No Country for Nihilism

‘T he coin don’t have no say. It’s just you,” Carla Jean Moss says to the psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh. He demands she play his game and call the coin flip that will determine whether he kills her. The coin allows Chigurh to view himself as an instrument of destiny. But Moss, sensible and grieving, exposes the pretense. In the film, directors Joel and Ethan Coen follow this verbal scene not with a cut to black and the sound of gunfire. Instead, we see Chigurh silently exit the home he invaded. When he checks his boots, the theater audience sighs, realizing that he is checking for blood, evidence. He killed her.

The extremely effective portrayal of evil in No Country for Old Men, both in Cormac McCarthy’s lapidary prose and in the Coen brothers’ film adaptation, has misled most literary critics and many viewers to see the story as one of total disenchantment. The cat-and-mouse chase between Anton Chigurh and Llewelyn Moss ends with murder done “off-stage.” (In the book, Moss is also unfairly disgraced in death.) The lawman Sheriff Bell (played in the film by Tommy Lee Jones), who intends to stop the murder, moves through the scenes bewildered at the rise of drug crime and immorality, eventually retiring, having failed to save a good man from evil. In the end, Chigurh leaves, after having murdered the widow, and is himself subjected to what seems like the random violence of a car crash. Yet, he still escapes the responding police.

Movieguide describes the film as having a “nihilistic, hopeless worldview” with a “pointless, hopeless, postmodern ending.” Even academic papers examining the film say it replaces the older Western’s clear moral framework with “a new more nihilistic form” where traditional morality is undermined. Some elements of the story make this reading seem plausible. Sheriff Bell admires, almost worships, “the old-timers” — older lawmen who imposed order on the American West. He chats with several throughout the movie, who give of-their-time conservative assessments of “the dismal tide” coming in. West Texan young boys with “bones in their noses” because they stopped saying “sir and ma’am.” Sheriff Bell agrees with these men; the audience seems almost invited to laugh at their naïveté.

These are all misreadings. No Country for Old Men is bleak in the way that many of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories are bleak; they fearlessly and realistically confront evil. But McCarthy (and the Coen brothers’ faithfulness to his novel) does not let evil have the last word; instead he allows an intrusion of grace into this world, a Christian subversion of the bleak scene.

Consider that after he murders Carol Jean Moss, Chigurh pulls himself from the car wreck and meets two boys on bicycles. He offers to pay for one of their shirts to use as a sling for his mangled arm. As my friend Dan Foster points out, Chigurh expects this to be transactional. He’s met with compassion and generosity. “Well, hell, mister, I’ll give you my shirt.” It’s a little telling of the Good Samaritan, “I don’t mind helping someone out.” It’s a direct parallel to an earlier scene in which Chigurh’s prey, Llewelyn Moss, bleeding, needful, offers to pay for the jacket of another young man, and the mercenary teenagers rudely demand to see the money first.

Bell, in one of his talks with another old-timer lawman, confesses that he thought at some point God would “walk into this life,” but that he doesn’t blame him for not doing so, being what he is. Bell views himself as having fallen short of the standard the old-timers set, including those set by the lawmen in his family lineage. His filial piety, the religion he seems to practice, appears on the surface to have failed him. He couldn’t protect the man he set out to protect, nor his wife. He never caught the evil in his time.

In a remarkable final scene of the book, he tells his wife about two dreams he had about his father:

I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

This is how the book ends. Reviewers committed to the view that No Country is nihilistic and bleak focus on him “waking up.” To pick one example, an essayist for Far Out Magazine says, plausibly, that the first dream reflects Bell’s sense of inadequacy before the example of his forebears. And that the second dream invokes a “mythical order” in which he is “simply marching toward a preordained destiny shaped by his father” — which the essayist views as just another restatement of the coin-flip premise: Life events are either seen as random, or inevitable, inexorable fate.

But that is wrong.

After I read him a few dirty limericks and said my prayers, I read my father-in-law this passage and the final chapter that precedes it as he lay on his deathbed last Thanksgiving. I remembered the scene more than 20 years earlier, when his father died. And how he wept manfully and fiercely. For me, this passage of “bleak” McCarthy was my chance to remind him of the only truth that could matter to him there.

“It’s just you!” Moss rebukes, a moral testimony to personal responsibility. Chigurh is confronted in the end by a Good Samaritan whose generosity he does not expect and cannot comprehend. Bell’s first dream is about the feeling that he has squandered an inheritance. It is the most compact retelling of the Prodigal Son parable in English prose. I think all men feel in some way that they fell short, that they squandered some of what was given to them. The second dream clearly echoes the words of Christ in John 14. The father is carrying a fire in the darkness, and he goes ahead to prepare a place of warmth and light for his son in “all that dark and all that cold.” McCarthy’s obvious Biblical intrusion takes the realist Christian view — a Pauline one, that law is inadequate to comprehend or contain evil. Yet a revelation of grace is here, ready to conduct us through the storm, through “all that dark and all that cold.” Bell doesn’t say that the dream was an illusion, but that at the end “I knew that whenever I got there, he would be there.”