The New Republic

It's a shame that Zodiac seems to have been forgotten.  It's an incredible deconstruction and deflation of the serial killer genre, and it's all the more impressive because it was directed by a man who made one of the genre's masterpieces.

Jesse James, Michael Clayton, and Knocked Up deserve more than they're getting, too.

- ejbenjamin

December 11, 2007 at 2:08pm

ejb-- Completely agree about Jesse James and Zodiac, which both probably make my top five of the year. Michael Clayton has been getting some love--Clooney actually got the best actor nod (surprisingly) from the National Board of Review and the Washington, DC critics. Based on the early evidence, I wouldn't be that surprised if he's nominated for Best Actor and/or the film for Best Picture.

- Chris Orr

December 11, 2007 at 2:24pm

Oh, goodie.  I would much rather read about stuff like this than about Who Hates Huckabee.

- drdannyu

December 11, 2007 at 2:53pm

Wow -- I'm getting lonlier and lonlier in my impatience with No Country.  Maybe I have to see it again.  But I have the plot right, right?  Bad guy goes from set piece to set piece chasing sort-of-good guy laying on some shtick or killing people or both?  What was the deeper meaning (or other compensation) that justified this dull horror-flick story (made more dull with slow pacing and no music)?  I'm genuinely curious.  Maybe Chris can explain it me.  Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is the most brilliantly directed movie ever (and there was much about *that* aspect I liked) and let's also say that the acting was very good (although the bad guy's performance didn't thrill me as much as it did others):  What about script and story and point?

- jhildner

December 11, 2007 at 3:40pm

You see jhildner. The entire movie was waiting for the final lines. For those of you who haven't seen it yet and would like to, please avert your eyes.

It was cold and snowin, hard

ridin. Hard country. He rode past me

and kept on goin. Never said nothin

goin by. He just rode on past and he

had his blanket wrapped around him and

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. Out there up ahead.

What we are talking is evil and capriciousness having its way but still having to contend with hope in the human spirit. And perhaps capriciousness and evil meets its own match. I truly do admire this flick. It is about as black as it can, embracing the wanton existential crisis......with the utterly redemptive saving grace. That little horn of fire and the WILL to ride into the darkness to light that fire. It kicks existentialism in the ass.

You're welcome.

- boxofrox

December 11, 2007 at 5:00pm

I don't know very much about theses things, but Amy Ryan strikes me as a well above-average actress. My first memory of seeing her was in her role as an ingenuous, mousy, Baltimore Port Authority cop in the second season of the "The Wire."  In latter seasons she became the love interest of on of the show's lead and evinced a certain sexiness. (For those of you who haven't seen her, she isn't a classic(?) beauty or glamour puss.)

I recognized her in "Gone Baby Gone" and her performance as a white trash/wigger babe.  Quite authentic. and. again, sexy--in a bad way. I saw her yesterday in her role as a bitchy (Alimony! Child support!) ex-wife in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead,"  Again, she came across as completely believable. What  do the critics say? Oh, yes, "authentic," genuine.  And as in "Gone Baby..." she displayed a repugnant, yet concupiscent  air.

- tec619

December 11, 2007 at 5:00pm

Oh yeah. Unless Marisa Tomei has the best plastic surgeon in the world--and he'd have to be good to fool me--she must have great genes. Her bod looks better than ever.  She played Phillip Seymour Hoffman's wife in "Before the Devil Knows You're Dead" and sowed a bit of flesh. Her acting was top drawer as well. Sh cheated on Hoffman, but still loved him. While not necessarily difficult to get across (especially for an actress with theatre experience) many airheads couldn't manage it.

- tec619

December 11, 2007 at 5:11pm

NO COUNTRY SPOILER

Boxo:

Okay, but....  Doesn't evil totally win in the movie?  If the big triumph of humanity is that, when confronted with evil, we refrain from all killing ourselves en masse, then I don't see "goin' on" as much of a redemption.  Anyway, I didn't see a coherent message about humanity here.  The bad guy struck me as a singular psychopath and not convincingly representative of anything.

Can you elaborate?

