Moral Violence?

I said in the last post that I studied this movie. In fact, I couldn't have done a better job of thinking about it, if I'd taken a class in the subject. But that's my point: I didn't take a class. I've never taken a class in cinema, never wanted to.

I watched, noted, read, noted—and all this was so far off my customary moviegoing behavior that I decided what I needed to do was "branch out"—into other similarly violent movies, and into Cormac McCarthy’s other violent books—but I failed, on both counts. I watched the Coens' famous Blood Simple exactly once, and spent a good portion of that viewing, making muffins in the kitchen, away from the blood on the DVD player. I did get all the way through McCarthy’s border trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain), underlining and scribbling as I went, pretty much as I had when reading No Country. Also, I stumbled through The Road, but it was hard to keep the thread of that dark tale, and often, I wanted to quit. In all four of those books, the dark topics overwhelmed the story lines, for me, and I found myself skipping whole scenes in search of a bit of nourishing verbiage about West Texas and Northern Mexico. I’ve not yet found a need to return again and again to any of those books the way I did, to No Country.

The Coens made No Country for Old Men vivid. They brought the violence home, even to people like me, who don’t especially want to watch it, and they demonstrated its point. That’s no mean feat, when half your audience wants to excuse itself forever at the first entrance of the stunbolt gun. I respect the film and trust the filmmakers, because, though they don’t flinch from the grisliness of the tale, neither do they make a fetish of hideous close-ups.

The Coens’ role, here, is even more delicate than McCarthy’s, for, when we read, we set our own boundaries. If we don't like what's happening, we can go get a glass of water. Since we are building the image, we can build at our own pace—in fact, every reader builds a different one! The writer just facilitates the image-building process. Where the writer is triggering images in us, the filmmaker is...picking one for us. As such, the Coens must’ve held their collective breath a lot, walking, as they were, that fine line between ‘ineffective’ and ‘overkill.’ I’m gonna be honest. I think they nailed it. In No Country for Old Men, the violent episodes are unforgettable, and yet they are hedged ’round with real dialogue, real people: small-town West Texans. The painful parts are shocking, indelible, then gone. We have both McCarthy and the Coens to thank, for this restraint.

Gess reminds me that darkness is sometimes a part of the tale, saying, “You don’t set out to write the dark parts of a story. You let it take you where it takes you.”

No Country for Old Men is … quite a ride.