When Anthony said that while taking off his socks after shooting the foreign janitor that was fixing the shower I switched from XBox to PlayStation it was so moving.
There’s a couple different ones, but one that stood out to me is that nothing in life is guaranteed, no matter what set of “rules” you follow. We’re not outside of time or chance
Every party did something different about the money, Llewyn did EVERYTHING right but his mother in law did him in on accident.
The cop tried being the honest cop and got nothing, the case goes cold.
Anton gets the money in the end but gets his ideal destroyed by a woman who blames him for all his killings, it's not fate it's his fault. Then he also gets owned by chance and not by being careful which also undoes his worldview.
Fantastic movie, however I think if I see anyone say it's about nihilism I do think they're legitimately moronic.
I agree with what you've written except for Llewellyn doing nothing wrong. I always thought he got himself killed by fate + he agreed to party with and frick that floosy by the pool. It was a momentary lapse in judgment which took his eye off the mission.
>Your daddy ever tell you how Uncle Mac come to his reward? Gunned down on his own porch over in Hudspeth County. Seven or eight of 'em come up there, all wantin' this, wantin' that. Uncle Mac went back in the house to get the shotgun. Well, they was ahead of him. Shot him in his doorway. Aunt Ella come out, tried to stop the bleeding. Uncle Mac all the while trying to get that shotgun. They just sat there on their horses, watchin' him die. After a while, one of 'em said somethin' in Indian and they turned. Left out. Uncle Mac knew the score, even if Aunt Ella didn't. Shot through the left lung. And that was that - as they say.
Kino...
Its one of those movies people watched that enjoyed the surface story and went on youtube to watch a dozen pretentious "analyses" from film school dropouts.
>cut off the novel ending(s) for Chigger & Sheriff Bell
Stolen valor proto-Boomer Bell showing up conveniently too late to do anything other than as a crime scene tourist is the villain. Carla Jean's the only one facing death with dignity, the heroine if there could be said to be one. Chig takes the recovered cash to the Principle (not the contractor) and offers his services him and Lewellyn are noble fool faces of the same coin Carson's Sheriff Bell if he was actually a war hero (MACVSOG in Nam, the baddest of the badass, and even Chig scares him).
>what was the message?
Live and Let Live pacifism isn't long for the world, and perhaps that's a blessing of sorts with paragons of passive fair weather easy virtue, like Tommy Lee Jones' character who didn't stop playing dead after Korea, either . . .
>stealing money off people doing million dollar dope deals that are willing to throw down with automatic weapons and have hired assassins on the pay roll is probably not a good play for you and your loved ones
Moss didn't know about those trackers in 1980. I have no idea how they would even work? I assume you had to be in range of a signal since gps didnt exist for normal people
If you steal a briefcase full of money, thoroughly inspect it for transponders, bugs, gps or other tracing devices. Also never show mercy to a mexican.
Nobody mentions how funny the film is. Bell casually retelling the story he read in the paper:
Here last week they found this couple out in California. They rent out rooms for old people, kill' em, bury' em in the yard, cash their social security checks. Well, they'd torture 'em first. I don't know why. Maybe the television set was broke.
Carry your cash in your own bag. No matter how nice the suitcase is, put the money into your own bag and make sure it's all real cash and not a transmitter.
Always mixed this up with There Will Be Blood because released same year and felt that switching the titles would be more appropriate for both......anyone?
There were a few.
We still deal with the same problems- the world isn't getting worse, just dealing with the same problems in different circumstances.
Having rules and guidelines for your life is important, but it doesn't mean you will always succeed following them.
Don't steal money, especially from mobs and cartels. But if you do: Always check the suitcase for a tracker.
Hollywood seems to do this on purpose and I haven't figured out why other than its just to frick with people andy Kaufman style where nobody knows its a joke. That's my theory anyway
Then why not just swap the faces? Makes no difference to the poster, see
Hollywood seems to do this on purpose and I haven't figured out why other than its just to frick with people andy Kaufman style where nobody knows its a joke. That's my theory anyway
Hollywood seems to do this on purpose and I haven't figured out why other than its just to frick with people andy Kaufman style where nobody knows its a joke. That's my theory anyway
I'm honestly upset that a television and film board is so illiterate about television and film. They switch it so it doesn't seem like one star is more important than the other. Each star has top billing depending on how you look at the poster. Diagonal billing like this is similar - if you read from left to right, Ted Danson looks like the lead, but if you read from top to bottom, Shelly Long comes first.
these are mostly teenage hobbyists and adult incels with only alienating political beliefs as a personality, so the results of legal agreements on billing order between the talent's reps and the production is basically invisible to them. Turns out, production knowledge is limited to people who... make stuff, not sit on the /Hollywood/ board on a Mongolian basket weaving forum and shitpost all day long.