- jhildner

December 11, 2007 at 5:25pm

Capricious chance has been a recurring theme in the Coen library. Chigurh is the anthropormorphism of the darkest aspects of chance as well as chance informed by human desires. We all live with old Anton Chigurh everyday. Could be a bus in the crosswalk. Could be that deal that we make at someone elses expense. Wanting has its own price to exact.

Even if only by virtue of a dream does a light in the dark and cold exist. So it does in fact exist.

Of course there are a bunch of different things to kick about on this little dark and brooding contemplation but this is the main point.

Cormac McCarthy's other popular tome is "The Road" which essentially redeems humanity by virtue of WILL.

Now you as an atheist should know something of will. What with all of the iterations of universal rights etc. Of course it is my contention that it is counterproductive to tell such a story and codify such a proposition for surely such a thing cannot contain as much. But the fact is you try nonetheless. To that end I honor. The will aspect of your convictions.

So the Coen's answered Jesus in his existential despair. Father. "Why hast thou forsaken me?' Answer of course is that he hasn't. Not really. Does broken will offer a new child in its stead? Something closer to the truth than could be had otherwise? Lot's of different ways to go here. If I'm not mistaken one of the Coen brothers was a philosophy student.Perhaps grad. Not sure. Easy enough to find out I guess. That might give a little insight into the weird affections of their flicks. Great stuff by my lights.

Please bare in mind that it is not my purpose to put specific words into the brothers mouths. Only approximating the roads they travel and ask us to travel too. Maybe have a laugh or two along the way.

- boxofrox

December 11, 2007 at 6:06pm

boxo-

Great stuff.  I haven't been able to shake No Country from my head since I saw it.  I appreciate you elucidating some of its points.  

- boneill

December 11, 2007 at 6:17pm

Shoot fire, bone. It's my pleasure. Quite a playground. Neh?

- boxofrox

December 11, 2007 at 7:13pm

"Chigurh is the anthropormorphism of the darkest aspects of chance as well as chance informed by human desires."  So, he represents both bad luck and ill will?  Seems kind of sloppy.  For what it's worth, my sense was that he was *supposed* to represent more the former -- an inscrutable malevolent force.  Hence his irritation when his victims plead, "You don't have to do this."  He does, I suppose.  We're told he has rules, but they're not very impressive.  They're actually kind of silly -- he must make good on a threat, for example, as though he has an obligation to the person being threatened.  This was meant to be startlingly perverse and maybe a little funny too, but I wasn't tickled.  I thought, this is the great mysterious Chigurh?  It just seemed like nonsense.  (Sort of like the answer to Why hast Thou forsaken me?  No good reason for the Passion, from a theological or literary perspective.  Jesus's dying for humanity's sins is heavy hokum -- just like this movie.  He could just as well have risen from the dead after dying of natural causes, and, given his following -- it would have been as effective in conveying the new promise of eternal life so long as you're Jesus-like.  I guess we're supposed to be moved that God would do this to his son for our sake, but that's stupid.  There's no coherent sense in which Jesus is actually suffering "for" us, except that God, for whatever reason, wants to do it this way.  And *I'm* the one who's working hard?  Anyway, I digress.)

The stuff about the flicker implies that the world is a whole lot of Chigurh.  And there are some lines in the movie to suggest a pessimism about the way things are going -- the sheriff (more so in the book I think) is a pretty reactionary these-kids-today sort who, it seems, is coming to terms with a new world order where human beasts roam.  But Chigurh is too exaggerated and singular a villain, and his crimes too gross, for him to be a convincing stand-in for the The Shit World We Live In or whatever.  It would be like saying Pscyho is about mothers and sons.  Meanwhile, I didn't see Will redeeming anything or anyone in the movie.  I didn't see the new child, or whatever.  Even the guy who goes on and lights the fire seems like he's doing it mechanically, like he has to because that's what the human animal does.  So the laconic rider -- just a-doin his thing, without any thought, evidently -- offers hope in an impossibly bleak world that doesn't exist represented by a demented freakshow?  It's all too rich.  I found that the Coens usual ironic touch didn't fit this dull, pretentious story.

