and evil do not befall men without reason. Heaven sends them happiness or misery according to their conduct.
-Confucius
Evil is good or truth misplaced
When MacBeth, Hamlet and other Shakespearean tragedies are presented to African tribes, the locals nod their heads in recognition. They relate in turn their own epics of “malfeasance” (as Frances Mcdormand’s Marge Gunderson characterizes criminal activity in “Fargo”).
Audiences have always been riveted by incidents of bad/evil behavior. Those of us with a spiritual practice often feel uncomfortable by our own fascination with, well…, brutality. We wonder what it says about us? Is it evidence of our fundamentally base and uncivilized nature? Are we not better off avoiding these kinds of stimuli so as to better cultivate the higher ideals represented by the spiritual heroes we idealize? “The Passion of the Christ” aside, (the most radical horror film of all time), are we not better off nourishing ourselves with the likes of “Gandhi”, “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”, “Siddhartha” and “Kundun”?
Much to the chagrin of those who believe that the art of cinema should focus on portrayals of peace and love, the New York Film Critics Circle has just selected the current Coen Brothers offering as its best picture. In New York, the Academy award winning brothers also triumph for best adapted screenplay from the Cormac McCarthy novel. Moreover, the Hannibal Lecter-like sociopath (Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh) walks away with the best supporting actor award. “No Country for Old Men” has already made its way to the top of the Golden Globes list, is a winner at a variety of other film festivals, and top Oscar nods are assured in February.
Returning to last year’s violent Academy winner “The Departed”, (and noting that “The Godfather” now occupies the top spot on most reviewer’s list of all time greats - having unseated Citizen Kane and Casablanca), there is little doubt that aggression and bloodshed play a compelling part in our stories and the movies that bring them to life. And bring them to death.
In effect, these become our meditations on good and evil, and all of the complexities that lie within. We are told by the wisdom of the ages that we are capable of the best and the worst of the world, since it is all housed within our being. Our collective unconscious - as well as our consciousness - understands what Krishna and Yoda always already know. There is no more doubt of the centrality of the dark side than there is of the Force itself.
The interaction of these forces as played out by the struggles of men and women with themselves and others is what constitutes the “action” movie. In the audience we find ourselves experiencing intensity as we’re moved by the energies on the screen that activates us somatically. This is our communion, our service, as we break popcorn with one another. We’re excited, confused, elated, inspired and afraid, and there is usually a life threatening danger lurking as the action unfolds. This is exactly what the hero is forced to confront and it’s never cute.
There are two hero roles in “No Country”. The first we encounter as the voice-over when the film opens with the camera panning slowly over a desolate southwestern desert. We listen to who we later learn is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). He’s reflecting on the sorry state of things in the USA border territories in 1980. He’s harkening back to earlier times of his father, and before. Times when many of the sheriffs never wore guns at all. In those days they relied more on skillful means to exercise and enforce the law. But things have changed. Now he can’t understand how a 14 year old that he recently had to escort to the electric chair had no hint of remorse for killing a young girl. He said he did it so he could see what it felt like to watch somebody die.
The Boomer generation is reminded of the Johnny Cash line from “Folsom Prison Blues”: “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. Now I’m stuck in Folsom Prison. I hang my head and cry”. There’s also the lesser known ballad from Sting titled “I Hung my Head”:
Early one morning with time to kill
I borrowed Jeb's rifle and sat on the hill
I saw a lone rider crossing the plain
I drew a bead on him to practice my aim.
… the rider was dead
I hung my head.
In these songs the killers become haunted with regret and remorse. There’s no threat of any head hanging intruding into the dark mind of Anton Chigurh.
As villain’s go, Chigurh is particularly chilling. His “worst in show” haircut becomes one of his hallmarks that accompany his emotionally constrained sociopathic mannerisms. His outer appearance resembles the Malcolm McDowell visage of crazy from “A Clockwork Orange”, but his comportment is more Dr Lecter. It’s a signature and unmistakable creepiness all his own. Anton’s never been complicated by notions of warmth or remorse, and his moral line of development lays south of any complications of right and wrong. Early in the film we witness him dispassionately dispatching of a couple of unfortunates in sequential scenes. They meet him - and their respective ends - in equally different and disturbing ways. In one there is Chigurh’s compressed air cattle gun: his weapon of choice. That’s for when he’s not getting down and dirty in hand to hand combat. Be very afraid of this man. And now he’s on a mission. Things have gone sideways. He’s upset and looking for his money.
