No Country for Anyone

I had been expecting Rififi, but apparently with Dassin recently passing away, everyone with a netflix account has decided now is the time to become admirers of French noir. I shouldn’t have let it bump down my queue so easily… who knows what a ‘long wait’ really means.

Instead, I sat down last night to watch No Country for Old Men, and I’m still watching it because there are glares from that movie that have not left me yet. I haven’t read this McCarthy novel yet, which will only allow me an indirect glance at his vision, but the Coen brothers really have to be commended for taking McCarthy’s prose, known to be cinematic but unfilmable, and giving it a just treatment on screen.

But it just adds more fuel to the fire for the question that me and my fellow McCarthyite coworker have spent odd lunches debating: Is McCarthy a nihilist?

In some ways, No Country for Old Men recreates the classic Leone trio of the good, the bad, and the ugly–that is to say, we have a good guy, a bad guy, and, yes, people in the middle. What makes these characters who they are? What are their motivations? It’s quite unclear for the good and the bad, while the motivation of the middle ground pushes the plot forward.

The unstoppable menace of Chigurh suggests an unimpeded march of evil, in line with other McCarthy monsters like The Judge from Blood Meridian. Their allegiance to nothing, lives ultimately surrendered entirely to a fate they are certain is beyond them, is the most chilling aspect of their characters. It recalls Iago at the end of Othello, demanding that nothing be demanded of him, for he has nothing to say. There is cruel calculation behind all of them and, it might be noted, in both of McCarthy’s books and in Shakespeare’s play, these characters are among the only characters still alive.

Bell, on the other hand, is an intelligent man who works for a good cause, but what do either of them really want in the end? I don’t want to give away any plot, but in some senses, the meaning seems to be, “Good and evil exist, but good is tired.” But, at what point might we say that survival itself is the highest good can attain to? And, if that’s the case, what should anyone bother to believe in?

The characters who suffer the most are in the gray. Leone, probably with tongue firmly wedged in cheek, calls them the ugly. They undoubtedly have their own codes, their own rationales, and they obviously have motivation, and they borrow from this pure evil and pure good freely where and when convenient to those aforementioned belief systems. Whether this weaved fabric is weaker than an iron mold is a theme tested in all great art and literature. Often, the good seem to suffer with the ugly, for no other reason than their association with them.

McCarthy’s characters are all challenges to any rigid belief system at all, yet anyone who has read his words, especially his paintbrush precision description of landscapes and the small phenomenons of nature, would find it difficult, I think, to label his theme outright nihilism. It’s more likely summed up in a short blurt that would engender McCarthy to minds like Jonathan Swift, skeptical of our reasoning. Belief in anything, much like meaning, is a magic trick of words and circumstance:

Creation is good. Humanity makes evil.