'He gave me some money but I think I lost it' #3

No Country for Old Men


2007, Miramax/Paramount


In this series of posts I'm looking at three films that share closely their themes of national and personal identity, violence, war and transgression. This time, it's NCFOM; last time it was In the Valley of Elah and you might also want to read the intro to the whole thing. Next time: No Country for Old Men

Plot summary

Set in West Texas in 1980, NCFOM is the story of a sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who on the verge of retirement finds himself pursuing a psychopathic hit man (Anton Chirurgh, played by Javier Bardem) across the state in the wake of a botched drug deal. Chirurgh is hunting Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam vet who makes his living as a hunter but who stumbled upon the proceeds of the drug deal and is attempting to make off with it to start a new life with his wife.

Like Hank Deerfield in In the Valley of Elah, Ed Tom Bell has devoted his life to the maintenance of order through the containment of violence and the imposition of the will of the group; like Hank, in the course of the film his belief that the maintenance of this order is possible is undermined.

Archetypal themes

Fathers, sons and the Law

Ed has succeeded his father in the job of sheriff; again the film is exploring the inheritance of the Law of the Father, literalised here in the role of the law man, and doing so from the point of view of the son – but the son as he himself is reaching old age. So we wonder throughout the film, whether it is really that America has changed or whether it is simply that Ed Tom has grown old; whether we are simply experiencing the truth that when men grow old the country is no longer their own and they can no longer truly be themselves.

Moss, in the mean time, is prepared to break the law in order to get what he needs to establish and protect his family life; he wants the money so that he and his wife, who is expecting his child, can move out of their trailer and make a new start as a family. Although he is prepared to become a criminal, therefore, he is operating within a recognisable moral order, one that Ed Tom and his father would both recognise: he is struggling to take on the American man’s honoured role as protector and benefactor of the family. But he finds that post-Vietnam America is no longer a nation that affords and enables a man to take on that identity.

Women, wives and mothers

There is no Det. Emily Sanders in this movie; Ed Tom Bell confronts Chirurgh alone. The women in the film – Ed Tom’s wife, Llewellyn’s wife and her mother – support their men, try to understand them but ultimately represent a terrible vulnerability, the powerlessness that Ed Tom and his law enforcement is intended to suppress but which is encroaching on his consciousness. They are the weakness that the archetypal American male identity has hitherto succeeded in denying and projecting elsewhere but which Chirurgh remorselessly brings home.

Violence and order

In the course of the film Ed Tom Bell is confronted with a violence he at first believes he understands but subsequently shocks him with its total absence of moral reasoning. Chirurgh kills not only because he must to achieve his aim, but because he can choose to do so, and choose on a whim – literally the toss of a coin. He is the Id, desire without control and (so) without meaning. Ed Tom Bell has lived his life by the law, the law of his father and, psychoanalytically, this is the Law of the Father, the necessity of controlling and directing desire in order to relate to others and develop as a man. Chirurgh defies the meaning and order that shapes Ed Tom’s experience as a social man, the order on which his identity and his nation’s identity relies. Bell is powerless against Chirirgh’s flat denial of meaning and the law:

‘The crime you see you now, it’s hard even to take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job – not to be glorious. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. You can say it’s my job to fight it but I don’t know what it is any more. More than that I don’t want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard.’

If it possible that people can behave like Chirurgh the basic truths that Bell has lived by are undermined; more than that, they lose meaning . If the code Bell has lived by has no meaning, what has his life meant and been for?

Borders and safety

Like In the Valley of Elah and There Will be Blood, NCFOM takes place in liminal territory at the boundary between the nation and the outside world. Chirurgh comes from over the border; he represents transgression intruding from outside, threatening the believed-in inviolability of protected internal space – neither the state nor the Self is safe from others and the Other, however strong and unassailable they feel on the inside.

Foreign war

The themes of violence, order and national/masculine identity come together in the largely unspoken presence of the Vietnam war, the fact of it hovering just outside the narrative field of vision throughout the film. Llewellyn Moss is a Vietnam vet; the war represents for him, and for the psychology of the nation, a kind of rupture which has allowed in difficult experiences and feelings of moral failure, uncertainty and a sudden absence of forward momentum. The nation and the man do not know whether they have failed or whether they have been failed; nor whether recovery and progress are possible. Moss the hunter is Chirurgh’s prey; he, the American man in the prime of life, war veteran and soon to be father, is victim of the amoral violent will to power that has been somehow allowed in by, or has broken into, the national space.

The parallel we are invited to draw is clear: foreign wars that fail in fact or in moral compass do violence to the character of the nation and to the strength and honour of its men; they undermine the ability of the American man to perform his archetypal role. Violence that occurs on foreign soil nonetheless break the hygiene seal around the national identity and the masculine identity that is coterminous with it.

The dream

The pivotal scene for the meaning of the film is the last one, Tommy Lee Jones’ much-discussed final speech about his dreams of his father. The notion of the dream is a rich one and of course directly references the galvanising and purifying symbol of the American Dream. Encompassed in this archetypal concept is the sense of the ideal that motivates us, the shared national ideal and the values and aspirations of our fathers; but also the sense of unattainability and possible falsity. What are we therefore to make of Ed Tom’s dreams? One suggests the loss of something valuable he/we were entrusted with by his/our father(s) (‘he gave me some money and I think I lost it’). But the next, about his father leading him over a cold, dark mountain pass with the promise of warming fire and their being reunited – is this showing the hopeless impossibility that, in death, Ed Tom will be reunited with his father and the truth and certainty of the values he passed onto his son? If so, if the dreams and beliefs by and for which we have lived are false, who are we? Or is dreaming our contact with the truth?