Chigurh is a classic illustration of the text-book psychopathic killer. He looks at other people as if they were aliens to be studied quizzically. He plays God in their world by inviting them into ritualistic games of chance, where a coin toss called wrong will cost them their life. He makes meaning through an array of lenses that always seem to end up getting blood on them. There’s no doubt about God’s having a sick sense of humor here.
A bit later on we hear Bell’s assessment of that mindset and its culture. “It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin “sir’ and “ma’am” the end is pretty much in sight.” This inquiry is the main thrust of the story. How have things regressed away from simple politeness, civic-mindedness and the other values that good neighbors and citizens live well by? In deconstructing the limiting constraints of traditional society, we realize our broad-axe has also cut out much of the social glue that holds “the good” together for people who need those supports the most.
As a modern day cowboy, Llewelyn Moss is played to perfection by Josh Brolin. He works as a welder and lives in a trailer with his wife Carla Jean. She works at Walmart, and is played by Kelly MacDonald (who shone as the fascinating female hero in the wonderful “Girl in the Café”). You get the idea that Moss was a respected soldier you didn’t mess with in Vietnam. An aspect of his goodness plays out when we see his conscience getting the best of him when he returns to a shootout scene later on to aid a struggling survivor. He knows the risk he is taking as he tells Carla Jean that he’s “fixin to do something dumber than hell”. But hey, he’s a good man, and also a bad ass man. He just wasn’t figuring on the likes of Anton Chigurh who make the Viet Cong look like good ‘ol boys. Big mistake.
We recently saw Brolin in “American Gangster” playing another excellent tough guy role. (He’s also gracing the cover of the Jan 08 GQ issue, appropriately titled “Return of the Tough Guy”). Like many Viet vets, Moss is taciturn and enigmatic. But unlike his role in Gangster, here he also exhibits a dry sense of humor along with a faintly tender side that peeks through. These are necessary elements for his role. He also enjoys subtly teasing his pure and simple wife in sweet ways, making Moss easy to warm to. Carla Jean becomes increasingly concerned as she finds out more about what Llewelyn’s been up to. As the other main hero in the film, Moss is soon finding himself on Chigurh’s bad side, and believes the money that can change the situation for he and Carla Jean is worth fighting and running for. You can feel that he’s confident he’ll be able to manage whoever’s after him.
Meanwhile, back at the beginning of the plot, while Bell’s voice-over fades we find Moss hunting for pronghorn in the desert. He wounds one, and while following the traces he intersects with a heavier trail of blood that we soon learn belongs to a large, limping pit-bull. This leads Moss to a scene straight out of Peckinpah’s “Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia”. A drug deal gone wrong has left several men and a couple of attack dogs strewn around a few abandoned vehicles in the middle of nowhere. Now there are only flies buzzing hungrily in the baking sun and caking blood. The Coen bros allow you to almost smell the mayhem.
Carefully surveying the scene, Moss discovers and leaves alone a large stash of heroin in the back of the pickup where one Mexican is still holding narrowly to life in the cabin. Not much he can do for him he reckons. Moss follows his instincts. He asks where the “last man standing” is to no response. We realize he believes that there may have been someone who walked away on the money side of this blood-bath. Moss heads down the dirt road and sure enough, in the distance, he eventually catches sight of someone on the ridge through his binoculars. Outlined on the horizon is a very still silhouette sitting under the shade of a lone tree. The man is facing the other direction while Moss sits patiently and waits. After a couple of hours without movement Llewelyn slowly moves closer and discovers that the man has just bled to death from the wound he sustained at the shootout. And the burden he’s been carrying contains two million dollars.
What is one to do? Moss is comfortable in knowing that he’s not responsible for this man’s death. Now the money is there all by itself and those bad men don’t seem like they’ll be needing it any more. Hmmm… Llewelyn takes the cash and bolts. Wouldn’t you? Welcome to the moral dilemma we find ourselves experiencing as we walk a mile in Moss’s craggy cowboy boots.
