No Country for old men

Author: Cormac McCarthy

I really enjoy the movie No Country for Old Men. It feels really unique, and a bit artistic, despite the plot being rather generic where a man is being hunted by someone for stealing money from a drug deal gone bad that he accidentally stumbled upon. The visuals in the movie are also really striking. I really like the opening scenes where Tommy Lee Jones narrates his thoughts (almost word for word with the opening pages of the book, I learned) and the film shows shots of wide open Texas with dark storm clouds and storms in the distance. The movie also has no soundtrack or music of any sort, which adds an ominous feeling to it.

The book was very very similar to the movie. Certainly the closest book/movie ratio than anything else I have read or watched. Many scenes were almost word for word what happens in the movie, such as what I described above, or the scene where the bad guy meets the gas station cashier and forces him to guess the result of a coin toss.

The overall message and tone of the book is that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, and crime is getting worse, more intense, and more violent. The main character is the Sheriff and the book stops multiple times and provides a narration from the Sheriff on his views on the particular case the book follows, and the world in general. For the Sheriff, crime is getting worse, and more senseless. He can’t seem to reconcile why criminals he runs into today do the things they do and compares them to criminals from his younger years who he thought of as more predictable and not as evil.

Just as a note, this idea that the world is getting worse, and crime is increasing, etc, is actually false. In more ways than you might think, the world is getting better, and crime is certainly decreasing, not increasing. Check out Factfulness for an optimistic and persuasive read for why the world is getting better, and why most of us assume it is getting worse. I also like this quite from Will Durant on the topic of increasing crime:

We think there is more violence in the world than before, but in truth there are only more newspapers; vast and powerful organizations scour the planet for crimes and scandals that will console their readers for stenography and monogamy; and all the villainy and politics of five continents are gathered upon one page for the encouragement of our breakfasts. We conclude that half the world is killing the other half, and that a large proportion of the remainder are committing suicide. But in the streets, in our homes, in public assemblies, in a thousand vehicles of transportation, we are astonished to find no murderers and no suicides, but rather a blunt democratic courtesy, and an unpretentious chivalry a hundred times more real than when men mouthed chivalric phrases, enslaved their women, and ensured the fidelity of their wives with irons while they fought for Christ in the Holy Land.

Will Durant

The Sheriff ends up stepping down from his duties at the end of the book as he can no longer carry on with the way the world is going. To use the title of the book, it is no country for an old man like him.

The story concludes with the Sheriff describing a couple dreams he had. Both the movie and book end abruptly after the Sheriff finishes describing the second dream. I’ll paste the quote below.

The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin’ through the mountains of a night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothin’ goin’ by – just rode on past. And he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down. When he rode past, I seen he was carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do, and I could see the horn from the light inside of it – about the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and he was fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold. And I knew that whenever I got there, he’d be there. And then I woke up.

I think the second dream is the Sheriff looking forward to dying and seeing his dad again. The Sheriff appears comforted by this dream. Beyond his desire to see his father again, he is also happy that he will soon no longer need to try and make sense of the senselessness he has encountered in his time as the Sheriff.

This might be one of the rare instances where I recommend the movie over the book. Though the book has a tad bit more detail in some scenes, they didn’t add a lot. The movie is visually striking, has good acting, and a unique style. Spend a couple hours watching it, and use the extra time you would spend reading the book to read something else.