The "No Country for Old Men" Post

The original comment about the movie here. Spoilers below.

I've read this and this about the movie and the Wikipedia entry. If you haven't seen the movie or read the book you can get a good idea of them from Wikipedia.

I feel kind of foolish for asking what this book means, when one of those posts says that the movie is didactic (and the book apparently more so). The biggest theme in the book/movie is pretty obvious: that mankind is getting progressively more evil. Hence the title, No Country for Old Men. Old men need tranquility not drug deals and endless violence.

I do have a couple questions about that theme. Why is the book set in 1980 (ish)? Presumably we are more evil 25 years later (although, really the crime numbers don't bear that out). Bell criticizes the culture of the time (kids with green hair and bones in their noses), but a lot of those criticisms seem dated. So I guess I'm not sure exactly what the commentary is; is it that the world is getting worse? are we just to believe that evil is always with us? or is the commentary subtly ironic and meant to mean the opposite? If it's meant to be ironic, it's probably a bit too subtle.

Chigurh is obviously a symbol/embodiment of evil, and probably Satan, romping the countryside and killing almost indiscriminately. His murders aren't completely random, however, because he does, as one character points out, follow a code. He is a man of his word. When he promises Moss that he will kill his wife, he has to follow through. He also returns the money he retrieves from Moss to the drug dealer, almost like he respects some property rights.  He also flips a coin at certain points to make decision about whether to kill certain people or let them go. She he respects the laws of chance and/or fate.

Moss and Bell are both sympathetic characters, but I think show the limits and flaws of humanity's resistance to evil. Moss is killed ultimately because he takes someone's money, albeit drug money. All his attempts at good--going to give the dying Mexican a drink, giving the hitchhiking girl a ride--end up disastrously for him and the intended beneficiary. One thing the book makes clear that the movie doesn't is that while Bell is decorated WWII vet, he actually abandoned his position when he maybe should have held it. Bell is embarrassed about it although the portrayal of his cowardice is unconvincing. Still I get the sense that at the near encounter between Bell and Chigurh at the hotel that Bell avoided the contact. Also, he retires from the job in part because he feels outmatched by Chigurh's. Maybe this is because I knew what would happen before hand, but I feel like McCarthy telegraphs that Bell has no chance of catching Chigurh. Bell represents a flawed and outmatched good.

The movie is conservative, not just because Bell is a sympathetic conservative character, but mostly because of its portrayal of evil. In this story, the devil is real. The book shows, and Conservatives believe, that humans are inherently flawed. Conservatives believe evil exists for evil's sake. Liberals, in contrast, believe in the perfectibility of humans, and do not believe in the kind of evil that Chigurh represents. But the book makes clear that Chigurh's actions can't be understood as anything but a desire to do evil.

