That is no country for old men[...]

An aged man is but a paltry thing (1,9)

 

The history of humanity is one of violence and cruelty, of expending enormous intellectual and emotional power toward visiting each upon one another.

 Man’s inhumanity to man, as it has been called, is seen in numerous episodes of our collective narrative, and if increased technology has escalated the global notification of atrocities like the gassing of ethnic Kurds, the genocide of Rwanda, the ethnic cleansings of Darfur and Kosovo, we dare not assume these things are indicative that we live in a more deadly, dangerous, eviler present than the past of our fathers and grandfathers. In the absence of surplus video archives, extant newspaper reports, or surviving photographic or illustrated representation, it is easy to forget the sweeping, comprehensive evils of our history (the effective extermination of indigenous New World peoples by colonizers, the sanctioned fury of Manifest Destiny, the witch trials of New England and the sweeping scope of the American slave trade are examples from this country alone).

In light of such cruelties it seems imprudent, and perhaps even slanderous, to suggest a film about a colloquial conflict (the deadly search to gain control of stolen drug money in borderland Texas) and a small cache of major characters (at the most generous count, there are seven principals) can be allegorically extrapolated to stand for our ten millennia of interpersonal violence. I have at times even argued that film cannot stand alone as art, as a medium capable of speaking to universal themes and to the depth of human experience: citing such reasons as its visceral reliance, its lack of historical perspective, its conflicting dualism of technique versus content. I suppose by that standard most of which we categorize as art falls short, with musical, physical, and graphic art all relying as much on emotion and aesthetic as film. Natural to the bibliophile I am, only literature—and only the highest of literature at that—seems capable of truly speaking to the human experience.

The novel No Country for Old Men, as written by 2007 Pulitzer Prize-laureate Cormac McCarthy, is not great literature. The author has achieved such a designation before that novel, most notably with his epic Blood Meridian and its depiction of absolute evil in the person of Judge Holden—a terrifying archon next to whom even No Country’s ironical killer Anton Chigurh pales—as well as after, with his nihilistic depiction of post-nuclear holocaust America in The Road (for which he took home the Pulitzer). 

Though written in McCarthy’s characteristic prose, which idiosyncratically omits much punctuation and relies on archaic, regional diction (in his review of the film, the eminent Roger Ebert suggests that McCarthy chooses his words not for “meaning or sound but for their architectural details, for the brushstroke they add to a sentence"), the story and its telling are not vintage McCarthy in their adherence to a particular genre—that of the existentialist noir/crime novels of masters like Chandler and Hammet—when he at his best transcends classification. So, in sum, we are left with a genre tale; one told with great skill and heft, to be sure, but lacking the transcendence of the greatest literature--the reckoning with its antecedents that all great novels must undergo.

I mention the novel because any discussion of the film must properly do so, in order to illuminate the distinction between the filmed and written word. Literature demands recollection, a reckoning with the giants of the past, which in their timelessness and staying power cannot be overcome but can at least be supplemented. Film, with its comparatively short history (while we still read literature written five thousand years ago, cinema in any form has existed only a century, and modern “talkies” even less), is less about reimagining and more about forecasting, of continuous improvement and innovation. If the filmed No Country for Old Men seems an homage to the golden era of films noir, much as something like L.A. Confidential was a decade ago or Chinatown twenty years before that, it also seems something much more simultaneously modern and timeless as it reckons with the ghosts of our past and foreshadows the ghosts to come. 

And, as a rule which all should follow but so many don’t, the connections between the film and the novel end as soon as the lights dim and the projector flicks on: one has little bearing over another, except perhaps as sporadic illumination; but where one is insufficient or unsatisfying, the other cannot stand in. This attitude should go far toward solving conflicts between the two, such as the ultimate fate of Carla Jean Moss, who in the novel is forced to partake in Chigurh’s fateful coin toss but in the film does no such thing—the film leaves open the possibility that she refused (this is the interpretation I prefer), and in debate the absolutism of that scene in the novel is of no value.

So what are we to make of this motion picture that so thoroughly enthralls, envelops, confounds, and ultimately stays in the mind of the viewer for days afterward? On a personal level I find this film of the most satisfying type, that which pleases on a visceral level—as is cinema’s primary responsibility—and on an intellectual and philosophical terrain, which provides its staying power. In the last twenty years I have been, by degree, only similarly affected by two movies, vastly disparate in their subject matter but brothers in tone and spirit: the Kafkaesque future of Minority Report and the furious past of Goodfellas. Both are films, like No Country, marked by dark irony and sudden, explosive periods of deadly violence. All three feature principals of moral ambiguity, and all three speak to the nature and root of humankind’s various cruelties—whether as a tool by which to gain power (Goodfellas), an attempt at altruism gone awry (Minority Report), or simply for no reason at all (No Country).

Though this review attempts to delve into the issues and themes circling around the film, and classifies according to the Big Idea, in the final analysis No Country for Old Men seems to me the sort of movie destined to the canon of American cinema, as Goodfellas already is and Minority Report should soon be, whether or not the film actually garners any particular awards (between the two older films there was only one Academy Award given, for Joe Pesci’s supporting performance in Goodfellas, which shows that awards, while all well and good, mean little as to a film’s ultimate fate). It is a movie that deserves to be seen for its stark visuals, studied for its technological acumen, and discussed for its timeless themes and pitch-black Gnosticism. And always at its core lies the uneasy sense that it speaks to something deeper than its literal self, to that violent gene we all carry yet universally despise. 

The prizewinning poet Yusef Komunyakaa writes: “You knew the curse was in the sperm/ & egg, but had faith in the soil/ That it’d work itself out in generations/ How flowing springs pierced bedrock/ How love pushed through jailhouse walls.” Komunyakaa’s optimism here, in an elegy to his mortal god Whitman, is dissimilar to the tone of No Country but is akin in essence, believing that there is in fact a violent curse upon man that requires something other than man to work itself out. Whitman saw this soil as democracy. McCarthy and the Coens posit a sort of impersonal fatalism. Qoheleth of Ecclesiastes sees the God of Israel as that one thing. Postmodern scientists long desperately for continued evolution to bring it to the fore. But, whatever the answer, No Country for Old Men is glorious enough to merit the debate, to ask us to first watch, then question.