The Coen Brothers: Westerns and Greek Tragedies

No Country For Old Men (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

“[‘No Country for Old Men’] is a reiteration of the old myth that Death stalks the land. That is why West Texas has that desert look, the scorched air, and the heat that leaves brave men listless.”

– David Thomson, Have You Seen...? 

No Country's setting is a classic neo-noir milieu of malevolence and amorality. Moss, like many other Coen heroes before him, is driven by money and vanity, but he lacks the ability to assess the chances against him. The Coens' noir flicks Blood Simple and Fargo are situated outside of the traditional metropolitan atmosphere. They do it again in No Country, but this time they take a more serious approach to the Western themes of civilization vs. the wild, the rule of the gun vs. the rule of law, the morality of violence, and American individualism. 

Moss only comes upon the money when a narrowly missed shot wounds a deer, and he climbs down from his high vantage point to put it to rest. This act of sympathy on the part of the hunter puts his fate in action. Moss returns to the murder site with water to assist a badly injured man, nearly sacrificing his life in the process, as a result of the same impulse. Sheriff Bell's reminiscences of the early days of Texas and clashes between lawmen and outlaws are voice-over narrations performed by Jones in his gravelly Texas accent. He is presented with a heinous deed that he cannot comprehend. The ideals that have shaped Bell and Moss no longer appear to apply. 

Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem epitomises the new west. He kills without remorse and pursues Moss with zeal. He kills with a cattle-slaughtering airgun. The cowboy and the ranch have been replaced by industrial meat production. Chigurh believes that death is unavoidable and that every choice and action leads to it. He is only functioning as Death's tool, not being responsible for his deeds. In this new western terrain, compassion and honour have no place; it's just the hunter and the prey. 

McCarthy's grim picture of reality is well captured by the Coens. McCarthy's neo-Western debunks the romantic vision of the west that the classic Western promotes, omitting the brutality and racism involved in the genocide of aboriginal peoples, westward expansion, and the Manifest Destiny mentality. With some of their greatest filmmaking—exquisitely planned scenes, an incredible eye for the peculiarities of human behaviour, and the ability to cast precisely the right actors—the Coens bring the book vividly to life. 

No Country for Old Men is set in 1980, and returns to the territory of the Coens' first film, Blood Simple (1983), with the windy desolation of the Lone Star state externalising the mindset of a country that is "hard on people" – especially those who go against Reaganite self-sufficiency without thinking things through. 

If Ray (John Getz) of Blood Simple gets caught up in a web of deception and killing when he decides to tidy up a murder scene for which he falsely believes his sweetheart is to blame, Moss puts his head on the block via an ill-advised act of charity. "You're on your own down here," says the opening narration in Blood Simple. 

The Coen brothers have always referenced and parodied previous films and literature, but this is their first direct adaptation. It's easy to understand why they were drawn to Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel, an extravagant found-cash period piece with a heritage that echoes William Faulkner and James M. Cain's grim pulp dramas. 

McCarthy's story is well-suited to the Coen brothers' upheaval of genre, and the film stays remarkably true to the novel's source material, condensing its dark humour and meditations on the depth of evil into a concise vision of grim fate and a relentless sense of the darkness released by criminal money.

In the following extract Richard Gilmore discusses the Coen Brothers western No Country for Old Men, and its relation to Greek tragedy.

The stories that the Coen brothers are interested in telling all seem to be very American stories. Their approach of choice is the genre of film. Their favorite film genre is very American, a genre the French call film noir, but No Country for Old Men is of another classic American genre, the western. Genre is an interesting way to try to say something about something because, as Jacques Derrida has made explicit, the “law of the law of genre” is that every new member of a genre set will deviate from and violate the apparent established principles of that genre. This is how Derrida describes the “law of the law of genre”: “It is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set.” This description of each new member of a genre set sounds to me a lot like what it means to be a (new) member of the set of Americans. Just as each new Coen film that has genre elements adds to and transforms the genre it participates in, so too, each new American adds to and transforms what it means to be an American.