- jhildner

December 11, 2007 at 8:10pm

Chigurh has rules. There is a capriciousness behind rules in and of themselves. No conscience. Just a law unto himself. It doesn't surprise me that you would be dissatisfied with the sloppy.

The Christ is a whole nother. Understand that it is irrelevant whether man created God hence Christ or vice versa. Full ownership for responsibility of the Passion makes its very own poignant conclusions about human nature. The transitioning of the sin beast is anything but superfluous and without redemptive value both theologically or literary (and as far as I'm concerned scientifically). Try speaking to the personal collectively and see what you come up with. But I digress.

You are certainly entitled to your dissatisfactions. I thought they did black about as hard as it comes. Yet still managed to be affectionate. Laconic though he may be, still he rides. As for the new child, that was broached according to will and the oblique Jesus reference. Something tangentially approachable given some latitude and generosity of vista without fear of Lillipution bondage in scripture.

You're a smart guy and it's a pleasure talking with you. Though your own malevolence as fashioned by your scalpel of reason is easily an equal pairing for the enthralled by the archetypals which you so disdain. There is just no room to breathe. What say that spirit?

- boxofrox

December 11, 2007 at 9:21pm

Boxo:

In re the Passion, maybe I should've said that it had no theological merit and conceded that it had *some* literary merit -- as perhaps an over-the-top symbolic setup for redemption.  As you know, Easter is when the flowers come out, and the flowers aren't as impressive without the nasty winter.  Plot-wise, it remains troublesome though becuse this God character is too harsh a poet.  Why must He bring everyone down *so* low?  Isn't the mundane terrible enough?  In fact, isn't it the fear of nothingness, rather than Roman torture or Hell's fire, that motivates belief in the first place?  Must the winter be so bloody?  The fundamental problem with this character, no matter how you conceive of Him, is that He's just got to be a huge Dick.  WDBTHTGP? and so forth.  The theologian explains that it has to do with original sin, which is a corrosive concept.  We didn't start out pure and fall, a convenient out for a perfect God -- blame the humans (or, more precisely, the woman).  (But you created us, oh Lord!)  Rather, we started out as amoral monkeys and have been falling upward ever since, inventing and refining (with more than a few bumps in the road) morality, art, civilization, and microwave ovens and losing in the bargain only our proficiency at the monkey bars and our taste for bananas.  (Thankfully, we still find feces funny.)  Backward looking longings for purity and innocence -- smeared all over most religions -- aren't my bag.  I'm not Gen. Jack Ripper from Dr. Strangelove, worried that my precious bodily fluids will be corrupted with foreign substances.  That's fear talking -- fear of death, fear of the future, fear of humanity, fear of lady parts -- "natural," perhaps, but unattractive and dangerous when emphasized.  (How much you want to bet that the 9/11 hijackers were virgins?)  "Human nature" turns out to be an elastic thing anyway -- something largely made up through human interaction, i.e., culture and civilization.  Religions think human nature is something to be repressed.  They don't understand that it's something that, to a significant degree, we get to invent as we go along.  How else did we get to where we are?

Human progress is an amazing thing.  I just read in The New Yorker about the "Flynn effect" regarding I.Q., which is the well-substantiated observation, named for the guy that first made it, that people get smarter, I.Q.-wise, over time.  They keep having to "re-norm" the I.Q. tests to make it harder to score a hundred.  In other words, your I.Q., tested when you were a kid, doesn't compare to your kids' tested today.  If current trends stretched back a hundred years, the average person was literally retarded by today's standards.  I also read an article in Vanity Fair about Pitcairn -- the tiny island midway between Australia and South America of Mutiny on the Bounty fame -- where, apparently, a few English guys have been raping little girls for 40-odd years.  The British courts decided that they must have known better, so offensive to common decency were their acts, and they were probably right.  Their offense wasn't to act in accord with human nature, properly understood, but against it.  Call it the Moral Flynn (not Errol Flynn) Effect.  "Tort" is the word English-speaking lawyers use for civil wrongs.  It comes from an old word meaning "twisted" -- i.e., unnatural, perverse.  We get to decide what's a tort, what's a crime, how they're punished, how we all get along.  The Bible, where coveting, contrary to the 1st Amendment, is punishable by death (and contrary to the cruel and unusual punishment clause, by stoning) is not where you want to look for answers.  After all, it was written by people who were, according to the Flynn effects, assholes and morons.

