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"In the dream, my deceased brother and I were crossing the mountains on horseback, and there was snow on the ground. Then he suddenly overtook me without saying a word. He kept riding and was carrying a torch made from a horn, as was done in the old days. I knew he was going ahead to light a fire amidst all that darkness, all that cold...
Van Horn, between Texas and Mexico.
Sheriff Bell got out of the car, scrutinized the parking lot, and decided to cross the police tape at the crime scene, room 117. He turned the handle and switched on the light. A subdued calm, but the silence was too cowardly to keep the eyes from the grate and the screws of the air duct, placed on the nightstand. He closed the door behind him, nothing seemed to move, time stood still in a very long pause. Then Bell looked out the window, at a corner of the curtain. He picked up the phone, the line was dead, broken. He drew his gun from its holster and opened the magazine. Someone had already seen what Tom Bell now saw. It was someone in the shadows, still nearby, patiently waiting for others' fears. What do you want to do? Are you sure of what you will find behind those five bullet holes? Of course. Unfortunately, you can't change anything, let it go, it's not for you. The old lawman turned off the light, paused in front of the doorway of room 117 for an infinite and icy moment. He opened the door and left. Forever. From the Evil he had breathed.
Santa Fe Institute, office of Doug Erwin, a few years ago.
Cormac: "Doug, what do you think about the meteorite that 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs? Do you think it was an isolated apocalypse, or could it happen again? What would the consequences be then?"
Erwin: "Mmmm... I wouldn't know how to respond about the chances of a new catastrophe... The ecosystem would surely collapse, debris and gases in the atmosphere and the magnitude of the desolation..."
Cormac: "Perhaps we deserve extinction, we are just fucking sentient animals."
Erwin: "Well... I am convinced that the planet would be much better off without us... Man is an encephalitic ape destined to disappear." (a dialogue between writer Cormac McCarthy and scientist friend Doug Erwin, a prelude to the post-apocalyptic novel The Road).
Death has the oblique face and sensational haircut of killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem, astonishing). A suitcase full of money is the cynical MacGuffin that spreads blood and divine wrath between Marfa, Texas and the Mexican borders. The old and weary sheriff Tom Bell (a laconic Tommy Lee Jones) is the moral conscience of a story choked in dark and desolate landscapes. Places soaked in the darkness of absolute Evil, characters on the razor's edge, subdued by the prankish fate of a coin toss or the wicked greed of men. Places trodden by the massacre of inhuman violence, overshadowed by enormous pickup trucks with drug lords and shotguns, where the law watches helplessly the events in a dreadful disillusionment with the past. When "...you could go around without guns...". The hunted cowboy Llewelyn Moss (the excellent Josh Brolin), and his dusty dream of redemption from the mediocrity of the everyday desert. Which not only nullifies the surrounding environment but also the people living within it. Based on the eponymous and definitive novel by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men is probably a tombstone for the tongue-in-cheek cinema of Joel and Ethan Coen.
There is no utopian redemption here, no wisecrack of Drugo or the tragedy that veers into the grotesque of Fargo. In the Coen Brothers' masterpiece, you will find nihilism and the dark skies of the present. Almost zero levels of self-irony this time, and understandably absent. Tom, retired, looks at his wife with dismay, and in the recounting of those obsessive dreams, the words brand the foreboding of a nightmare at the doorstep. The fate of humanity in a coin worth a few cents.
Heads or tails?
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