Except Paul Dano and Jonah Hill, they still visit.
They probably made the poster first then slapped on the billing and all the other shit, everybody is used to billing so they didn't think much about it being mismatched.
Black person the frick do you want from me? I didn't work on the movie, go knock on one of the Cohen's doors if you're so desperate to know.
3 months ago
Anonymous
I want someone who considers films to be enough of an interest that they post on a board like this to have some fricking idea of what movies are. The question is on par with 'what do all those names at the end of the movie mean?'
3 months ago
Anonymous
What the frick are you talking about? I was asked why they didn't switch the heads on the posters to match the billing, I didn't make the poster so I don't know the internal thought process of the designer so I made a guess.
3 months ago
Anonymous
He's a homosexual ignore him anon. Let him huff his own farts for thinking knowing how a very convoluted and nuanced sub culture of insiders think and do things is common knowledge and you're a moron for not knowing.
This is actually the correct explanation. Incompetence is far far more likely than say
[...]
I'm honestly upset that a television and film board is so illiterate about television and film. They switch it so it doesn't seem like one star is more important than the other. Each star has top billing depending on how you look at the poster. Diagonal billing like this is similar - if you read from left to right, Ted Danson looks like the lead, but if you read from top to bottom, Shelly Long comes first.
No Country for Old Men is an anti western, the good guy dies unceremoniously, the bad guy has the strong moral conviction and the wizened old veteran Sheriff Bell is racked with uncertainty, guilt and spiritual depression for how he was the sole survivor in Nam when his platoon got bombed and he ran and how his father and his relatives died unceremoniously as well, they didn't get their last hurrah. The idealization of the past is just that, in reality heroes of the died all the same unfulfilled and the world kept turning.
>Sheriff Bell is racked with uncertainty, guilt and spiritual depression for how he was the sole survivor in Nam when his platoon got bombed and he ran
Wait what? Did I miss this in the movie or is it just in the book?
It's in the book, last 20% after Llewellyn dies is just Bell coming to terms with himself and the death of Llewellyn and the specter of Anton.
"I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does"
In the book towards the end he talks about serving in WWII when his squad hid in a barn and then got shelled by a German mortar. He fired back at first and then ran away to save himself while the rest of his squad got trapped inside and BTFO and he got a Bronze Star for it. It's implied that this experience makes him feel inadequate and seeking redemption and to make things right in the world, which is contrasted with Chigurh and the events of his police career which show that the world is generally unfair, uncaring and that horrible things almost always happen by chance. Bell feels that the world used to make sense when his dad was Sheriff and now violence is pointless and he can't do anything to stop that either but the speech his uncle gives at the end then demonstrates that life has always been violent, nonsensical and by chance even in the "good old days".
Sugar is the evil in the world
Lou Ellen is the good
Tommy L Jones is the impotence of good men
Sugars car crash is reminder that the universe is beyond all of us and even good and evil are subservient to it's whimsRYLES OF NATURE!!
"I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning"
"When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way."
What a weird way to rationalize murder.
Oh well you chose to be here and now and here and now I'm going to kill you so really you chose to get murdered and it's your fault.
The chick at the end was 100% correct, it's all a huge cope for him being a psychopath.
He's less a person and more a force of nature, they only humanized him in the movie to dumb it down a bit.
In the book he's depicted as tall blonde and blue eyed, very much akin to Moby Dick which was Cormac's biggest inspiration to a lot of his works.
And it's not that someone choose to be in the wrong place at the wrong time they just were it could happen to anyone, Anton's justification is that he allows fate one last chance to decide whether someone dies.
So in a way he’s similar to The Judge.
But the whole point of the Judge is that his world view is wrong. The kid refuses to engage in the Judge’s worldview of war is god and later kills him after discovering he lives a long life after showing mercy to many different characters in the book. The same could be said about Carla Jean I’ve only watched the movie but the fact she criticizes him in the book and refuses to engage in his coin game, same way the kid refuses to engage with the Judge’s game of war must mean she is correct in her assumptions especially at the end when Anton is hit by a car which breaks his control over fate and shows just how truly mortal he is.
