The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Mark T. Conard

competent, and passionate that he is able to complete the mysterious task sent him by the Oracle of Delphi and to find the murderer of the previous king of Thebes, King Laius.

      Unfortunately, as it will turn out, it is Oedipus himself who killed the previous king, as predicted by the same Oracle of Delphi long ago. He has also married his mother and fathered his children/siblings. As a consequence, Oedipus's wife/mother commits suicide, he blinds and exiles himself, his incest-produced children will fight and be responsible for each others’ deaths. Llewelyn Moss is similarly smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate. His intelligence and competence lead him to the “last man standing” (as Moss puts it to the man he finds dying in a truck, saying, “there must've been one”) and to the money. His compassion compels him to return to the site of the drug deal gone bad to bring water to the dying man who asked for it. It is not at all clear whether or not Chigurh or the Mexicans would have ever picked up the transponder signals if he had not gone back, but it is certainly clear that once they have found Moss and his truck at the scene, they will be on his trail wherever he goes. A fate similar to Oedipus's disastrous ruin awaits Llewelyn Moss: both he and his young wife will be brutally murdered; all that he has will be lost.

      Power, Hubris, and the Fatal Flaw

      Anton Chigurh is a monster, in the sense that Emerson uses the word in his essay “The American Scholar,” that is, in association with “monitory” and “admonition,” drawing on its Latin derivation meaning a warning or an omen.⁴ The ancient Greek tragedies were meant to serve that same function, that is, warning about especially human temptations that would lead to disaster. Tragedy was considered a source of wisdom as well as of entertainment, and the primary wisdom that the ancient Greek tragedies taught was also written on the wall at the famous and perhaps most holy of Greek temples, the Oracle of Delphi: “Avoid hubris.” Hubris is a difficult word to recover from the Greek, but it means something like arrogant ignorance, thinking that you are better or more powerful than you really are. The Greek gods hated hubris, and one of their primary occupations as gods was punishing humans for their hubris.

      Hubris was such a problem for the Greeks not because they valued timidity or even humility but because they loved power, and they loved powerful, proud people. As Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics, “The man is thought to be proud who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them.” The Greek ideal was to manifest all of your true power, and to be very powerful, without overstepping your own limits, without presuming to have more power than you really have. This is a very difficult ideal to achieve because one does not know what one is capable of until one tries to do things beyond what one has done before. And yet, the Greeks (Aristotle, for one) assumed that one could know what one is capable of and thereby avoid the calamities of hubris. The above quotation from Aristotle concludes, “for he who does so beyond his deserts is a fool, but no virtuous man is foolish or silly.”⁵ This Greek ideal, this wisdom, is, too, exhorted upon the wall at Delphi: “Know thyself.”

      Llewelyn Moss is a man of considerable resources, but his powers have been lying more or less dormant. He has innate powers of intelligence and determination as well as some acquired abilities learned while serving in Vietnam. Virtually all of these powers are banked, the way one banks a fire, because there is no way to exercise them in his day-to-day life. He has a good job as a welder that does not require all of either his intelligence or determination. He has a lovely young wife and a comfortable trailer home but no obvious way of improving his situation beyond this level of comfort. In many ways he seems to be happy and successful, but it is a difficult thing to have powers that you have no opportunities to use. Doing pretty well in America has never been the happiest of options if there is some chance that you could be doing better. Of course, that possibility of doing better becomes real for Llewelyn when he comes upon the briefcase full of cash. He barely seems to hesitate before he decides to go for it.

      A key element of Greek tragedy is the idea of the protagonist's hamartia, the fatal flaw. Hamartia is a term derived from archery and literally means “off the mark,” signifying that one's aim has been slightly off. The protagonist of a classic Greek tragedy must be essentially a good person, a person whose intentions are good but who does not really or fully know himself or herself, and this lack of self-knowledge is mixed with a bit of hubris, which puts off one's aim. This is quite literally suggested of Llewelyn at the beginning of the movie when he is hunting for antelope and ends up shooting one in the hindquarters. In a sense, the entire movie is prefigured in this scene. It is a scene that shows Llewelyn to be highly competent, an expert at hunting: the way he uses his boot for a barrel rest, the way he adjusts the sight for the distance of the shot, his patience in taking the shot, his picking up his shell after he takes the shot are all signs of his expertise. All are signs of his knowledge, his ability, his power, but the scene also shows his ultimate hubris, literally and figuratively. Instead of killing the antelope, he only wounds it, the worst possible outcome for a responsible hunter. He is clearly frustrated and annoyed with himself, and he heads out after the wounded antelope to try to finish what he has started.

      It is a long shot that he thinks he can make. It is not a shot that he will make, but he is just good enough to actually hit the antelope at the distance of almost a mile. All of the elements of the movie are here, Llewelyn's talents as well as his misjudgments, as well as certain implacable facts of nature; distance, heat, the movement of the antelope are the facts of nature that will undo his best intentions. His aim is good but not quite good enough, and the worst possible consequences eventuate because he was willing to try the difficult shot. His experience is a Greek tragedy in miniature.

      Our Place in the Universe

      There is a problem in philosophy that is related to a problem in art and to one in science as well. The problem is, in part, epistemological, that is, it is a problem of knowledge, and it is, in part, a problem of communication. It is the problem of discovering and communicating new knowledge about the world. Take, for example, the phenomenon of gravity. Gravity is invisible. Before Newton, no one had thought of the concept of gravity to explain things as different as a falling apple and the movement of the moon. Of course, the signs of gravity were everywhere, but people did not know how to see them as signs of gravity. Then, once you have the concept of gravity and you see that this explains the movement of the moon, the movement of the planets, and even the movement of the earth, how do you explain it to someone else so that they can understand this new and powerful concept? Well, the way Newton did it was to talk about falling apples.

      A more explicitly philosophical example can be found in the writings of Heraclitus. Heraclitus of Ephesus (585–525 BCE) was one of the more famous of the pre-Socratic philosophers. He was known as “the Dark One” and “the Riddler” because what he had to say about human life and the way he said it were so pessimistic, puzzling, and elusive. He said, for example (and most famously), “One cannot step in the same river twice,” which seems to be factually false and yet strangely, provocatively true.⁶ The structure that Heraclitus developed for conveying his cryptic ideas is based on a model that Hermann Fränkel calls the “geometrical mean,” which has the form A/B = B/C. Using an example from Heraclitus—“Man is stamped infantile by divinity, just as the child is by man”—Fränkel notes that this would have the form divinity/man = man/child.⁷ This is a way of trying to convey some very abstract wisdom about our human position in the universe. What he is trying to convey is the very difficult, nonhuman knowledge that we may not be the ultimate things in the universe, that not everything in the universe is about or for us. This is hard knowledge for us to see because so much of our attention is devoted to getting what we think we want, to finding in the world the things that we need, that it becomes our primary frame of reference: the world as the source of what we need. The world, in short, appears to us to be about us. Heraclitus is trying to convey a wisdom, a knowledge, that recontextualizes our place in the universe for us. He is trying to communicate this to us so that we might understand ourselves differently, and having this knowledge will help us to live better, more satisfyingly, in this world.

      There is a similar structure in the movie, and, I think, a similar wisdom. That is, the scene shift from Anton Chigurh killing the nameless car driver with his cattle stun gun to Llewelyn Moss hunting antelope is bridged with a virtually identical piece of dialogue, first uttered by Anton to the driver