The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Mark T. Conard

Llewelyn to the antelope he has fixed his sight on: “Hold still.”⁸ They are the words of the hunter to his prey. The basic formula seems to be that Anton is to human beings (and to Llewelyn, in particular), as Llewelyn the hunter is to the antelope. Just as the antelope can have little or no understanding of the principles that govern and guide its hunter, Chigurh's human victims can understand about as much of what governs and guides him. It is very hard to understand people who act from motives that are very different from our own. The default position is to label such people evil or morally reprehensible, but that is more or less just a throwing up of one's hands. It is more or less a confession of being confounded. The first step toward wisdom is an acknowledgment that there may be more going on than that of which we are aware. This has always been the central goal of philosophy, to figure out what the more going on might be.

      Rules and Vulnerability

      Anton Chigurh is like a walking abattoir. People are just cattle to him, which makes his weapon of choice especially appropriate. He is like a modern version, one updated for a heavily meat-eating American public, of the traditional figure of Death with his scythe. One of the most profound moments in the movie, or the moment that raises some of the most profound philosophical and, especially, ethical questions, is the moment when Chigurh asks Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), “If the rule you follow brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” This is the great human question, the great philosophical question. It is the question that is central to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, where he frames it in terms of the problem of how to live a life without regret.⁹ It is what lurks under Camus's claim that the only real philosophical question is the question of suicide.¹⁰ That is, is there a rule that we can follow and, in following it, be brought to a place where we can affirm our whole life? Are some rules better than others, and if so, which rules, or, what ultimate rule, is the best? The desideratum is to find a rule that will free us from the fear of death, because, following it, we will feel that we lived our lives in a way that left out nothing important. Wells seems, at the penultimate moment before his death, to regret the rule that had brought him to that place. Llewelyn Moss, with increasing awareness of just where his rule has brought him, clearly has increasing anxiety about the rule he has been following. At the very end of her life, Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald) is forced to evaluate the rule she has followed that has brought her to be sitting in a bedroom across from Anton Chigurh. There is a moment when a shadow seems to pass over her face as she considers it. Even Sheriff Bell, who has some very specific ethical rules he follows, which have worked for him, seems to be undone by the end of the movie.¹¹ It is as though Anton Chigurh comes as a kind of avatar of death, a remnant of the ancient Greek gods, and his function is to undo or to make irrelevant everyone's rules.

      What rule, then, does Chigurh follow? There are two scenes that mirror each other and reveal something important about the rule that Chigurh follows. The first scene is the very powerful and very creepy one in which Chigurh gets annoyed with a friendly question from the proprietor of the gas station (Gene Jones): “Y'all getting any rain up your way?” What follows is a tense exchange that subtly escalates into what is clearly a life or death situation for the proprietor. Chigurh demands that the owner call a coin toss. After some resistance he does call it: “Heads.” Heads it is. Chigurh leaves the coin and walks out. The proprietor gets a reprieve. In a similar scene, with Carla Jean, although we do not see the toss, it is pretty clear that she loses the bet and is killed. (As he leaves her house, Chigurh checks his boot soles for blood, an obvious danger in his line of work.) What is interesting about these two scenes is that in them Chigurh has vaguely human desires. In the first of the scenes, he really wants to kill the gas station proprietor. In the second scene, one feels as though he would really prefer not to kill Carla Jean. In both instances, he subjugates his desires to the flip of a coin, to chance. That is his principle. It is the principle that keeps him from a certain kind of vulnerability. As he tells Carla Jean, in the novel, when she says to him that he does not have to kill her, “You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It does not allow for special cases. A coin toss perhaps.”¹² That is, he recognizes that it is precisely his feelings, his desires, that make him vulnerable. His rule—that chance must trump any desire that he might have—is in the service of maximum invulnerability. I read the sudden and violent crash that occurs right after Chigurh leaves the house where Carla Jean was staying as a sign that there are higher laws yet in the universe than Chigurh's principle. As Chigurh is to Carla Jean, so are the higher laws to Chigurh. What the nature of those higher laws is I am not sure, but Chigurh's principle is no defense against them. Since these laws are higher and counter to Chigurh's principles, there is some reason to hope that they are also more sympathetic to human wishes and desires than Chigurh is, but that is a small hope indeed.

      Apollo and Dionysus: Reason and Passion

      The late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophical movement known as existentialism can be understood, in part, as a reaction against the Enlightenment period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Enlightenment was a period of great confidence in the human ability to use reason to shed light on the ways of nature. It is not that people thought they had all the answers but that they were convinced that all the answers would be forthcoming if methodological reason was applied to any given situation. This confidence applied to social contexts as well as to contexts of nature. The framing of the U.S. Constitution was an Enlightenment-influenced project producing a great Enlightenment document. Science produced technology, and technology created new industries, new factories, and new social structures. These industries and factories and social structures often resulted in new forms of abject poverty, human degradation, and war. The philosophical response to these unforeseen, unintended, but very real consequences of the Enlightenment was to question the very basis of Enlightenment ideals. Philosophers began to consider whether there might not be some fundamentally irrational principle in the world that will always evade rational accounting. Perhaps it is the very reliance on reason, at the expense of emotion and community and art, that is the problem.

      Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), explicitly takes on the conflict between science and art, between reason and passion. Nietzsche saw these late eighteenth-century conflicts as a recapitulation of a similar conflict that occurred in Athens in the fifth century BCE. According to Nietzsche's narrative, the great Greek tragedians Aeschylus and Sophocles were philosophers with a wisdom to teach, and that wisdom had to do with the importance of balancing reason and passion into a perfectly proportioned whole. Reason without passion was empty and meaningless, while passion without reason was chaotic and dangerous. Nietzsche invoked two Greek gods to represent the two sides of the equation: Apollo (for reason) and Dionysus (for passion). The need to balance these two energies within us is what Nietzsche took to be the sublime wisdom conveyed in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles. Greek tragedy, however, became corrupted, according to Nietzsche, by a rather unexpected figure: Socrates. The Socratic demand, according to Nietzsche, was that everything we do be rational. When Socrates questioned people in the marketplace of Athens, his expectation was that the person he questioned should be able to give good reasons for all of his beliefs. If he could not, Socrates implied that he should not believe those things. This spirit of Socratism, as Nietzsche calls it, began to infect Greek tragedy, especially in the plays of Euripides, where the sublime elevations of feeling and passion—in the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles—were reduced to much more ordinary, everyday sorts of scenarios that were well explained by the chorus and ended with the ratification of some rational moral principle.¹³

      For Nietzsche, dry Apollonian reason lacked all power of creativity. The Enlightenment emphasis on reason led to a kind of social sickness, a desiccated preoccupation with order and reason that made human life more or less pointless. His physicianly prescription was for a recovery of some of those lost or suppressed Dionysian energies. The Dionysian is associated with wild nature, which can be as violent as it is reproductively fruitful.

      Wildness is a central tenet of our American identity. The word “wilderness” is from the Anglo-Saxon wildëor, a wild animal or beast, so that “wilderness” means “where the wild things are.”¹⁴ Europe, on the other hand, is associated with civilization. As Roderick Frazier Nash explains in his book Wilderness and the American Mind, “The largest portion of the energy of