man. Had he not done this he might have lived the
American Dream. Struck Gold, Won the Lottery, Beat the Bank in Vegas.
But he, as much as he is a rebel on the margins of society, is a
decent human. That’s why we root for him and that’s why ultimately he
is doomed. You play with this demon, and you lose.

So the whole movie is about the modern decay of values. Lewellyn is
the myth outdated. The self made frontier man. Tommy Lee Jones is the
Lawman who can do nothing to restore the moral order when a force of
this magnitude is unleashed.

There is some tang of satisfaction when the hitman is t-boned and has
to walk away from the money. Even he can’t escape unscathed the
randomness of death.

But If there is a triumph, or redemption to this bleak bleak tale, it
is in the smallest moments. Where we have to remind ourselves that
life is not a genre. That what matters is not who gets the money, or
who gets away, or gets even, it’s who retains their heart in this
tidal wave of darkness. Lewellyn wakes up in the middle of the night
saying, “Awww hell.” Knowing he is doomed to do the right thing. Or a
Vet gives another vet a break. It’s even the sheriff getting out of a
rigged game at the end. Taking his losses and folding his hand and
stepping back from the table, knowing sometimes, that’s a close to a
jackpot that life allows.

But the real quiet heart of the film is when the wife confronts the
lunatic at the end and retains her dignity in the face of a terror by
not playing his coin toss game. “It’s not in the coin,” she says with
contempt, “It’s in you.”

What a film.