No Country for Old Men, then, is and is not a classic western. It takes place in the West and its main protagonists are what you might call westerners. On the other hand, the plot revolves around a drug deal that has gone bad; it involves four-wheel-drive vehicles, semiautomatic weapons, and executives in high-rise buildings, none of which would seem to belong in a western. There is a beautiful moment when Sheriff Ed Tom Bell and his sidekick, Deputy Wendell, are riding along, following a trail, and Deputy Wendell remarks on the tracks they are following in a way that recalls for me a moment in John Ford’s great classic (and revisionist) western, The Searchers (1956), when Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) and Martin Pawley (Jeffrey Hunter) are following some tracks that will be similarly fateful for everyone involved. It is an interesting connection (I won’t claim it is a reference) because in The Searchers, Ethan says, “We’ll find ’em. Just as sure as the turnin’ of the earth”—and they do. They find ’em, sure enough; but in an odd, somewhat inexplicable twist, there is no final confrontation between Ethan and Scar (Henry Brandon), the hated Comanche chief he has been seeking for seven years. Instead, it is Martin who kills Scar, and he appears to have done it while Scar was asleep in his tepee. Sheriff Bell is pretty dogged for a while, but he will give up the search altogether before he finds his adversary, Anton Chigurh.

Anton Chigurh might as well be Melville’s Moby Dick for all of the human compassion, or even human motivation, that can be found in him. It makes as little sense to speak of him as evil as it does to say that raw nature, a blizzard or a flood, is evil. He has principles, the equivalent in a man to the laws of nature. Given his principles, he does not act irrationally or from passion; he is more of an inexorable force. He is not a rampaging killer on the loose; he has been summoned by a human will, a human desire, to achieve a desired end. He appears only because he was summoned. The recognizable and clear evil lies with the one (or those, since there may be others involved; the film is not explicit on this point) who summoned him. He was summoned because of greed, lust for power, an indifference to the suffering of others, and personal gratification. He who summoned him will learn, too late, that, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, he has summoned a power that he cannot control, that it was pure hubris to think that he could control it.

That evil man is of little interest to either Cormac McCarthy, the author of the novel, No Country for Old Men, or to Joel and Ethan Coen, the makers of the movie. What is of interest to McCarthy and the Coens is rather what happens when a good, but flawed, man encounters this force of nature in human guise. In this sense, No Country for Old Men recapitulates the patterns of ancient Greek tragedy. As in ancient Greek tragedy, a good but flawed man will become enmeshed in events that will prove to be his ruin. It will be what is good in him as much as what is flawed that will engage him in these events, and his ruin will be complete. Oedipus is a kind of paradigm of the way the ancient tragedies begin and end. It is because Oedipus is so smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate that he ascends to the throne of Thebes and rules as a good and noble king. It is also because Oedipus is so smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate that he is able to complete the mysterious task sent him by the Oracle of Delphi and to find the murderer of the previous king of Thebes, King Laius.

Unfortunately, as it will turn out, it is Oedipus himself who killed the previous king, as predicted by the same Oracle of Delphi long ago. He has also married his mother and fathered his children/siblings. As a consequence, Oedipus’s wife/mother commits suicide, he blinds and exiles himself, his incest-produced children will fight and be responsible for each others’ deaths. Llewelyn Moss is similarly smart, self-confident, competent, and passionate. His intelligence and competence lead him to the “last man standing” (as Moss puts it to the man he finds dying in a truck, saying, “there must’ve been one”) and to the money. His compassion compels him to return to the site of the drug deal gone bad to bring water to the dying man who asked for it. It is not at all clear whether or not Chigurh or the Mexicans would have ever picked up the transponder signals if he had not gone back, but it is certainly clear that once they have found Moss and his truck at the scene, they will be on his trail wherever he goes. A fate similar to Oedipus’s disastrous ruin awaits Llewelyn Moss: both he and his young wife will be brutally murdered; all that he has will be lost.

Power, Hubris, and the Fatal Flaw

Anton Chigurh is a monster, in the sense that Emerson uses the word in his essay “The American Scholar,” that is, in association with “monitory” and “admonition,” drawing on its Latin derivation meaning a warning or an omen.The ancient Greek tragedies were meant to serve that same function, that is, warning about especially human temptations that would lead to disaster. Tragedy was considered a source of wisdom as well as of entertainment, and the primary wisdom that the ancient Greek tragedies taught was also written on the wall at the famous and perhaps most holy of Greek temples, the Oracle of Delphi: “Avoid hubris.” Hubris is a difficult word to recover from the Greek, but it means something like arrogant ignorance, thinking that you are better or more powerful than you really are. The Greek gods hated hubris, and one of their primary occupations as gods was punishing humans for their hubris.