Yeah Cormac carried themes through different books the judge and Anton serve similar purposes as a sort of ambiguous supernatural entities, Anton getting into the car crash after having his ideals questioned is sort of ironic in how fate even came for him.
The Judge and the Kid on the other hand is much bleaker, the kid turned man could never find redemption after leaving the gang, he tried to confide his sins and guilt in a woman who was long since dead, he even killed a kid himself mostly out of pride and then at the end in the brothel we have some similarities with the judge in how he took the midget to bed paralleling the judges acts with actual children (there was also the girl who went missing but that's mostly speculation. In the end the kid could not escape his past, his sins, and was embraced by the judge in a shithouse of all places as one last indignity heaped on him and the Judge went on dancing.
The epilogue of Meridian shares a lot of ideas with NCFOM, with the whole people who dig holes and how each whole wouldn't exist without the last, like how Sheriff Bell was dealing with his lineage and how he came to the expectations of himself.
I don’t see the kids death at the hands of the judge as anything but a victory because it proves the judge’s worldview wrong. The fact he shows guilt is proof of his humanity and his willingness to move away from violence and war. A quote the judge later uses against the kid is proof of this
>You sat in judgement of your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and broke with the body of which you pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprises
The judge doesn’t want the Glanton gang to be introspective or judgemental of themselves because if they are, they would feel guilt and realize he is full of shit. Despite the reverse chariot, fool and the hangman all cards either drawn or represented symbolically in the book the gang continues on their path despite fate telling them to turn back.
Another thing to bring forth is the concept of names something that comes up in another McCarthy novel Outer Dark. Where if you can’t name something it doesn’t exist or can’t be controlled. The same applies to the kid, he doesn’t have a name so in a way the judge cannot control him. Later on in the book the judge tries to name the kid but it falls on deaf ears as everyone just reverts back to calling him the kid. The kid cannot be named or controlled and is autonomous so the judge’s answer to the kid is quite obvious
>whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
The answer is death or the removal from existence which the judge happily does at the end. For the dwarf prostitute I think McCarthy was just being hyperbolic since many of the other prostitutes were described as being childlike. She was probably just petite. The kid is desperately in want of a maternal figure in his life which is deprived of him early on in the book where his mother and sister is dead and his father refuses to speak their names.
3 months ago
Anonymous
Good post, makes me want to reread Blood Meridian and get around to his other works
3 months ago
Anonymous
Contd. The kid now the man calls the old woman at the end of the book abuelita which means grandmother but he also adds a suffix which changes the meaning from just grandmother to grandmama, mama or gram gram, something you would use with a person you deeply love.
The kid already proved the judge wrong by surviving the desert when judge says that he and Tobin would die there due to the kid showing mercy. Worse than that the kid continues to live until 45 which throws another blow at the judge who believes that war is god and through taking of another life the victor extends their our own.
The situation with Elrod only aims to point at the so called lack of unity that the Judge says war possesses. The more experienced the man kills the less experienced and naive Elrod. It should also be noted that the kid gives plenty of warnings to Elrod which the boy refuses to listen to, naive, ignorant and foolish as the glanton gang was during their escapades.
In the end the kid and Carla Jean call out the bullshit of their killers. Anton decides their fate not the coin and the judge as a falsified king.
3 months ago
Anonymous
An interesting and more hopeful interpretation of the book than most. It makes me think of the dual meaning and title of the book, Blood meridian basically means that this period of time in south USA and north Mexico is the bloodiest and most violent period in human history, bu the second title of An Evening of Redness in the West signifies that this period of violence is coming to an end and so the Judge would soon be out of work as this walking embodiment of war.
Amateur question. A story doesn't have to have a fricking message. A story just is. Cormac McCarthy didn't sit at the typewriter thinking "Now what message do I wish to convey to humanity with my little story here?", he just wrote a good fricking story. The moral of the story, if there is one, should emerge organically. That's what C. S. Lewis told Kingsley Amis anyway and they knew more about writing stories than you or I.
Cormac very intentionally put the themes and meanings in his works the idea that things should appear organically is a cope that you could write something and have the same levels of depth as any of the greats if only people would pick them apart too.
A story doesn't have to have a message yes but a story also doesn't have to be read, you'll find these stories in bargain bins and usually written by women.
