I’m guessing you haven’t watched No Country in a while, but you might remember the rough outline. And that’s enough to recall that narrative in No Country always borders on a state of suspended disintegration. This is a fancy conceptual framework that doesn’t matter to anyone but me, but here’s what I mean by it. There exists a bizarre stasis in the personalities and moods of the film’s characters (humans “suspended” in their actions and temperaments), as well as in the world of the film (where all possibilities for community have “disintegrated”).

Re-watching the movie, I noticed that the main characters rarely ever inhabit the same scene together. Their relationships are not filmic—shown on-screen—but more or less purely functional, based on certain narrative conceits (e.g., Chigurh must pursue and kill Moss). As a result, nothing ever alters our perspectives on Moss, Bell, Chigurh, or the interactions between them. The characters aspire to be larger-than-life, like the gods and kings of Greek tragedy.

Though there are shadows of everyday life (at least the cinematography gives us some vivid images), the film more or less blares out to the audience:

“These men on screen are not the everyday men we see in the news— men who actually shoot innocent people, or involve themselves in illicit drug trades, or police our small towns. There are actual reasons why those ordinary people might do what they do. This is a movie, so explanation is secondary.”

And, more succinctly:

“Chigurh is a badass, not a human being!”

Strangely enough, this appeal to badassery, as I term it, roots much of what is genuinely gripping about No Country: its taut narrative,moments of intense suspense, a sense of dread at the outcome. It also partly explains why the film is not satisfying six years later. No Country wants to be treated—and was treated by most critics at the time—not as a reasonably suspenseful movie, but as an art movie, an Oscar movie, with all the trappings and subsequent awards. But the Coens do not treat the film’s situations or characters with the substantial depth that one should expect out of ‘art.’

Unlike ancient tragedies (or even a hero-laden epic like The Iliad), dialogue is limited to phrases, and characterization rarely rises above the level of caricature. Where the Greeks showed pathos, the Coen brothers show off types. Well-shot, even well-acted types, perhaps, but in the end just types—and types, like Chigurh’s ‘badass,’ that don’t exist in any substantial, important sense in contemporary life.

I am reminded here of an opening line in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Rich Boy”:

“Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing.”

A more obvious referent for No Country is the classical Western. Like John Wayne in the films of John Ford or Howard Hawks, No Country revels in its stoic, hyper-masculine attitude. A comparable intensity comes through in the rigid facial expressions of Bardem and Brolin and the stark Texan landscapes.

But the classical Western, at its height, showed the figure of the cowboy in a broader social context. And John Wayne’s stoic characters always possessed long-held fears, deep traumas reflective of his age—watch The Searchers a second or third time, and the distinction between starting with an “individual” versus starting with a “type” become clearer. The individual becomes ‘typified.’ Conformity and pressure from his surroundings creates a ‘John Wayne.’ In other words, it is not as if John Wayne emerged out of nothing.

By contrast, what social context does Chigurh have? What trauma created Chigurh? Did he come out of something, rather than nothing?

I remember vaguely—though maybe I made it up myself—one critic’s explanation for Chigurh’s inhumanity. It may have come from his time in Vietnam, which is briefly alluded to in the film. But traumatized veterans do not act like Chigurh did. They do not exact brutal, calculated violence repeatedly, systematically. Much more likely in post-war routine is paralysis, an inability to act. True, acts of violence do emerge intermittently, usually ill-directed at family or friends. But Chigurh is a well-oiled machine going through the motions, not a broken one.

My guess is that this critic was reaching for straws, as we were in making of No Country a grand metaphor.

For Chigurh, the thrill is clearly in the hunt, not in any monetary reward (he says as much) or because his psyche has some hidden depths: he’s simply a monster, an otherworldly force of nature.

Yet for all the death he causes, the community he interrupts—west Texas of the 1980s, with its endless motels and roads—seems already stagnant, dying. The world of No Country is monochromatically, and rather tediously, bleak. Chigurh’s status as a complete outsider, disrupting the ordinary mores of ordinary people, actually serves to shake life out of its rut. He teaches (or reinforces the lesson) Sheriff Bell—as the embodiment of ‘old’ forms of Justice and Law—what the world is really like, apparently, at its core.

For Bell, the story of Moss’s untidy fate is one example among many. The viewer can tell from the deep lines on Bell’s face that he has encountered these dark forces of human nature before. Tommy Lee Jones acts out this “world-weariness” in all his speeches, much like Javier Bardem embodies “badass.” The Sheriff seems to want out of the apparent darkness that is human life.

Suppose that Bell gives us a way to understand the character of Anton Chigurh: he is the manifestation of our unconscious extremes. He represents the political and psychological worst of humanity, an evil that cannot be fathomed.

This is probably the way the Coens envisioned Chigurh, if they thought of him within some larger ideological landscape at all.