More on No Country For Old Men
Spoilers ahoy.
One thing I have yet to see in any analysis of the movie is the mental state of the Chigurh character. I mean, obviously he’s off his nut, he kills people semi-randomly with a cattle stunner. But in terms of his “career” and this movie, I think he’s breaking down in a curious manner. I would imagine in the world of this movie he’s killed people before, the guy in the office didn’t just say “Hey you with the pneumatic killing machine, mind taking care of this drug money thief for me?” So he’s been doing this awhile and he’s good at it. But he starts going off the reservation so much so that they have to hire a second assassin (I think I remember it being clearer in the book that Wells is a killer) to get him. I doubt he went around ventilating people’s brains much before, it’s just too much of a signature, strange, thing to get away with for long. So at some point he starts using the cattle stunner, that’s weird. Then he tells Wells the thing about “if the road you were on got you here, what use was the road” which is one of those semi-profound things you hear from time to time but in this case, maybe he’s really commenting on himself? Maybe before this job at some point he had a something bad happen and that’s when the switch flipped.
The biggest case for Chigurh’s mental breakdown is when he kills the guy who hired him and when the accountant asks if he’s going to shoot him too, Chigurh says “I don’t know, can you see me?” You could say this is just a tough-guy weirdo way of saying “I was never here” but Chigurh doesn’t seem like the type to play those games. I think he’s genuinely asking the guy, as if he’s unsure of his own presense. If that’s not the extra crazy-cherry on top of the nutcake, I don’t know what is.
Everybody talks about Chigurh as a “force of nature”, an unstoppable Terminator-style killing machine. I like the idea of making him damaged in some way, it makes him more real. The faceless agent of death thing is a little too trite for me, I want to imagine what happened before. When Moss hides the money in the vent, you get a sense of his mind working and it makes him more human than just some hick. Chigurh making sure not to get his feet dirty does the same thing but giving him more mental problems than the factory-issued ones that all killers share gives him more texture. If he was just death incarnate or the something like that, would you be at all curious about what happens to him after he walks off with his broken arm?
