Spoilers ahead
“Fill your hands you son-of-a-bitch!”
Says Rooster Cogburn as he bravely charges four-on-one against Ned Pepper and his outlaws. Retied and an alcoholic at the start of the film, Cogburn’s resolve on the side of moral justice and duty marks the completion of his arc, a moment of western catharsis that the audience cheers for. True Grit (1969) is an excellent exemplification of the Western genre, an adventure about a morally complex character between clear moral boundaries and all the guns, wild west environments, and exciting score to boot. However, the 2008 film No Country for Old Men approaches westerns very differently. Rather than embracing familiar themes of redemption and bravery, the Coen brothers twist these themes on their head in order to expose Hollywood and the audience’s expectations of genre.
Genre, as outlined in Film Art: An Introduction, are systems and conventions of similar iconography, plots, themes, and characters that are employed to help filmmakers structure stories and audiences form expectations. Hollywood’s relationship with its audiences are largely built off of genre; our expectations and ritualistic nature urge us toward specific films to create specific emotions. Genre differences can arise when filmmakers take old elements and present them in new ways. But it is especially rare when a film violates genre conventions entirely; taking each and every element and breaking it over its knee.
No Country for Old Men is set desert landscape with the guns, sheriffs and outlaws all exemplifying the western genre, but much of the iconography is tainted with an uneasy emptiness. One shot that sticks in my head is the establishing shot as Anton walks into the gas station. The long shot’s desert landscape looks dead and dry, both sky and earth devoid of the color that gave the American West’s adventurous look from films in the 60s. The marks of civilization that signified the “boom town” in typical westerns look rusted, old, and yet uncomfortably modern; the car, power lines, and gas station somehow look older than the environment around them. The Coen’s opt for still shots rather than pans, letting the audience sit in the dinginess of the environment rather than projecting spectacle and grandeur.
No Country for Old Men‘s wastelands, both desert and urban, convey a sentiment of a time long gone and an uneasiness that sets this film apart from other Westerns.
The score of the film is also notable, mostly because the film doesn’t really have much of score, or any music for that matter. Rather than the adventurous overtures of typical westerns, an empty sounding film creates tension that betrays the audience’s expectations. The use of sound is incredible, from the “blip” of the transponder to Carter Burwell’s subtle, almost unnoticeable swells of ambient music, sound is integral to the film’s mise en scene and the emotion it conveys.
Sheriff Bell isn’t the “main character” but certainly the protagonist in which the central theme revolves around. Nostalgic for a past that no longer exists, he retires at the end of the film once the morally straightforward, “good vs. evil” perspective, his kind demeanor, and solid wits akin to an old detective no longer hold up in the modern world. It’s notable that the Sheriff and his deputy ride horses, iconography that Film Art: An Introduction attributes to the “outlaws” of westerns, as opposed to the criminal’s use of modern automobiles. Bell’s most powerful scene, in my opinion, is when he sits down with Carla Jean to discuss Moss’ unwillingness to get help from the police. When Carla Jean tells Bell how determined and resourceful Moss is, Bell breaks into a metaphorical story, about how one of friends Charlie, when trying to kill livestock for slaughter, was himself injured when his bullet missed and ricocheted. He concludes with “even in the contest between man and steer, the issue is not certain.” Then Bell sighs and laments, “‘course they slaughter steers a lot different these days. They use an air gun, shoots a little rod… animal never knows what hit him.” This scene is written so tragically, and you along with Bell can feel the way a little bit of cathartic justice that Bell believes in is long dead. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHnMFX2OuhM
Our main character Llewelyn Moss is a rough and tough lone wolf squarely placed between the moral framework common amongst other Western characters. But he doesn’t get a redemption or heroic death; the Coen brothers kill him offscreen by some unknown and unseen gang members. Breaking one of the Western’s most fundamental conventions, the audience is let down in an anticlimactic whimper as the old-time, unconventional traits that positively serve past western characters, such as True Grit’s Cogburn, instead leave Moss dead. It’s to note that Moss’ adversaries throughout the film are portrayed as unseen, and filmed as a tension building thriller. In a genre that pits the hero and villain, along with their moral qualms, at eye-line-match from one another, there is not a single “face-off” or “final confrontation” between antagonist and protagonist. Moss’ two deadly encounters with the gang are a good example: none of them are ever pictured in detail, just silhouetted in suggestion, like a force of nature rather than a human antagonist.
However, nothing really feels like a force of nature more than Anton Chigurh, the film’s central antagonist. Across the novel and film, Anton is a character who is physically unexplainable; his name and appearance tell nothing about who he is, and his characterization by Javier Bardem brilliantly leaves the audience with more questions than answers. He is without remorse, compassion, or emotion, yet has an unexplainable moral code seen when confronting the gas station owner and Llewelyn’s landlord; this complexity underlines the futility in understanding his character. The Coens write Anton as a looming force of nature. Sheriff Bell and Anton never even meet, let alone an old fashioned stand-off, yet his presence overshadows the entire film, leaving a trail of dead in his wake. He kills not through a bad-ass gunfight or a confrontation of moral differences, but through happenstance and causality, as best illustrated in the scene between him and Carson Wells. I think a brilliant decision the Coen brothers make is leaving the fates of the accountant and Carla Jean uncertain; denying narrative closure and further complexifying Anton’s moral standpoint further play with the audience’s expectations. At the end of the film, Anton is suddenly hit by a car, leaving him gravely injured but his overall end unknown. I have always interpreted this as the ambiguity of fate, how calamity befalls him not in the middle of committing a villainous deed, but simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. At the same time, fate isn’t justice bound, as Anton simply gets help from some bystanders and walks away. It speaks to the expectations we have onto what befalls those who are good verses evil.
The Coen brothers have a lot to say about Hollywood’s use of genre. Audiences have been trained to expect certain things through repetitive use of genre patterns, something especially appealing to larger studios and cinematic universes. One of the oldest genres in filmmaking, westerns have been reflexively rebranded and redone in order to appeal to a continuously shifting audience. No Country for Old Men, for lack of a better word, slaps you across the face, and exposes our dependency on familiar patterns and our innate impulse to seek new thrills from set expectations.
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