Gawkin' on Death
DECEMBER 19, 2007 TAGS:
By Robert Roper
Death fascinates. Death is fun to look at. Especially violent death … especially if it happens to some other guy.
A case in point is the current Coen Brothers movie, No Country for Old Men, from the novel by Cormac McCarthy. The super-violent beginning comes out of the book, the hellacious scene where Anton Chigurh, McCarthy’s I-am-an-instrument-of-sovereign-fate killer, takes out a sheriff’s deputy by strangling him from behind with his own handcuffs. It takes a long time for the deputy to die, kicking and gurgling on the floor of his office. The nickelplated cuffs bit to the bone, McCarthy tells us, describing a jet of hot blood spraying a wall. You can almost see Ethan and Joel, on first read-through, looking at each other and saying, “Oh, man, too bad we can’t use that – it’s not in dialogue, but jeez – what a great line.”
Like many other movies these days, No Country establishes its super-violence within the first few seconds of screen time. After seeing the deputy die with animal terror in his eyes, we know we’re in for a serious piece of edgy cinema. No ironized acts of violence here – the Coens have moved on from Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink, even from Fargo, where the copious spills of blood were seasoned with smirky laughs. Here we get to see the guy really die. We are in the presence of a serious meditation on mortality here, on the iron laws of doom.
Before he wrote the grim-but-moving, often transcendent novel The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer, McCarthy wrote No Country in a much trashier mood, stringing together scenes of savagery in a baggy, awkward thriller plot. The violent passages are cool as these things go; they are like the ultra-violent set-pieces in the novel Blood Meridian, published in 1985 and said to be McCarthy’s masterpiece. That earlier novel of the American Southwest also seemed to live just for its violent spasms, with a lot of sameness in the background and not much overall build in the book’s architecture. McCarthy’s violent passages are like switched-on genes in a wash of junk DNA. If you have a taste for hard-ass stone killer action and, especially, for the details of personal weaponry – “The shotgun was a twelve gauge Remington automatic with a plastic military stock and a parkerized finish” – you can’t go wrong in a McCarthy novel set in contemporary or near-contemporary times.
McCarthy has a metaphysics, too. He is a believer in iron laws of manhood and iron laws in general, the universe proposed to function according to ineluctable laws of spirit. Some of his most evil and seductive characters are men who hitch themselves to a set of supposed laws whose operation they nudge along, making of themselves exterminating angels, like Anton Chigurh, played severely by Javier Bardem in the movie, and the man called “judge” in Blood Meridian, played by nobody as yet. The great scenes in the novel are not the shootouts, in fact, but the scenes where Chigurh has a reason for killing somebody and quietly confronts the poor devil and explains that the end is near, indeed, is here. Just so we know that we are all subject to Grim Reaperhood, children as well as grandmas, girls as well as salty males, Chigurh snuffs a lovely 19-year-old woman named Carla Jean for no good reason – although Chigurh would say, for a very good reason, and I Am It. The Coens stage the pointless extermination much as McCarthy wrote the dismal, fascinating scene:
She sat slumped forward, holding her hat in her arms. You’ve got no cause to hurt me, she said.
I know. But I gave my word.
Your word?
Yes. We’re at the mercy of the dead here. In this case your husband.
That dont make no sense.
I’m afraid it does.
I dont have the money. You know I aint got it.
I know.
You give your word to my husband to kill me?
Yes.
He’s dead. My husband is dead.
Yes. But I’m not.
The catch is that Carla Jean’s husband – played with immense appeal by Josh Brolin – refused to take a deal Chigurh offered to return some stolen money and thereby not get his innocent wife killed. He got killed in due course, and now although the money is no longer an issue, Chigurh is carrying through on his pledge to punish the husband by murdering the wife.
You dont owe nothin to dead people.
Chigurh cocked his head slightly. No? he said.
How can you?
How can you not?
They’re dead.
Yes. But my word is not dead. Nothing can change that.
You can change it.
I dont think so. Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.
You’re just a blasphemer.
Hard words. But what’s done can not be undone.
