The Coen brothers’ 2007 film No Country for Old Men is not your typical Western: the hero doesn’t win, or even survive, the villain gets away, and the ending isn’t a shootout but rather a slow, calm, monologue by a character who was the least involved of the three main characters. The final scene, much debated by fans and critics, does however give us a window into the movie’s deeper meaning and the Coens’ pessimistic worldview.
Works Cited & Consulted:
* “Cormac McCarthy – Subconscious is older than Language.” YouTube, uploaded by sdobric. Oct 18, 2014.
* “The Coen Brothers interview on NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007).” YouTube, uploaded by Eyes On Cinema. Sep 23, 2014.
* “Why do we dream? – Amy Adkins.” YouTube, uploaded by TED-Ed. Dec 10, 2015.
* “Movies I Love (and so can you): No Country for Old Men (2007) [*Spoilers*] .” YouTube, uploaded by Movies I Love (and so can you). Aug 22, 2013.
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Transcript provided by Youtube:
00:00
[And in the dream I knew that he was going on ahead.
00:04
And he was fixing to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold.]
00:10
The Cohen brothers’ 2007 film No Country for Old Men is not your typical Western:
00:15
the hero doesn’t win, or even survive, the villain
00:18
gets away, and the ending isn’t a shootout but rather a slow, calm, monologue by a character
00:23
who was the least involved of the three main characters.
00:26
Sheriff Bell tells his wife about his dreams,
00:41
and then we abruptly cut to black.
00:43
So, what gives?
00:45
After focusing so much on Moss escaping Chigurh, does it really make sense for the story to
00:50
leave the audience with a seemingly peripheral character’s enigmatic breakfast conversation?
00:54
Yes, because the final scene gives us a window into the movie’s deeper meaning and the
00:59
Coens’ pessimistic worldview. We realize that
01:02
Bell is one of the“Old Men” of the title, and we get a glimpse into why
01:07
there’s “no country” for them anymore.
01:10
Waking up, he struggles to face the actual world of chaos and randomness, and so he’s lost.
01:17
The Coens use the dreams to show Bell mourning the decent, lawful world he believes in — which
01:23
probably never even existed but has been an illusion, or a dream, all along.
01:29
The Coens’ ending is both pessimistic and opaque.
01:31
On the one hand, Moss’ end tells us that our past sins catch up with us.
01:36
Even if he repents, like with Marion Crane in Psycho, the movie will execute his punishment.
01:41
Yet, on the other hand, the story rejects justice when Chigurh escapes — as if his
01:46
outcome has been determined by one of his own coin tosses.
01:49
We’re left with a frightening interplay of the arbitrary and the inevitable, in which
01:54
we must fear both moral punishment and the total lack of moral order, yet can’t trust
01:59
in either.
02:01
So let’s dig in to the meaning of the dreams.
02:15
In the film, Sheriff Bell is hesitant at first to share them with his own wife since he doesn’t
02:20
think his wife would find them engaging, a hint to the audience since the wife, in the
02:24
cinematic adaptation, stands in for the reader of Cormac McCarthy’s book — us.
02:29
The choice to end with dreams can even be read as a tongue-in-cheek joke since it’s
02:33
well-known that most people find hearing about others’ dreams boring.
02:36
So this is hardly the dramatic ending that an average movie audience might be chasing.
02:41
But it’s also not uncharacteristic for the Coens.
02:59
Bell says:
02:59
[Both had my father in ’em. It’s peculiar. I’m older now than he ever was by twenty years.]
03:06
Something’s off, and time has been inverted, because Bell is now older than his father
03:11
he is the “old man.”
03:13
Bell represents a character displaced from a Western. The older ideas of law enforcement
03:19
or simple dualities and causalities no longer seem to apply.
03:23
This world has become too dangerous and too wild, and Bell retires because of it, defeated
03:28
by this new world and its ambiguity.
03:31
His first dream is about how his father gives him “some money.”
03:37
The bulk of the film has been about the struggle between Moss and Chigurh to get a case with
03:43
two million dollars.
03:44
All of the characters who are concerned with the money end up dead or injured or morally empty,
03:50
while Bell survives and stays intact long enough to retire.
03:53
So this first dream leaves us with the sense that greed eventually leads people to fall,
03:58
and that those who don’t place importance on money live a safer and fuller life.
04:03
But money in dreams also tends to symbolize success, thriving or good fortune.
04:07
Bell’s losing the money evokes his loss of this world, which baffles him and seems
04:12
to have no use for him anymore.
04:16
In these final moments, Bell has another chance to understand recent events, but his losing
04:21
the money also symbolizes his inability to see the world clearly.
04:24
He’s out of touch not just because the world’s moved on, but also because it was never what
04:30
he thought it was.
04:45
The second dream is about riding on horseback through the mountains — getting as far away
04:49
from civilization as possible.
04:58
Sheriff Bell’s monologue at the beginning of the film reminisces about older times when
05:03
some of the “old-time” sheriffs never carried a gun.
