In Plain Sight: Symbolism in ‘No Country for Old Men’
Hunting for meaning in a Coen brothers classic
by Cammila Collar
When it comes to the art of finding embedded meanings and messages in movies, you can have a field day with any film from the Coen brothers. Most of their movies offer a litany of key moments and choices, each implying something different about the film’s underlying themes. But fascinatingly, their film No Country for Old Men, a 2007 crime thriller set in 1980 Texas, stands apart in this regard. It’s not that the film isn’t loaded with choices and ideas that imply a wealth of subtext, it’s just that the subtext is always the same. Each richly layered moment finds a new, ingenious way to communicate No Country’s singular message: life is random, and death can take any of us at any time.
In fact, it could easily be said that the movie’s unsettling villain Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) represents death itself, stalking his prey with a calm, unaffected reserve, and ceding to pleas for mercy only through random chance — if his victim wins a coin toss. No Country returns to this theme of random chance determining our lives again and again, but a few of the ways it does so particularly stand out. Let’s walk through the top five.
Human Cattle
In one of the first scenes, we see Chigurh stop a man on the side of a desolate road and unceremoniously kill him with an air-powered captive bolt pistol that’s normally used for stunning cattle. In the very next scene, hunter Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is depicted eyeing a herd of antelope through the exacting sites of a high-powered rifle. The message is clear; man or beast, Remington 700 or cattle gun, death doesn’t care — it’s coming for all of us.
“What business is it of yours where I’m from, friendo?”
One of the most quotable moments in the movie is when Chigurh coolly badgers the elderly clerk at an isolated gas station. Chigurh asks the stranger how long he’s been working there, and when the man tells him the business used to be his father-in-law’s, Chigurh fixates on this point, repeatedly asking the man “So you married into it?” He then pulls out one of his infamous quarters and engages in his usual coin flip of life or death. As he holds the flipped coin down on the counter, he quietly demands that the man call his bet — heads or tails. Bewildered, the man asks what they’re betting on and Chigurh simply insists again that the man call his bet. “I didn’t put nothin’ up,” the man insists, to which Chigurh responds “Yes, you did. You’ve been putting it up your whole life, you just didn’t know it.” Chigurh then points out that the quarter was minted in 1958, that it’s been traveling 22 years to get to the man right here, right now.
Chigurh’s barrage of questions are meant to illustrate how many incidental events have led the man to this situation, staring death in the face from behind the counter at a Terrell County Texaco station. For instance, if he hadn’t married the daughter of a gas station owner, he wouldn’t now be crossing paths with a psychotic killer — hence Chigurh’s preoccupation with the man “marrying into” a coin toss for his life. Chigurh describes the coin’s 22-year journey to this one precarious interplay in order to illustrate this very idea: the events that determine how we live and when we die are incalculable and unknowable. Any of us could be sealing our fate with the most benign action at any moment.
The Silence of God
It’s notable that No Country for Old Men has no soundtrack. There isn’t a single scene set to an orchestral score or background music. The quiet has a remarkable effect on the film’s events, giving us a distinct feeling of desperation and solitude, and making every gunshot, footstep, and breath of wind ring in our ears with uneasy intimacy. This aspect also feeds into the movie’s ongoing theme, its harsh quietness making the characters seem even more alone, un-special, and at the mercy of a random, chaotic universe, with no music evincing the feeling of a God-like third-person narrative.
What’s the deal with Woody Harrelson?
Woody Harrelson shows up about an hour into the film, stunning us with laid-back Texan charisma as a high-class hatchet man enlisted to wrangle the rogue Chigurh for the criminals who hired him in the first place. He enters the film with stature and importance, and we get the distinct impression that he’s the best of the best at his job. A few lines are traded with his superior, including some more veiled references to random chance and luck, and then he sets out. He pops up again in a scene with Llewelyn before he’s cornered quite blithely by Chigurh and killed after a whopping ten minutes of screen time. So why did the Coen brothers cast him in the first place? Why introduce such a magnetic, capable character only to kill him off three scenes later? The answer should be familiar at this point: to further the movie’s message that nobody, no matter how charming, interesting, or important, is safe from the relentlessness of death or the uncaring nature of cruel happenstance.
“The coin don’t have no say, it’s just you.”
Even after he’s gotten his stolen money back, Chigurh still shows up to kill Llewelyn’s widow, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald). He’s acting purely on principle; he offered to spare her if Llewelyn surrendered the money and his life, but Llewelyn refused. Chigurh is calmly waiting for Carla Jean when she comes home, but when he offers her the coin toss, she is the first and only character in the entire film to offer us a different perspective than the cold, nihilistic one we’ve heard up until now. She refuses to call it, unwilling to play his stupid game even if it means her death. Chigurh is visibly angered and perplexed by her stubbornness, as Carla Jean points out that regardless of all the truths we’ve absorbed throughout the film about death’s random and unfair nature, the coin is just a coin, and Chigurh is just a man making a choice to pull the trigger. This small, glimmering moment offers a point of light in the bleak thesis behind No Country, reminding us that even in the hard, cold, unpredictably brutal world we live in, we still have the free will to act with grace and compassion for as long as the uncertain time we’re given.
Originally published at www.tribecashortlist.com on September 20, 2016.
