You’re probably here because you’re confused about the ending of the Coen brothers’ Best Picture-winning No Country for Old Men (2007). Specifically, you probably want to know the meaning of the two dreams shared by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) before the film cuts to black and the credits roll.
Well, you’ve come to the right place.
To definitively explain the ending of this complex movie, though, we need to go through the film piece by piece, exploring its less urgent mysteries first before arriving at Sheriff Bell’s dreams. That way, we’ll know what the stakes are for the ending, and what thematic meanings we can derive from it.
So let’s begin. No Country for Old Men’s thematic conflict is largely displayed on the surface, so we needn’t dwell on it too long. We’ll summarize, though, that the film follows an aging sheriff who’s forced to confront the apparent rise in senseless, outrageous violence in his small Texas community. This trend comes to a head when a local man (Josh Brolin) comes across the scene of a drug deal gone wrong and walks away with two million dollars—leading him to be pursued by Mexican drug dealers and a frighteningly ruthless, persistent killer. Eventually, the man is murdered, and the sheriff retires, having come to feel “overmatched” by a growing sinister presence in contemporary society.
Our primary mystery, then, is the exact nature of the sinister presence. And it isn’t easy to identify, because Sheriff Bell is a man of few words and doesn’t pontificate much on the matter.
Fortunately for us, the Coens have given us a character that personifies what’s troubling him: the film’s primary antagonist, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). In other words: to find out what’s troubling Bell, we need to examine Chigurh’s behavior.
Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) is the only character with any real knowledge of Chigurh, and he tells us:
He’s a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that.
What are these principles? We learn about them through Chigurh’s actions during the film. What I will go on to demonstrate as my first major point in this analysis is that Chigurh harbors a complex, bizarre understanding of human encounters. In short, he perceives every situation as a chance collision between people and objects that is predestined to lead to the individual either living or dying, and he aims to ensure the “correct” outcome without interfering himself.
I’ll explain, don’t worry.
The fullest look we get of Chigurh’s eccentric belief system is his remarkable interaction with a gas station owner early in the film. This encounter first demonstrates Chigurh’s obsession, which will recur throughout the film, with how things got to their present location. He’s especially interested in where the man is from and how he came to own the gas station: “You’ve lived here all your life?… So you married into it.” And it’s not only the man’s path he’s keen on: he also invokes the origins and journey of a coin that he wants the man to call heads or tails: “It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here, and now it’s here, and it’s either heads or tails.”
By contrast, when the man asks Chigurh where he is from, Chigurh responds with a rude retort: “What business of it is yours where I’m from, Friend-O?”
In summary, Chigurh spends the conversation with the gas station owner gathering details about the man’s journey and invoking details about the coin’s journey—while fiercely resisting giving any such details about his own.
And Chigurh’s focus on the paths of people and objects doesn’t just make for an odd conversation. Alarmingly, it appears to inform his intention to potentially kill this random man on the spot for no reason, contingent on the toss of the coin. Chigurh’s strange logic appears to be that since the coin has traveled such a long, winding journey to arrive at its current place, it has inherent authority as to the outcome of the encounter. Later, Chigurh will echo this same reasoning to Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) after demanding that she call a similar life-or-death coin toss: “I got here the same way the coin did.”
There’s another notorious movie villain who flips coins to determine victims’ fates: Batman’s adversary, Two-Face (coincidentally played by Jones in 1995). But as we can see by the aforementioned remarks, Chigurh, unlike Two-Face, doesn’t use the coin as a tribute to (in the movies) randomness or (as in the comics) indecisiveness, but rather out of respect for the coin itself.
From our viewpoint, of course, this is absurd, because it devalues Chigurh’s own role in the outcome. Deferring to an inanimate object negates the fact that Chigurh himself is the one who will potentially execute the victim despite his clear option to desist. But Chigurh doesn’t see it that way, dismissing that very objection from Carla Jean (“The coin don’t got no say!”) by again invoking the meandering path of the coin. In his mind, it seems, the human free will doesn’t take precedence, as we believe it does. Rather, Chigurh believes that he must carry out the will of the coin, an object. He’s not a meaningful participant in the matter—just an enactor of what the coin ordains.
