A Pilgrim’s Digression

Having finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men recently, I am looking forward to this movie just about as much as any film in recent memory. This book (and apparently the film as well) is not for people who expect a satisfactory, happy conclusion. Negative reviews I have read concentrate almost exclusively on the lack of an ending in which the bad guy gets killed.

For example on the subject of how the book ends, one reviewer writes that “…McCarthy–in keeping with his nihilistic view of the universe–has Moss [the protagonist] killed off before such a climax can even take place. Perhaps in an attempt to one-up McCarthy on anti-climaticism, the Coen brothers have him killed off-screen.”

It sounds to me like the Coens aren’t one-upping anyone, instead sticking very closely to the book. In the book, there is a rather gaping hole in the ending during which Moss is killed. McCarthy does not describe the shootout, leaving it completely ambiguous about what happened and who killed who, or even if Anton Chigurh, the psychopath that has been chasing Moss, did the killing himself. Nora Ephron has written a rather humorous piece for the New Yorker, in which she and her movie-going partner try to figure out what the heck happened in this film. She even goes to the book, to which the film is apparently so faithful that even reading McCarthy provides no answers.

I have to admit, I found the darkness at the heart of this book so disturbing, I can’t say that it was an entirely pleasant read. It’s uncomfortable to find a writer apparently with no desire whatsoever to make his reader feel even the slightest bit hopeful that there might be good at work in the world. Before “No Country,” I read his novel The Road, which if anything is even more bleak. How much more bleak can you get than post-apocalyptic humans who cook and eat a newborn infant because there is no food left to eat anywhere on earth?

Additionally, Anton Chigurh, the psychopath at the heart of the bleakness in “No Country,” is a representation of Satan himself, as far as I am concerned. It is not that he is unconcerned with questions of good and evil–in his philosophical moments, he does take up the issue–but that he just doesn’t care if there is a right or wrong or not. In one scene in the novel, the sherrif, Ed Tom, comments that the problem with drug dealers today is not that they don’t fear the law, but that they don’t even give the law a thought. That is most disturbing, and extrapolated to Chigurh’s morality–his unconcern for right or wrong, and by extension God–that is most disturbing. Sometimes, he lets his victims live on the toss of a coin, and if someone actually wins, he is as uncaring as if they had lost. Nothing concerns him, certainly not human life. He allows people to live, and he takes their life with equal impassivity.

I happen to like, dark, bleak pessimistic stories such as this. Having written that, I doubt I will be able to persuade my wife to see the film with me, because she hates such movies. I am quite looking forward to it, though. McCarthy in the hands of the Coen Brothers…seems like a match made in Heaven, or perhaps Hell.