No Country For Old Men Meanings

Submitted by: anonymous
Added: 2009-06-19 13:56:58     Rating:

At first glance, this movie is about missing drug money and a bunch of "old men" who are involved in the plot. A man trying to get away with the money, a killer who is after the money, and the sheriff who is after both of them. But there is an underlying message that you don't see right away.

No Country for Old Men points out that in the big scheme of things, nothing matters. At the end of the movie, everyone is dead, the money is missing and the sheriff retires. Why? Because he felt overwhelmed. At first he thought he could make a difference but in the end he learns that no one makes a difference.

Just look at the gas station scene. The killer's conversation about the coin.

"Don't put it in your pocket."
"Why not?"
"If you put it in your pocket it will become mixed with all your change and it will become just another coin, which it is."

The Coen brothers were subtly giving us a view of life, represented by coins.

Another thing is the ending. Why did the movie end with a monologue of some dream about the sheriff's dad? Well honestly, the Coen brothers could have ended the movie anywhere. The point was that life doesn't just end after the resolution of a film. Things go on and whatever events took place in the movie matter very little to everyone else in that universe.

This movie is amazing. Action, emotion, and deep thought provoking undertones.

It took me a while after watching this movie to come up with an idea of what the meaning could be. I think the message of the movie is that the world is changing and isn't the same as used to be. Thus the title "No Country For Old Men." But then again I could be completely off track.

Submitted by: anonymous
Added: 2009-07-16 12:07:47     Rating:

The theme of this film is that evil will always prevail. Think about the scene where Anton Chigur is in the car accident and simply walks away, broken bones and all.

Submitted by: Author418
Added: 2009-12-29 07:31:10     Rating:

I think that the title itself leads me to believe that the idea of the film rests (as others have said); that the world has changed. If you think about traditional westerns (and traditional judeo-christian values) good triumphs over evil. That tended to be represented by an upstanding lawman in a white hat. In those passion plays, evil swept into town in a black hat (in this movie, black clothes and a black bowl haircut)and did bad things until Act III where the good sheriff would triumph and the movie ends happily. I beleive that this film is showing a different view of that archetype. In this film the Tommie Lee Jones character strives to be "Gary Cooper" but he is unsuccessful not because he is unworthy, but because the times and the rules have changed so much that "old men" like himself and their values are no longer valid. So while evil did not really triumph either, at the end of the film the Sheriff did not "save the day" and his retirement is the ride off into the sunset, not in triumph but in resignation that his time has passed.

Author418 is definitely on the right track, I think. The title comes from the first line of W.B. Yeats' famous poem "Sailing to Byzantium"; readers might profit from looking up the poem and reading some of the analysis of it.

But Cormac McCarthy, the literary giant who wrote the book, is also going deeper and darker than merely exploring the bewilderment of a retiring small-town sherrif. Killer Anton Chigurh (a play on "chigger," that annoying parasite in the South) is an agent of Chaos and Radomness. Crazy psycopath that he is, he sticks to a code that makes no sense to a sane person: Flip a coin. Heads, you live; tails, you die. And yet, McCarthy insists, does not the world often seem to operator in just such an insane manner? Notice who survives: the killer and the sherrif, which suggests that we may be able to strike a blow at evil/chaos/randomness, but we will never eradicate it, and that only those who can see and accept this vision can be truly alive or effective, although they may be sadder for it.

It's a shuddering view of the world, one designed to shake up our naive, complacent ideas that we can impose order or create a world that makes sense or operates rationally.

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