His dedication to refraining from interfering in the outcome is such that he refuses to call the tosses, demanding that the potential victims do so instead. This also demonstrates his acknowledgement of the target’s agency in addition to the coin’s. It appears, then, that what Chigurh truly values is the interaction between the person and the object (the coin).
It’s not only the coin, after all, that has followed a remarkable path to arrive at this moment. The potential victim has, too. Thus, as we’ve observed, Chigurh expresses interest in these people’s paths, for example inquiring about the gas station owner’s life story (“You married into it”) and asking Carson Wells, “If the road led you to this point, of what good was the road?” He’s musing about these unfortunate individuals’ chance arrival into a circumstance in which they may die. That circumstance, from his perspective, is embodied by the coin, an object with which the potential victim has improbably, randomly collided, and which will reveal to Chigurh whether that collision was meant to result in the individual’s death. If so, he’ll faithfully enact that outcome.
But, you might wonder, why doesn’t Chigurh flip a coin for all of his victims? Most of them, after all, don’t get such a luxury (including Wells).
This is because Chigurh for most of the film is on a larger mission: to retrieve the missing money.
It’s never made clear whether Chigurh has been hired by the American drug buyers to get the two million dollars, or by an outside party, or by no one at all. But what is absolutely clear is that Chigurh, for whatever reason, wants that money. Badly. Once he has set himself to this goal, we can observe through his actions that he not only perceives every human being that comes in his way to be expendable, but that he is positively obligated to murder them.
After all, throughout his bloody rampage, Chigurh has various opportunities to spare victims: the Mexican in the motel shower, Wells offering him the briefcase, Carla Jean, the American accountant (“You’ve seen me?”), and various civilians that he kills for their cars or other reasons. In all cases he puts them to death only for being in his way, even if incidentally.
Based on what we have already said about Chigurh, we can deduce that this is because Chigurh believes that he is predestined to retrieve the money, and that those who might obstruct him are consequently predestined to be killed. A coin toss would be redundant for these individuals, because it’s already evident that the circumstances they have wandered into necessitate their deaths. Their need to be executed is already assured.
In fact, Chigurh makes a telling comment to Wells that outlines this manner of viewing his retrieval of the money as a foregone, fated conclusion: “I know where it’s going to be… It will be brought to me and placed at my feet.” Again, Chigurh believes that his recovery of the money is destiny; therefore, all who get in his way (in this case, Wells) are destined to die. The coin doesn’t need to confirm this.
Chigurh’s belief that he is fated to recover the money also helps us to explain possibly his signature trait: his utter ruthlessness. Throughout the film, his behavior is notable for its disregard of all etiquette or rules of engagement. An officer leaves him unsupervised while handcuffed in the precinct, assuming that he’ll comply with the process. He doesn’t. A man pulls over in deference to an apparent policeman, assuming that he has a good reason for strangely wielding a cattle stun gun. He doesn’t. These expectations of mutual decorum are of no import to Chigurh, who simply takes advantage of the opportunities they offer him.
And his viewing of his retrieval of the money as a foregone conclusion also engenders his memorably blunt, simple style. Chigurh isn’t glamorous (as anyone can see by his haircut), but he is extremely efficient. When he kills, he doesn’t waste time with drama or flair. He doesn’t even use a gun when possible, since it would leave messy traces behind, but instead prefers to use, of all things, a pressurized cattle stunner, symbolically minimizing even the humanity of his victims—slaughtering them simply and quietly, like animals. Unimpressive aesthetics like these owe to the fact that Chigurh follows only one rule: that he will obtain the money. Style can wait.
We now have a fairly good idea of what Wells means when he says that Chigurh “has principles.” As we’ve seen, Chigurh sees himself as bowing completely to circumstance, executing only those who are meant to die, which unfortunately includes most of the characters in No Country for Old Men, since they are obstructing his predestined retrieval of the two million dollars. For those whose deaths aren’t so obviously necessary, he uses a coin as a proxy for the mandate of circumstance.
No one obstructs Chigurh’s retrieval of the money more than Llewelyn Moss (Brolin), who, thanks in part to his military training, has the wherewithal to stay a step ahead of Chigurh for much of the film. But Moss has stark weaknesses compared to Chigurh, of which Wells unsuccessfully tries to advise him in the hospital.
