Dread Simple

I titled this post before I wrote it. That's what I get: now I can't think what to write. The Coens made another movie, Blood Simple; that's where I got the idea. I used the word "dread" to describe the effect the violence of the single-minded killer, Chigurh, had on me, when first I watched No Country for Old Men. I often wonder how I made it through this movie once, but, mercifully, the killing scenes don't haunt me.
That's because the Coens didn't dwell on them. Eureka! The violence, in the end, is not the point. Once we're subjected to a taste of it in the opening scenes, is largely assumed. Implied. Horrific, and yet not splattered before us. This leaves the viewer to dwell on the desert, instead.
So here I am, sitting down to have my final say on this Coen movie, and suddenly I'm at a loss. (Gess and I have agreed: it's five blog posts per film. Then we move on to another one.) What this is, is reluctance to leave the theater! And why should this surprise me?!--I, who've watched this movie, as I've said, on an excess of occasions.
McCarthy's prose suits the landscape; the landscape suits the tale; the Coens kept that spareness going. Here are some examples where characters drop just a few syllables around a reaction, or an emotion: simple. Chilling.
Chigurh to Man from Dallas: "Could you step out of the car, please? I need you to step out of the car."
Wendell to Bell: "Aww! They even shot the dog!"
Dying Mexican drug runner to Llewellyn: "Cierra la puerta! Hay lobos!"
But something gets through the violence. Sheriff Bell, the Force for Good, says to Molly, his secretary: "What's that Torbert says about truth and justice?"
    Molly: "We dedicate ourselves daily anew. Somethin like that."
    Bell: "I think I'm gonna commence sayin it twice daily.
    It might come to three times, 'fore it's over."

...
But, of course, my favorite understatement is the final scene, where Bell, now retired from the police force, is describing a dream he just had. His wife listens, indulgently, wryly (wry, because they have this joke about his being retired, having time to dream, and she has to go to work, and he's detaining her to tell her about his dream). Bell has been struggling with being defeated by whatever this great evil is that has overwhelmed his county, his state, the world. He was forced to retire, over this Chigurh business, over this string of crimes that he could not stop. There are a number of soliloquies in the book--and, in the book, all soliloquies belong to Bell--where he muses on the drug trade, how come it was able to take such hold, and so on. The Coens analyzed all these, and sprinkled pithy bits in scenes, maintaining McCarthy's focus.
Here's the dream. It's about Bell's father, who died when he was twenty years younger than Bell is now:
"It was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up."
The book ends right here. So does the movie. I know exactly what I make of it, but I'll let you decide for yourself. It makes me take heart, somehow.