There’s a moment in No Country for Old Men (2007) where Llewelyn (Josh Brolin) checks into a motel while trying to stay one step ahead of the hounds that are nipping at his heels. As he walks to his room, a woman at the pool notices him and tries to entice him to enjoy her company.
The other week I spoke about ‘reasoning with the unreasonable’ and used No Country for Old Men as an example. I want to expand on that a little and talk about how a villain can be more than just a villain. People think the title No Country for Old Men is a strange one but I think it’s more of a summation for the film’s themes and intentions. Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) is modern evil. He is unstoppable, blind, stupid Death with a capital D and he represents the corrupting influence that has changed America so that it no longer resembles itself in the eyes of our elders. That’s the film’s central conflict between hero and villain, as well as its thesis about changing society (a thesis which is right and wrong—because, I mean, America has always been a violent place), all summed up in a pretty title.
In the above scene at the motel, Llewelyn is on top of things. Unlike other characters of the film, Llewelyn knows not to bother attempting to reason with Chigurh. Instead, he tries to outrun him. When the girl propositions him, he politely turns her down — more out of self-preservation than loyalty to his wife, I think. When he says he’s looking out for what’s coming, we know what he means. The woman’s comment that “no one ever sees that” is one of my favorite lines in the film. It’s a tad overwritten – by which I mean it sounds like writer’s dialogue, not real-life dialogue – but so what? It delivers the intent of the scene and the theme of the film.
Llewelyn may not be the brightest character every created for a crime thriller but he’s no dummy. However, here is the only moment where he slips up and lets his guard down. Maybe it’s the beer, maybe it’s the girl, or maybe it’s simply the desire to forget about the chase for a moment and relax. Whatever the reason, we never see him alive again. Our next sight of Llewelyn is a cold shot of him dead on the floor of his hotel room. The Coens don’t even give him a close-up. It’s like the directors are judging him for his lapse in resolve. When Death is on the hunt, there’s no time for play.
“How do you defend against it?” asks a lawman when trying to comprehend the violence of Chigurh.
The answer is that you can’t.
Anton Chigurh may be a hitman but he might as well be a masked slasher or a hooded reaper. If we continue with the idea of Chigurh as Death—it doesn’t matter whether we mean Death with a scythe or Death as a cancer diagnosis—we can look at how the story puts its characters in Death’s way and how they attempt to reason with it. Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) tries to rationalize with the irrational, Llewelyn tries to outrun it, Carson (Woody Harrelson) tries to beat it, and Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) pleads for mercy. These varied responses to approaching Death make for a more exciting conflict.
I want to talk about Carla Jean’s final scene, because I feel it delivers on the film’s themes and Chigurh’s monstrous rationale. Earlier in the film, Chigurh played a coin toss to decide whether a confused store clerk would live or die. The store clerk didn’t know what he had to lose, but the audience did. When Chigurh plays the same game with Carla Jean, she seems to understand the rules in a moment that is absent from the screenplay.
Carla Jean says, “You don’t have to do this.”
Chigurh is amused. “People always say the same thing.”
“What do they say?”
“They say, ‘You don’t have to do this.’”
Carla Jean tries to reason with the unreasonable Chigurh. But he’s not convinced. Like her husband, we never see Carla Jean alive again. Chigurh leaves Carla Jean’s home and makes sure his shoes are clean, suggesting all we need to know about what happened inside the house. Not long after, Chigurh escapes the story, though not before suffering a broken arm in a car accident. Capturing or killing Chigurh would’ve gone against what the writers (the Coens and novelist Cormac McCarthy) were trying to say via his character. But perhaps sensing some need in the audience to see Chigurh in pain, they at least gave us that bone sticking out of the killer’s arm at the end. If Chigurh is Death, and we’re being honest about what Death is, then maybe that’s the best we can hope for; that he will also know pain.
I think No Country for Old Men is a masterful film adaptation of a masterful novel. The sharp dialogue, the performances full of clever ideas, the moody camera work, and the story full of subtext; it’s just wonderful. But it’s how the film handles all of this that interests me most. It’s a movie where you discover something previously unnoticed or craft a new theory with every viewing.
Writers can learn so much from No Country for Old Men, both the film and the book. Think about how your characters work through the intense situations they’ve found themselves in – do they attempt to reason with it, do they try to fight it, ignore it, deny it? Think about whether your story’s themes can say something about the world, about people, about the light (or darkness?) at the end of the tunnel we’re walking down together. And think about whether your antagonist – be they human or monster – represents something more. Figure out what that is (you don’t need to tell us, but it’s good for you to know), and see if that will lead to exciting new developments for your story.
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