Hubris was such a problem for the Greeks not because they valued timidity or even humility but because they loved power, and they loved powerful, proud people. As Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics, “The man is thought to be proud who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them.” The Greek ideal was to manifest all of your true power, and to be very powerful, without overstepping your own limits, without presuming to have more power than you really have. This is a very difficult ideal to achieve because one does not know what one is capable of until one tries to do things beyond what one has done before. And yet, the Greeks (Aristotle, for one) assumed that one could know what one is capable of and thereby avoid the calamities of hubris. The above quotation from Aristotle concludes, “for he who does so beyond his deserts is a fool, but no virtuous man is foolish or silly.” This Greek ideal, this wisdom, is, too, exhorted upon the wall at Delphi: “Know thyself.” Llewelyn Moss is a man of considerable resources, but his powers have been lying more or less dormant. He has innate powers of intelligence and determination as well as some acquired abilities learned while serving in Vietnam. Virtually all of these powers are banked, the way one banks a fire, because there is no way to exercise them in his day-to-day life. He has a good job as a welder that does not require all of either his intelligence or determination. He has a lovely young wife and a comfortable trailer home but no obvious way of improving his situation beyond this level of comfort. In many ways he seems to be happy and successful, but it is a difficult thing to have powers that you have no opportunities to use. Doing pretty well in America has never been the happiest of options if there is some chance that you could be doing better. Of course, that possibility of doing better becomes real for Llewelyn when he comes upon the briefcase full of cash. He barely seems to hesitate before he decides to go for it.

A key element of Greek tragedy is the idea of the protagonist’s hamartia, the fatal flaw. Hamartia is a term derived from archery and literally means “off the mark,” signifying that one’s aim has been slightly off. The protagonist of a classic Greek tragedy must be essentially a good person, a person whose intentions are good but who does not really or fully know himself or herself, and this lack of self-knowledge is mixed with a bit of hubris, which puts off one’s aim. This is quite literally suggested of Llewelyn at the beginning of the movie when he is hunting for antelope and ends up shooting one in the hindquarters. In a sense, the entire movie is prefigured in this scene. It is a scene that shows Llewelyn to be highly competent, an expert at hunting: the way he uses his boot for a barrel rest, the way he adjusts the sight for the distance of the shot, his patience in taking the shot, his picking up his shell after he takes the shot are all signs of his expertise. All are signs of his knowledge, his ability, his power, but the scene also shows his ultimate hubris, literally and figuratively. Instead of killing the antelope, he only wounds it, the worst possible outcome for a responsible hunter. He is clearly frustrated and annoyed with himself, and he heads out after the wounded antelope to try to finish what he has started.

It is a long shot that he thinks he can make. It is not a shot that he will make, but he is just good enough to actually hit the antelope at the distance of almost a mile. All of the elements of the movie are here, Llewelyn’s talents as well as his misjudgments, as well as certain implacable facts of nature; distance, heat, the movement of the antelope are the facts of nature that will undo his best intentions. His aim is good but not quite good enough, and the worst possible consequences eventuate because he was willing to try the difficult shot. His experience is a Greek tragedy in miniature.

– No Country for Old Men. The Coens’ Tragic Western by Richard Gilmore in The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers. Edited by Mark T. Conard.

Olivier Assayas on the Making of Cold Water

Cold Water (Directed by Oliver Assayas)

Cold Water, directed by Olivier Assayas is set in and around Paris in 1972, and follows a young couple, Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet) and Christine (Virginie Ledoyen), as they rebel against their parents and the bureaucracy that they believe has shackled them. Gilles and Christine are clever, beautiful, and from opposite sides of the tracks: the former comes from an academic household, while the latter is the daughter of a working-class father and a bohemian mother who, like Christine herself, is cast off as "crazy." 

Assayas creates a a realistic, documentary impressionism that would become a trademark of his later work, implying that Gilles and Christine's relationship had already passed from memory. 

The structure and style of the film are informed by a sense of fading memories. Scenes flash past in brief moments, frequently appearing half-formed, implying that Gilles, the narrative's core consciousness, is unable to recollect every detail that leads to the film's unexpected catharsis. 

Cold Water begins with a nanny telling Gilles and his younger brother about the horrors she witnessed as a youngster in war-torn Europe, but the kids are too engrossed to even pretend to be interested. We see Gilles thrown out of his classroom since the youngster exhibits the deadpan boredom of rebellious adolescence. Christine is even more erratic than Gilles, fabricating claims about a police officer's misbehaviour before brandishing scissors as a potential weapon against herself and others. 

Cold Water is filled with an unsettling sense of loss that is both romantic and realistic. Neither the teenagers nor the adults in the film are lauded or humiliated. Gilles and Christine's parents and other authority figures try to reach out to them through art, such as Caravaggio's paintings and Rousseau's literature, but such work strikes them as hopelessly foreign. The music of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Janis Joplin, and Creedence Clearwater Revival is featured heavily on the soundtrack, and Gilles and Christine are touched by the classic, primarily American rock of their day. 

