Have you talked to him? The driver said.
No.
He don’t know what happened?
No. Let’s go.
They rolled out across the desert in the dark.
When do you aim to tell him? The driver said.
When I know what it is that I’m telling him.
(No Country For Old Men, Cormac McCarthy, 59)
If you’re confused, don’t worry. That’s intentional. There are a grand total of zero speech marks throughout the 309 pages of Cormac McCarthy’s brutalist Western. The reader is forced to exert extra attention to differentiate between the spoken word and descriptive text. I came across a similarly engaging dynamic when reading the late Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, who, after beginning a lengthy conversation between two characters (Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Moore, for example) and listing their names, would subsequently refer to each character after the spoken text by their pronouns (e.g. ‘he said’ ‘he said’ etc.), forcing the reader to keep intense focus to remember which character is speaking. This won’t be everyone’s idea of easy reading, and will likely irritate many, but it was a very compelling narrative form for me personally.
The passage at the top of the post details a conversation between the unnamed driver and the hulking force of death that is Anton Chigurh. While Chigurh’s name is referred to at the end of his speech during various other points in the novel, the effect of not including his name in the interchange is one of terror and unbearable tension, not helped by his incredibly laconic and intimidating responses. We have already seen Chigurh take out two men in a coldly efficient manner at the novel’s beginning, and it’s unlikely this driver is going to have a happy end. Funnily enough, he doesn’t.
The Coen Brothers delivered an incredibly faithful and acclaimed adaptation on the silver screen, although several of the small details they chose to omit have made a significant impact on my previous viewings. In the film, there are no direct references or conversations to suggest that Chigurh is working for anyone but himself. From the first scenes (faithfully and accurately replayed from the source material) we can tell that this a man you don’t mess with. The lack of a boss figure higher up the line only increases tension and unease. The Coen brothers’ Chigurh is a lone wolf with nothing to lose; no familial ties are ever mentioned or subtly implied, and there’s certainly never anything as narratively oblique as a monologue or voiceover to describe Chigurh’s intentions. Only Tommy Lee Jones’ Sherriff Bell gets that as he acts, as in the novel, as the voice of reason in an unreasonable landscape.
While I’m particularly interested in how a complete lack of backstory is a necessary characteristic for a silent hero, the same point can be made about the silent villain (or at least, a laconic one; central characters are rarely completely silent across the entirety of the screening time). In both cases, the character’s ahistorical narrative creates intrigue and, potentially, fear. Not knowing can create the desire to want to know more, but, for the case of villains like Chigurh, it could create the opposite effect. If he’s willing to kill without a second thought, then we probably don’t want to know what got him to this stage of insanity. Or maybe we do. Either way, this refusal to provide information about a character’s past leaves a subjective space for the audience’s imagination to fill.
One of the greatest achievements that the Coen brothers managed to transfer from McCarthy’s prose was the sense of shock in the depictions of death; namely, how these scenes are mentioned in the aftermath as loose footnotes. We are not allowed to witness the killings, only to hear about them after the event. Following the threatening phone exchange between Llewyn Moss and Chigurh, we might expect a grand showdown between the two, like the traditional Sergio Leone Westerns we know and love. But we don’t. As Ethan Coen notes: ‘The convention is…ingrained that the good guy is going to meet the bad guy and they’re going to confront each other’. In the film, shortly after Carla Jean’s mother has accidentally revealed Moss’s location to a group of Mexicans, his body is found in the motel. In the novel, as Moss retires back to his motel room, we read:
‘He went on up the walkway and climbed the stairs and went in’ (236)
Then, a mere 4 pages later:
‘He pulled back the sheet. Bell walked around the end of the table. There was no chock under Moss’s neck and his head was turned on the side’ (240)
McCarthy robs the reader of any satisfaction that might be gained from an action-fuelled shootout. Moss isn’t even taken out by Chigurh himself, but by a group of unnamed men, increasing the sense of pathos and hopelessness as we witness the aftermath of violence from Sherriff Bell’s point of view. The bad guy wins, as Chigurh extracts the briefcase from the motel and escapes, albeit with substantial injuries from a car crash.
A final intriguing change in adaptation from McCarthy’s original text takes place during the conversation between Carla Jean and Chigurh near the film’s climax, where two have a brief debate about the use of Chigurh’s coin as an instrument to decide life and death. In the film, the conversation stops as Carla Jean refuses to make a bet on the coin toss, cutting to Chigurh leaving the house and shutting the door. In the original prose, however, while she initially refuses to ‘call it’, as Chigurh demands, she ultimately relents, guessing tails. Chigurh reveals that the coin was heads, apologises, then the two share a brief philosophical conversation before Chigurh finally carries out the act he promised.
By cutting out Chigurh’s more thoughtful monologues about fate and destiny from their screenplay, the Coen brothers essentially add another level of dehumanisation – and fear – to Chigurh’s character, challenging the audience with a certain level of ambiguity in this case. McCarthy says obliquely at the end of the paragraph: ‘Then he shot her’ (260). The reader is under no illusion that Carla Jean is dead. Admittedly, we are no less convinced of Chigurh’s psychopathic tendencies in the book than in the film, but the choice to remove all of Chigurh’s musings about the nature of fate seems to be a deliberate decision to avoid any human – and thus relatable – characteristics, thus making the character more monstrous and amoral. We don’t see Chigurh shoot Carla Jean in the film, although it’s clear that he has done so if the audience has been following a key visual signifier across the film – namely, Chigurh’s boots, which he always makes sure to keep clean from blood after he has ended the life of his victims. Once he has left Carla Jean’s house, he leans an arm against a beam of the house while he checks each boot for any substances, then departs after concluding that each shoe is fine.
Despite a few interesting differences, both the book and the film of No Country For Old Men represent masterful, subtle exercises in storytelling, something which is particularly helped in the Coen brother adaptation by a complete lack of soundtrack. Sit back and enjoy the silence (and violence), friendos.