He is God-like, Chigurh – or like what he imagines God is, a maniacal croupier spinning fate’s wheel, entirely without mercy when it comes to enforcing the lovely verdict, Death. Relenting somewhat – maybe just wanting to play with her – he offers to flip a coin: Heads she lives, tails he shoots her.
Call it, he said.
I wont do it.
Yes you will. Call it.
God would not want me to do that.
Of course he would. You should try to save yourself. Call it. This is your last chance.
Heads, she said.
He lifted his hand away. The coin was tails.
I’m sorry.
She didn’t answer.
Maybe it’s for the best.
She looked away. You make it like it was the coin. But you’re the one.
It could have gone either way.
The coin didn’t have no say. It was just you.
Perhaps. But look at it my way. I got here the same way the coin did.
One of the things to be noticed about this scene – about this whole book – is the absence of sex. We have come to like Carla Jean because she is witty and decent and nubile (played compellingly by Kelly Macdonald, from Gosford Park and Finding Neverland), yet McCarthy’s relentless metaphysical truth-telling stops short of bold explorations of that uneasy subject. Because that there ain’t manly to talk about, you know. That there is really evil and this here is a book that a red-blooded fellow can read without shame in the presence of his wife and his pimple-faced brother-in-law the preacher, with no kinda porn in it ’cept maybe a little of that other kind, good old American gun-kill porn, with passages like this one, about another of Chigurh’s unlucky victims:
He did close his eyes. He closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion, women he had known…. He lay half headless on the bed with his arms outflung, most of his right hand missing. Chigurh rose and picked up the empty casing….
Now there ain’t no harm in that, no sir! That there is pure fun! That ain’t no queer stuff about men and girls gettin’ naked and doin’ all that kinda stuff that God aimed to be done in private, if it has to be done, you know, somewheres.
Where the book and the movie come to grief is in the long last act, when the Cormackian metaphysics begin to work against the plot dynamics. Carla Jean’s husband, Llewelyn, as alive and attractive as she is, a real movie hero, adept at violence but with a hint of something good about him, capable of redeeming himself, in the old movie-ish way (the whole plot grows out of his impulsive theft of a suitcase full of dollars from a drug deal gone wrong), ends up dead. There is no reason for him to die so soon – other than the McCarthyian reason that we all die, we are as the grass of the field, as ants crushed beneath the heel of leering, implacable Fate. And in fact there are a hundred reasons why he should not die, with a third of the story still to go. We care about him, we like how he is with Carla Jean, and for two-thirds of the movie he has avoided extinction at the hands of psychopathic Chigurh. A meaningful face-off is in the cards. To film such a face-off in a plausible way with feeling would have taken a bit of genius, and we would like to have seen it.
No worries – there are pleasures to be gained from fidelity to a cruel philosophy. The fix is in, we all must die, and that’s all we need to know in this awful life. What we have in the last long act is the good ol’ boy sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones straining mightily after transcendence, complaining about how much violence there is these days, waxing mournful over the tide of evil that’s bearing us all away, in this fallen era of drug cartels and people forgetting to say Yes sir and No sir like they should. And maybe inevitably Tommy comes to wax poetic about his father – fathers being repositories of tender, hopeless feelings for certain kinds of writers – a good man, we are told, hardworking, a man who’s entirely irrelevant to this story, but here he is, oddly prominent at the end:
He knew about horses and he was good with em. I’ve seen him break a few and he knew what he was doin. Very easy on the horse. Talked to em a lot. He never broke nothin in me and I owe him more than I would of thought…. He would never of made a lawman. He went to college I think two years but he never did finish. I’ve thought about him a lot less than I should of and I know that aint right neither.
You know what, Tommy? Maybe you have thought about him enough. And maybe that’s enough right there. We get the picture.
Violence is bad. Evil is bad. We shouldn’t be thinking about the things this story has so profitably shown us. Next time, we will turn away. I swear. Next time.
Robert Roper, the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, is writing a biography about Walt Whitman and his family.
Death fascinates. Death is fun to look at. Especially violent death … especially if it happens to some other guy.