Gilles and Christine navigate the congested halls of classes, expensive residences, and police stations in the first half of the film, while the second half is diaphanous and poetic, presenting a view of the transitory ideal of connection that motivates teenage revolt in the second half. 

Gilles flees to the countryside, following Christine to an apparently abandoned house, where they and hundreds of other young people dance, smoke cannabis, make out, and keep a fire going. As Gilles, Christine, and their classmates wander around the house, the camera, which appears to be pervasive, pursues them playfully. In a youthful party, Assayas comprehends the exhiliraring energy of movement—of wandering from room to room in quest of future promise.

As Hilary Weston insightfully remarks: ‘A spirit of rebellion has always run through the work of French writer-director Olivier Assayas, but it is perhaps most acutely felt in his masterpiece Cold Water. After growing up in the political tumult of France in the sixties and seventies, Assayas followed a path similar to the one traveled by several titans of the French New Wave, first working as a critic for Cahiers du cinéma, then moving on to film projects, including collaborations with André Téchiné and his own feature directorial debut, the 1986 Disorder. In 1994, he made his artistic breakthrough with Cold Water, a portrait of the unruliness of youth that draws inspiration from his own life. The film originated as a commissioned piece for All the Boys and Girls of Their Age (Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge), a French television series focused on adolescence that also included work by Claire Denis and Chantal Akerman. Aside from the subject matter, the rules of the game were that each episode contain a party scene using rock music and be shot on Super 16 mm within an eighteen to twenty-four-day time span. Assayas’s response to the challenge was a formally daring, poignant drama about a pair of rebellious young lovers, Gilles (Cyprien Fouquet) and Christine (Virginie Ledoyen), in the early 1970s. The film reaches its high point in a thirty-minute-long party scene at an abandoned country mansion, set to a string of tunes that evoke the era.’

Though it garnered praise when it played in the Un Certain Regard section of the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, Cold Water has long been unavailable, having never received wide theatrical distribution.  

Prior to the film’s opening at New York’s IFC Center, Hillary Weston spoke with Assayas about its autobiographical origins and the impact it had on the rest of his career.

Q: Can you tell me about Tous les garçons et les filles and how you became involved with the series?

OA: Chantal Poupaud initiated it, and I’d known her because she was doing a lot of PR for indie movies. She approached me pretty early on with this idea of having a few filmmakers make movies about their teenage years, using the music they had listened to at that time. Because I had been making movies that had some kind of musical background, some kind of rock-and-roll texture, I was one of the first filmmakers she contacted. I think Jean-Claude Brisseau and Benoît Jacquot were also involved. But then it did not happen, and time went by.

Once in a while I’d get a message from Chantal asking, “Are you still in?” It must have been in the works for a couple years, and finally she called to tell me she had found a producer. He happened to be Georges Benayoun, from IMA Films, and they had convinced ARTE, the French-German cultural channel, to finance it. The idea was to do a fifty-minute TV movie on a very small budget. Maybe if it had happened earlier, I would not have been onboard because I would have been very busy with other projects. I’d just made a movie called A New Life, which was a total disaster. I’m happy with the film, but the shoot was plagued by conflicts with the producer, who disagreed with the approach of my cut. The whole thing was a nightmare, so I thought it was a good time to try something else, something new.

I wanted to make a feature. I didn’t want to make a fifty-minute TV movie; I was not interested in shooting something autobiographical and just having it be something that’s aired on television once. I needed to make something that was a bit more lasting. So I told Chantal and Georges that I was going to make—with whatever small budget they were giving me—a ninety-minute semi-experimental film. And everything fell into place. I started shooting right after the opening of A New Life, and I needed that freedom. The sense of lightness that 16 mm gives you—for me, that was something completely different. I’ve always made very personal films, but this was straightforward autobiography, even if it was fictionalized.

Q: What was it like to work on this kind of project?

OA: The paradox of the project was that it was a commissioned work—and it was the first time I’d done anything that remotely resembled commissioned work—but someone was commissioning me to be very personal. It had a more lasting influence on my work than I could have imagined. It was the start of a new chapter in both my life and my career. The lightness and pleasure of the filmmaking tools, and the lack of pressure because it was so cheap, gave me a sense that I could continue on that path and make movies that were not too dependent on French financing. I wouldn’t have done a movie like Irma Vep had I not had the experience of making Cold Water before it. And the same goes for the documentary I did on Hou Hsiao-hsien, HHH, which I made with Eric Gautier, who followed what we did on Cold Water. I made one more Super 16 movie—Late August, Early September—so it was a whole moment in my work when I really enjoyed using this 16 mm camera. I sum it up as my “Dogme moment.” It was pre-Dogme—it was three years earlier—but it was pretty much the same idea and had a very similar energy.

