Last night, I finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men.” I don’t know what made me pick it up in the first place: the movie disturbed the hell out of me. The novel didn’t have a different ending; in fact, the plot lines are identical. So why does the novel feel more human than the film?
The Coen Brothers film of “No Country,” like most of the narrative in the novel, is a fast paced stalking / chase scene. The primary difference in the novel’s structure is that the plot is inter-cut with personal narrative from Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (whether these are journals or letters to a daughter he doesn’t have, is never quite clear). In fact, the protagonist in the novel, if you’re following character arc, is the Sheriff. He’s the only one who changes during the course of the narrative. He’s affected by the events and quits his job as Sheriff near the novel’s conclusion (film as well).
Why does this make the novel human? The Ed Tom narrative of “No Country” is largely biographical with some metaphysical reflection. As readers, we get to see the family history of Bell, which is in some ways parallel to the history of Texas. Bell becomes the center-piece of the narrative. In the film, Bell becomes something of a minor character. Llewellyn Moss, the Vietnam vet/hunter who stumbles on the drug scene gone wrong, becomes the protagonist of the film. Thus when he dies, even though it is Greek in that he dies from his own hubris, it feels like we’ve been watching the wrong movie. In both the film and the novel, there are only hints of Moss’ past. We know he was in Vietnam, nothing more — except perhaps that he wears a boar’s tusk as homage to someone who passed in that other country. Other than Ed Tom Bell, no one in the novel has anything one would call a past.
Toward the end of the novel, Ed Tom Bell reflects on the nature of Satan. When he was a child, he says, he believed. He shifted away as he grew older. Now, he’s beginning to believe again. If there is such a thing as Satan, Bell believes he’d be a drug runner.
One of the more striking things in McCarthy’s novel is the use of names. Almost all of the main male characters have simple (mostly four letter) last names — Bell, Wells, Moss — and the men are generally referred to by last name (the deputies have longer names — Wendell, Torbert — but they serve the action, they’re of little consequence). In contrast, the women are referred to by first name — Carla Jean — or, like the Mexicans and the men behind the drug dealing, no name at all. In stark contrast to all this stands Anton Chigurh. The first time I encountered the name, the question hit my brain: what kind of name is that? Anton suggests Russian — and though he’s described as dark complected, he also has stone blue eyes. At the end of the novel (more or less), Sheriff Bell is talking to a lawyer about good and evil. Bell adds that a lawyer friend once told him that “in law school they try to teach you not to worry about right and wrong but just follow the law.” Toward the conclusion of the conversation he asks the lawyer if “he knew who Mammon was.” There is some dialogue figuring out if they’re talking about the same thing: “I know it’s in the bible. Is it the devil?” “I don’t know. I’m goin to look it up. I got a feelin I ought to know who it is.”
The conversation immediately shifts to the “mystery man who killed the trooper” and whether or not he’s a ghost. Bell concludes, “No, he’s out there. I wish he wasnt. But he is.” In this passage, and also with the passage reflecting on the nature of Satan, we get a clue as to the depiction of Chigurh. I did a search of biblical names for Satan — and then another for Russian names for the devil. There is no exact match, but would Chigurh look so out of place on this (partial) list? Azazel (Hebrew); Baalberith (Canaanite); Balaam – (Hebrew devil of avarice and greed); Baphomet; Beelzebub – Lord of the Flies, taken from the symbolism of the scarab (Hebrew); Behemoth – Hebrew personification of Lucifer in the form of an elephant or hippopotamus; Beherit – Syriac name for Satan; Chemosh – National god of Moabites, later a devil; Cimeries – Rides a black horse and rules Africa; Dagon – Philistine; Demogorgon – a name so terrible as to not be known to mortals. What if Satan were not just a mythical being, but someone who, like Christ, took human form — not to bring hope, but to destroy it.
I was raised Irish Catholic, which means with equal helpings of guilt and fear. I broke away toward the end of my high school years. In college (Catholic college, no less), I was taught how to meditate by a priest who was also a psychiatrist. He led sessions for students on relaxation, visualization, etc. He looked like Terrance Mann in “Yes Man” so there was something of that New Age guru to him as well. But the sessions served me. Over Christmas break, I told my mother, who had been a Charismatic Christian (misnomer if I ever heard one) since before I was in high school, that I’d been learning how to meditate. She said nothing, but went out the next day and came back with a pamphlet that more or less said — meditation is emptying your mind so that the devil can get in. I didn’t believe it, but late that night, I awoke from a dream — it was like the cover of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” — two dark eyes glowing like coals, pursuing me in the darkness. I was so terrified: I thought that if I closed my eyes to sleep, those eyes would return. But I also knew it was my fears, not the devil. I did not believe in Satan. Some ten years after that dream, I went to visit a friend and was met by his room-mate, who I knew casually. The young man met me in the doorway and his eyes were insane: he looked possessed, in every sense of the word. I was terrified. What had happened to this man? He invited me in to wait for his room-mate and I almost declined (I’ll wait outside, thanks). But it was raining and I couldn’t find an excuse that wouldn’t offend. Once I was inside, he told me that he’d shot heroin (this was new to him at the time). I realized that he had been possessed, and if there was a devil it came from the poppy.
Sheriff Bell more or less says the same thing: if there’s a Satan, he’s a hit man/drug runner. This is where both the unrelenting brutality and ascendency of Chigurh and the reflections of Ed Tom Bell come together: the novel is basically the effort of a relatively good man to come to terms with the presence of evil in the world — not just the world at large, but his world, the world for which he, as Sheriff, is responsible. This, for me, is the heart of the novel, and the piece that makes it human. The reason the movie disturbed me, and the reason why there was such an outcry at the ending (in Hollywood of all places — they were crying for a Hollywood ending) is that it lacked the lens of humanity. It was more or less just an evil character pummeling a better one and winning. The theme of chance is also a large factor in both novel and film — Moss stumbles on the drug scene, Chirgurh twice flips a coin to decide life and death, a good number of Chirgurh victims are simply the person who is there who has what he needs — but it is not the main theme.
Movies are rarely the place for reflection. In film, at its best, questions are raised by action and left for the audience to consider. A perfect example of this is Allen’s “Vicky Christina Barcelona,” a film that explores relationships by portraying them — gay, twosomes, threesomes, old lovers, new lovers, constant lovers, inconstant lovers — each acted out with depth and merit and none of them particularly work out. I left the movie wondering: what makes a good relationship? (I don’t know that I’ve yet come to an answer). I left “No Country” more or less feeling like I’d been bludgeoned. I liked the film; I was grateful for an ending that was not Hollywooded — decided by panels of viewers to help film makers determine which version would bring in the greatest amount of viewers (and therefore cash); and I thought the acting was brilliant. I did not read the novel at the time — or any other novel of Cormac McCarthy. There is enough brutality in my world without inviting additional, imagined scenes. I’m glad I eventually did — because it did what only a novel can do, offer the lens of a narrator to help define the parameters of the action and to lend to it his humanity.
The Magic Lantern 