I'm a big fan of the Coen Brothers. "Fargo" is one of my favorite movies. So of course I was excited about "No Country for Old Men," which was apparently their best movie since it won the Academy Award, right?
I think old men should have been disqualified from voting for Best Picture that year. This movie pandered like crazy to old men, specifically grumpy old men. (By the way, "No Country for Grumpy Old Men" is definitely a movie I would see. Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau raised from the dead and going on a killing spree. "Gruff but endearingly homocidal" could be the tagline.)
It took me a while to really get into words what was wrong with this movie, but after I had an argument with a stranger on Facebook I got it down. (Ain't that always the way?) This guy on Fecebook waxed pretentious about how the movie "bespoke some sort of deep internal disquiet about modern life," that the country and indeed the world had turned away from old men and seemed foreign and dangerous and blah blah blah.
And that is indeed what a big part of the movie seemed to try to bespokinate. Tommy Lee Jones and some other guys were old men who were scared and baffled and downright helpless in the face of the threats of the modern world, what with its proliferation of Dorothy Hamill-coiffed serial killers and suchlike. There's one long and incredibly dull scene at the end of "No Country for Old Men" in which Tommy Lee Jones goes to some other old guy's house in the middle of Bumblefuck, Texas and they trade pithy platitudes about the world creeping to hell in a handbasket, or something. I wanted to tell them to grow the hell up.
This gets to what I call have long called the "grumpy old man argument." It's a tried and true device in which grumpy old men complain about the modern world by saying that everything was better in the good old days. These arguments usually start with phrases such as "In my day" or "I remember a time when," etc. They're almost always bullshit.
In essence, the grumpy old man argument is really "The world has passed me by. I don't really get what's going on nowadays. Therefore, it's the world's fault." It always involves looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, looking at the present with bile-covered glasses, and then just completely making shit up.
Here's an example: Have you ever heard a grumpy old man say "I remember a time when people were kind and decent to each other!" Yeah, pops, except to minorities. And women. And foreigners. And you know, even among white men, there were lots of fistfights. I'll grant that there was less gun violence (although, violent crime levels are currently at lows not seen since the '50s), but if you read any history about ordinary life in the first half of the 1900s, it's little besides fistfights and suicides. Lots of suicides. Of course, the grumpy old men only remember how Old Man Johnson would come by each morning and say "hello" to the family. They leave out the part about Old Man Johnson beating his kids and blowing his salary each week on whiskey.
I'm not saying that everything is great nowadays. For one thing, a lot of attempts at positive change are being impeded by grumpy old men and other, younger conservatives who are terrified that if we change the worst health insurance system in the developed world to something more closely resembling the best health insurance systems in the developed world, we'll suddenly all be standing in bread lines and praising our Great Benevolent Leader Obama. It's not based on logic, just on that primal, irrational fear of change that is the grumpy old man's stock in trade.
But all that aside, the reality is that the world is not more or less sinister than it ever was. It's just as sucky, but in different ways. Yes, we now have global warming and terrorism and Jonas Brothers. But we used to have World Wars and institutionalized racism and Andrews Sisters. Grumpy old men only think it's worse now because they're not used to it all.
Which gets us back to "No Country for Old Men." Basically, the premise of a lot of it is that the world has become scary and freakishly violent -- this being embodied by Anton, the aforementioned Dorothy Hamill-coiffed denim enthusiast who just walks around killing people for no reason. The problem is that Anton, as scary as he is (and he really, really is, thanks in part to a brilliant performance by Javier Bardem), is not some archetype of modern life. Guys like Anton don't simply don't exist in the real world. There have been plenty of serial killers (very few lately though, have you noticed that? It seemed like you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a serial killer in the early '90s. But when was the last time you heard of one these days?). But most real serial killers are a lot more like Jeffrey Dahmer -- nerdy, conniving, private, sexually perverse. They're horrific, but not in a showy, charismatic way. They simply don't just walk around town with a cow-puncher killing people for no reason and constantly get away with it. And moreover, they're extremely, extremely rare.
You know who does walk around killing people for no reason though? Jason, Freddy, Michael Myers, etc. Anton is one of the great movie monsters of all time, but that's it. He's not a commentary about modern life, because modern life simply isn't like that. Violent crime rates are low, the threat of nuclear war is at a lower ebb, and even terrorists are not the master villains that we've made them out to be -- they're just a small collection of lunatic fringe radicals that really don't have very good resources and will never really get normal folks on their side. (And that opens a can of worms that I will now close and perhaps re-open in another post.)
Bottom line is, people in this country are as safe or safer than they've ever been -- they're paranoid, to be sure, perhaps because they watch too much exploitative news -- but safe. We have lots of actual things to be scared of, from climate change to falling house prices to idiots screaming into cell phones, but if Anton is supposed to be a metaphor for that kind of thing, the Coen Brothers and Cormac McCarthy really need to go back to metaphor school.
