This film took days to digest. I still feel it rumbling in my gut like 3-day-old meatloaf. My dreams have had equal effect. In my dreams Anton Chigurh stands over me with a half-smile, waiting for me to wake up. He's eager to flip his coin. He's eager to bestow my fate.
I imagine Chigurh as the go-to guy for the devil. Not just any ordinary henchman but the one Satan knows will get the job done. You can just see Satan in frustration of the futile efforts of his demons. "What do you mean its not done," he says, "Get me Anton Chigurh dammit!"
The silver screen has had many villains; each trying to lure viewers to deem them the worst. It seems each effort of creating the master villain falls short on some aspect. Too scary, not scary enough. But Anton Chigurh is enough. He is evil personified. He is what Thomas Harris hoped Hannibal Lecter would be. The problem with lector is not a question of evil. It's actually the opposite. Harris makes Lecter angelic, makes him a divine being. He's all-knowing and all-seeing. Lecter is more god-like than devilish. He's far too sophisticated for the likes of Anton Chigurh or the devil for that matter. Lecter, with his elegant tastes and refineness would pity Chigurh, not admire. His real only fault is craving human flesh. And Lecter would never kill nor eat Clarice Starling. Such a thing would be below him, something a heathen would do.
Devil's Rejects' Otis Driftwood kills people as easily and naturally as Chigurh. But Otis prefers to take his time. He gets off on it. He likes to slow things down and court the victim in his own sadistic way. He likes to peel off their faces and grope and molest the victim with the barrel of a loaded gun. Driftwood is crazy. And he's easy to diagnose. He's your garden variety psychopath with a thirst for blood and a history that makes his actions explainable. But most importantly, he's human. In fact it's his humanity that scares you the most. He and his family sit down for Sunday dinners and stop at the corner drug store for ice cream. They're sick, ruthless Americans who consume, watch classic sit-com re-runs and lock cheerleaders in chicken pens. Decisions to kill and eat banana oatmeal for breakfast are made on the same wavelength. It's who they are.
I think the main difference between Chigurh, Driftwood and Lecter is restraint. Lecter is a sophisticated being who prides himself in his ability to resist. He would rather savor the flavor of the perfect moment than to indulge without restraint. Driftwood kills for pleasure and pleasure alone. But he couldn't just shoot and leave. His pleasure comes from watching the victim watch him as he slowly mutilates and gropes them. He restrains himself from premature killings and keeps victims for months before being completely satisfied.
Chigurh is death and waits for no one. He reminds me of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the first Terminator film. He's mechanical and cold and doesn't yeild to begging and reason. As a symbol of death, Chigurh isn't just killing but delivering fate. His victims fates have more to do with their own choices than his. Chigurh's coin flipping quirk show's us his logic. Call it luck or chance or fate. If it lands on the side you didn't call then not only are you going to die, but you are supposed to die. Their choices did this, not his. And I'm not talking about the choice to call heads or tails. But every choice the person has made in their life up to their final one. Whether this logic makes any sense doesn't matter. It makes sense to Chigurh. It didn't make sense to Carla Jean Moss. Llewelyn's country bumpkin wife couldn't understand it. She admits to Chigurh of not having anything to live for, but doesn't think that her husband’s stupidity should seal her fate. Earlier in the film, bounty hunter Carson Wells describes Chigurh as a man of strange principles. It's these principles that force Chigurh's hand. He promised Llewelyn that he would kill his wife if Llewelyn didn't comply with Chigurh's demands. So even after Llewelyn is dead, Chigurh, being a man of principle, keeps his promise. But unfortunately for Carla Jean, Llewelyn's selfish pride and stupidity did seal her fate. Sometimes our decisions affect more than ourselves. Sometimes stupidity gets us killed. Sometimes it gets family members and innocent people killed. Sometimes both. During that final moment, when Chigurh pulls out his coin and demands Carla Jean to call it, you know she's not going to win. Even if she called tails 100 times, it would still, 100 times come up heads. So is it fate that Chigurh represents or consequence of choice?
Llewelyn Moss is anyone of us. His greed, courage, creativity and stupidity shows what all of us are capable of. He, at times, seems to be smarter than Chigurh. He seems to be the perfect match for Chigurh. He seems to be able to, at times, outwit fate. His cunning and inventiveness makes for some thrilling moments. Moss is renegade and cutthroat and we love it. But he gets killed. He lets his guard down and suffers the penalties for it. But it isn't his fate to die. Chigurh doesn't kill him. Moss shares some beer with a bored, horny stranger and lets his guard down. He, after intense, well-planned-out, carefully calculated actions, seemingly ripe without error chooses to have a beer with a total stranger; an absolute contradiction to everything he'd done up to that point. Moss's fate is the consequence of his choices. So, in effect, Chigurh did kill him.
I think it stands to reason, in a story full of shady and deceiving characters that one acts as a beacon. Tommy Lee Jones is Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. Bell doesn't ever meet Chigurh or find Moss; in fact his close-call encounters with both don't really have any relevance to the plot. But his words do. Bell's a straight-shooting, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy. His narration gives the story context and depth. Bell sort of putters around the Texas landscape looking for Moss with an ongoing thought that acts as a theme throughout the film. 'What the hell has happened?' Bell thinks back to when his father was a sheriff, "didn't even carry a gun," he tells us. He's disgusted at the way things are going. After investigating Llewelyn's death Bell has coffee with a fellow big city sheriff. "It's the dismal tide," the sheriff tells Bell as the two talk about the evil in the world. The dismal tide. What a statement. Evil does seem to slither and slide into the conscious mind. It certainly doesn't appear all at once. Evil creeps and crawls into our lives. It blends in and adapts to its surroundings. As years go by things certainly progressively get worse in the world. Evil is on the rise. But it doesn't happen all at once. It's the dismal tide.
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