"No Country for Old Men" by Cormack McCarthy
I completed reading this book today. 6 September 2016.
There's two kinds of people that don't ask a lot of questions. One is too dumb to and the other don't need to. p. 298
Earlier this summer, motorcycling, I stopped in Van Horn, Texas at the intersection of US 90 south and I-10 for some lunch at Chuy's Mexican restaurant. Chuy's had acquired a bit of notoriety as a lunch spot for NFL football commentator, John Madden, as, notoriously fearful of flying, he plied the continent between NFL football games in his "Madden Cruiser" bus.
After lunch, I and my companions, Elk and Mr. Z3, rode south, down US 90, into the desert, in the direction of Big Bend, National Park. Our destination, 120 miles down the long desert highway, was Marfa, TX, a funky, artsy, fartsy town, known for minimalist art, originally a railroad whistle stop, isolated in the, stark, empty west Texas desert.
For us motorcyclists, Marfa was a place to go... another notch on the motorcycle riding bucket list. There's an old, redone, Art Deco hotel there... hotel Paisano, that is a destination spot for weekenders, either from El Paso or Las Cruces, over 200 miles to the west, or from San Angelo, Lubbock, Amarillo an equal distance to the northeast.
We would go to Paisano, walk around the adjacent neighborhood, go to the bar, have dinner, and clear out the next morning... direction Albuquerque, 500 miles to the northwest.
Marfa is a locale where quite a number of movies have been filmed. To wit: the 1950 film, "High Lonesome," starring Chill Wills and John Drew Barrymore; the 1956 Warner Brothers film, "Giant," starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Sal Mineo, Carroll Baker and Dennis Hopper; Kevin Reynolds's 1985 feature film, "Fandango;" 2006, "There Will Be Blood," is an adaptation of of the Upton Sinclair novel "Oil;" finally, also in 2006, the adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, "No Country for Old Men."
The Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men," won an Oscar for Best Picture in 2008. The setting for the movie is the west Texas towns along and around US 90...Van Horn, Del Rio, Fort Stockton, Sanderson... and further out Odessa to the north east and El Paso to the west. Far west Texas. During our stay in Marfa, we were smack dab in the center of "No Country for Old Men," country.
The movie features Javier Bardem playing the role of Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic, hired killer who is hunting down a Viet Nam vet, good old boy who accidentally, while antelope hunting, comes upon a drug deal gone bad, and, foolishly, as it turns out, takes $2.4 million in cash from the scene.
Bardem's Anton Chigurh is one of the great acting performances in movies. For me, iIt is up there with Christopher Waltz' role as Colonel Hans Landa in Tarentino's "Inglorious Basterds." Bardem received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role playing Chigurh.
"No Country for Old Men" is one of those movies ("Blazing Saddles," Apocalypse Now," "Inglorious Basterds," "Caine Mutiny," "Reservoir Dogs," etc.), that I watch at least once a year. Its a cinematographic masterpiece.
I bought the book several years ago after I read McCarthy's apocolyptic novel, "The Road." But, I only got around to reading the book last week as I was reminded of its setting during my motorcycle riding visit to Marfa, Texas in June of this year.
Far West Texas... brutal country... empty... and, maybe, if Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is to be believed, sinister. Highway US 90.
The movie follows the book pretty well. However, the book has "scenes" that did not appear in the movie.
One to wit: In his final dash to escape Chigurh, Llewelyn Moss picks up a hitchhiker near Boerne, on the road, I-10 west to El Paso, a 15 year old, tattooed, drop out, girl (who claims she is 18). Their relationship is platonic, but, Sheriff Bell wonder's, after discovering Moss's and the girl's demise, how he can explain the girl's presence to Moss' 19 year old wife, Carla Jean.
Moss: He didn't look up. "What are you havin?"
Girl: "I don't know. I aint looked at the menu."
Another difference between book and movie: After Chigurh has killed the innocent Carla Jean (Moss' wife)... for no other reason that he had promised now dead Llewelyn, that he would do it if Llewelyn didn't turn himself in... he is involved in random auto accident. The book spends much more time detailing the accident and the efforts to locate Chigurh following the accident, than does the movie.
The overwhelming image I see in the movie is Chigurh... how his skill and cold heartedness combine to create a truly outsized, evil character. Reading the book, however, the image of aging Sheriff Ed Tom Bell weighs heaviest in my own reflections.
Sheriff Bell soliloquizes on the nature of evil and its effect on him at the beginning of each chapter in the book. The movie includes some of this, but in a much diminished form. Ed Tom Bell believes, as a life long law enforcement officer, that evil is more pervasive as he nears the end of his career, than, when he first started out as a cop. He is troubled by his own sense of helplessness as a law enforcement officer as evil mounts.
Some excerpts of Bell's soliloquies:
Loretta (Sheriff Bell's wife) told me that she had heard on the radio about some percentage of the children in the country bein raised by their grandparents. I forget what it was. Pretty high, I thought. Parents wouldn't raise em. We talked about that. What we thought was that when the next generation come along and they don't want to raise their children neither then who is goin to do it? Their own parents will be the only grandparents around and they wouldn't even raise them. We didn't have an answer about that. On my better days I think that there is somethin I don't know or there is somethin that I'm leavin out. But them times are seldom. I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train. p. 159.
I've lost a lot of friends over these last few years. Not all of em older than me neither. One of the things you realize about getting older is that not everbody is goin to get older with you. You try to help the people that're payin your salary and of course you can't help but think about the kind of record you leave. This county has not had a unsolved homicide in forty-one years. Now we got nine of em in one week. Will they be solved? I don't know. Ever day is against you. Time is not on your side. I don't know as it'd be any compliment if you was known for second guessin a bunch of dopedealers. p. 216
There's two kinds of people that don't ask a lot of questions. One is too dumb to and the other don't need to. p. 298
Loretta did say one thing. She said somethin to the effect that it wasn't my fault and it was. And I had thought about that too. I told her that if you got a bad enough dog in your yard, people will stay out of it. And they didn't. p. 299
The book is a metaphor for the battle between Satan and God. The prose is frontier... stripped down and doom soaked. The book is tough and violent. The west Texas setting is harsh. The book's tone is dark even before the worst of the violence is committed. "No Country for Old Men" is a brutally satisfying thriller from the start.
Sadly (?), the book plays well to my own frequent musings about good versus evil, and general sense of pessimism about the future.
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