Maybe Chigurh is God.  He's nasty.  Check.  He's in total control.  Check.  He's inscrutable.  Check.  He lacks all warmth, remorse, and self-regard.  Check.  He functions according to incomprhensible laws of his own strange design.  Check.  Mere people are pathetic up against him.  Check.  He presides over a bleak desert populated by losers/victims.  Check.  Maybe I have No Country all wrong.  Maybe it's, allegorically speaking, right up my street.  What's the word for God-hate?  (Seriously, I can't call it up, and it's so apt.)  It's what I've always said:  If God's real, He's a psychopath.  I think I do need to watch the movie again after all.

I'm glad you think I'm smart -- back at you, buddy -- but I think my salpel is liberating next to faith's cudgel (or should I say Chigurh's cattle stunner), espcially because my scalpel is grasped firmly by human hands.  I breathe a lot easier having it.  It's a mistake to think that profundity is sacrificed along with grand superstition.  The truth continues to be far more interesting than the relatively lame contrivances we used to fill in the blanks with thousands of years ago.  We have a bad track record when it comes to guessing what's really going on.  The sun turns out just to be a star up close, for starters.  Who'd've thunk it?  The guy who did think it, as it happens, using his scalpel.

- jhildner

December 12, 2007 at 2:02am

So you're going to Chigurh the Christians, heh? Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't you dedicated to the destruction of a straw god? One of the new iconoclasts. In its stead erect a monument to truth as you see it? One that you can't see? Isn't that what you are ultimately doing? I mean you know as well as I know that truth cannot be sufficiently codified as to represent the fully encompassed living reality. As you say, we are daily stepping forward such that our children likely operate in a different sphere than we did only yesterday. I suppose those universals might look something like "Do unto" when all said and done. Yeah. Those folks, those ancients were pretty foolish as we look back upon their follies. Imagine that they created this ridiculous story about a garden and a proximal experience of journey from and back to, simultaneously. Talk about lost in the desert! But of course they are nothing like you and me in all of our modern splendor. Silly little fairy tales and such are for children and fools.

You're the line rider. That still won't change the circle you live in.

- boxofrox

December 12, 2007 at 7:56am

Oh. One more thing. I hearby give you permission to dislike this movie. Even intensely if you please. It doesn't make me one way or tahother. I just like the proximities which are implied by this kind of work. That's just me. Many other folks think this movie sucks, too. So you're not alone in disappointment.

- boxofrox

December 12, 2007 at 8:11am

Hey Chris. Didn't you promise a revisit on No Country? Or is that just wishful thinking on my part?

- boxofrox

December 12, 2007 at 9:15am

This is a repost from an old thread, on Chigurh's whereabouts in LLewelyn's murder scene when Bell entered.  It fits here, though, as long as the movie's being dissected:

I figured Chigurh was hiding in the corner of the room when Bell entered, then left through the open door when Bell checked the bathroom.  The corner was darkened in the shot of Bell entering the room, and it wasn't clear to me (though apparently it was to some) that it was empty.  

The tension of the scene is held until Bell, after checking the bathroom, first looks back at the door.  There is the sense he's afraid to look where the viewer believes Chigurh is standing.  It ties back to two points - Bell's opening voice-over, when he says he doesn't want to be killed by what he can't understand, and Chigurh's sparing of the accountant who agrees to never have seen him.  Bell senses where Chigurh is, and agrees not to see him.  

I take the coin, in that scene, as the height of Chigurh's attempt to transform himself into allegory, to not simply be one agent of fate but an embodiment of all fate.  He left the coin for Llewelyn, who he didn't kill: he's taking credit for all deaths, now.  

