Okay, so I haven’t been blogging. No explanations other than super busy. Moving forward…
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen several films that I think give us a pretty good look at the postmodern sensibility in ways that matter. Probably the most haunting and memorable is the Cohen brothers’ “No Country for Old Men,” a film I’d been avoiding because I’d seen the trailer, and I knew the bad guy was going to be someone I was going to want to keep out of my head. I finally broke down and watched it about a week ago, and Javier Bardem, as Anton Chigurh, was as bad as I expected, and worse. A man wedded to a set of principles that establish a code of “integrity” to murder and revenge, Anton is a killer in pursuit of drug money wrongly taken in a story that often swerves in seemingly random directions, introducing interesting characters for little reason other than to brutally do away with them. “You don’t have to do this,” the victims keep saying. Sorry, but yes…he does. Tommy Lee Jones, as the near-retired Texas law man in pursuit of Anton, gives valiant chase for awhile, but the further he goes, the more he realizes the rules of the game have drastically changed. The evil of the movie wants to reduce action and choice to a coin toss, but one poor woman caught up in the maelstrom of death refuses to play the coin toss game, looks the killer straight in the eye, and tells him the coin has nothing to do with it. “It’s just you,” she says (or something like that), but even as you nod in agreement, there’s a pile of things in the movie to remind you that not all is explainable in this world. But once we thought the explainable outweighed the mysterious.
Maybe not anymore.
This is the first film to have stayed with me with this kind of power in a long time. Finally, though, the more I reflect on it, the more I sense that something is not quite true here. Randomness and unexplainable events are certainly prisms through which we experience life, but the linkages between choice, character, action, and patterns of outcome are observably strong. Though collisions of circumstances and lives often catch us by surprise with no discernible explanation, it doesn’t naturally follow that there is therefore no reason, no meaning, no cause and effect, to our lives. Not that the Coen brothers are arguing this, but a life in which evil is randomly seeking out victims in unpredictable ways unconnected to character and choice is a much more frightening world than a world of sin and its predictable results.
Made me dream dark dreams…