Potpourri

1. Prediction: the IPad will bomb. I think it has a couple fatal flaws: 1. no flash support, 2. no keyboard, and 3. no device to hold it up. One of the great things about a laptop is you can put it on your lap and adjust the angle of the screen and get a good, hands-free view of the screen. 4. No gray-scale screen. The Kindle screen I think makes is better for people who want something like the IPad for reading. 5. Not as portable as the IPhone. most people will think they're covered with their IPod Touch/IPhone. Could be wrong, but this is what my gut tells me.
2. Did you see Superman Returns? I just watched it again recently. It seemed to me that the story was a dramatization of the gospels. First, Superman goes off for several years by himself, to investigate his destroyed planet. Something similar to Christ's fasting, or maybe the unaccounted for time before his ministry begins. When he returns, Lois tells superman that the world doesn't need a "savior," but it clearly does in the form of Superman. Superman proceeds save a number of people miraculous for some period. In the mean time, Lex Luther creates the crystal island in the middle o the ocean which threatens to destroy almost all humanity. Superman knows he is going towards the kryptonite that Lex Luther has, but he intentionally submits to his own death.  He is killed by Lex Luther on the crystal island, even stabbed in the side, before falling into the water to his "death." He is pulled from the water and his wounds are tended to by Lois for some time. He then returns to the water only to emerge to purge the world from sin crystal island. It's not a perfect analogy, but to me, the parallels are striking.
3. Has there ever been a more uneven movie than Up? I wish the whole movie was like the first 20 minutes, but that probably would not keep 4 year-olds interested.
4. My new most hated company is Samsung. I bought a Blu-ray player for Christmas, and it worked fine except that it never would connect to the internet, despite saying "Wireless LAN ready" on the box. I finally broke down and read the instructions, and it said I needed a USB wireless card. If a Blue-ray player can't connect to the internet immediately it's not "wireless ready" it's "wireless compatible" at best. So I bought the cheapest wireless card I could find, not really knowing how it would work with the system. After trying that a bit, and not getting it to work, I went online to discover that, to get the wireless to work, you have to buy a Samsung proprietary "dongle" (no really), and that dongle costs 70 bucks, or almost the cost of the Blu-ray player itself. So I took the player back. I think I'm just going to get a PS3, mostly for Blu-ray, although I'll probably play it some. I do like the aesthetic of Samsung products, though.
5. I love this short post about the Alito-Obama Citizens United confrontation. I wish supreme court justices like Alito would do more media. I can only see it helping. I also like this Althousian post. Every once in a while, between photo blogging, and other semi-serious posts, Althouse criticism someone witheringly. You make a lot of enemies with posts like that. I think I care too much about being liked to write posts like that.
6. In an effort not to insist upon the last word, I'm not going to post any more comments over at B v. E on the last two blog posts (Avatar, and Education). I do have more thoughts about education. Brett, the reasons I used economic analysis on this education question, is that I essentially view the problem as an economic one: we have a finite amount of resources (money and time); how do we best allocate those resources in the classroom? Do we teach math, science, dance, psychology, self-help, curiosity, architecture? When you have so many alternatives and each person derives different utility from different options, you need a market responsive to individual preferences.
7. I just got a copy of No Country for Old Men, and I'll re-post on it when I'm done reading (which could be a while).

Blog Grab Bag

I have a lot of post ideas, but not enough time to write detailed post on all of them. So I've decided to write a sentence or two on each in one post.

• Avatar: I agree with all the political criticism that's been written about Avatar (Brooks, Goldberg). But the thing that really bugs me about this movie is how the technology in the "future" hasn't evolved far enough to have unmanned aircraft, or unmanned robot warriors. Absurd.

• The Fugitive: I just realized that this movie has a ridiculously leftist plot, that as many times as I've watched doesn't really make complete sense. Still I watch this movie almost every time it's on TV.

• No Country for Old Men. Saw this on USA. Really bloody for cable. The story's seems simple yet I think there is some deeper meaning. There must be something to this "film making" talent. Have you seen it and do you think that it is a conservative movie? Also, what does it mean?

• Elders Quorum Moves: Do you think that church members should rely upon the elder's quorum to move them when they could probably handle it themselves? Is it abusing a church system to do so, or giving others a chance to serve?

• Conan v. Leno. I like Leno but  love Conan. (I've never liked Letterman, although I think he is edgier/usually funnier than Leno.) But I don't think Conan ever had the broad appeal necessary to make the Tonight Show work. I also don't think it's Leno's job to just get out of Conan's way either. Maybe Conan can partially blame the low ratings on the Leno Show's bad lead in. (Although there is still the local new in between.) But the Tonight Show is not Conan's entitlement. I do think this mess is Zucker's. He thought he could promise Conan the Tonight Show to keep him at the network and the day of reckoning would never come. He was right. It's going to be more like a month or reckoning.

• I have this compulsion to always make another blog comment. It's not that I necessarily want to have the last word, just that I always have some other thing to say or new way to make an argument that I dwell on until I put it down in a comment. In real life I just bit my tongue and the urge leave after the subject has changed. In blogging, the post is always out their taunting me. When do you say "when" when blogging?

• Art, it seems to me, is best when it combines something familiar, yet somewhat edgy. Music that pushes boundaries but is still melodic. Movies that have not formulaic plots, but still have plots. Does that mean that trends are necessary to keep art great?

• Being a lawyer is considerably suckier than I anticipated. I think this is for two reasons. First, you clients usually aren't happy. Frequently the kind of people that are involved in a lawsuit are shady characters. At a minimum they have sharp elbows. Also, they're not happy because almost all cases end in a compromise. Second, cases have real value, usually in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars range. It's not fun making close decisions when an errors can have huge ramifications.