Matt Damon recently made waves in the film industry by stating on The Joe Rogan Experience that Netflix wants their movies to restate the ‘plot three or four times in the dialogue’ because viewers are on ‘their phones while they’re watching’. It’s no secret fast content is winning the race with short-form content becoming a steady flow of entertainment for millions, and people are making millions off of entertainment.

“No Country for Old Men” is a Coen brothers film, and it is unique in ways that contrast greatly with current media, yet it is effortlessly captivating to this day despite its release being in 2007. The themes of the film are layered deep within its sparse dialogue, and it’s criticized for its bleak and nihilistic tone. Everyone has a different experience watching it, which speaks to its creative choices. But if there’s anything that’s clear about the film, it’s that it deals with human instincts, and the churning, natural forces of change.

THE RULE OF MAN [I must fight nature]:

Llewelyn (Josh Brolin), put most simply, is the protagonist. First and foremost, he presents us with recognizable and admirable traits. He is loyal to his wife, personable, and partial to simplistic reasoning. In many ways, he reacts to situations like the audience wishes they could. He is easy to understand, and that’s what allows the audience to place themselves in his shoes. Eventually, he stumbles upon a cartel deal gone wrong, bodies strewn about, and a briefcase loaded with one million dollars in cash.

This presents viewers and Llewelyn with a moral quandary: take the briefcase and lay low, or leave the situation as it was found. Llewelyn takes the most likely approach, and takes the money.

In his surveying of the scene, he finds a dying man, begging him for a drink of water. Llewelyn contradicts the more inconsiderate instinct and comes back late at night with a jug of water. He is inevitably punished for this, being chased out of the scene by the cartel and is almost killed.

By turning selfishness into selflessness, he still ended up suffering repercussions which he most likely could have avoided if going for the selfish option. That is something that ends up happening near the film’s conclusion. Llewelyn is expected to have a big standoff with Anton, the “villain” of the film, and ends up dying to a bunch of cartel members before it even happens. He tries to fight the happenings of complete chance, and pays the price for it.

If Llewelyn is the tragic hero of the story, yet he dies struggling against the laws of the world, one would think what would happen if one was to join the world.


THE RULE OF WORLD [I must join nature]:

Anton Chigurh, portrayed by Javier Bardem, is a character that is detached from everything around him and who has a strange obsession with the rules everyone follows. While he may be one of the most realistic depictions of a sociopath according to a group of psychiatrists in a study of over 400 movies, he is by no means an idiot. He is, in the words of the hitman hired to kill him, a man that follows principles that “transcend money or drugs or anything like that…” One of the most terrifying things about Anton is the fact that he will always make his way to his victim, and that there is no reasoning once he gets to them. He is mechanical and flawless in almost every way. He shows the audience that he is smart, without explicitly stating it.

There is no fluke or trick to escape his methods. He is chaotic, yet cunning and complex.

In one of the most acclaimed scenes, Anton presses a man at a gas station to call a coin flip, betting on his own life. The shop owner is placed into an objective, unbiased, and uncaring gauntlet, but to Anton it is no different than the life anyone could live. When the shop owner mentions how he married into his business, Anton is practically disgusted, because to him it shows how the man simply got lucky in life without truly experiencing its cruelty firsthand. That luck is the same thing that pushes him closer and closer to Llewelyn.

When the world takes a life, it is sudden, cruel and harsh. Or, as Anton would put it, fair.

If someone were to be killed in an accident, it’s not the world choosing who lives and dies. It’s simply chance, like in a coin flip. To Anton, this fact is ineffable, and it is where he gets his motivation. Anton is an agent of everything around him, which is perhaps why he holds disdain for the things we see as humane, such as love for family or friends. But in doing so, Anton goes against the things he stands for; or rather lack of. He is pretending to be a slave to chance while simultaneously enacting rigid control over his every action.

By using freedom as his guideline, he is still creating a guideline. By recognizing that the world is cruel and unforgiving, he became cruel and unforgiving. So who’s the hero if the hero is dead?

THE RULE OF SELF [I must run from nature]:

The story of “No Country For Old Men” isn’t an objective story. It is narrated by Sheriff Bell, an old officer who simply wants to be the one to defeat the monster that Anton is. He holds himself up to very high standards initially, to the point where he believes if something cannot be fixed by him and him alone, he should simply throw in the towel.

That is something he actually does in the film as he follows the trail the two men have been leaving to Llewelyn’s murder scene. He hesitates to open the motel door, and we see Anton hiding behind it. In a moment of complete chance, he opens the door and peers inside, and his choice to simply leave is what saves him.

Anton, within the story that Sheriff Bell creates, is a personification of the world he has grown up in—cruel and unforgiving. He believes it is his job to go forth and defeat that force of nature, and when he finally confronts it, it isn’t there.

He does, after this confrontation, throw in the towel and retire. He goes and talks with an old friend, named Cousin Ellis. He says, “You can’t stop what’s comin’. It ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.” Which is a perfect representation of how the audience perceives the film. Many would like to imagine themselves as the heroes, taking on the wrongs of the world and righting them. But that just isn’t a burden we can carry by ourselves, and that’s where disappointment plays into the film.

The film is still much like a Coen Brothers film in the way that it is realistically sad. Their movie “Fargo” contrasts the polite environment of Minnesota with an incompetent crime that ends up getting several people killed. But for a change, the conclusion of this film takes a more meditative and bittersweet turn. Former Sheriff Bell tells his wife about two dreams he had about his father.

In the first, Bell meets his father in some nondescript town, in which his father gives him money. Bell thinks he lost it. This is a great way of separating Bell from the craze of money and wealth the film is centered on. In the second, Bell recalls a snowy night, in a far away time. He imagines himself riding on horseback through the night, and his father slowly passes him, wrapped up in a blanket, carrying a small firelight within a horn. Bell thinks it was good that he was passing, as if he was setting a fire up further along the trail.

This proves that while the audience can think of a forgotten paradise, ‘a country for old men,’ there is no such thing. There can always be good within the midst of evil. The reason we all think things were better in the past, and the reason these glasses of nostalgia blind people so well, is because of the people they’ve seen molded by those times. It’s easy for the audience to see people hardened by the test of time and think their travesties are no different from what they experience now.

The truth is that in many ways, happiness is forged from strife. Good can be found in terrible people, and even the best of people can do the worst things. This is an age where perfection is pursued in relentless strides, with the development of perfect algorithms that understand the consumer’s wants and needs, and perfect intelligences that outsource thinking. Bell’s nostalgia mirrors another more cultural nostalgia for a time when the audience were people, not distracted price points. Matt Damon’s observation highlights a world where we want the rules of the film to be as rigid and predictable as Anton’s coin flip, good or bad. But the brilliance of this film is in its refusal to be content. It is an experience that demands the one thing fast media hates, the ability to sit within the disappointment and get something from it.

The truth is many still have trouble seeing that good exists not simply to enact change, but to do so in spite of evil. The world is cruel and unforgiving, but that fire passed on through generation to generation has never been extinguished. Everyone will eventually have to pass on that spark in their time, too. In order to understand the symbolism hidden within “No Country For Old Men,” the audience needs to pass the cruelty of nature and their own disappointment, in order to bring their own spark forth.