No Country for Old Men is an enchantingly horrific film, and this was not an accident. Through an intentional series of slow-moving scenes, demented dialogue, barbaric murders, and the gentle ticking of a clock, the Coen brothers weave a story of utter despair, chaotic randomness, and graphic violence that emphasizes all that is horrifying about existence. No, their critique is not of human existence specifically but rather of all existence in general. While they have plenty to say about humanity which is crude and hopeless, they reserve their greatest critique for existence itself, which is as empty and lifeless as the desert scenes in which their characters live (and brutally die).
When the film begins, Sheriff Ed Tom is busy recounting the inexplicable wickedness found in modern crime and concludes “I don’t know what to make of it”. Sheriff Ed Tom is the mouthpiece for the Coen brothers, who like many of their contemporaries, are left with many unanswered questions in the presence of ultimate evil. Like the Grand Inquisitor in the Brothers Karamazov, these directors recount many heinous evils told in the papers, and they invite everyone around them to dare to explain the “why” within such a horrible “how”.
The Coen brothers are not shy to provide their own explanation, and the answer stumbled upon by these brilliant directors is that all of existence is one constant pulse of randomness. Life is a coin tossed in the air, with nothing to guide it or direct it (the evil Anton chooses his murder victims by the flip of a coin), and the only constant is the ticking of a clock in the background. According to this film, life in this world is nothing other than a rapine encounter with Lady Luck, someone who Hamlet poetically (and accurately) described as “thou strumpet Fortune.”
And what a strumpet Fortune proves to be in this film! For while the mechanistic and uncontrolled clock is ticking, the viewer is immersed in a nonsensical and painstakingly cruel blood-bath. It is a world where the semi-protagonistic Llewelyn, after taking a stand and promising to hunt down the evil Anton, is himself murdered by random gangsters with no formal association to Anton. It is a world where a police officer tells his superior “I got it all under control”, and then is immediately strangled by Anton. It is a world where the hunters are the hunted, where the wife is just somebody to screw, and the source of all law and order (Sheriff Ed Tom) shows a heroic commitment only to claiming an early retirement (he sheepishly states at the beginning of the film, “I don’t want to push my chips out forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand.”) Llewelyn pushes his chips forward and is murdered; Sheriff Ed Tom chooses not to play this game of chance and instead chooses to draw an early pension. Ladies and Gentlemen, this is No Country for Old Men.
The end of the film momentarily allows a brief sliver of light to shine in all this darkness. Ed Tom, while enjoying his early retirement (his wife can’t join him for a horse ride because she is not retired), begins to tell his wife about a dream. In this dream, Ed Tom was riding horses with his dad over a mountain pass, and his dad was carrying fire in a horn with the purpose of starting another fire somewhere else. His dad kept riding past him and went ahead, and Ed Tom says that he knew the reason why: “He was fixin’ to make a fire out in all that dark and all that cold. And I knew that whenever I got there he’d be there.” After the mind has been saturated by two-hours of self-described meaninglessness and chaotic fluctuations of barbarism, Ed Tom reveals some hidden dream where there is a fire of warmth and purpose and fraternity in the midst of all that is cold and cruel in this meaningless world. But this dream comes to an abrupt end (like the lives of so many people who are murdered in this film) when Ed Tom simply says, “And then I woke up.” The clock starts ticking, the film is over, and the window of light that was opened for a few moments is thrown shut, and all that absorbs the viewer is darkness, despair, and horror.
Paradoxically, the content of this film (contrary to its central theme) is itself no random flip of the coin but rather a weighted coin designed to create the outcome described above. In essence, this film visually describes, in an intentional and choreographed manner, a similar perspective recounted in the Book of Wisdom:
Brief and troubled is our lifetime; there is no remedy for our dying, nor is anyone known to have come back from Hades. For by mere chance were we born, and hereafter we shall be as though we had not been; because the breath in our nostrils is smoke, and reason a spark from the beating of our hearts, and when this is quenched, our body will be ashes and our spirit will be poured abroad like empty air. Even our name will be forgotten in time, and no one will recall our deeds. So our life will pass away like the traces of a cloud, and will be dispersed like a mist pursued by the sun’s rays and overpowered by its heat. For our lifetime is the passing of a shadow; and our dying cannot be deferred because it is fixed with a seal; and no one returns.
Wisdom 2:1-5
This passage from Wisdom helps dispel the myth that this film’s central theme is new or modern, for the idea that the world is random, that life is meaningless and that reason is only ‘a spark from the beating of our hearts”, is as old as Shakespeare, as old as Scripture, and as old as existence itself. What this film says in two hours, scripture says in five sentences, but both were condensed in three words by Shakespeare: “thou strumpet, Fortune!” In the end, the visceral enchantment of this film is not based on some novel insight into human nature or some captivating revelation about human existence; the power of this film (and it indeed is powerful) is based on one simple fact: that it is hard to take your eyes off of a strumpet. She is entertaining to watch, but she comes with some serious psychological baggage.
When Hamlet asks Rosencranz and Guildenstern to describe where, exactly, they live in relationship to the strumpet Fortune, Guildenstern replies, “In her privates, we!” Some people just have all the luck! And yet, in just a few more acts, Rosencranz and Guildenstern are dead, murdered by the whimsical navery of Hamlet himself. Thus for both Shakespeare and for the Coen brothers, no one rests very long in Fortune’s private parts, and even when they do so momentarily (such as finding $2 million in a random briefcase), it is only a matter of time before they contract a life-ending STD. Lady Fortune may be a strumpet, but she is a deadly strumpet, and only young men are foolish enough to entertain her, whereas all wise and old men have exiled her to her own country.