No Country For Old Men (2007)
At the end of the Coen Brothers' blood-soaked, neo-Western, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell tells his wife about two dreams he has about his father. In the first dream, he loses some money his father gave him. In the second dream, Bell sees his father holding a torch, riding ahead into the darkness of a snowy mountain pass.
If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Could it be, then, that Chigurh’s quote actually relates to the status of the universe? We tend to presume there’s this underlying simplicity to everything – but things may simply not be so. Maybe Occam’s razor is blunt. Maybe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony – but chaos, hostility and murder.
Could this be the directors’ way of showing the underlying reality of the story? Far from Anton being “a ghost” or some kind of contemporary grim reaper, he is just a man like Llewelyn and Ed Tom? People always describe Chigurh as a form of unstoppable evil, however, I think they ignore the fact that this story may be coming from the memory of Sheriff Bell – and may therefore be coloured by his feelings towards it.
Well, alright. It’s worth saying that the book has a different ending, where CJ gets the coin toss wrong and is killed, so maybe I’m reading into this a bit too much. Actually, on that…
“Life is a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury;
Signifying nothing.”
No Country hints at notions like conservatism, nihilism, free will, morality but never says anything definitive. Maybe this is the point of the story. That, although it seems to be discussing something particularly profound, it is actually ‘a tale told by an idiot’ – a jumbled mess of happenings that cause you to look for a kind of depth which, on greater inspection, simply isn’t there.
In other words, part of the nihilism of the piece is that you can’t say anything principled about it.
At the end of the Coen Brothers' blood-soaked, neo-Western, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell tells his wife about two dreams he has about his father. In the first dream, he loses some money his father gave him. In the second dream, Bell sees his father holding a torch, riding ahead into the darkness of a snowy mountain pass.
Shortly before Bell tells the stories of the dreams, he tells his wife that his father died young, and in a sense, his father will always be a younger man. More importantly, throughout the movie, Bell ponders the violence in the area where he is sheriff and, since he's close to retirement, wonders whether he's too old for the world in which he lives. The title of the movie is No Country For Old Men, and Bell is one of those old men. It's become too violent too quickly for someone of his age, and he can no longer cope. The world needs someone younger, like his father, to light the way in the ever-growing darkness around it—exactly like the second dream Bell describes.
As for the first dream? Maybe Bell just needs a new wallet.
Sheriff Bell tells his wife about his dreams, and then we abruptly cut to black.
So, what gives? After focusing so much on Moss escaping Chigurh, does it really make sense for the story to leave the audience with a seemingly peripheral character’s enigmatic breakfast conversation?
Yes, because the final scene gives us a window into the movie’s deeper meaning and the Coens’ pessimistic worldview. Bell is identified as one of the“Old Men” of the title, and we get a glimpse into why there’s “no country” for them anymore.
Waking up, he struggles to face the actual world of chaos and randomness, and so he’s lost.
The Coens use the dreams to show Bell mourning the decent, lawful world he believes in -- which probably never even existed but has been an illusion, or a dream, all along.
The Coens’ ending is both pessimistic and opaque. On the one hand, Moss’ end tells us that our past sins catch up with us.
Even if he repents, like with Marion Crane in Psycho, the movie will execute his punishment.
Yet, on the other hand, the story rejects justice when Chigurh escapes -- as if his outcome has been determined by one of his own coin tosses.
We’re left with a frightening interplay of the arbitrary and the inevitable, in which we must fear both moral punishment and the total lack of moral order , yet can’t trust in either.
So let’s dig in to the meaning of the dreams. In the film, Sheriff Bell is hesitant at first to share them with his own wife since he doesn’t think his wife would find them engaging, a hint to the audience since the wife, in the cinematic adaptation, stands in for the reader of Cormac McCarthy’s book -- us.
The choice to end with dreams can even be read as a tongue-in-cheek joke since it’s well-known that most people find hearing about others’ dreams boring.
So this is hardly the dramatic ending that an average movie audience might be chasing -- but it’s also not uncharacteristic for the Coens.
Bell says that he’s now twenty years older than his father was in the dream. Something’s off, and time has been inverted, because Bell is now older than his father -- he, instead of his father, is the “old man.”
Bell represents a character displaced from a Western of old The older ideas of law enforcement or simple dualities and causalities no longer seem to apply.
