No Country for Old Men

CHRIS PILKINGTON discusses the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's thriller

"Call it." Javier Bardem's character, Anton Chigurh, repeats this phrase on two occasions in Joel and Ethan Coen's film adaptation of No Country for Old Men.

It is apparently an imperative uttered by one determined to force those he meets to accept their agency and responsibility for their decisions. However, chance rather than choice influences the outcome of the coin toss. Chigurh's potential victims are reliant not on their own wills to prevent their deaths but on an unpredictable result.

In acquiescing with his order, his victims relinquish their autonomy. To retain it they must, as Carla Jean Moss (Kelly MacDonald) recognises toward the end of the film, refuse to "call it". This frustrates both killer and audience, and seems to be an unsatisfactory response to the problems of individual agency that No Country for Old Men explores.

The Coens keep Carla Jean's survival or demise from the audience, suggesting only the latter when Chigurh checks the soles of his boots (for blood, presumably) after leaving her house. Before either killing or not killing her, Chigurh compares his arrival as being subject to the same random forces that brought the particular coin he holds into his possession.

Such a parallel forms an incongruous juxtaposition, as throughout the film Chigurh, the "ultimate bad ass" in Llewelyn Moss's (Josh Brolin) words, is depicted as being unstoppably relentless. Even after he kills the businessman who hired him to retrieve the money stolen by Llewelyn, he still continues his pursuit of it. Because of this, he seems to represent a notion of predestination, making his pronouncements about chance inappropriately ironic. He is a believer in a power whose existence his own example seems to refute.

Chigurh is the embodiment of the uneasy tension between fate and chance that exists in the film more generally. He is presented as the personification of predetermination, yet like the Mexicans similarly searching for the missing money, he is blindly following Llewelyn wherever he takes the suitcase and the tracking device within it.

Although his persistent pursuit might suggest autonomy, Chigurh is not directing himself but is being directed by the desperation and caprice of Llewelyn. Chigurh seems no more sentient than the attack dogs that the Mexicans set on this character after guilt causes him to return to one of the dehydrated drug dealers with water.

He might choose to follow the tracking device, but Chigurh cannot choose where this gadget might take him. He thus represents an uncertainty between autonomy and dependence that his assertions about chance attempt but ultimately fail to resolve.

The inadequacy of this existential expedient does not discourage Chigurh from using it, since he seems to have concomitantly discovered a means by which he can disclaim all responsibility for the murders he commits after his tossing of the coin. He need not assume that by agreeing to his demand to "call it" his victims accept the liability for their deaths that should be his.

Instead, he can place complete responsibility with the coin. For Chigurh, this object seems not to be a means of determining the future but of disclaiming responsibility for whatever might result from his actions. As might be becoming apparent from the progression of this discussion of No Country for Old Men, consideration of Chigurh's character and his coin reveal conflicting complexities that further investigation seems only to confound.

This article began with the same imperative that Chigurh utters at two points in No Country for Old Men. It will probably end with the phrase, too. Its use was a command to the reader to do what this writer cannot. The strands of autonomy stemming so clearly from each character when the film commences, eventually snap and intertwine with those of others, resulting in a tangle that tugging at individual loose ends fails to unravel.

Fate and chance are mixed uncertainly in the film: they fail to dissolve into each other, remaining distinct like two rocks cast together in a small bucket of water. What No Country for Old Men quite concludes about autonomy is difficult to say. Watch the film, and call it.

Chris Pilkington is a second-year English undergraduate at Hertford College.