A case in point is the current Coen Brothers movie, No Country for Old Men, from the novel by Cormac McCarthy. The super-violent beginning comes out of the book, the hellacious scene where Anton Chigurh, McCarthy’s I-am-an-instrument-of-sovereign-fate killer, takes out a sheriff’s deputy by strangling him from behind with his own handcuffs. It takes a long time for the deputy to die, kicking and gurgling on the floor of his office. The nickelplated cuffs bit to the bone, McCarthy tells us, describing a jet of hot blood spraying a wall. You can almost see Ethan and Joel, on first read-through, looking at each other and saying, “Oh, man, too bad we can’t use that – it’s not in dialogue, but jeez – what a great line.”
Like many other movies these days, No Country establishes its super-violence within the first few seconds of screen time. After seeing the deputy die with animal terror in his eyes, we know we’re in for a serious piece of edgy cinema. No ironized acts of violence here – the Coens have moved on from Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink, even from Fargo, where the copious spills of blood were seasoned with smirky laughs. Here we get to see the guy really die. We are in the presence of a serious meditation on mortality here, on the iron laws of doom.
Before he wrote the grim-but-moving, often transcendent novel The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer, McCarthy wrote No Country in a much trashier mood, stringing together scenes of savagery in a baggy, awkward thriller plot. The violent passages are cool as these things go; they are like the ultra-violent set-pieces in the novel Blood Meridian, published in 1985 and said to be McCarthy’s masterpiece. That earlier novel of the American Southwest also seemed to live just for its violent spasms, with a lot of sameness in the background and not much overall build in the book’s architecture. McCarthy’s violent passages are like switched-on genes in a wash of junk DNA. If you have a taste for hard-ass stone killer action and, especially, for the details of personal weaponry – “The shotgun was a twelve gauge Remington automatic with a plastic military stock and a parkerized finish” – you can’t go wrong in a McCarthy novel set in contemporary or near-contemporary times.
McCarthy has a metaphysics, too. He is a believer in iron laws of manhood and iron laws in general, the universe proposed to function according to ineluctable laws of spirit. Some of his most evil and seductive characters are men who hitch themselves to a set of supposed laws whose operation they nudge along, making of themselves exterminating angels, like Anton Chigurh, played severely by Javier Bardem in the movie, and the man called “judge” in Blood Meridian, played by nobody as yet. The great scenes in the novel are not the shootouts, in fact, but the scenes where Chigurh has a reason for killing somebody and quietly confronts the poor devil and explains that the end is near, indeed, is here. Just so we know that we are all subject to Grim Reaperhood, children as well as grandmas, girls as well as salty males, Chigurh snuffs a lovely 19-year-old woman named Carla Jean for no good reason – although Chigurh would say, for a very good reason, and I Am It. The Coens stage the pointless extermination much as McCarthy wrote the dismal, fascinating scene:She sat slumped forward, holding her hat in her arms. You’ve got no cause to hurt me, she said.
I know. But I gave my word.
Your word?
Yes. We’re at the mercy of the dead here. In this case your husband.
That dont make no sense.
I’m afraid it does.
I dont have the money. You know I aint got it.
I know.
You give your word to my husband to kill me?
Yes.
He’s dead. My husband is dead.
Yes. But I’m not.
The catch is that Carla Jean’s husband – played with immense appeal by Josh Brolin – refused to take a deal Chigurh offered to return some stolen money and thereby not get his innocent wife killed. He got killed in due course, and now although the money is no longer an issue, Chigurh is carrying through on his pledge to punish the husband by murdering the wife.
You dont owe nothin to dead people.
Chigurh cocked his head slightly. No? he said.
How can you?
How can you not?
They’re dead.
Yes. But my word is not dead. Nothing can change that.
You can change it.
I dont think so. Even a nonbeliever might find it useful to model himself after God. Very useful, in fact.
You’re just a blasphemer.
Hard words. But what’s done can not be undone.