This world has become too dangerous and too wild, and Bell retires because of it, defeated by this new world and its ambiguity.
His first dream is about how his father gives him “some money.” The bulk of the film has been about the struggle between Moss and Chigurh to get a case with two million dollars.
All of the characters who are concerned with money end up dead or injured and morally empty, while Bell survives and stays intact long enough to retire.
So this first dream leaves us with the sense that greed eventually leads people to a fall, and that those who don’t place importance on money live a safer and fuller life.
But money in dreams also tends to symbolize success, thriving or good fortune. Bell’s losing the money evokes his loss of this world, which baffles him and seems to have no use for him anymore.
In these final moments, Bell has another chance to understand recent events, but his losing the money also symbolizes his inability to see his world clearly.
He’s out of touch not just because the world’s moved on, but also because it was never what he thought it was.
The second dream is about riding on horseback through the mountains — getting as far away from civilization as possible.
Sheriff Bell’s monologue at the beginning of the film reminisces about older times when some of the “old-time” sheriffs never carried a gun.
Bell is filled with nostalgia for a safer, straightforward time, where he imagines every crime made sense and every criminal got put away, much like the plot of a typical Western.
There’s a reference to going back in time when Bell says his father was “carrying fire in a horn.”
This isn’t a torch meant to provide light, but a primitive way of starting fires by carrying hot embers from one campsite to the next so there’s no need for flint or a match.
It’s carrying the promise of a fire up ahead. The life that Bell is living now is represented by this cold, mountainous path, full of moral uncertainty and darkness.
But by carrying forward this fire, he feels he is continuing on his father’s essence... and somehow this will enable a return to that simpler good his father represents.
Yet this dream appears to be not a prophecy, but simply a desire. He tells his wife:
He needs the certainty that, in the end, there will be warmth and light. But he’s dreaming about something that can never come true and deep down, he knows it.
The sudden cut to black seems to confirm this -- the only answer is nothing.
No Country can be called a Neo-Western. The Neo-Western which builds on recognizable Western imagery to reach a very different conclusion and worldview.
Classic visual and story cues tell the audience that this should be a Western: the desert setting, the clearly defined heroes and villains, guns, drugs, a chase after money, and Stetson hats.
All superficial signs would point to an ending where the hero prevails, takes a big bag of money, and rides off into the desert sun. Instead, No Country’s hero — Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin — is killed by a third party.
Moreover, he’s far from a clear-cut hero. He’s a thief. The first major action we witness from him is stealing money.
Sheriff Bell assumes that Moss is the good guy because he is pitted against Chigurh, who is clearly the villain, but this doesn’t automatically make him righteous.
Moss’s sudden death also remind us of a film noir plot. If the Western’s traditional hero triumphs over unbelievable odds, the noir’s hero -- who’s also smart and well-intentioned, if more flawed than a Western hero -- can’t overcome those odds.
The remorseless villain — Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem — is likewise less straightforward than the bad guys of old. With his coin toss game of death, he’s intentionally modeled himself as a force of random destruction.
Chigurh’s actions stem from a worldview that has logical integrity, whether or not it represents the truth.
As the carrier of this coin, he believes in reminding people that their lives are ultimately subject to forces (whether they’re god, or death, or chance) that are out of our control.
In the end, far from being brought to justice, Chigurh is injured by a car accident and then just barely gets away.
He is a personification of the seeming haphazardness of the world the Coens give us, which doesn’t care about our notions of right and wrong, or fair and unfair -- the world has its own unknowable plans for us, or maybe no plan at all.
Sheriff Bell survives and outlasts by remaining on the sidelines of the action. d he follows in Chigurh’s and Moss’s footsteps, ever a step behind.
In this scene, Bell sits in the same spot as Chigurh and looks at his reflection in the TV screen, as if about to step into Chigurh’s shoes and imagine his mindset, but instead, he merely says Chigurh’s actions have left an “impression” on him, as if he’s not a sheriff at all but merely an observer.
The movie’s themes and structure result largely from how closely the film follows Cormac McCarthy’s novel.
Ed Tom Bell’s monologue about his dreams in the end -- it’s taken from the novel, too.
In an interview with Oprah, Cormac McCarthy explained his view on the human subconscious, saying, “It understands language because it understands the problems that you’re working on, and then when you’re sleeping it will work on them for you.”