Of course, it's obvious what Anton is really supposed to be a metaphor for -- he's the boogieman that grumpy old men invent in their tiny minds to reconcile their discomfort with the unfamiliar with their own massive egos. Maybe the United States isn't exactly a country for old men, but it could be one if old men were willing to say hey, this new world might make me feel a bit odd, it might not be what I'm entirely used to, but things change, and maybe I should try to stretch myself a bit and meet it halfway. But no, that can't be it. I'm perfect. The problem is that this goddamn world is crawling with serial killers with funny hair! That's it!
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5 comments:
I understand your dislike for nostalgia and grumpy old people. I share this sentiment 100%. I don't really think that is the theme of the movie though. In fact, what I remembered about the grumpy old man scene is that grumpy older man basically put the smackdown on Tommy Lee Jones' whining about the old days and was all, "this country was always violent". I thought that it was because Tommy Lee Jones was old and complacent and stuck in the past, he was completely ineffectual at his job. I mean, I guess the movie sort of feels sorry for old men, but I don't think it validates their views. I mean, Tommy Lee Jones is really, really bad at his job, but doesn't seem to be willing to admit it. Maybe he once was good at it, but he's old now and should move to a retirement home, in the city, not the country, where old men do not belong. I actually didn't think about any of this when I saw it, so I'm not sure if I really remember everything all that well.
But I do want to say that I agree with you that Anton was a little too psycho. I wanted him to just be no-nonsense career man. To have his own set of rules he uses to get a job done and to not be affected by murder, if it is necessary. They imply this a little, but it just seems that he enjoys the killing too much.
Hm, interesting. I really felt that the movie was portraying Tommy Lee Jones as the real hero, a poor old man confused and helpless in the face of modern life. I remember in particular one scene in which his goofy young greenhorn cop came to see him in a coffeeshop to tell him about the latest murder, and Tommy Lee just gave some very world-weary wisdom about how "well, what would be the point of going to the scene, son, when blah blah blah?" and the greenhorn said, "aw shucks, guess you're right, wise old feller," and meanwhile I was screaming to the screen "Bullshit! Get your ass off that chair and go to the crime scene, you lazy old prick! Someone's slaughtering innocent people! At least pretend to try!" That might have been the point when I felt like the movie was supporting Tommy Lee instead of exposing him as an incompetent, and everything else seemed to support that interpretation, including this old blowhgard on Facebook that I mentioned. But I could be wrong.
Coen Bros. movies are like the Constitution. There's a great framework, with lots of details, and some very clear ideas in places. But there's also a lot of room for interpretation. You can be a Coen Bros. Scalia, looking for the original intent of the filmmakers, or you can be a Coen Bros. Earl Warren, and use the substance of the film to suit your own allegorical needs. All you need to do is try to convince a majority of the Supreme Court of People Who Enjoy Analyzing Coen Brothers Movies that your allegory is better. At which point a Coen Bros. movie allegory becomes law.
For example. Anton can be Modern Life, scary and obviously worse than the good ol' days. Or he can be Evil, constantly staying a step ahead of Good. Or he can be Untempered Justice, which is something that should scare all of us. Or he can be Anti-Justice (how many of his victims "deserved" their deaths?). Or he can be Corruption (did you see how he bought off those kids at the end, sowing greed in virginal soil?) Or he can be Virtue. Or Madness. He can also just be one scary, murdering dude, sans allegory. The same goes for the rest of the cast, the plot, and the credits.
Which is why I love Coen Bros. stuff; I'm an allegory fanatic. I love looking for meanings in things that look like they're meaningful. And I went absolutely allegory nuts after No Country for Old Men. Even after it's done, you really can't definitevly answer even the most basic questions of the story - who's the hero? what happened to Anton (I personally think he was mortally wounded and dropped dead the second after the scene ends)? Did Tommy Lee Jones dream the whole thing? Did he kill himself? Seriously, this was some good stuff. I need to watch it again.
I agree that the beginning of the movie set up Tommy Lee Jones to be the hero (and his character seems to really believe he's the hero), but then at the end, he turns out to be incompetent and totally gets handsome Josh Brolin killed, and then seems totally confused as to how it all went so horribly wrong. But maybe I am being a total Coen Brothers' Earl Warren about it.
I also think you should not argue with people on Facebook. It's a horrible abomination. Never before have people had such a wide audience for their opinions, and thought them through so little. Back in my day, you had to spout nonsense to people's faces, or at least through email. I'm just so confused and helpless in the face of modern social networking sites. It's like there is no website for sort-of-young women these days.
Hm. Now I want to see the movie so I can have an opinion, too.
Generically, though, I agree with Ed about the past not being as hot as everyone remembers. From lynchings to most kids being raised in blue-with-cigarette-smoke Father Knows Best households, things could easily have been better and I think they are. Except for this new parental paranoia thing where you can't let your kids alone for a second because a stranger might snatch them. But that's subject for another day...
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