No Country for Children, or: the Serial Killer is Never Just a Traveller
One character in a Coen brothers film gives us a heart-wrenching insight into the psychopolitics of this damned moment
I couldn’t stop laughing when that cop said ‘leads? Sure, I’ll check with the boys down at the crime lab. They got four more detectives working on the case. They got us working in shifts’.
I laughed so hard that I almost peed my pants. I went on laughing for a minute or two, and eventually, the audience started laughing with me, infinitely amused by my cracking up this loudly and joyfully. It was in a movie theater in Haifa in 1998 (as you may have noticed, I’ve become a bit nostalgic lately, for reasons that shall be made clear momentarily).
I watched ‘The Big Lebowski‘ maybe ten more times since then, and it still ranks high on my ’favorite films ever’ list. I’ve loved many other Coen Brothers films: the captivating Barton Fink and the absolutely perfect Fargo, their inspired remake of True Grit (after the 1969 classic by Henry Hathaway with John Wayne as the aging US Marshal), and the thoughtfully amusing Hail, Ceaser! from 2016.
I could not stand though, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which I found senselessly cruel and over the top in a not-so-funny and not-so-clever way (American audiences and critics gushed over it, which I interpreted as a sign of the anxiety the American public was swimming in, which could only be calmed by clear, forceful, shockingly violent, in-you-face displays of cartoonishly binary plotlines). I didn’t like the TV version of Fargo for similar reasons.
The Coen Brothers’ most exquisite ‘serious‘ work must be No Country for Old Man from 2007, starring Tommy Lee Jones (his usual excellent self as an old cop), alongside Josh Brolin and Javier Bardem. Those two provide acting brilliance for the ages: Brolin as Llewelyn Moss, a 1970s Texas trailer park welder-hunter who comes across an epic drug deal gone wrong, and Bardem as Anton Chigurhm, a mafia psycho-killer hitman who’s sent to hunt him down.
An early scene in NoCountry is one where Brolin goes hunting and discovers the gnarly scene of the drug deal through chance, bad luck, and persistence. This visually and thematically riveting scene, especially, is timeless cinema gold. It uses space, composition, and point of view with such breathtaking dexterity it should make any film lover artistically climax.
But The reason I’m bringing up the Coen Brothers is Anton Chigurh, especially as chillingly encapsulated in this memorable scene (starting around the 01:20 mark).
Dramatic irony
When an audience knows something important about a situation that a character doesn’t, it is called dramatic irony. The Instagram and TikTok generation loves this technique: they love telling their audience, using subtitles or a prerecorded intro, that they are about to prank a family member or a spouse. And that moment of anticipation, when the unsuspecting victim is about to fall into a trap the audience knows is there but they don’t - that’s dramatic irony in social media.
When the scene above plays, the audience watching ‘No Country for Old Men’ already knows Anton Chigurh is a psychopath: it is an established fact at this point, which, of course, charges the scene with heightened emotion.
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