No Country for Old Men: meaning?

No Country for Old Men is based on the Cormack McCarthy novel of the same name. The Cohen Brothers really add something to the gritty, dark perspective of this deep story. The whole time I watched I thought about postmodernism.

The bad guy in the movie Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Borden, is a sociopathic killer who’s been sent to retrieve drug money is a very memorable, shadowy character that is so merciless that he is more like a plot device than a character.

I really liked this movie. It was really the story line that kept asking the question, “what does your life mean?” “all the choices you’ve made have brought you to this point.. what do think about that” (or something to that effect) The killer Chigurh asks the question before he kills people and the protagonist Sheriff Ed Tom Bell played by Tommy Lee Jones is introspective about the question of why? Why is there so much violence? What was the purpose of the victims deaths? And he can’t answer it at all.

The story was so compelling that It makes me want to read the book & and buy the movie. Because I’ve been plagued by the same questions my whole life. An like the story, I’ve got no answers… just questions and reflections.

In the end, the view is left with the killer not merely getting away but succeeding in killing and innocent protagonist victim. It’s a “pull the wings off of a fly” moment, but the killers reasons are that he “made a promise”. The kicker is that as he is driving away from the victim’s house he broadsided by a station wagon. He is hurt badly. He’s got a compound fracture with a bone sticking out of his arm. He pays a couple of kids to shut their mouths about seeing him walk away from the accident.

For me, this was a powerful scene because it underlines that NOBODY is exempt from mortality and seems to be the authors way of saying that violence has no explanation, it just happens. Even the Anton Chigurh’s existence as a merciless killer, it just happened. I don’t know if I completely agree with that, but it is a very interesting perspective on reality.