He is God-like, Chigurh – or like what he imagines God is, a maniacal croupier spinning fate’s wheel, entirely without mercy when it comes to enforcing the lovely verdict, Death. Relenting somewhat – maybe just wanting to play with her – he offers to flip a coin: Heads she lives, tails he shoots her.
Call it, he said.
I wont do it.
Yes you will. Call it.
God would not want me to do that.
Of course he would. You should try to save yourself. Call it. This is your last chance.
Heads, she said.
He lifted his hand away. The coin was tails.
I’m sorry.
She didn’t answer.
Maybe it’s for the best.
She looked away. You make it like it was the coin. But you’re the one.
It could have gone either way.
The coin didn’t have no say. It was just you.
Perhaps. But look at it my way. I got here the same way the coin did.
One of the things to be noticed about this scene – about this whole book – is the absence of sex. We have come to like Carla Jean because she is witty and decent and nubile (played compellingly by Kelly Macdonald, from Gosford Park and Finding Neverland), yet McCarthy’s relentless metaphysical truth-telling stops short of bold explorations of that uneasy subject. Because that there ain’t manly to talk about, you know. That there is really evil and this here is a book that a red-blooded fellow can read without shame in the presence of his wife and his pimple-faced brother-in-law the preacher, with no kinda porn in it ’cept maybe a little of that other kind, good old American gun-kill porn, with passages like this one, about another of Chigurh’s unlucky victims:
He did close his eyes. He closed his eyes and he turned his head and he raised one hand to fend away what could not be fended away. Chigurh shot him in the face. Everything that Wells had ever known or thought or loved drained slowly down the wall behind him. His mother’s face, his First Communion, women he had known…. He lay half headless on the bed with his arms outflung, most of his right hand missing. Chigurh rose and picked up the empty casing….
Now there ain’t no harm in that, no sir! That there is pure fun! That ain’t no queer stuff about men and girls gettin’ naked and doin’ all that kinda stuff that God aimed to be done in private, if it has to be done, you know, somewheres.
Where the book and the movie come to grief is in the long last act, when the Cormackian metaphysics begin to work against the plot dynamics. Carla Jean’s husband, Llewelyn, as alive and attractive as she is, a real movie hero, adept at violence but with a hint of something good about him, capable of redeeming himself, in the old movie-ish way (the whole plot grows out of his impulsive theft of a suitcase full of dollars from a drug deal gone wrong), ends up dead. There is no reason for him to die so soon – other than the McCarthyian reason that we all die, we are as the grass of the field, as ants crushed beneath the heel of leering, implacable Fate. And in fact there are a hundred reasons why he should not die, with a third of the story still to go. We care about him, we like how he is with Carla Jean, and for two-thirds of the movie he has avoided extinction at the hands of psychopathic Chigurh. A meaningful face-off is in the cards. To film such a face-off in a plausible way with feeling would have taken a bit of genius, and we would like to have seen it.
No worries – there are pleasures to be gained from fidelity to a cruel philosophy. The fix is in, we all must die, and that’s all we need to know in this awful life. What we have in the last long act is the good ol’ boy sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones straining mightily after transcendence, complaining about how much violence there is these days, waxing mournful over the tide of evil that’s bearing us all away, in this fallen era of drug cartels and people forgetting to say Yes sir and No sir like they should. And maybe inevitably Tommy comes to wax poetic about his father – fathers being repositories of tender, hopeless feelings for certain kinds of writers – a good man, we are told, hardworking, a man who’s entirely irrelevant to this story, but here he is, oddly prominent at the end:He knew about horses and he was good with em. I’ve seen him break a few and he knew what he was doin. Very easy on the horse. Talked to em a lot. He never broke nothin in me and I owe him more than I would of thought…. He would never of made a lawman. He went to college I think two years but he never did finish. I’ve thought about him a lot less than I should of and I know that aint right neither.
You know what, Tommy? Maybe you have thought about him enough. And maybe that’s enough right there. We get the picture.
Violence is bad. Evil is bad. We shouldn’t be thinking about the things this story has so profitably shown us. Next time, we will turn away. I swear. Next time.
Robert Roper, the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, is writing a biography about Walt Whitman and his family.
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