>I don’t get it so there’s nothing to get
when you encounter this situation in the future you can just say its about nihilism or the industrial revolution or crap like that to hide how much of a moron you are
All I'm saying is if you guys insist on moralism and didacticism in your stories maybe you should stick to children's books.
All works are reflections of the morality and beliefs of its author, believing otherwise is moronic, even the choice to present things as indifferently and honestly as possible is someones belief.
>I don’t get it so there’s nothing to get
when you encounter this situation in the future you can just say its about nihilism or the industrial revolution or crap like that to hide how much of a moron you are
“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
A quote from another of Cormac's works which helps to further contextualize Anton, Anton believes in what he does and has to unease about his actions, Sheriff Bell is the opposite he has nothing but doubts about his convictions and feels guilty for even being alive.
Guilt is a nice angle, I haven't considered that singularly before.
Bell's opening monolog leans on that lack of understanding and the fear rooted in it, comparing himself to his forefathers and elders in his work (law enforcement) and his closing monolog does seem centered on dreams of guilt and consequence and debt to his father.
Moss returns to the Mexican with water, seems guilty in bed.
Anton doesn't seem to regret a single thing, he's almost immune to guilt allowing him to move freely.
Interesting that most the characters in this are military vets, guilt and its connection to surviving in the world after echoes around it.
Guilt is a nice angle, I haven't considered that singularly before.
Bell's opening monolog leans on that lack of understanding and the fear rooted in it, comparing himself to his forefathers and elders in his work (law enforcement) and his closing monolog does seem centered on dreams of guilt and consequence and debt to his father.
Moss returns to the Mexican with water, seems guilty in bed.
Anton doesn't seem to regret a single thing, he's almost immune to guilt allowing him to move freely.
Interesting that most the characters in this are military vets, guilt and its connection to surviving in the world after echoes around it.
Anton is not some unique evil in the grand scheme of things. Every era had its monsters. The sheriff was wrong to think times are getting worse, he's just being nostalgic. They're all insignificant, Anton is not the agent of fate he thinks he is which is why he gets randomly BTFO by a car.
The murky reality of random chance. The film has a scene where a woman argues with the main antagonist about how he has a choice, the character is show multiple times relying on a coin flip. However the post poignant scene in my opinion is the car wreck, that is one of the most random things that could have happened. It wasn't the result of a character flipping a coin, it was one of several possibilities the universe could have thrown at the characters.
Even if they drove safely, obeyed all traffic laws, a truck could barrel through and head on collide with them. So even though the character flips coins, and could decide whether to do something or not, the universe at large, by which he is one aspect of that whole, is subject to inexplicable random chance.
>Just take the coin, old timer >I...I don't know why you come round my store like this being so rude >Shut up, you got this store from your wife's father, this country obviously is not for you, one could almost say this is no country for an old man
He said it right here, Anon
if you have autism you're invincible
He died horribly, though, sepsis set into the open fracture and they don't have penicillin in Mexico.
This, he had the kind of fracture that kills people in days. Highly unlikely he survived.
It really is not country for old men
People can die.
its just neat
don't be a homosexual
adapt or die
Some countries aren't for old men
That was my favorite line of the film
When Anthony said that while taking off his socks after shooting the foreign janitor that was fixing the shower I switched from XBox to PlayStation it was so moving.
Can't outrun fate
You can’t bargain with fate
There’s a couple different ones, but one that stood out to me is that nothing in life is guaranteed, no matter what set of “rules” you follow. We’re not outside of time or chance
greed bad
>suppressed shotgun
>*ZZZZHVUMP!*
I would put the chances of the Coen brothers having shot a gun at zero.
Wish I still had the gif of a eurogay crying from the recoil of an AR.
it was a magnetic railgun not a 12g
The world is chaos and we're all trying to make order from it.
shitwood documentary
A cattle gun makes a kino weapon
If this is where your rule brought you, of what use was the rule?
It's this + fate
Every party did something different about the money, Llewyn did EVERYTHING right but his mother in law did him in on accident.
The cop tried being the honest cop and got nothing, the case goes cold.
Anton gets the money in the end but gets his ideal destroyed by a woman who blames him for all his killings, it's not fate it's his fault. Then he also gets owned by chance and not by being careful which also undoes his worldview.
Fantastic movie, however I think if I see anyone say it's about nihilism I do think they're legitimately moronic.