As Wells knows, the fact that Moss is even in the hospital makes him eminently vulnerable; Chigurh, by contrast, when injured manages to stay off the grid by blowing up a car and stealing medical supplies in the ensuing chaos without so much as quickening his stride. Wells tries to illustrate to Moss that Chigurh’s monomaniacal persistence will eventually overcome him, noting that Chigurh could easily endeavor to kill Moss’s wife just to demoralize him. But the physically battered Moss can only respond to these well-founded warnings with the type of swashbuckling, tough-guy remark that, as we’ve established, would be completely alien to Chigurh: “Maybe he’s the one who needs to be worried. About me.” Wells in turn assures him, correctly, “Well, he isn’t.”
The chivalrous, old-school Moss, then, is really no match for the hyper-efficient Chigurh, so, as Wells predicts, it’s only a matter of time before Moss is found and killed. In addition, Chigurh had promised to kill Carla Jean if he defied him, which Moss disregarded—so Chigurh finds her to finish the job. He explains to her, “I gave my word,” to which she replies, “That don’t make sense.”
We, however, can make sense of it, or at least follow his thought process, because we know that Chigurh now perceives her as just one more person whom circumstances have ordained to die. In Chigurh’s mind, he isn’t choosing to kill her, just effecting what is supposed to happen based on Moss’s decisions. Chigurh offers her a coin toss (“It’s the best I can do”), just to be sure that it was meant to be—but she declines, and he kills her, checking his feet for blood as he leaves the house.
But now an intriguing scene ensues wherein Chigurh’s vehicle is hit by a car that runs a red light, apparently breaking his arm. Two boys witness the crash, and he pays one of them for a jacket to refashion as a sling and for their silence about seeing him. What is the meaning of this scene?
Well, the moment recalls an earlier scene in which a grievously injured Moss, still in possession of the two million dollars, overpays a group of young men on the border for a jacket. It’s an essential purchase, possibly saving his life, and it’s possible only because he is, if only temporarily, rich. Similarly, the car crash scene with Chigurh, which also includes a medically essential purchase, emphasizes the fact that Chigurh has the two million dollars now, and can likewise use it to get himself out of trouble.
The scene shows that Chigurh himself is not immune to the potentially deadly consequences of the twisting, random paths of objects and people that he puts so much stock in. But now that he has the two million dollars, he can overcome some of those unfortunate hands inevitably dealt by fate.
Perhaps this is why Chigurh—whose reasons for getting involved in this saga, remember, are never made clear—is so invested in obtaining the lost money in the first place: maybe he just wants to get an edge on fate, knowing from his own meditations that it’s only a matter of time before his meandering path leads him into harm’s way, too. Remember that his rude “Friend-O” retort to the gas station owner seemed to indicate his resistance to (and therefore his awareness of) the potential for the rules of fate to apply to him, too.
Let’s get back to Sheriff Bell. Our initial undertaking was to define the evil that troubles him and ultimately leads him to retire, by examining Anton Chigurh’s behavior. Now, we can state our findings. If Chigurh carries out his crimes, as we’ve said, as only an agent of circumstance, a completely dispassionate executor of an apparently a priori mandate—then this must be the way that Bell perceives the contemporary violent crimes of West Texas: not as though they were enacted by a conceivable human will, but rather as though they were fated, inevitable occurrences akin to natural disasters.
This perspective, of course, allows for no meaningful intervention from a law enforcer like himself. Therefore he indeed must feel “overmatched,” compelled to retire in defeat.
But does this monumental shift in crime, so discouraging to Sheriff Bell, truly reflect a change in the West Texas countryside, or only in Bell himself? Bell thinks it’s the former, opining to an agreeing fellow officer that things in America are generally in decline: “Any time you quit hearin’ Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.” However, Bell’s cousin Ellis later challenges this view in a pivotal conversation, telling Bell an old story of a senseless family murder and concluding: “What you got ain’t nothing’ new. This country’s hard on people.” He even goes on to chastise Bell for his dejection:
You can’t stop what’s coming. It ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.
Thus, in response to Bell’s despair that he can no longer control the violence ravaging the country—represented by Chigurh, whose belief system is immune to human reason or fear of the law—Ellis asserts that Bell in fact could never control it. He accuses Bell in his old age of retaining a stubborn “vanity” regarding the capabilities of his profession. Bell doesn’t refute this argument, and it seems to me unmistakably the more persuasive one.