(When Carla Jean refuses to call the last coin toss, saying, "You do it, not the coin," she forces him to act as a person and not as fate.  Immediately he's subject to the chances that all people, but not ideas, are subject to, and his car is clobbered.  And he must extragantly overpay for a clean shirt, a repetition of the scene in which Llewelyn, bleeding from one of Chigurh's bullets, buys a jacket while being asked, "Were you in a car accident?"  Chigurh had been the one who enforced the terrors that happen to everyone, but now he's prone to them as anyone.  He had been the car accident, now he gets in car accidents.  To become human is as bad an ending as possible, in this movie.)

- gellis17

December 12, 2007 at 9:40am

Funny, boxofrox -- I got exactly the opposite message from No Country.  Because to me the salient point is that the father the sheriff is dreaming about is dead, and thus the road he's leading his son down in the dream leads to death.

For me the dream symbolizes that everybody's road leads to the same place, and it doesn't matter to anybody but you if you're a good man or a murderer, innocent or guilty -- what we call "justice" is an arbitrary structure that we impose on events that we ultimately have no control over, and the universe tends to be stubbornly uncooperative in providing us the order that we crave.

In a just world, the murderer doesn't escape justice, and the virtuous lawman saves the innocent woman.  But in the real world, there is no difference between the lawman, the innocent and the murderer.  Because the universe doesn't care who lives or who dies.  Justice is not something built into the world by some benevolent Creator that rewards the virtuous and punishes the vicious.

So the murderer lives, and accomplishes his mission, but it could just as easily have gone the other way.  It all comes down to chance, as Chigurh says -- combined with free will, as Carla Jean says.

Now you can call that message a lot of things, but I think few would find it a message of redemptive, saving grace.  To some people, it's a hopeless and nihilistic view of the world; the kind of sentiment that drives them to religion or self-destruction.  Personally, I view it as a call to action -- if free will is the only tool at our disposal to create justice, punish the wicked and reward the virtuous, then we need to devote ourselves to that cause with as much passion as we can muster.

Because we're all we've got -- and if we're not enough, nothing will be.

- austinexpat

December 12, 2007 at 1:33pm

austinexpat --

Thank you!  You've articulated an interpretation of the movie that makes sense to me:  We live in a cold, empty universe, and then we die.  Reminds me of my experience watching the movie:  We sit in a cold, empty theater in midtown for two hours, and then we leave.  Missing is all the fun we're supposed to have along the way.  I guess it's too much of a downer for my taste -- from both an escapist or literary perspective.

- jhildner

December 12, 2007 at 2:50pm

gellis17: Interesting confluences. Clever I must say. I'll have to see this flick again. Went when I found some late at night time and wasn't full up for it. Need to chew on those conclusions a bit.

- boxofrox

December 12, 2007 at 3:19pm

austinexpat: Well all right, man. If I'm not mistaken though your final comments had a thing or two to say about faith. You see that as being substantially different somehow. I see faith as being drawn from the same well.

- boxofrox

December 12, 2007 at 3:26pm

Interesting discussion. I haven't seen the film (it is not on here, yet) but sure are curious and won't miss it. On the Coen brothers' oeuvre, Jack has made very interesting points. And very close to truth.

There is something in austinexpat's argument that shows what they call a "performative contradiction":

"- what we call "justice" is an arbitrary structure that we impose on events that we ultimately have no control over, and the universe tends to be stubbornly uncooperative in providing us the order that we crave.

In a just world, the murderer doesn't escape justice, and the virtuous lawman saves the innocent woman."

So at the same time, austin is denying justice or defining it as an "arbitrary structure" that we impose on events, he is saying that  "in a just world..:". He is applying that very structure to events...

So austin's argument, it seems, is not that justice is an "arbitrary structure", but that these events were not accorded with justice.

And why weren't them... well, at least since Plato we know that "there is no justice without just men"...

- luispc

December 12, 2007 at 3:35pm

luispc: You're close, but I think I can explain a little further.

What I'm saying is that No Country's message is that "justice" is not *intrinsic* to the universe, but something that men create, arbitrarily -- and often fail to create even on their own terms.  The laws of nature provide no assistance in the cause of justice; or to put a more theological spin on it, if there is a God, it is a Deist God at best: one which takes no action on matters of good and evil in the human frame of reference.