I agree with what you've written except for Llewellyn doing nothing wrong. I always thought he got himself killed by fate + he agreed to party with and frick that floosy by the pool. It was a momentary lapse in judgment which took his eye off the mission.
I got to meet Roger Deakins today
Why don't the Coens work with him now? Maybe that would be a weird thing to bring up, people tell me I'm rude sometimes.
Fate as it occurs to you is uncaring, meaningless, and random.
Also didn't realize until recently, wife was that underage girl from Trainspotting.
>Your daddy ever tell you how Uncle Mac come to his reward? Gunned down on his own porch over in Hudspeth County. Seven or eight of 'em come up there, all wantin' this, wantin' that. Uncle Mac went back in the house to get the shotgun. Well, they was ahead of him. Shot him in his doorway. Aunt Ella come out, tried to stop the bleeding. Uncle Mac all the while trying to get that shotgun. They just sat there on their horses, watchin' him die. After a while, one of 'em said somethin' in Indian and they turned. Left out. Uncle Mac knew the score, even if Aunt Ella didn't. Shot through the left lung. And that was that - as they say.
Kino...
Why did the pajeets do that to Uncle Mac Tonight????
Its one of those movies people watched that enjoyed the surface story and went on youtube to watch a dozen pretentious "analyses" from film school dropouts.
>cut off the novel ending(s) for Chigger & Sheriff Bell
Stolen valor proto-Boomer Bell showing up conveniently too late to do anything other than as a crime scene tourist is the villain. Carla Jean's the only one facing death with dignity, the heroine if there could be said to be one. Chig takes the recovered cash to the Principle (not the contractor) and offers his services him and Lewellyn are noble fool faces of the same coin Carson's Sheriff Bell if he was actually a war hero (MACVSOG in Nam, the baddest of the badass, and even Chig scares him).
>what was the message?
Live and Let Live pacifism isn't long for the world, and perhaps that's a blessing of sorts with paragons of passive fair weather easy virtue, like Tommy Lee Jones' character who didn't stop playing dead after Korea, either . . .
never bring water to a dying man
>stealing money off people doing million dollar dope deals that are willing to throw down with automatic weapons and have hired assassins on the pay roll is probably not a good play for you and your loved ones
Moss didn't know about those trackers in 1980. I have no idea how they would even work? I assume you had to be in range of a signal since gps didnt exist for normal people
It's a simple radio receiver.
Pay attention in school zoomer... wait that's probably your problem, I assume you think bethoven was black?
i must have missed radio receiver class
I'm sure you got an A in penguin 101 and the holocaust.
It's a film adaptation of a book. I'm surprised no one pointed it out.
mercy is evil
If you steal a briefcase full of money, thoroughly inspect it for transponders, bugs, gps or other tracing devices. Also never show mercy to a mexican.
Nobody mentions how funny the film is. Bell casually retelling the story he read in the paper:
Here last week they found this couple out in California. They rent out rooms for old people, kill' em, bury' em in the yard, cash their social security checks. Well, they'd torture 'em first. I don't know why. Maybe the television set was broke.
Carry your cash in your own bag. No matter how nice the suitcase is, put the money into your own bag and make sure it's all real cash and not a transmitter.
No one beats entropy but no one has the right to stop trying.
Don't go back to the scene of a shootout to give some dumb, desiccated Mexican no frickin agua.
The message is that they were all toys in this story
whats ms nesbitt have to do with cartel drug money mom
Always mixed this up with There Will Be Blood because released same year and felt that switching the titles would be more appropriate for both......anyone?
still do
don't have pity with criminals
Satan will stop at nothing to kill you if you get ahead in life.
Coens are hacks
People are bad
Mind your own business if you're running a retail counter, don't make small talk with strangers.
Frick b***hes.
Get money.
If you ever find giant bag of money take it all out and check for a transmitter. Then re-pack the money in a different bag.
Death is le inevitable
Trash pseud movie
old men are not allowed in the country any more
If you blow really hard enough into an wet assault pistol you, too, can shoot pit bulls, mid-lunge.
Where do I get an assault pistol? Sounds badass!
1911s can shoot when wet
There were a few.
We still deal with the same problems- the world isn't getting worse, just dealing with the same problems in different circumstances.
Having rules and guidelines for your life is important, but it doesn't mean you will always succeed following them.
Don't steal money, especially from mobs and cartels. But if you do: Always check the suitcase for a tracker.
You can't stop what's coming.
Ain't all waiting on you.