As with other Coen brother’s movies (Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, Fargo), trouble begins with what seems to be a relatively simple opportunity. Yet soon and sure enough, unintended consequences begin to unfold, disrupting the simplicity as things begin to take unfortunate turns. It’s at these points that you wonder about the ethically gray territory you’re now tip-toeing through. Similarly, Sam Raimi’s “A Simple Plan” finds Billy Bob Thornton (playing a clinically simple man) happening upon this same kind (wrong kind) of money in a crashed airplane while walking with his friend and brother in the woods. We can hear the universal refrain: “Gee, here’s this big bag of money that clearly belonged to what looks like some bad guys. Seems they fell on some bad times and here they are now dead. No sense in us just letting this money go to waste; either out here or in some government holding tank. Who’s to know? What’s the harm?”
It’s hard to condemn someone so tempted by this seeming serendipity solving a list of nagging financial problems? Doesn’t seem like such a bad idea at the time. But then, something that seems too good to be true usually is. The number one rule in these situations, particularly as the Coen brothers frame them, is that there are no clean getaways.
By the time we leave the several scenes surrounding the bloodbath, Chigurh has already killed several men, including a couple of his partners. There is one chase scene at the end of this first act in which Moss is pursued by a pit bull down a river in early dawn that is electrifying.
When Sherriff Bell and his deputy survey this scene, the deputy remarks to his boss, shaking his head, “it’s a mess ain’t sheriff”. Bell’s droll wit roles out like greasy Texas chicken, “if it ain’t, it’ll do till the mess gets here”.
In his understated “aw shucks” manner, Bell is nonetheless aghast by this insane world of drug-crime and other senseless acts of violence. And they seem to be moving ever closer his way. He’s dismayed but not daunted, while animated by an encoded value system that holds sacrificing oneself for the sake of the public good as what’s most important in life.
I won’t share any more about the plot, other than mentioning that there is a hotel scene in El Paso that’s reminiscent of another El Paso hotel confrontation of the same sort. Laughlin’s Hotel was where Sam Peckinpah directed Steve McQueen in his gunfight against a ring of bad guys who are after his bag of stolen money in “The Getaway”. I have to wonder whether the Coen brothers didn’t sample from that well, and if so: well sampled! This time, on either sides of a door in a dark El Paso hotel, Moss and Chigurh bring the audience together in an extended silent meditation of suspense. They’re watching their breath, and listening very closely. Feverishly feeling foreboding.
This latest effort is the best Coen Brothers work to date. They’re on their game, applying ever-fresh originality to the action movie/hero’ journey as it hits all the right discordant notes. You’re drawn into experiencing a flowing and presenced state, surfing the excitement and the terror, the tenderness and the pain. It’s the heart of the American dream and its discontents. They create a meditation of Shiva and Kali for our collective fantasy with the quick easy fix. It’s disturbing dharma, but that’s what we’re moved by.
Everything comes together and works well in this movie. Jones, Brolin, Bardem and MacDonald all offer Oscar worthy performances. Woody Harrelson is well chosen to animate his sly, self-satisfied quirkiness as bounty hunter and Vietnam vet Carson Wells. The soundtrack is rich yet subtle and a perfect complement to the powerful lighting and shadow dance that is masterfully edited by the brothers.
Amongst other things, the film is contemplation on that most Integral of principles: the Shadow. In “No Country” we’re captivated by its gravity and its effect. Since Iraq there have been many conversations around American and European dinner tables around the nature of evil. About who is evil and why. Maybe it’s the terrorists, or maybe its George Bush and the Americans who are evil? However we judge these matters, what the film affirms is that there are indeed shadow elements that we do well to carefully regard. And not only to regard, but to strive to better integrate these energies into the means with which we understand and operate on our world.
Growth and development, in the service of a transpersonal transformation invites us to see all early meaning-making systems clearly. I believe this is one reason we feel informed and fascinated by these moving picture meditations on the dark side of the force. The matrix takes many forms, and there is liberation in engaging its contours through the engagement of the good and evil action film. The Coen brothers’ dojo is a powerful learning environment, and their practice creates a worthy challenge.
