By Restless

In December I watched the new Coen Brothers film, No Country For Old Men, which has gone on to win the Academy award for Best Picture.  It is a tragedy, a work of unremitting violence.

As I left the multiplex, I thought: What are these guys saying here?

I mean, the Coens, the actors (Josh Brolin, others), all of the artist who put this together who made this considerable effort to construct something far more substantial than the usual meaningless mish mashes of action and mayhem like others have done recently (Tarintino’s Kill Bill 1 & 2, Rodriguez’s Sin City and Scorsese’s The Departed being the most notable examples).

The best art reflects society back on itself, revealing the underlying reality by peeling away the white noise, the static = American idol, anything Britney/Lindsey/Paris, “Reality” shows, Fox News, Happy “News” – that clogs understanding.

So what was revealed by the film?  I had been moved, but I wasn’t sure why, or how.

For help, I consulted Aristotle’s poetics, the 2000-year old tome still considered the Bible on dramatic construction.

In the late 70’s the film opens with what passes now-a-days for a Greek chorus, in the guise of Tommy Lee Jones aging Texas country sheriff, which as Aristotle says serves to comment on and reinforce the central idea of the work – things aint what they used to be.  Or, to be more clear, decent people can’t stand up to or stop the ruthless, sociopathic evil unleashed by the unwinnable “war on drugs” imitated by Nixon, then reeling from the failures of the war in Vietnam.

This idea is reiterated throughout by Tommy in voice over and on camera as well as by other secondary characters - Another technique of modern Greek choruses (for the Greek choruses in modern film see Jonathon Richards Guitarist in the tree in “There’s something about Mary” and the actual Greek chorus used by Woody Allen in his film with Mira Sorvino of about 10 years ago)

We catch first sight of the ruthless evil just after Tommy Lee’s first chorus in what Aristotle calls a Parode with the induction of the films chilling villain.  Anton Chigurh, and his thunderous escape from custody.  The Parode is a kind of “Parody” of the action to come, a preview, a warm up, serving to setup the action, in this case the level and type of violence of the film.

From there the filmmakers move right into what Aristotle calls the “complicating”, the setup – Lewelyn Moss, a Vietnam vet out hunting antelope on his day off comes across the violent remains of a drug shoot out with one half of a survivor. He recovers a satchel full of money, getting back to his trailer park wife with no one the wiser and his fortune seems assured.

But, that’s just it – Aristotle teaches there would be no drama at all without a reversal of fortune. Furthermore, poetics says this reversal must come from an error in judgment, not from depravity.  And finally, said error must instill putt and/or fear in the viewer (as opposed to disgust and/or revulsion).

Thus, when Josh Brolins Llewelyn decides that the right thing to do is to take the sole survivor the water he so desperately had requested, we are setup for the roller coaster for the rest of the film.  Called by Aristotle “The Denouement”, the hero’s tragic reversal of fortune.  But, this is just the first of several misjudgments our hero makes, all however stemming from his basic decency and goodness.

From then on, every scene in the movie hammers home the single idea: Decent men and women don’t stand a chance against amoral evil.  They are either destroyed by it, or corrupted by it.  There is no escape.  Aristotle teaches that the denouement of a story serves to build up a well of pity and fear in the audience, leading up to catharsis, or a purging of said pity and fear.

In this films case, as in the only other masterpiece of the first decade of the 21st century, David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence”, the catharsis comes when we realize that the urge to decency, to goodness, can never be completely exterminated by corruption, or evil.  This makes for mature and ultra modern entertainment!

No country for old men is the place we’ve come to inhabit, or will be living in soon enough.

Check it out!