That's vanity.
trackers and agua really break a homie
There Are No Clean Getaways.
You should be kind to strangers because you don't know how dangerous they are.
ROLL IT https://youtu.be/ggALrwLBnDo
>What was the message of this film?
That there is truly No Country for Old Men (2007).
dont be a criminal or a cop
Life is cruel and pointless and everyone suffers for nothing and then dies in pain and fear. That's it. It can't get any simpler than that.
It's time to get rid of Old wh*te moids
don't take things that don't belong to you
i really want to be there and take all the guns and then run off with them
What happened to loo ellen in the end? they never showed it
bad guy checking his boots is a pretty clear indication
Watch the doors
Texans are soo hard they go hunting in desert without aqua
If he needs water he'll lap it from the hoofprint of a deer, like a Texas Ranger
Is the poster real? The starring names are under the wrong heads.
It's in alphabetical order.
Hollywood seems to do this on purpose and I haven't figured out why other than its just to frick with people andy Kaufman style where nobody knows its a joke. That's my theory anyway
That's called billing. The big dicks get listed first.
Then why not just swap the faces? Makes no difference to the poster, see
I'm honestly upset that a television and film board is so illiterate about television and film. They switch it so it doesn't seem like one star is more important than the other. Each star has top billing depending on how you look at the poster. Diagonal billing like this is similar - if you read from left to right, Ted Danson looks like the lead, but if you read from top to bottom, Shelly Long comes first.
Or maybe they are just trying not to cover up the faces of the painting.
Your convoluted explanation is a sign of autism not of literacy friendo
Oh, okay, you are being moronic on purpose. Thanks for clearing that up.
Kek no I'm being serious, it's funny to me you think I'm not though.
these are mostly teenage hobbyists and adult incels with only alienating political beliefs as a personality, so the results of legal agreements on billing order between the talent's reps and the production is basically invisible to them. Turns out, production knowledge is limited to people who... make stuff, not sit on the /Hollywood/ board on a Mongolian basket weaving forum and shitpost all day long.
Except Paul Dano and Jonah Hill, they still visit.
They probably made the poster first then slapped on the billing and all the other shit, everybody is used to billing so they didn't think much about it being mismatched.
You're being moronic on purpose, right?
Black person the frick do you want from me? I didn't work on the movie, go knock on one of the Cohen's doors if you're so desperate to know.
I want someone who considers films to be enough of an interest that they post on a board like this to have some fricking idea of what movies are. The question is on par with 'what do all those names at the end of the movie mean?'
What the frick are you talking about? I was asked why they didn't switch the heads on the posters to match the billing, I didn't make the poster so I don't know the internal thought process of the designer so I made a guess.
He's a homosexual ignore him anon. Let him huff his own farts for thinking knowing how a very convoluted and nuanced sub culture of insiders think and do things is common knowledge and you're a moron for not knowing.
This is actually the correct explanation. Incompetence is far far more likely than say
this anons crackpot theory.
It's in the title.
No Country for Old Men is an anti western, the good guy dies unceremoniously, the bad guy has the strong moral conviction and the wizened old veteran Sheriff Bell is racked with uncertainty, guilt and spiritual depression for how he was the sole survivor in Nam when his platoon got bombed and he ran and how his father and his relatives died unceremoniously as well, they didn't get their last hurrah. The idealization of the past is just that, in reality heroes of the died all the same unfulfilled and the world kept turning.
>Sheriff Bell is racked with uncertainty, guilt and spiritual depression for how he was the sole survivor in Nam when his platoon got bombed and he ran
Wait what? Did I miss this in the movie or is it just in the book?
It's in the book, last 20% after Llewellyn dies is just Bell coming to terms with himself and the death of Llewellyn and the specter of Anton.
"I always thought when I got older that God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn't. I don't blame him. If I was him I'd have the same opinion about me that he does"
i like how bitter he sounds when he says he didnt
In the book towards the end he talks about serving in WWII when his squad hid in a barn and then got shelled by a German mortar. He fired back at first and then ran away to save himself while the rest of his squad got trapped inside and BTFO and he got a Bronze Star for it. It's implied that this experience makes him feel inadequate and seeking redemption and to make things right in the world, which is contrasted with Chigurh and the events of his police career which show that the world is generally unfair, uncaring and that horrible things almost always happen by chance. Bell feels that the world used to make sense when his dad was Sheriff and now violence is pointless and he can't do anything to stop that either but the speech his uncle gives at the end then demonstrates that life has always been violent, nonsensical and by chance even in the "good old days".
