The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Mark T. Conard

picks up a pistol from the car seat, slows down, then, as he drives by, takes a shot at the bird. What is this about? On one level, it may be a foreshadowing: Chigurh, bird of prey to birds of prey, will ultimately miss his target, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin). However, on a deeper level, the scene connects with other Coen brothers films.

      In the movie Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967) the über-boss, Boss Godfrey (Morgan Woodward) (with an ominously theocratic name), who oversees the chain gang working the Florida state back roads, is a mirror sunglasses–wearing, all but silent figure of ominous justice. There is a scene in the film when Boss Godfrey, standing in the middle of the road, raises the cane he uses over his head. One of the chain gang workers, Rabbitt (Marc Cavell), immediately runs over to the truck, grabs a rifle off a rack in the back window, hurries back, and hands it to Boss Godfrey. At first you think, “That's a pretty risky move, entrusting his rifle to one of these hardened criminals,” but then you see Boss Godfrey take the bolt for the gun from his vest pocket. He slides the bolt home, raises the gun, and shoots a hawk flying just overhead. The scene begins with shots establishing a relationship between the chain gang workers and Boss Godfrey. One of the workers, Tattoo (Warren Finnerty), says, “Don't he ever talk?” After Boss Godfrey shoots the bird, Luke (Paul Newman) replies, “I believe he just said something.” I take this scene to indicate how brutally and arbitrarily violent this man can be and that what he is saying when he shoots the bird is that he is the bird of prey to birds of prey. Just establishing the pecking order, as it were, so the members of the chain gang can see.

      This figure of the lawman who is really beyond the law, beyond, even, as Nietzsche says, good and evil altogether, is picked up by the Coen brothers in O Brother, Where Art Thou? in the character of Sheriff Cooley (Daniel von Bargen). Sheriff Cooley wears mirror sunglasses just like Boss Godfrey in Cool Hand Luke, with the similar cinematic effect of showing reflections of the world in the glasses but never showing Boss Godfrey's, or Sheriff Cooley's, eyes. Sheriff Cooley is as relentless in his pursuit of the escaped chain gang convict, Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), as Boss Godfrey is of Cool Hand Luke. Sheriff Cooley seems to be a representative of the law, but when it comes right down to it, when the law pardons Ulysses and his friends, Sheriff Cooley remains implacable in his pursuit of his own conception of justice. When Sheriff Cooley is about to string up Ulysses and his friends, even though they had been pardoned by the governor, Ulysses pleads, “It ain't the law!” To which Sheriff Cooley replies, “The law. Well the law is a human institution.”

      In O Brother, Where Art Thou? Sheriff Cooley is a direct lifting from, or a direct reference to, Cool Hand Luke. I would not be surprised if Sheriff “Cooley” was not an intentional reference to the title of the earlier movie. Anton Chigurh's arbitrary and violent shooting of the hawk (the bird of prey to birds of prey) on the bridge connects him to Boss Godfrey directly and to Sheriff Cooley, indirectly. To psychologize for just a moment, it seems clear that Cool Hand Luke made a powerful impression on the Coen brothers when they first saw it. What seems to have especially impressed them is the figure of a putative lawman who is motivated by an apparent concept of justice that has nothing human in it. This figure is not always a lawman but has its counterpart in the Coen brothers’ Fargo, O Brother, Where Art Thou? and No Country for Old Men. There is a thin thread of allusion that connects these four films that is quite obvious once you see it but is invisible before you see it. Once you see it, this scene becomes richly allusive and deepens in meaning. This is why one frequently has the sense after watching a Coen brothers movie that there was more going on than one quite got. One has that sense because there is more going on than anyone ever gets. The more I see in No Country for Old Men, the more I am convinced that there is much more that I am not seeing. This is a very important realization to have in order to begin to really get what is going on in a Coen brothers film. In this sense, their films are like the world: there is always more to understand; there is always more to get. The goal, then, is, in the words of Henry James, to “try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”¹ That is, perhaps, an unachievable goal, in life or in art, but it is that to which we should aspire, and certainly, the Coen brothers’ movies richly reward the attempt to find more in them.

      Westerns and Greek Tragedies

      The stories that the Coen brothers are interested in telling all seem to be very American stories. Their approach of choice is the genre of film. Their favorite film genre is very American, a genre the French call film noir, but No Country for Old Men is of another classic American genre, the western. Genre is an interesting way to try to say something about something because, as Jacques Derrida has made explicit, the “law of the law of genre” is that every new member of a genre set will deviate from and violate the apparent established principles of that genre. This is how Derrida describes the “law of the law of genre”: “It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set.”² This description of each new member of a genre set sounds to me a lot like what it means to be a (new) member of the set of Americans. Just as each new Coen film that has genre elements adds to and transforms the genre it participates in, so too, each new American adds to and transforms what it means to be an American.

      No Country for Old Men, then, is and is not a classic western. It takes place in the West and its main protagonists are what you might call westerners. On the other hand, the plot revolves around a drug deal that has gone bad; it involves four-wheel-drive vehicles, semiautomatic weapons, and executives in high-rise buildings, none of which would seem to belong in a western. There is a beautiful moment when Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his sidekick, Deputy Wendell, are riding along, following a trail, and Deputy Wendell remarks on the tracks they are following in a way that recalls for me a moment in John Ford's great classic (and revisionist) western, The Searchers (1956), when Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) are following some tracks that will be similarly fateful for everyone involved. It is an interesting connection (I won't claim it is a reference) because in The Searchers, Ethan says, “We'll find ’em. Just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth”—and they do. They find ’em, sure enough; but in an odd, somewhat inexplicable twist, there is no final confrontation between Ethan and Scar (Henry Brandon), the hated Comanche chief he has been seeking for seven years. Instead, it is Martin who kills Scar, and he appears to have done it while Scar was asleep in his tepee. Sheriff Bell is pretty dogged for a while, but he will give up the search altogether before he finds his adversary, Anton Chigurh.

      Anton Chigurh might as well be Melville's Moby Dick for all of the human compassion, or even human motivation, that can be found in him. It makes as little sense to speak of him as evil as it does to say that raw nature, a blizzard or a flood, is evil. He has principles, the equivalent in a man to the laws of nature. Given his principles, he does not act irrationally or from passion; he is more of an inexorable force. He is not a rampaging killer on the loose; he has been summoned by a human will, a human desire, to achieve a desired end. He appears only because he was summoned. The recognizable and clear evil lies with the one (or those, since there may be others involved; the film is not explicit on this point) who summoned him. He was summoned because of greed, lust for power, an indifference to the suffering of others, and personal gratification. He who summoned him will learn, too late, that, like the sorcerer's apprentice, he has summoned a power that he cannot control, that it was pure hubris to think that he could control it.

      That evil man is of little interest to either Cormac McCarthy, the author of the novel, No Country for Old Men, or to Joel and Ethan Coen, the makers of the movie.³ What is of interest to McCarthy and the Coens is rather what happens when a good, but flawed, man encounters this force of nature in human guise. In this sense, No Country for Old Men recapitulates the patterns of ancient Greek tragedy. As in ancient Greek tragedy, a good but flawed man will become enmeshed in events that will prove to be his ruin. It will be what is good in him as much as what is flawed that will engage him in these events, and his ruin will be complete. Oedipus is a kind of paradigm of the way the ancient tragedies begin and end. It is because Oedipus is so smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate that he ascends to the throne of Thebes and rules as