So in ending with these dreams, the Coens endorse McCarthy’s view that our subconscious can synthesize our problems on a deeper level.
But Sheriff Bell’s dreams show that not all problems can be solved by our inner selves — sometimes the subconscious tells you what you truly want, but it’s a wish that’s impossible to fulfill.
The Cohen brothers’ 2007 film No Country for Old Men is not your typical Western: the hero doesn’t win, or even survive, the villain gets away, and the ending isn’t a shootout but rather a slow, calm, monologue by a character who was the least involved of the three main characters.
Sheriff Bell tells his wife about his dreams, and then we abruptly cut to black.
So, what gives? After focusing so much on Moss escaping Chigurh, does it really make sense for the story to leave the audience with a seemingly peripheral character’s enigmatic breakfast conversation?
Yes, because the final scene gives us a window into the movie’s deeper meaning and the Coens’ pessimistic worldview. Bell is identified as one of the“Old Men” of the title, and we get a glimpse into why there’s “no country” for them anymore.
Waking up, he struggles to face the actual world of chaos and randomness, and so he’s lost.
The Coens use the dreams to show Bell mourning the decent, lawful world he believes in -- which probably never even existed but has been an illusion, or a dream, all along.
The Coens’ ending is both pessimistic and opaque. On the one hand, Moss’ end tells us that our past sins catch up with us.
Even if he repents, like with Marion Crane in Psycho, the movie will execute his punishment.
Yet, on the other hand, the story rejects justice when Chigurh escapes -- as if his outcome has been determined by one of his own coin tosses.
We’re left with a frightening interplay of the arbitrary and the inevitable, in which we must fear both moral punishment and the total lack of moral order , yet can’t trust in either.
So let’s dig in to the meaning of the dreams. In the film, Sheriff Bell is hesitant at first to share them with his own wife since he doesn’t think his wife would find them engaging, a hint to the audience since the wife, in the cinematic adaptation, stands in for the reader of Cormac McCarthy’s book -- us.
The choice to end with dreams can even be read as a tongue-in-cheek joke since it’s well-known that most people find hearing about others’ dreams boring.
So this is hardly the dramatic ending that an average movie audience might be chasing -- but it’s also not uncharacteristic for the Coens.
Bell says that he’s now twenty years older than his father was in the dream. Something’s off, and time has been inverted, because Bell is now older than his father -- he, instead of his father, is the “old man.”
Bell represents a character displaced from a Western of old The older ideas of law enforcement or simple dualities and causalities no longer seem to apply.
This world has become too dangerous and too wild, and Bell retires because of it, defeated by this new world and its ambiguity.
His first dream is about how his father gives him “some money.” The bulk of the film has been about the struggle between Moss and Chigurh to get a case with two million dollars.
All of the characters who are concerned with money end up dead or injured and morally empty, while Bell survives and stays intact long enough to retire.
So this first dream leaves us with the sense that greed eventually leads people to a fall, and that those who don’t place importance on money live a safer and fuller life.
But money in dreams also tends to symbolize success, thriving or good fortune. Bell’s losing the money evokes his loss of this world, which baffles him and seems to have no use for him anymore.
In these final moments, Bell has another chance to understand recent events, but his losing the money also symbolizes his inability to see his world clearly.
He’s out of touch not just because the world’s moved on, but also because it was never what he thought it was.
The second dream is about riding on horseback through the mountains — getting as far away from civilization as possible.
Sheriff Bell’s monologue at the beginning of the film reminisces about older times when some of the “old-time” sheriffs never carried a gun.
Bell is filled with nostalgia for a safer, straightforward time, where he imagines every crime made sense and every criminal got put away, much like the plot of a typical Western.
There’s a reference to going back in time when Bell says his father was “carrying fire in a horn.”
This isn’t a torch meant to provide light, but a primitive way of starting fires by carrying hot embers from one campsite to the next so there’s no need for flint or a match.
It’s carrying the promise of a fire up ahead. The life that Bell is living now is represented by this cold, mountainous path, full of moral uncertainty and darkness.
But by carrying forward this fire, he feels he is continuing on his father’s essence... and somehow this will enable a return to that simpler good his father represents.
Yet this dream appears to be not a prophecy, but simply a desire. He tells his wife:
He needs the certainty that, in the end, there will be warmth and light. But he’s dreaming about something that can never come true and deep down, he knows it.