Wait that's his uncle? Thought he was his older brother.
Bring an extra Baja Blast I'd you go hunting in the desert.
Sugar is the evil in the world
Lou Ellen is the good
Tommy L Jones is the impotence of good men
Sugars car crash is reminder that the universe is beyond all of us and even good and evil are subservient to it's whimsRYLES OF NATURE!!
Llewellyn.
Thank you
"I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning"
"When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently. That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are not some other way. They are this way."
What a weird way to rationalize murder.
Oh well you chose to be here and now and here and now I'm going to kill you so really you chose to get murdered and it's your fault.
The chick at the end was 100% correct, it's all a huge cope for him being a psychopath.
He's less a person and more a force of nature, they only humanized him in the movie to dumb it down a bit.
In the book he's depicted as tall blonde and blue eyed, very much akin to Moby Dick which was Cormac's biggest inspiration to a lot of his works.
And it's not that someone choose to be in the wrong place at the wrong time they just were it could happen to anyone, Anton's justification is that he allows fate one last chance to decide whether someone dies.
Still a massive cope but I see that element of giving fate one last chance now. Thanks for the (you)
So in a way he’s similar to The Judge.
But the whole point of the Judge is that his world view is wrong. The kid refuses to engage in the Judge’s worldview of war is god and later kills him after discovering he lives a long life after showing mercy to many different characters in the book. The same could be said about Carla Jean I’ve only watched the movie but the fact she criticizes him in the book and refuses to engage in his coin game, same way the kid refuses to engage with the Judge’s game of war must mean she is correct in her assumptions especially at the end when Anton is hit by a car which breaks his control over fate and shows just how truly mortal he is.
Yeah Cormac carried themes through different books the judge and Anton serve similar purposes as a sort of ambiguous supernatural entities, Anton getting into the car crash after having his ideals questioned is sort of ironic in how fate even came for him.
The Judge and the Kid on the other hand is much bleaker, the kid turned man could never find redemption after leaving the gang, he tried to confide his sins and guilt in a woman who was long since dead, he even killed a kid himself mostly out of pride and then at the end in the brothel we have some similarities with the judge in how he took the midget to bed paralleling the judges acts with actual children (there was also the girl who went missing but that's mostly speculation. In the end the kid could not escape his past, his sins, and was embraced by the judge in a shithouse of all places as one last indignity heaped on him and the Judge went on dancing.
The epilogue of Meridian shares a lot of ideas with NCFOM, with the whole people who dig holes and how each whole wouldn't exist without the last, like how Sheriff Bell was dealing with his lineage and how he came to the expectations of himself.
I don’t see the kids death at the hands of the judge as anything but a victory because it proves the judge’s worldview wrong. The fact he shows guilt is proof of his humanity and his willingness to move away from violence and war. A quote the judge later uses against the kid is proof of this
>You sat in judgement of your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and broke with the body of which you pledged a part and poisoned it in all its enterprises
The judge doesn’t want the Glanton gang to be introspective or judgemental of themselves because if they are, they would feel guilt and realize he is full of shit. Despite the reverse chariot, fool and the hangman all cards either drawn or represented symbolically in the book the gang continues on their path despite fate telling them to turn back.
Another thing to bring forth is the concept of names something that comes up in another McCarthy novel Outer Dark. Where if you can’t name something it doesn’t exist or can’t be controlled. The same applies to the kid, he doesn’t have a name so in a way the judge cannot control him. Later on in the book the judge tries to name the kid but it falls on deaf ears as everyone just reverts back to calling him the kid. The kid cannot be named or controlled and is autonomous so the judge’s answer to the kid is quite obvious
>whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
The answer is death or the removal from existence which the judge happily does at the end. For the dwarf prostitute I think McCarthy was just being hyperbolic since many of the other prostitutes were described as being childlike. She was probably just petite. The kid is desperately in want of a maternal figure in his life which is deprived of him early on in the book where his mother and sister is dead and his father refuses to speak their names.
Good post, makes me want to reread Blood Meridian and get around to his other works
Contd. The kid now the man calls the old woman at the end of the book abuelita which means grandmother but he also adds a suffix which changes the meaning from just grandmother to grandmama, mama or gram gram, something you would use with a person you deeply love.
