‘He gave me some money and I think I lost it.’

In the Valley of Elah: 2007, Warner Bros
No Country for Old Men: 2007, Miramax/Paramount
There Will be Blood: 2007, Paramount Vantage/Miramax

A digression in three (or possibly four) parts

Carl and I were very interested in these three films, which all appeared within the year. Because I wanted to talk about the three of them together this whole thing is gigantically long and I’m splitting it up a bit and will post it over a few weeks. Try to manage your excitement in the mean time and remember what Dr Freud told us about delayed gratification being the best kind (or at least the most useful) (or at least the most socially acceptable).

Needless to say there is an element of spoilerage in what follows so if you don’t want to know the score, look away for, well, the entirety of this discussion.

So here’s a short intro.

The set-up

These three films lend themselves to being considered as a trio. All American, they also all came out in 2007 and, to my mind, are all preoccupied with the constellation of a particular series of archetypes associated with masculinity, belief and nationhood. The films discuss fathers and sons, hardship, sacrifice, success and belief; and the current state of the nation. Iraq is relevant not centrally but as the unspoken problem that is troubling all these values – even though two of the movies are set in the past. It irrupts symbolically in the continuing central theme of morally unreasoned violence, much of it perpetrated in desert landscapes and border country – uncontained or illegitimate violence that intrudes into liminal physical space, that betrays or corrupts systems of moral order. Two of the films star Tommy Lee Jones; all three attracted Oscar nominations and were critically much-discussed.

The archetypes animating the movies are familiar both as themes in American popular culture (fathers and sons, the national identity) and tropes of American discourse (discussion of what it is and should be to be American, Christian faith and the Bible, America as a nation of God, the relationship with the land and its resources, the border and the frontier, the foreigner, the law and oil). They all suggest deep-seated unease about what kind of a man you are if you are an American man; what kind of person you are if you are a man; what kind of a father you are and what kind of father you had.

Each of the three provides a different perspective on the current state of American masculine identity and of the nation, not because one symbolises or is the cause of the other but because, in these cultural expressions, they are coterminous values.

Next time: In the Valley of Elah.