05:12
Bell is filled with nostalgia for a safer, straightforward time, where he imagines every
05:17
crime made sense and every criminal got put away, much like the plot of a typical Western.
05:23
There’s a reference to going back in time when Bell says:
05:26
[When he rode past I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I
05:31
could see the horn from the light inside of it about the color of the moon.]
05:36
This isn’t a torch meant to provide light, but a primitive way of starting fires by carrying
05:41
hot embers from one campsite to the next so there’s no need for flint or a match.
05:46
It’s carrying the promise of a fire up ahead.
05:49
The life that Bell is living now is represented by this cold, mountainous path, full of moral
05:54
uncertainty and darkness.
05:56
But by carrying forward this fire, he feels he is continuing his father’s essence…
06:00
and somehow this will enable a return to that simpler good his father represents.
06:06
Yet this dream appears to be not a prophecy, but simply a desire.
06:11
He tells his wife:
06:12
[I knew that whenever I got there he’d be there.]
06:15
He needs the certainty that, in the end, there will be warmth and light.
06:20
But he’s dreaming about something that can never come true and deep down, he knows it.
06:25
The sudden cut to black seems to confirm this — the only answer is nothing.
06:31
No Country can be called a Neo-Western.
06:33
The Neo-Western which builds on recognizable Western imagery to reach a very different
06:38
conclusion and worldview.
06:39
Classic visual and story cues tell the audience that this should be a Western: the desert
06:44
setting, the clearly defined heroes and villains, guns, drugs, a chase after money, and Stetson
06:50
hats.
06:51
All superficial signs would point to an ending where the hero prevails, takes a big bag of
06:55
money, and rides off into the desert sun.
07:03
Instead, No Country’s hero — Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin — is killed
07:08
by a third party.
07:10
Moreover, he’s far from a clear-cut hero.
07:22
He’s a thief.
07:23
The first major action we witness from him is stealing money.
07:27
Sheriff Bell assumes that Moss is the good guy because he is pitted against Chigurh,
07:31
who is clearly the villain, but this doesn’t automatically make him righteous.
07:35
Moss’s sudden death is also indicative of a film noir plot.
07:38
If the Western’s traditional hero triumphs over unbelievable odds, the noir’s hero
07:44
— who’s also smart and well-intentioned, if more flawed than a Western hero — can’t
07:49
overcome those odds.
07:53
The remorseless villain — Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem — is likewise less
07:58
straightforward than the bad guys of old.
08:20
With his coin toss game of death, he intentionally models himself as a force of random destruction.
08:37
Chigurh’s actions stem from a worldview that has logical integrity, whether or not
08:42
it represents the truth.
08:53
As the carrier of this coin, he believes in reminding people that their lives are ultimately
08:58
subject to forces (whether they’re god, or death, or chance) that are out of their control.
09:04
A villain with purely selfish motives can be defeated and forgotten about in a classic Western shootout
09:09
but how do you defeat an idea?
09:20
In the end, far from being brought to justice, Chigurh is injured by a car accident and then
09:25
just barely gets away.
09:26
He acts as the personification of the seeming haphazardness
09:31
of the world the Coens give us, which doesn’t
09:33
care about our notions of right and wrong, of fair and unfair — this world has its own
09:38
unknowable plans for us, or maybe no plan at all.
09:43
Sheriff Bell survives and outlasts by remaining on the sidelines of the action.
09:47
and he follows the footsteps of Chigurh and Moss, always a step behind.
09:51
His mediocre triumph in the end is merely to stay out of evil’s path.
09:56
And thus, he too is a disappointing shadow of the true western’s justice-seeking sheriff.
10:01
In this scene, Bell sits in the same spot as Chigurh and looks at his reflection in
10:05
the TV screen, as if about to step into Chigurh’s shoes and imagine his mindset, but instead,
10:11
he merely says Chigurh’s actions have left an “impression” on him, as if he’s not
10:16
a sheriff at all but merely an observer.
10:25
The final cut to black also recalls these reflections in the black TV screen,
10:30
putting us in the same seat as Chigurh and Bell.
10:34
We’re given the choice –to dream of an unattainable just world,
10:38
or wake up and see the terrfying randomness of reality.
10:45
The movie’s themes and structure result largely from how closely the film follows Cormac McCarthy’s novel.
10:58
Ed Tom Bell’s monologue about his dreams in the end — it’s taken from the novel,
11:03
too.
11:04
In an interview with Oprah, Cormac McCarthy explained his view on the human subconscious,
11:08
saying,
11:08
[It understands language because it understands the problems that you’re
11:12
working on, and then when you’re sleeping it will work on them for you.]
11:15
So in ending with these dreams, the Coens endorse McCarthy’s view that our subconscious
11:20
can synthesize our problems on a deeper level.
11:23
But Sheriff Bell’s dreams show us that not all problems can be solved by our inner selves
11:28
— sometimes the subconscious tells you what you truly want, but it’s a wish that’s
11:34
impossible to fulfill.
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This post was previously published on Youtube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video