No Country for Old Men: The Nature of Change
Meet Anton Chigurh. Cinema’s greatest villain.
“What's the most you've ever lost on a coin toss?”
Javier Bardem delivers a profound, complex, and chilling performance. Ours is a villain who—quite literally—views human life as no more significant than cattle. He is essentially unstoppable; knowing what he is doing, where he is going, and how circumstances will transpire. He is a monster, somehow operating on what he believes is a code of ethics.
It is early in the film when the viewer realizes there is a very real chance Anton is not going to be stopped.
No Country for Old Men’s message is often misunderstood by the casual viewer.
A deeper viewing peels back the layers.
Change.
Change—and the inevitability of change—is the theme of this movie.
The story starts as a classic Western, cloaked in every trope of the genre. Hero. Villain. Good. Evil. Justice. Revenge. High stakes. All of it.
We are broken from this spell in the second act of the film, when our protagonist is killed. This is a paradigm-shattering turn of events. In a classic Western, the showdown would be at the end of the movie; act three. Here, it is at the end of the second act.
Above: Llewelyn Moss, our main character and protagonist, dies off-screen at the end of act two. In a traditional Western the protagonist’s showdown is at the end, the hero wins, and we witness the battle—none of which occur here. No Country shatters the traditional paradigm.
In a classic Western, the showdown would only include the hero and villain. Here, the hero is killed by peripheral characters—not the antagonist. In a classic Western, the showdown is the penultimate reward before the standard thrill of good triumphing over evil. Llewelyn is killed off screen; we, as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), arrive in the aftermath.
Every genre trope of the Western story is established. Every genre trope of the Western story is broken.
The thesis of the film: change is inevitable. Circumstances evolve.
That the molds once based in reality are no longer. The traditional Western story was once relevant, and accurate. That mold is futile in the world we live in today. And the new mold, in the world of No Country for Old Men, is ugly, harsh, evil; unfathomable. Human nature void of humanity.
No Country for Old Men is a Western for the times we now live in.
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The nature of change is this.
With or without you, it will march forward. It will never cease. And the rate of change is greatly accelerating.
Change offers both a challenge and an opportunity.
The challenge—those disconnected from the times will immediately be left behind.
The opportunity—boundless for those incessantly scanning the horizon, constantly course-correcting; relentlessly identifying the opportunities change always creates.
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The ending scene is understood in context once the theme of inevitable change is established. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell speaks of the rich tradition of classic lawmen in earlier times. Working in a world so rational, stable, and predictable some Sheriff’s didn’t even carry guns.
Sheriff Ed recognizes the world is no longer one of logic and order. He understands he can make no sense of it. Feeling outmatched and ineffective, he retires.
His despair is conveyed in the film’s final scene, when describing a dream to his wife. It is of his Father, going ahead of him, blazing a path through challenging—though familiar—territory. To an established place of comfort and familiarity; a rugged trail carved by the lawmen before him.
That path exists no more.
Times have changed. Times will always change.
Far faster now than they ever have in the scope of human history.
The paths of then are no more.
The old molds are left behind. The old molds are broken. You must adapt. You must evolve.
Or you will be left behind with them.
Mark Joseph Huckabee
