A recent letter to The Guardian expresses disgust that the Coen Brothers’ ‘No Country For Old Men’ won so many Oscars.
The writer condemms the glorification of “tough guys slaughtering one another” and states melodrammatically:
“And then we wonder why our adolescents take pride in violence”.
My response to this kind of blinkered crticism is to say that the people who get off on the movie’s depiction of bloodshed or see it in any way as a model to emulate were fucked long they watched it.
The movie is not like other crude exploitation films in that what we see is not killing as entertainment but a study of one twisted individual as a symbol of something sinister at the heart of modern society.
The maniacal figure of Chirgugh represents a “living prophet of destruction” and one of the most terrifying fictional characters ever created. He may be an extreme case but you only have to open a newspaper or turn on TV to see his brand of heartless cruelty is a daily fact of life.
You can bury your head in the sand if you want to but that won’t make this harsh truth go away.
The corruption and cruelty depicted in Cormac McCarthy’s tale , and the Coen Brothers’ brilliant movie, is all the more chilling because it neither condones nor directly condemns this personfication of evil.
This is what makes the story so disconcerting for the moral majority who prefer the panacea of moral fables where good overcomes evil and noble actions are always rewarded.
