Soft City (London: Collins Harvill, 1974), 129.
15. Jameson, Postmodernism, 20.
16. Ibid., 19.
17. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 501–2.
18. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, in The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000), 57.
19. Ibid., 61.
20. Ibid., 75.
21. Ibid., 81.
22. Jameson, Postmodernism, 4.
23. The quotation at the beginning of the film is from Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 1. The Coens introduce only one minor rewording, changing Fitzgerald's “Sing in me, Muse, and through me” to “O Muse, sing in me and through me.”
24. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 60.
25. Ibid., 70.
26. Joel Coen, interview by Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret for Positif: Revue périodique du cinéma (Paris), September 1991, translated in Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen, 192.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
The Coens’ Tragic Western
Richard Gilmore
The point is there aint no point.
—Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
Coen Irony
No Country for Old Men (2007) is, one might say, one more step in Joel and Ethan Coen's cinematic effort to say something about this country and about being a member, a citizen of this country, the United States of America. No Country for Old Men feels like a very different kind of movie from every other Coen brothers film. It is more serious, or it is serious in a different way from their other movies. It is not unusual for the Coens to take on dark themes in their movies, but previous to No Country for Old Men there was always a level of what I will call meta-irony. That is, there was a level of detachment, a sense that their movies were meant to be taken as just stories, that you should not take them too seriously. To be offended by Fargo (1996) because it seems to be making fun of midwesterners is to take it too seriously. Irony, however, is a tricky business. People are suspicious of the ironic because those who are ironic never quite mean what they say. The ironic, for their part, are more or less invulnerable to attack, since to take them seriously is to miss the point, and not to take them seriously precludes an attack. With No Country for Old Men, the Coens have given up their ironic detachment and made a much more straightforward movie. Certainly, there is irony within the movie, but the movie itself lacks the sheen of ironic detachment that is a part of a movie like Fargo.
One reason for this change may be the fact that this is the first movie that they have made based on a novel. It is not irrelevant to the tone of the movie that that novel was written by Cormac McCarthy. That the Coens chose this novel by this writer, however, also reflects an evolution in their cinematic and storytelling concerns. It is a sign of their willingness to give up some of their ironic detachment, to give up a posture of invulnerability, in order to say something more straightforward about their perceptions of how the world is. This, it seems to me, is a step into philosophy.
The previous Coen brothers movie that has the most in common with No Country for Old Men is, in fact, Fargo. In Fargo there is an older, wiser police chief, Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) and her less experienced or savvy deputy, Lou (Bruce Bohne), just as there is in No Country for Old Men. In both movies, a local police officer is confronted with some grisly murders committed by men who are not from his or her town. In both movies, greed lies behind the plots. Both movies feature as a central character a cold-blooded killer who does not seem quite human and whom the police officer seeks to apprehend. No Country for Old Men, therefore, is not completely new territory for the Coens, but no one in Fargo has much of a sense of irony, although the movie itself is ironic, whereas Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), for example, certainly does have a sense of irony although the movie No Country for Old Men does not feel ironic at all.
A great moment of Bell-ian irony is when he is reading a story from the newspaper to his deputy, Wendell (Garret Dillahunt), about a couple in California who were taking in older people as tenants, then killing them for their Social Security checks and burying the bodies in the backyard. After Bell reads aloud from the paper, “Neighbors were alerted when a man ran from the premises wearing only a dog collar,” Bell comments sardonically, “You can't make up such a thing as that. I dare you to even try.” Bell continues, appreciating the full irony of the story, “But that's what it took, you'll notice. Get someone's attention. Diggin graves in the back yard didn't bring any.” When Wendell fights back a smile, Bell says, “That's all right. I laugh myself sometimes.” There is a bittersweetness in that confession that shows the deep humanity that may be part of the ironist's position. His comment, “I laugh myself sometimes,” links, for me, this nonironic movie with all of the Coen brothers’ ironic movies, movies in which horrors (a Ku Klux Klan rally, a hooded kidnapped woman trying to run blindly from her killer kidnappers, the chopping off of a woman's toe, for example) are treated as things to be laughed at. There is a sadness to their funniest movies, and humor in their grimmest.
To Kill a Bird
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) is another Coen brothers movie that is referenced in No Country for Old Men. The reference is indirect, as it originates in McCarthy's novel, but it nevertheless works on another level within the Coens’ oeuvre. There is a sequence in No Country for Old Men in which we see Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) driving at night. He comes to a bridge and there is a hawk, a bird of prey, perched on one of the railing posts of the bridge. Chigurh picks up a pistol from the car seat, slows down, then, as he drives by, takes a shot at the bird. What is this about? On one level, it may be a foreshadowing: Chigurh, bird of prey to birds of prey, will ultimately miss his target, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). However, on a deeper level, the scene connects with other Coen brothers films.
In the movie Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967) the über-boss, Boss Godfrey (Morgan Woodward) (with an ominously theocratic name), who oversees the chain gang working the Florida state back roads, is a mirror sunglasses–wearing, all but silent figure of ominous justice. There is a scene in the film when Boss Godfrey, standing in the middle of the road, raises the cane he uses over his head. One of the chain gang workers, Rabbitt (Marc Cavell), immediately runs over to the truck, grabs a rifle off a rack in the back window, hurries back, and hands it to Boss Godfrey. At first you think, “That's a pretty risky move, entrusting his rifle to one of these hardened criminals,” but then you see Boss Godfrey take the bolt for the gun from his vest pocket. He slides the bolt home, raises the gun, and shoots a hawk flying just overhead. The scene begins with shots establishing a relationship between the chain gang workers and Boss Godfrey. One of the workers, Tattoo (Warren Finnerty), says, “Don't he ever talk?” After Boss Godfrey shoots the bird, Luke (Paul Newman) replies, “I believe he just said something.” I take this scene to indicate how brutally and arbitrarily violent this man can be and that what he is saying when he shoots the bird is that he is the bird of prey to birds of prey. Just establishing the pecking order, as it were, so the members of the chain gang can see.
This figure of the lawman who is really beyond the law, beyond, even, as Nietzsche says, good and evil altogether, is picked up by the Coen brothers in O Brother,