That finally brings us to Bell’s two dreams, which conclude the film.
The first one is vague, involving Bell waiting in town for his father to give him money, which he then loses. Luckily, we’ve already covered the symbolism of money in No Country for Old Men. It’s a means of alleviating dangerous and even deadly situations, as conveyed in the two separate scenes involving Moss and Chigurh in which they essentially pay their way out of dire trouble. In this dream, Bell loses money given to him by his father. This must mean that Bell is reflecting that he has lost the means of averting danger and death, which were conferred on him by his father, a sheriff himself.
This dream, then, is a meditation on Bell’s impending mortality. He had always felt, as a sheriff like his father, that his skills and importance to the community lent him a measure of security or even invulnerability. But now that he’s retired, which his father never was, and now that he’s significantly older than his father ever was, he’s coming to feel that this invulnerability has worn off: he’s getting closer to death.
The second dream is somewhat more complex. It entails Bell’s father riding out ahead of him in a cold, dark, mountainous pass with fire in a horn to light ahead and wait for his son. Bell remembers that his father “rode on past me, kept goin’, never said nothin’” with his “blanket wrapped around him.” This imagery can only be interpreted as symbolic of the father’s early death.
Thus, this dream, like the first, is a meditation on mortality. Unlike the first, though, Bell remembers a feeling associated with it: “I knew that whenever I got there, he’d be there.” The hopefulness of this sentiment, however—referring, it seems, to a benign afterlife where father and son can reunite—is shattered by Bell’s next sentence, the last words of the film: “And then I woke up.”
These final words and their abrupt, blunt delivery are unmistakably meant to undermine the content of the preceding dream as fantastical and starry-eyed, and therefore we know that Bell’s optimistic feeling of his father being “out ahead” waiting for him in the afterlife has been revealed to be merely a dream, a fantasy, with Bell having now “woken up” to the harsher reality of a true, final death.
So why does Bell end the movie haunted by thoughts of his own mortality? Well, again, his being retired is surely a factor, as he’s now unavoidably in the final stage of his life. But more important is the change that we see in Bell over the course of the film. Remember that he increasingly perceives himself as helpless to curtail the violent crimes plaguing the countryside, culminating in his feeling of being “overmatched” and his consequent retirement. Based on our interpretations of Bell’s two dreams as meditations on death, we can deduce that as Sheriff Bell has come to realize his relative ineffectiveness in staving off others’ deaths, he is starting to realize his inability to stave off his own, as well.
With the illusion of his own agency over death punctured by the ineluctable crimes of Chigurh and others, Bell in his retirement is forced to face the inescapable corollary of that powerlessness: that he, too, will die. Now that his “vanity,” as correctly diagnosed by Ellis, is finally fading, he’s coming to face all facets of that chilly truth:
“You can’t stop what’s coming.”
That’s the story of No Country for Old Men. The intensely bleak ending to this film is attributable, of course, to Cormac McCarthy, the acclaimed novelist who wrote the source material, and whose works are famously desolate in their portrayal of human frailty.
Both the novel and the movie are cognitively challenging works of art, and both have proponents and detractors. I myself have mixed feelings about this film, so I won’t end this essay with my usual glowing tribute to the filmmakers’ achievements. I think it’s too reliant on regional tropes to fully transcend its setting (and its genre: the Western), and maybe more importantly, it isn’t peopled with great characters the way a masterpiece should be. We have a near-stereotype (Bell), a surreal monster (Chigurh), and a weak, unfortunate, would-be hero (Moss): none of these strike me as the vibrant personages of a true classic.
NCFOM‘s 2007 counterpart, There Will Be Blood, on the other hand, could never be accused of this weakness, even though it’s less complex in its mysteries and philosophizing. I therefore esteem it higher and submit my critical opinion that the Best Picture prize of that year was awarded to the lesser film. The ambition of the Coen brothers, however, in creating such a difficult work can’t be denied, and therefore I hope this essay strikes the movie’s more enthusiastic admirers as a faithful exploration of its themes and symbolism.
–Jim Andersen
For another Coen Brothers classic, see my explanation of The Big Lebowski.
The point of this introductory section, then, is to emphasize the question: “Why?” Why do bad things happen to good people?
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