Some theists hate that idea, perhaps because a universe in which good does not come from God is terrifyingly random: they can't stand a universe where a Creator doesn't love us or guide us, or at least put its thumb on the scales now and then.  They argue that to deny the existence of a loving, involved God is to deny teleology itself, and make all action essentially purposeless.

But some atheists, myself included, find such an absence of God not a reason for hopeless despair, but a reason for courage and industry.  We do not need God on our side to do good, and to us, the worst kind of "sin" is to quietly submit to (or even defend!) misery and injustice because of a belief that such things are inevitable or "part of God's plan."

To answer boxofrox, though, I don't think No Country goes as far as I do in leaving us with any reason for faith or hope.  The ending of the movie, to me, is bleakness and confusion -- a tired old man who doesn't understand his world anymore, and thus has no more power to create justice.  His mission failed, his burden dropped, he's left rudderless and impotent, in a house with a wife who doesn't seem to need anything from him.  Even his dreams have nothing to show him but death.

So while I found it to be an excellent, thought-provoking film, it's also an unremitting downer.  For me it's a real memento mori: a reminder of death's inevitability, underlining how it's the one adversary over which victory is impossible.  Death cannot be fought, fled, tricked or negotiated with.  And it could come at any moment -- with the flip of a coin, or the crash of a car -- to the innocent as well as the guilty.

- austinexpat

December 12, 2007 at 5:44pm

Thanks for the development austin, but still I'm not convinced by your atheist despair, though not hopeless.

Let's start where you say:

"But some atheists, myself included, find such an absence of God not a reason for hopeless despair, but a reason for courage and industry.  We do not need God on our side to do good, and to us, the worst kind of "sin" is to quietly submit to (or even defend!) misery and injustice because of a belief that such things are inevitable or "part of God's plan.""

This is very worthy and what you are saying is that you are a just man -- a man that won't submit to misery and injustice -- without shelter, in a way. At the same time, though, you are saying that you do participate in an idea of justice that you are prepared to fight for!

So, unless you are saying that that idea of justice that you are prepared to fight for is something arbitrary or random (created by you on your own terms), you cannot honestly say that justice is "something that men create, arbitrarily -- and often fail to create even on their own terms".

I also do not believe in "laws of nature" as they have been understood modernly. For me, nature itself does not answer us. But I do think that, in our modern blindness, we forgot an idea of nature thought by the Greeks, developped in Medieval Christian theology (by Thomas Aquinas) and later in Locke. In this case nature means man reached to it's moral perfection after having taken, within himself, an idea of the good that, after being taken by him, is him.

The Christian God -- the God made man -- means exactly this: the possibility of men reaching their moral perfection after His example as "symbol of the self", as Jung called it. And the idea of justice or "symbol of the self" that you have implicit in your speech when you say that you are commited with justice -- that you are a just man, that you strive for moral perfection, independently of a transcendent God (a God that died in that Friday called the Holocaust) -- and will act after your commitment is very much this one.

The 20th century confirmed the history of Christ and confirmed Hegel: God is dead but God lives. Now, he lives in us, when we know that we cannot live without His idea of justice (that to live within an idea of justice of our own creation means nothing but a dangerous illusion), when we disccover ourselves commited with that idea of justice even when ask "Father, why did you abandon me?"

- luispc

December 13, 2007 at 3:23am

Allow me to put here the most relevant passage of the Old Testament, reading it without mistrust, knowing that no one is asking for your faith or for your blind obedience but merely for your self-knowledge and your possible joy:

"My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. "Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world. "Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them."

And, of course, love is that justice that you know is within yourself.

- luispc

December 13, 2007 at 3:57am

The passage is John, 17, 20-26

- luispc

December 13, 2007 at 3:58am

luispc: "So, unless you are saying that that idea of justice that you are prepared to fight for is something arbitrary or random (created by you on your own terms), you cannot honestly say that justice is 'something that men create, arbitrarily -- and often fail to create even on their own terms.' "

Well read!  That is exactly what I am saying.  Justice is arbitrary -- and I, like every other human being, am the arbiter.

- austinexpat

December 13, 2007 at 10:26am

You are not being honest with yourself austin. Or with me...

- luispc

December 13, 2007 at 10:41am