Rurality

If you do a Google search on 'No Country for Old Men, stills', you call up a ream of images, few of which have anything to do with the rural scenery that sticks with me most. What you get, instead of the marvelous series of photos that the Coens open the movie with, is a window on how much the ghoulishness in this film is what has held people's attention. I guess I forget that.

I had to go to YouTube and post the whole first scene (see below). That's sort of cheating, but there it is. 

Did we as modern people dive right into the gore, and miss the transcendental point altogether? It's like riding a rollercoaster, this movie; it's like sticking your finger in a light socket: it just feels so good to be scared. Is that it? If the Coens had decided to clip every murder scene just before it got bloody, it would have made no less an impression on me. I'd've watched the film seven hundred times anyway, starting from the moment when the Tommy Lee Jones character monologizes:

I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old.

Where others were shocked to attention what they might call reality, I went straight for the rurality.

I have allowed the language of the rural people in this film to become mine. I use this, in moments of frustration:

Well, Wendell? With all due respect, that don't make a lot of sense!

Sometimes I just say, “Well, Wendell?!”—like when I lose my keys. I appreciate the gravity—and the reality—of the tale. It's just that I let its spindly, positive message be the one that gets through, again and again, to me.

What's that message? It's that people whom the rest of the world calls simple-minded have nothing to fight true evil with except their simple-mindedness, and they can cope, that way. They can survive small skirmishes. And, when they die, their deaths are not in vain.

What do you suppose would have happened to Beehive Hair Woman at the trailer court, if she’d not planted herself in simple opposition to Chigurh when he demanded to know where Llewelyn worked? (Her husband flushing the toilet off-screen is of course what turned the tide—Chigurh evidently decided that blowing her away was not worth it—but d’you think she’d’ve let him get close enough to put that little thing against her head? I think not.)

                                                                                                              

Chigurh: Where does he work?

BHW: I cant say.

Chigurh (more slowly): Where… does he work?

BHW: Sir, I aint at liberty to give out no information about our residents.

Chigurh: Where does he work?

BHW: Did you not hear me? We cant give out no information.

                                                     

Then the toilet flushes, and just as Chigurh is changing his mind, Beehive Hair Woman makes a tiny, animal move. She throws her shoulder forward, as he’s backing out the door. It’s a “Harrumph!” gesture, relief at the breaking tension mingling with “…and stay out!”

Real.

[N.b. Dialogue punctuated as McCarthy would have—did, in fact.]