You’re probably here because you’re confused about the ending of the Coen brothers’ Best Picture-winning No Country for Old Men (2007). And you’ve come to the right place.
To definitively interpret Sheriff Ed Tom Bell’s (Tommy Lee Jones) two dreams, though, we first must go through the film piece by piece, exploring its less urgent mysteries. That way, we’ll know what the stakes are for the finale and what thematic meanings we can derive from it.
So let’s begin. No Country for Old Men’s thematic conflict consists of an aging sheriff being forced to confront the apparent rise in senseless, outrageous violence in his small Texas community. This trend meets him head-on when a local man (Josh Brolin) comes across the scene of a drug deal gone wrong and walks away with two million dollars—triggering hot pursuit from Mexican dealers and a frighteningly ruthless, persistent killer (Javier Bardem). When the man is eventually murdered, Sheriff Bell retires, feeling “overmatched” by a growing sinister presence in contemporary society.
Our primary mystery, then, is the exact nature of this sinister presence. And it isn’t easy to identify, because Sheriff Bell is a man of few words. Fortunately, the Coens have given us a character that personifies what’s troubling him: the film’s primary antagonist, Anton Chigurh.
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? Based on the events of the film, 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 view of Chigurh’s eccentric belief system comes during 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 arrived at 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.” Similarly, he discusses the journey of the coin in his hand, which 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.”
But while Chigurh spends the conversation with the gas station owner gathering details about the man’s journey and invoking details about the coin’s journey, he fiercely resists giving any details about his own origin. 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?”
Alarmingly, Chigurh’s discourse on the paths of people and objects appears to inform his intention to kill the owner of the gas station on the spot if he calls the coin toss incorrectly. Chigurh’s strange logic is that since the coin has traveled such a long, winding journey to arrive at its current place, it has 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 coin toss: “I got here the same way the coin did.”
He’s not the first villain to determine victims’ fates on tosses of a coin: Batman’s adversary, Two-Face (coincidentally, played by Jones in 1995), does the same. But apparently Chigurh, unlike Two-Face, doesn’t use the coin to invoke randomness (as in the movies) or indecisiveness (as in the comics). He uses it because he respects the coin itself.
From our viewpoint, of course, this is absurd, since it devalues Chigurh’s own role in the outcome. Deferring to an inanimate object negates the fact that Chigurh is the one who will potentially execute the victim despite the clear ability 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, free will doesn’t take precedence. Rather, Chigurh believes that he must carry out the will of the coin. He’s not a meaningful participant in the matter—only an enactor of what the coin ordains.
It’s also important that he refuses to call the tosses, demanding that the potential victims do so instead. This demonstrates his acknowledgement that his targets have agency, too, not just the coin. 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, as Chigurh emphasizes when speaking to the gas station owner (“You married into it”) and Carson Wells (“If the road led you to this point, of what good was the road?”). In both cases, he muses about these individuals’ chance arrival into circumstances in which they may die. That circumstance, from his perspective, is embodied by the coin, an object with which the potential victim has improbably 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.
But, you might wonder, why doesn’t Chigurh flip a coin for all of his victims? Most of them 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 drug 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 clear is that Chigurh, for whatever reason, wants the money. And once he sets himself to this goal, we can observe through his actions that he not only perceives everyone in his way as expendable, but that he believes 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, Carla Jean, the American accountant (“You’ve seen me?”), and various civilians that he kills for their cars or other reasons.
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 outlines this belief explicitly: when Wells notes that Chigurh does not know where the money is and offers to help in return for his life, Chigurh responds confidently: “I know where it’s going to be… It will be brought to me and placed at my feet.” Again, Chigurh clearly believes that his recovery of the money is a foregone conclusion; therefore, anyone who gets in his way is destined to die. The coin doesn’t need to confirm this.
Chigurh’s belief that he is fated to recover the money also explains 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 wielding a cattle stun gun. He doesn’t. These expectations of decorum mean nothing to Chigurh, who simply takes advantage of the opportunities they present.
We can also now trace the reason for Chigurh’s blunt, simple style. He 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, avoiding messy traces, instead preferring, 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 includes most of the characters in No Country for Old Men, since they are obstructing his predestined retrieval of the two million dollars in drug money. For the executions that 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, as 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, stays off the grid when injured by blowing up a car and stealing medical supplies in the ensuing chaos without so much as quickening his stride. Wells tries to convince Moss that Chigurh’s monomaniacal persistence will eventually win out, noting that Chigurh could easily kill Moss’s wife just to demoralize him. But the battered Moss can only respond to these 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 is 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,” and 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 does this mean?
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.
It also shows that Chigurh himself is not immune to the potentially deadly consequences of the twisting, random paths of objects and people. But now that he has the money, he can overcome some of the 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 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 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. Having examined Chigurh’s behavior, we can state our findings. If Chigurh carries out his crimes, as we’ve said, as only an agent of circumstance, a dispassionate executor of an a priori mandate—then this must be how Bell perceives the contemporary violence of West Texas: not as though they were enacted by a conceivable human will, but 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. So he indeed must feel “overmatched,” compelled to retire in defeat.
But do these recent crimes, so discouraging to Sheriff Bell, truly reflect a change in the West Texas countryside, or only in Bell himself? Bell opines to a 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.” Ellis 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—Ellis asserts that Bell in fact could never control it. He accuses Bell in his old age of retaining “vanity” about the capabilities of his profession. Bell doesn’t refute this argument, and it’s unmistakably the more persuasive one.
That finally brings us to Bell’s two dreams.
The first is vague: Bell waits 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 pay their way out of dire trouble. So Bell losing money from his father must mean that Bell feels 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 has retired, which his father never did, 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 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 he can reunite with his father—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 wishful and starry-eyed, so we know that Bell’s optimistic feeling of his father being “out ahead” has been revealed as merely a fantasy, and he has now “woken up” to the harsher reality of a true, final death.
Why does Bell finish the movie haunted by thoughts of his own mortality? Well, again, his retirement is surely a factor: 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. Based on our interpretations of Bell’s two dreams as meditations on death, we can deduce that Sheriff Bell, having realized his inability to prevent others’ deaths, has also acknowledged that he cannot prevent his own, either.
In other words, with the illusion of agency over death punctured by the ineluctable crimes of Chigurh and others, Bell is forced to face the corollary of that powerlessness: that he, too, will die. Now that his “vanity,” as diagnosed by Ellis, is finally fading, he’s coming to face all facets of the chilly truth:
“You can’t stop what’s coming.”
And that’s the story of No Country for Old Men. The bleak ending to this film is attributable, of course, to Cormac McCarthy, the acclaimed novelist who penned 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 have mixed feelings about the film, so I won’t end this essay with my usual glowing tribute to the filmmakers’ achievements. The ambition of the Coen brothers, however, in creating such a difficult work can’t be denied, so 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.
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