The sudden cut to black seems to confirm this -- the only answer is nothing.
No Country can be called a Neo-Western. The Neo-Western which builds on recognizable Western imagery to reach a very different conclusion and worldview.
Classic visual and story cues tell the audience that this should be a Western: the desert setting, the clearly defined heroes and villains, guns, drugs, a chase after money, and Stetson hats.
All superficial signs would point to an ending where the hero prevails, takes a big bag of money, and rides off into the desert sun. Instead, No Country’s hero — Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin — is killed by a third party.
Moreover, he’s far from a clear-cut hero. He’s a thief. The first major action we witness from him is stealing money.
Sheriff Bell assumes that Moss is the good guy because he is pitted against Chigurh, who is clearly the villain, but this doesn’t automatically make him righteous.
Moss’s sudden death also remind us of a film noir plot. If the Western’s traditional hero triumphs over unbelievable odds, the noir’s hero -- who’s also smart and well-intentioned, if more flawed than a Western hero -- can’t overcome those odds.
The remorseless villain — Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem — is likewise less straightforward than the bad guys of old. With his coin toss game of death, he’s intentionally modeled himself as a force of random destruction.
Chigurh’s actions stem from a worldview that has logical integrity, whether or not it represents the truth.
As the carrier of this coin, he believes in reminding people that their lives are ultimately subject to forces (whether they’re god, or death, or chance) that are out of our control.
In the end, far from being brought to justice, Chigurh is injured by a car accident and then just barely gets away.
He is a personification of the seeming haphazardness of the world the Coens give us, which doesn’t care about our notions of right and wrong, or fair and unfair -- the world has its own unknowable plans for us, or maybe no plan at all.
Sheriff Bell survives and outlasts by remaining on the sidelines of the action. d he follows in Chigurh’s and Moss’s footsteps, ever a step behind.
In this scene, Bell sits in the same spot as Chigurh and looks at his reflection in the TV screen, as if about to step into Chigurh’s shoes and imagine his mindset, but instead, he merely says Chigurh’s actions have left an “impression” on him, as if he’s not a sheriff at all but merely an observer.
The movie’s themes and structure result largely from how closely the film follows Cormac McCarthy’s novel.
Ed Tom Bell’s monologue about his dreams in the end -- it’s taken from the novel, too.
In an interview with Oprah, Cormac McCarthy explained his view on the human subconscious, saying, “It understands language because it understands the problems that you’re working on, and then when you’re sleeping it will work on them for you.”
So in ending with these dreams, the Coens endorse McCarthy’s view that our subconscious can synthesize our problems on a deeper level.
But Sheriff Bell’s dreams show that not all problems can be solved by our inner selves — sometimes the subconscious tells you what you truly want, but it’s a wish that’s impossible to fulfill.
From ScreenPrism
If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
Yeah, I know. It happens to everyone. You’re waiting for the final showdown and then that happens. It’s an ending I’ve been thinking about for quite some time now, so here’s my take on it.
“Once you quit hearing ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’, the rest is soon to follow.”
Sheriff Bell’s traditionalist attitude is the main target of criticism in the book and film. It’s parodied slightly in the discussion with the El Paso sheriff, where he laments the rise of “kids with green hair and bones in their noses” and dismantled by Ellis (you know, the cat man), when he describes a similarly brutal murder which took place years and years ago in 1909. Likewise, Wells and Chigurh are both arguably psychopathic killers and yet both address people by “sir” throughout the film, in spite of what Bell says.
Or, as Carl Jung would have said, he learns “the sole purpose of human existence: to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
Maybe it sounds like I’m trying to hammer hope into a strange, nihilistic ending – but this makes more sense when you consider that Bell was a WWII deserter in the book and never truly forgave himself for leaving his comrades to die, even though he surely would’ve died alongside them.
It’s a pretty obvious theme – but worth bearing in mind when it comes to the death of Llewelyn. See, No Country for Old Men takes its name from the first line of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ by William Butler Yeats. The poem’s central message is that in order to be happy in old age we should abandon the world’s more primal pleasures and turn to the spiritual and eternal instead. This, then, explains the tonal shift that occurs in the final fifth of the story. Like a person, as the film approaches its end, its focus changes from the external to the internal; the money fades into insignificance.
