Of course he did. That is the point, better made than I made it. No
character in the film with enough in the way of clues to know what he
or she thinks is really ethical with the exception of Sheriff Bell.
Every one of them makes major choices that are unethical and the
presence of the remnants of an ethos does not really save them.
The sheriff is of course a law man and in the film I think the law
represents ethical standard.
Chigurh, early on, decides he wants the money and kills two people who
would know that he was doing the old double cross. The whole movie is
about his chasing the money and killing anyone who gets in his way. It
is not his money and no effort is made to show that he thinks it is.
The faint trappings of an ethical system in some of his decisions that
result in gratuitous killing do not describe an ethos. It also seems
to me that if stoicism is the choice here, the point of that
philosophy is that you make the best of your place in society, embrace
it and make it yours, but working according to the rules within that
niche. Chigurh breaks all the rules and is a fugitive. If stoic, it is
badly gone wrong.
Moss does come back to the scene of the drug deal gone bad and brings
water to the still living drug runner, but it is incidental to finding
the money and taking it. It is not his money regardless of where it
comes from and he has committed a crime besides endangering his life
from the "bad guys" who also want the money.
His wife is concerned about his actions, but only insofar as they
endanger him. She is an accessory after the fact.
Of course there are all the dead drug people.
What is interesting is that that all the unethical people are killed
off, except Chigurh. Why is that? Avenging angel? I may have been
wrong about that. He wallowed too much in the ethical mud. Even if his
emotional motivations are hidden from us there is nothing that
separates him ethically as you say from Hitler, or Torquemada. But
then again who knows what Cormac McCarthy believes? He could believe
in avenging angels which would allow Chigurh to walk away for "the
next job". I think the Coen brothers like that he is the only one to
walk away because it shows the lack of any ethical element in the
universe. The fact that it breaks the usual Hollywood morality play
ending and we know Chigurh is not going to be brought back as the
terror in a series of slice and dice movies kind of reinforces that.
The brothers Coen seem to play with the nihilistic view a lot and I go
back to my earlier idea that much of their point of view is to show
ordinary people, knowing and unknowing, up against real horrors and
that there is no moral center, just people pleading for their lives.
You may disagree, but the whole direction of Tommy Lee Jones(he is
good, isn't he?) at the end underscores, at least to me, the
disappointment of his retirement. He expressed that he could not
longer cope with the world as it is. He knew that had he entered the
motel room where Moss was killed a minute earlier he would have been
dead and the fallacy that he was in control in his niche in life was
exposed and he was not strong enough for it. As the carrier of the
only ethical sense in the movie based as it was on the law which he
enforced, then retirement was abandonment of his ethical role and its
failure. The character is stoic in the sense that he availed himself
of an option available to someone in his station in life, but the
moral center of the story is gone.
So we have all the major players dead, Chigurh walking away, not
punished like the others, and Sheriff Bell stepping off the ethical
stage. Nihilism.
Or it could be a twisted version of the Wizard of Oz. :-)
Winsor
Long Beach, California, USA
On / January 6, 2008 CE, at 2:13 AM, Andrew Fildes wrote:
> Aristotle claimed that everyone is trying to do
> the right thing. problem is that they all have a unique view of right
> - Hitler thought he was right.
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