No Country For Old Men

I love both the novel and the faithful film adaptation of No Country For Old Men. On the surface (and a number of my friends seem unable to get beyond that surface), it's a brutal film about a ruthless, heartless assassin who goes after a guy who stumbles upon a great big bag of drug money. The sheriff goes after that assassin, even as the drug dealers and assassin go after poor Llewelyn Moss. Of course, since just about everyone who's intended to watch/read this story already have, I'll just spoil the story: Llewelyn dies in the end, and the assassin gets away. There. I did it.

Now, I find the story is really quite a tragic commentary about our times. It seems easy to think of Llewelyn as the somewhat dishonest but otherwise innocent common folk, the sheriff Ed Tom as the good guy and Anton Chigurh the assassin as the baddie. However, of all the characters, I find Chigurh the most fascinating. He is not so much evil, as he is purely rule-driven. Ed Tom is the helpless old timer who reminisces of the good old days, but ultimately he's a broken man who cannot face up to the realities of a society going morally downhill. Llewelyn is just really quite a sideshow in that he just wants to get away with his money, and is ruthless in his own selfish money-loving ways.

While Ed Tom laments how things have turned ugly and simply gives up pursuing Chigurh in the end because he realizes that he's facing a force he simply could not defeat, Chigurh holds strong to his rules all the way to the end. Chigurh operates in a simple logic: He gets the job done. To get the job done, he kills anyone who gets in the way of his job. However, sometimes some people are in the way, but may or may not adversely affect the execution of the task, so Chigurh may or may not kill those people. To decide that, he does one of two things: flip a coin, or if he's sure the person will keep quiet, have the person swear to silence.

I think it is easy to assume that Chigurh is evil precisely because he's such a rule follower. Yet there seems to be little malice in what he does. He does not kill someone just because they're annoying (there's one lady in the story who was, but he did not kill her because she was not a significant impediment and because it was more trouble than she's worth). He does not kill out of hatred (Llewelyn threatens Chigurh at one point). I think he is disturbing and labeled evil simply because he has no emotional investment whatsoever in that killing. In a way, perhaps, he is something like Spock. And perhaps people have really hard times with characters like that: they are...alien.