Q: You use the word “experimental,” which makes me curious about the style of the film and why you approached telling the story in that way.

OA: I had no idea you could make a feature in four weeks. But we shot Cold Water in that amount of time. I thought: okay, I’m going to make a feature that will be a separate project within the shooting of Cold Water, but it would have the same kind of experimental texture of the movies that Philippe Garrel made in the seventies or Andy Warhol made in the sixties. Beyond making a movie about the seventies, I wanted to embed the notion of a kind of film that would have been made in the seventies. The thing that is strange for me about Cold Water is that this movie was shot in the mid-nineties, but when I looked at the film again while doing the restoration, it felt like the seventies. Instead of being a retro re-creation of the seventies, it deals with something that’s at the core of those years. It’s a movie I could have made as a teenager if I was making movies at that point.

Q: How did you go about casting the roles of Christine and Gilles?

OA: Initially, the rule was that I did not want to use anybody who had seen a camera. I wanted to start from scratch. A lot of the prep for the film was spent casting, which went on for months. I didn’t know Virginie Ledoyen at that time, but she was the actress I had the most trouble casting. I was concerned that she was too good-looking for the part. Also, she had had a career as a child actress. But the minute I met her I sensed that she was exceptional, that she was a unique actress. She was not part of the “Dogme” rules of the project, so it took me a while to accept that I was going to use her. But the second I made up my mind I was comfortable with the decision, and when we started shooting, I realized she was absolutely Christine, and she would transcend the part. Cyprien Fouquet was in many ways closer to my initial view [of his character]. He was this sort of Bressonian actor; he was very pure and had an interiority and intensity. I often think back to Cyprien as a perfect representation of the person I was at that time, and I feel very lucky to have found him.

Q: What was your experience like working with the two of them?

OA: I don’t rehearse at all now, but at the time I did some rehearsing. I certainly didn’t do any reading with the actors before the shoot, but we rehearsed on the set. I was surprised how much I was using very long shots, which made the editing very simple because all the material was there. Years later, when I made Something in the Air, which is about teenagers during the same period, I had a hard time making the kids understand what the seventies were about. The politics, the energy, and the relationship to culture and music—I had to explain that. They played it, but I’m not sure they completely understood it. But when I was making Cold Water in the mid-nineties, there was no misunderstanding. They knew exactly what this was about.

Q: Music is such an important part of your work. Did this film change your approach to it?

OA: Cold Water was a turning point. I’ve always had a hard time with scoring movies. It’s something I did on my first and second features, and I was not so happy with the results. I did it on my third feature, Paris Awakens, and though the music was by John Cale and considerably better than the music on my previous films, I was still not happy with the way music connected with emotions and within the images. The movie I made right after that, A New Life, had no music at all. So Cold Water was a way of going back and building a new relationship with music.

What was fascinating about it was that, for the first time, I was using only music that I loved. The way I approached that very long party scene was by structuring it with music, with tracks that would cover the specific emotions and the way they change during the night. Ultimately, the songs ended up becoming one with the narrative—they say something that’s beyond the story. I think that people who have experienced the seventies are connected by that music, so all of a sudden it’s a universal language.

In many ways, the soundtrack to Something in the Air is much closer to the kind of music I loved at that time. I was very much into British underground. But the way I approached Cold Water was a little different. It doesn’t have the music I was actually listening to; it’s the music kids at that time were listening to. Then there were things I was not even aware of, like the first single by Roxy Music, “Virginia Plain.” Within the context of the film I realized that there is something extremely modern in the track, and that it was a harbinger of what would happen with punk rock. I also used songs by Leonard Cohen and Donovan that were from mature albums, not carried by the energy of their early days. These albums had the melancholy texture of artists who were producing beautiful music but were not that much a part of the zeitgeist. There was already something about the late sixties and early seventies that was fading, and those songs were about the fading.

Q: You’ve talked about how your films are all connected in some way. I’m wondering where Cold Water fits into the context of your career.

OA: It’s like a second first film in many ways, but it’s also strangely a prequel to my first film, Disorder. The characters in that film were the closest I’d ever gotten to autobiography, and they are ultimately the characters of Cold Water [as they would be] a few years later.

– Of Their Age: Olivier Assayas on the Making of Cold Water. By Hillary Weston https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5594-of-their-age-olivier-assayas-on-the-making-of-cold-water