No Country for Old Men - Post Script

Seeing my first post on the topic, a friend pointed me to an article in Wycliffe's newsletter about the movie "No Country for Old Men."

In "Praying the Psalms with No Country for Old Men," David Tiessen posits that NCFOM, like the psalms, explores the reality of a violent and desperate age and yet points to a distant glowing hope:

In the spare, minimalist terms of old westerns such as "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly," the film offers a meditation on the shift from the 'old country' of the trusting relations upon which neighbourliness and care for strangers is built and in which justice would prevail, to the emerging 'new country' of the violence of selfish greed and remorseless individualism which drives even the law to despair. The march of violence seems inexorable and inevitable, and as the film progresses we discover through and along with the characters the alternatives before them: join the game for one’s own gain but ultimately succumb to the inevitability of a violent end; risk resistance at the cost of the despair and exhaustion of watching the wicked triumph; resist the game on alternative (nonviolent) terms. In this film the results of these alternatives don’t look much different – it is always the violent and the wicked who seem to triumph: there is no country left for the ‘old men’ who presume the good. It is the bad and the ugly who win. It is Psalm 10, verses 1-11.

....Yes, the march of violence seems inevitable, but in the end there is a glimmer of hope that alternative forms of resistance are right in themselves and, at the very end, there is a final ‘verse’ that is the film’s prayer and benediction: Where it seems that God has all but abandoned us to the violent night, there remains the dream of a glowing fire somewhere up ahead in the dark, beckoning us on. With that, "No Country for Old Men" offers our culture a contemporary Psalm, turning us in the end to listen and look again for God in the dark. (source)

I would add that the movie seems to have an embedded critique about the "in my day things weren't so bad" argument. The fact is that "this country" has always been hard on people. So what does it mean, philosophically, that we feel such displacement, as though we were more suited to another age?

-t