And that’s why Llewelyn dies off-screen. This is the moment when the film reveals that the plot is not important. Nor was it ever, really. Rather than being a cat-and-mouse thriller, No Country for Old Men is a coming-of-age tale in which the real protagonist, Sheriff Bell, comes to understand his place in the universe.
I actually think this story has something of a happy ending. When Bell details his final dream, I think it’s the inception of his self-forgiveness. He’s realised the goals he’d set himself were always too great and that, like lighting a fire, you can only produce so much warmth and protection in an otherwise cold and hostile world.And that’s why Llewelyn dies off-screen. This is the moment when the film reveals that the plot is not important. Nor was it ever, really. Rather than being a cat-and-mouse thriller, No Country for Old Men is a coming-of-age tale in which the real protagonist, Sheriff Bell, comes to understand his place in the universe.
Or, as Carl Jung would have said, he learns “the sole purpose of human existence: to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
Maybe it sounds like I’m trying to hammer hope into a strange, nihilistic ending – but this makes more sense when you consider that Bell was a WWII deserter in the book and never truly forgave himself for leaving his comrades to die, even though he surely would’ve died alongside them.
“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
Before Carson Hwells finds out exactly how dangerous Chigurh can be, he is confronted with the question above. The funny thing is, in the context of this scene, Chigurh seems to be mocking Carson’s ability as an assassin. His principles led him to his death, therefore, Chigurh’s methods > Wells’ methods.
But let’s look at it from a different angle. How about we think of “the rule” as having a similar usage to “the law” (meaning “set of laws” rather than “one individual law”.)
The penultimate scene shows our antagonist incapacitated by a car crash. This represents an uncaused event: the traffic light was signalling red and yet – contrary to the rules of the road – the opposing vehicle failed to halt, smashing straight into Chigurh.
The penultimate scene shows our antagonist incapacitated by a car crash. This represents an uncaused event: the traffic light was signalling red and yet – contrary to the rules of the road – the opposing vehicle failed to halt, smashing straight into Chigurh.
“You hold still.”
There are a lot of similarities between the three main characters of this film. All three men walk back into crime scenes, a lot of the shots are the same, there’s echoes in the dialogue. No two characters really appear in the same shot together (okay, Llewelyn and Chigurh kinda do – but it’s very brief and in the dark.) There’s a kind of ‘three parts of the same person’ thing going on. Llewelyn and Chigurh both suffer gunshot wounds in the same standoff, both get injured in what either is or appears to be a car accident, both hand over money for a shirt to dress their wounds. There’s probably tonnes more.
Could this be the directors’ way of showing the underlying reality of the story? Far from Anton being “a ghost” or some kind of contemporary grim reaper, he is just a man like Llewelyn and Ed Tom? People always describe Chigurh as a form of unstoppable evil, however, I think they ignore the fact that this story may be coming from the memory of Sheriff Bell – and may therefore be coloured by his feelings towards it.
“The same way the coin did.”
The final confrontation between Chigurh and Carla Jean seems like a fairly straight analogy for the dilemma of determinism: either CJ must accept her fate and be killed, which is no kind of choice at all, or she must resign to the randomness of the coin toss, in which case she still has no control over her outcome.
However, unlike the Texaco man, Carla Jean refuses to comply. I think this is an important aspect of the story. Many philosophers believe that the key to our freedom is our ability to do things for a reason, rather than some confusing ability to do otherwise. So, this could be seen as an intellectual defeat for Chigurh. Carla Jean chooses to die rather than play by Chigurh’s rules, demonstrating that she is free in ways that he is not.
However, unlike the Texaco man, Carla Jean refuses to comply. I think this is an important aspect of the story. Many philosophers believe that the key to our freedom is our ability to do things for a reason, rather than some confusing ability to do otherwise. So, this could be seen as an intellectual defeat for Chigurh. Carla Jean chooses to die rather than play by Chigurh’s rules, demonstrating that she is free in ways that he is not.
“Life is a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury;
Signifying nothing.”
No Country hints at notions like conservatism, nihilism, free will, morality but never says anything definitive. Maybe this is the point of the story. That, although it seems to be discussing something particularly profound, it is actually ‘a tale told by an idiot’ – a jumbled mess of happenings that cause you to look for a kind of depth which, on greater inspection, simply isn’t there.
In other words, part of the nihilism of the piece is that you can’t say anything principled about it.
From ArbitrayNonsense
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