The Art of "No Country for Old Men"

SPOILER ALERT!

Though I had wanted to wait until I read the book, I recently watched the film No Country For Old Men. I heard and read so much about Cormac McCarthy's supposedly being the "next big thing," but teaching hinders my pleasure reading. My roommate rented the movie, and I couldn't turn down the opportunity to see the latest Best Picture.

I was struck by the story-telling method. The film medium seems to be catching up with modern and post-modern literary forms. It is such a simple movie, free from elaborate spectacle and spared of constant action. The film starts out with some shockingly graphic violence that establishes Anton Chigurh, but once he is characterized by it then the violence only occurs through implication. The audience no longer needs to see Chigurh's atrocities because the purpose of the violence has been accomplished. When one of the main characters Llewelyn Moss is finally murdered, the audience is not even shown the scene but only shows Sheriff Bell discovering the body. The directors, Joel and Ethan Coen, negate the importance mere story and focus on the development of character so skillfully by simply omitting scenes toward which the plot would move.

No Country For Old Men is framed by the narration of Sheriff Bell, the primary protagonist. Bell confesses to the audience that while he doesn't fear death, he eschews "[meeting] something [he] doesn't understand." The problem for Bell lies in his gradual realization that he does not understand the new type of criminal he now regularly encounters. The film closes with Sheriff Bell's wondering what he'll do that day and relating a dream he had the night before about a slow journey to meet his dead father, conveying his retirement into uselessness. By denying the audience that which see so easily, McCarthy and the Coens reveal to the audience the motivations of the three main characters and unveil true essence of the piece-that this is, indeed, no country for old men. To me, the recognition given to No Country For Old Men reflects an appreciation for sophisticated expression in a time when bookstore shelves are unabashedly overfed with low-brow kitsch whose only purpose lies in the lining of wallets. No Country For Old Men helped restore my faith in the constancy of art's importance, which has been continually ravaged by ghost-written celebrity "autobiographies" and reality television. Cormac McCarthy has created an insightful meditation on American society, revealing, in his fiction, truth about our world.