Cormac McCarthy and No Country for Old Men
"I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job, but I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say: okay, I'll be part of this world."

I was originally planning on writing up my thoughts on Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, but I could probably benefit from reading the book again beforehand. I got in most of the first reading while I was sick; I came down with a cold on Christmas night. This made the book read even more like an odd fever dream than if I hadn't punctuated the chapters with coughing fits and naps. So in lieu of talking about my vague impressions of the novel, I'll write something about the movie version of No Country for Old Men and Oprah's interview with McCarthy (which I've recently rewatched and seen, respectively). Since I think both Blood Meridian and the movie have quite a few thematic elements in common--and I suspect these might be major themes of McCarthy's work in general--this will help when I eventually revisit Blood Meridian.

The Oprah interview can easily be found on YouTube and I think it's worth watching. As far as I know, it's the only public interview McCarthy's allowed. Oprah's questions and comments are generally embarrassing (e.g. her awkward lines about him being a "different kind of writer" when he casually dismisses the value of a wide readership and material remuneration) and lightweight (she asks him if he ever has "aha!" moments), but she deserves credit for landing the interview in the first place and I got the impression that McCarthy didn't mind. If anything, it was probably his kind of interview: simple and affable. And McCarthy does his thing anyway. All of his responses are stated plainly and matter-of-fact, but it's easy to read a lot of them back into his work. Across a wide range of subjects (religion, McCarthy's experience with poverty, etc.), he says things that gel with my general sense that BM and NCfOM stress the necessity and essential ambiguity of hope. When Oprah asks whether or not he's sorted out the whole "God thing," McCarthy's laconic answer is that he doesn't believe a person has to have the question of God's existence worked out in order to pray. When describing being evicted from the $40 a month hotel he was living in, he mentions his own luck in that something, some "unforeseen thing", would come about to benefit him just when things were truly desperate. Probably most obviously, he talks about how lucky our society is and that if his writing had a single message, it is that a person should appreciate life even when it's "pretty damn bad." I think that all the violence and depravity that appear in his stories is towards the end of pointing out a vital uncertainty that serves as the basis of our being and living. In both works, he floods the narrative with an overwhelming amount of suffering and alienation and then, after presenting a single closing image which may be entirely naive, asks us whether or not life is worth it anyway. It's not just a matter of having hope in the face of uncertainty, but the very possibility of hope itself being uncertain.

Because this uncertainty is so vital, McCarthy portrays it as a fundamental metaphysical and existential force that is oddly law-like. There's a kind of Heraclitean dialectical relationship between fatalism and uncertainty on one hand and agency and uncertainty on the other. This plays itself out, for example, in Chigurh's pursuit of Moss (Chigurh = fatalism; Moss = agency) and Chigurh's coin tosses. I think this is alluded to in the interview when McCarthy briefly talks about how the laws of probability are unshakable, but that ultimately there is no reason why one person should be in one group rather than another. Faced with the blind laws of probability, human beings as moral agents are left to dwell on the slight margin of chance that offers both anxiety and freedom, nihilism and self-creation.

I think saying that most of No Country for Old Men is relatively straightforward in terms of plot can be accepted with little to no argument and, initially, the sheer silliness of that plot was a turn-off to me that prevented the movie from being great. I still think there are a couple of ways in which the movie trips up (the ending isn't one of them), but overall it's impressive. The bulk of the interpretative work falls on the end of the movie of course, but there's also a fair amount at the very beginning. When the sheriff, narrating, mentions his encounter with a boy who'd been planning to kill someone for as long as he lived and felt certain he was destined for Hell, this is the initial presentation of the two heads of nihilism: the boy's grim certainty and the sheriff's own shock and lack of direction. The sheriff balks at uncertainty ("a man would have to put his soul at hazard") and is consequently left impotent from the standpoint of agency, and this inefficacy is at the heart of the movie as a whole. At the risk of overreaching, I'm additionally going to say that Moss stumbling across the money, when he wounds the antelope and tracks it across the prairie only to spot a limping black dog from the botched drug deal, is something like an unconscious bargain with primal violence. I don't think it's just an irrelevant coincidence within the plot that Moss is hunting when he comes across the scene. Moss' violence is an uncertain one, in contrast to Chigurh's.

Chigurh is methodical and dispassionate in his killing. He uses a device used to kill cattle and determines his victims based on "principle." Chigurh represents a ruthless determinism of basic cause and effect, where there is only a single "tool" for every "job." From Chigurh's perspective, pursuing Moss will lead to a clear and final result: Moss' death. From Moss' perspective, the conflict is uncertain and strange. The tragic aspect of Moss' death is that it is largely a victory for fatalism (although, significantly, Chigurh was not his killer). For Chigurh, the coin toss is the only admissible chance within his world, a pseudo-chance, but the "best [he] can do." Chigurh wants to believe that his own actions are just as perfunctory and unthinking as the coin being carried along in his pocket, but receives a shock at the ending of the movie, visibly uncomfortable over Moss' wife insisting that he does not have to kill her, that he in fact has a choice. Of course, Chigurh kills her (this isn't ambiguous) and seemingly thereby affirms the truth of his own worldview, until a random car accident injures him.

The sheriff is the most ambiguous of the three. First, he is notably unable to save Moss and this moral failure is most emphasized in his chat with his buddy after leaving the morgue. The two cops bemoan how the world is leaving them behind and collapsing into chaos and the dialogue ends with the other cop (i.e. not Tommy Lee Jones) asking how to defend against someone who walks into the same crime scene twice, a question which would seem to have a pretty easy answer. The explanation of the two dreams at the very finale of the movie isn't all that difficult: For the first, Jones' character feels like a rudderless disappointment to his father. The second is an image of hope and brightness in the dark, which is recognized as possibly being a complete illusion with the final line of the movie: "Then I woke up." What's more difficult is his visit with Ellis (his uncle?) who points out that inexplicable violence has always been a part of the profession and of the world in general (or at least since 1909). This shows the sheriff's decision to retire for what it is, a moral cowardice in the face of uncertainty. What's more difficult is the other contortions in Ellis' little talk: he affirms that the sheriff can't stop what's coming and that to think differently would be vanity and mentions never asking to be a deputy. This could be just as simple as telling Jones to buck up and accept the overwhelming odds without resigning, but I can't help but think it's more complicated. Namely, these statements apparently reinforce the sheriff's impression of his lack of agency, which is not a plus.

There are other things about the movie worth talking about in more depth, like the humorous aspects (Chigurh's standoff with the convenience store owner & the significance of being a 'Nam vet come to mind) and the shots of the wide, barren Texas landscape--harsh and serving to dwarf the people that nonetheless belong to it and are at home in it. But I'm out for now.