[True Love]

Originally Posted by Arbitrary

I have one response to all of this pretentious bullshit.

Great clip, but movies are not swords in fields. Not every event is meaningless, especially when it's a story by people who aren't known to be complete wingnuts. That said, good stories have lots of room for more or less valid (and interestingly personal) interpretations (you can read mine in the spoiler space below, although the one in Fammaden's first quote is probably better). I don't think they are necessarily pretentious, or bullshit, even if they do smell like responses to inkblot tests. That's what makes them interesting!

Spoiler Alert, click show to read:

One thing a lot of reviewers seem to miss (in general, not as much here) is that this is not really about Bell's inability to deal with a new and more violent world. As has already been pointed out here, Ellis puts the kibosh to that: the world has always had psychopaths like Chigurh. I tend to agree that Bell is a more central character than Lewellyn (or Chigurh) and I think that he probably understands Ellis's point, but gives up anyway. The key difference between him and both Lewellyn and Chigurh is not intelligence or competence (they all seem to have a lot) or the willingness to kill people willy nilly (I argue below that this isn't Chigurh's real strength), but what I would call focus, or mental toughness. Bell just has too many doubts about his ability to understand the world or people like Chigurh, and when he comes to the end of the case, where he handled the parts he understood with a great deal of skill and still failed to make much of a difference, he decides that his time is up and bows out, despite the guilt he has from knowing that Ellis is probably right. If he was more sure of his principles he would be more determined to figure things out, but part of him doesn't think it's possible to understand or stop some things, and the subsequent sense of fate and futility undermines his ability to do so. But deep down he also knows that he's wrong. And that's all the closure I think you need for him.

Chigurh doesn't seem to have any doubts about what his purpose or principles are, and it gives him a level of focus and mental toughness that puts him a notch above everyone else in the movie. He methodically anticipates most things but has no problems dealing with chance, and when he literally gets blindsided, visibly shaken, and badly wounded, he still has the strength of will to start patching himself up and get away from people who would prevent him from doing what he wants to do. It'll take more than that to knock him off his game. That scene gives you all the closure you need for Chigurh, in my opinion.

Lewellyn has a lot of focus and determination and he doesn't give up, but he also shows why this does not give you a "WIN AT LIFE" button. He sees the chance to jump into a new situation and gain a big advantage, but the classic problem with making a big commitment right away is that you don't know what you don't know. Lewellyn makes a pretty darn good run of it, but the viewer can see that Chigurh is better and the Mexicans more determined and resourceful than he thinks, and when he stops to talk to the woman it should not be terribly surprising that this turns out to be his last mistake. This is a movie about a bunch of different characters who are all interesting for different (but interlocking) reasons. Lewellyn is not the hero and the story is not obligated to keep him around to learn something by overcoming the bad guy. Not everybody learns their lesson in time.

This is where I may depart more from the book (and maybe less so from the movie), but I don't think the movie necessarily endorses Chigurh as a sort of Nietzschean superman who rises above everyone else because he's super-rational and willing to kill anyone, or says that the future belongs to such people whether we like it or not. This is the usual tack that movies take in basically deifying psychopaths - see Silence of the Lambs for a movie that I actually like quite a bit that is sort of the canonical example of this - but I don't think No Country for Old Men quite goes there (the book may go further). Chigurh can and will die eventually from some event that he didn't anticipate or cannot prevent, whether it's a person who is directly trying to kill him or not. He is very very smart and has no mental hangups or compunctions to get in his way, but he is not omniscient and he is only one person. All it takes is one person who can understand him and marshal the resources of the 98% of society that view serial killers as a bad thing. I will have to watch to movie again to be sure, but I think Ellis alludes to this.

In real life it turns out that being a psychopath doesn't necessarily make you much more rational or focused, and most serial killers and other psychopaths get caught at about the same rates as other criminals. It's not being a psychopath that makes a person scary competent, it's mental toughness and focus. The ability to kill people without compunction is relatively minor. Ellis's point is not just that psychopaths and other people have always been around, but that society has survived and thrived in part because they can be dealt with. To believe either that modern evil is new or that it is completely unstoppable is vanity; otherwise we wouldn't be here. Bell knows it and deep down we all know it, but there is always the temptation to let our fascination or incomprehension (two shades of a basically similar response) fool us into thinking that there's nothing we can do about it. The failure to see beyond that is what I view as the real failing of the old man.