The kid already proved the judge wrong by surviving the desert when judge says that he and Tobin would die there due to the kid showing mercy. Worse than that the kid continues to live until 45 which throws another blow at the judge who believes that war is god and through taking of another life the victor extends their our own.
The situation with Elrod only aims to point at the so called lack of unity that the Judge says war possesses. The more experienced the man kills the less experienced and naive Elrod. It should also be noted that the kid gives plenty of warnings to Elrod which the boy refuses to listen to, naive, ignorant and foolish as the glanton gang was during their escapades.
In the end the kid and Carla Jean call out the bullshit of their killers. Anton decides their fate not the coin and the judge as a falsified king.
An interesting and more hopeful interpretation of the book than most. It makes me think of the dual meaning and title of the book, Blood meridian basically means that this period of time in south USA and north Mexico is the bloodiest and most violent period in human history, bu the second title of An Evening of Redness in the West signifies that this period of violence is coming to an end and so the Judge would soon be out of work as this walking embodiment of war.
Past a certain elevation, a building with a missing floor can be a bad thing…
nicely done.
Amateur question. A story doesn't have to have a fricking message. A story just is. Cormac McCarthy didn't sit at the typewriter thinking "Now what message do I wish to convey to humanity with my little story here?", he just wrote a good fricking story. The moral of the story, if there is one, should emerge organically. That's what C. S. Lewis told Kingsley Amis anyway and they knew more about writing stories than you or I.
To bad Martin didn't take his dad's advice
Cormac very intentionally put the themes and meanings in his works the idea that things should appear organically is a cope that you could write something and have the same levels of depth as any of the greats if only people would pick them apart too.
A story doesn't have to have a message yes but a story also doesn't have to be read, you'll find these stories in bargain bins and usually written by women.
All I'm saying is if you guys insist on moralism and didacticism in your stories maybe you should stick to children's books.
All works are reflections of the morality and beliefs of its author, believing otherwise is moronic, even the choice to present things as indifferently and honestly as possible is someones belief.
I was just being an butthole really, sorry. Have a good day anon
S'all good bro.
>I don’t get it so there’s nothing to get
when you encounter this situation in the future you can just say its about nihilism or the industrial revolution or crap like that to hide how much of a moron you are
Death is inevitable, good writing is optional
“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
A quote from another of Cormac's works which helps to further contextualize Anton, Anton believes in what he does and has to unease about his actions, Sheriff Bell is the opposite he has nothing but doubts about his convictions and feels guilty for even being alive.
Guilt is a nice angle, I haven't considered that singularly before.
Bell's opening monolog leans on that lack of understanding and the fear rooted in it, comparing himself to his forefathers and elders in his work (law enforcement) and his closing monolog does seem centered on dreams of guilt and consequence and debt to his father.
Moss returns to the Mexican with water, seems guilty in bed.
Anton doesn't seem to regret a single thing, he's almost immune to guilt allowing him to move freely.
Interesting that most the characters in this are military vets, guilt and its connection to surviving in the world after echoes around it.
Sounds like babby's first nietzsche to me
free will v. destiny
who was the bad guy again?
Just as any MCarthy fiction, actual evil exists, eternally.
its something about the israelites destroying america and white men having no place in the country anymore becuase of the israelites
Anton is not some unique evil in the grand scheme of things. Every era had its monsters. The sheriff was wrong to think times are getting worse, he's just being nostalgic. They're all insignificant, Anton is not the agent of fate he thinks he is which is why he gets randomly BTFO by a car.
Why does Tommy Lee Jones have top billing despite the fact that we see him for like 20 minutes total?
The murky reality of random chance. The film has a scene where a woman argues with the main antagonist about how he has a choice, the character is show multiple times relying on a coin flip. However the post poignant scene in my opinion is the car wreck, that is one of the most random things that could have happened. It wasn't the result of a character flipping a coin, it was one of several possibilities the universe could have thrown at the characters.
Even if they drove safely, obeyed all traffic laws, a truck could barrel through and head on collide with them. So even though the character flips coins, and could decide whether to do something or not, the universe at large, by which he is one aspect of that whole, is subject to inexplicable random chance.
>Just take the coin, old timer
>I...I don't know why you come round my store like this being so rude
>Shut up, you got this store from your wife's father, this country obviously is not for you, one could almost say this is no country for an old man
He said it right here, Anon
mexicans are bad
Everything is getting shittier and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
Kill cops to be free.