Dismantling the Western: Film Noir’s Defiance

of Genre in No Country for Old Men

lee clark mitchell , princeton university

No sooner did the Western appear than viewers heralded its demise and ever since
have applauded the passing of a genre that keeps rising triumphantly from the
dead.1 The appearance of John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), then Sergio Leone’s A
Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), then Clint
Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992) and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) represent a
series of resurrections. Each film brought new life to materials that had come to
seem hackneyed and inconsequential, revising them into something refreshingly
new yet generically recognizable. Recently, however, Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
seem to have driven a stake through the heart of the Western in a film that at once
engages the genre’s central concerns and quietly lays them to rest. No Country
for Old Men (2007) is based on the 2005 novel by Cormac McCarthy, which also
solicits our desire for a Western yet reveals the baselessness of its terms. Ethan
Coen has insisted that their film was shot from a script so faithful to McCarthy’s
novel that he and his brother Joel simply copied it out as a screenplay: “One of
us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat”
(“The Making of No Country for Old Men” 2008). In fact, by its very nature as
adaptation, their film strays from the novel, and yet it does represent a version
true to the novel’s spirit by paradoxically turning more than McCarthy does to
conventions of the Western. In short, they adapt his narrative to film in a way
that enhances the novel’s informing contradictions by soliciting us cinematically

1. For evidence of the greatly exaggerated reports of the genre’s death over the course of the
twentieth century, see my conclusion to Westerns, which begins, “Almost the moment the Western
emerged, critics hastened to pronounce the last rites, as if a melancholy nostalgia that would come to
permeate the genre was already part of its reception” (Mitchell 1996, 257).

Genre, Vol. 47, No. 3  Fall 2014 

DOI 10.1215/00166928-2797327  © 2014 by University of Oklahoma
336 GE N RE

into a generic Western space only to deny such a reading through a series of film
noir techniques.
Keep in mind that the constituent features of the Western, both narrative and
cinematic, include its celebration of “the overwhelming landscape, the strange
qualities of light” (French 1977, 104);2 its nostalgia for a simpler past yet pro-
gressive belief in the triumph of law and order; and most centrally, its display
of manhood as the intersection of honor and self-­reliance. In extolling these vir-
tues, Robert Warshow ([1954] 1962, 151) argued sixty years ago: “Why does the
Western movie especially have such a hold on our imagination? Chiefly, I think,
because it offers a serious orientation to the problem of violence such as can be
found almost nowhere else in our culture. One of the well-­k nown peculiarities
of modern civilized opinion is its refusal to acknowledge the value of violence.”3
Perhaps no species of film defies the constituent features of the Western (or its
“serious orientation”) so dramatically as film noir. In contrast to Panavision land-
scapes, noir characteristically focuses on cramped urban spaces shadowed by
claustrophobic expressions. Even the occasional rural exceptions, like Nicholas
Ray’s They Live by Night (1948), Tay Garnett’s The Postman Always Rings Twice
(1946), or Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950), ignore landscape in their focus on
interiors, automobiles, and night scenes.4 Far from nostalgia, moreover, a species
of dread pervades film noir for a past that continues to haunt the present, leaving
little hope in a benign future.5 And law and order remain ever in jeopardy, with
death alone the stopgap resolution to anarchic energies unleashed by the past.
Perhaps more conspicuously defining the genre is its immutability of character,

2. Philip French (1977, 105) cites Howard Mumford Jones’s list of “five ‘significant components
in the delineation of the Western landscape in paint and words’: astonishment, plenitude, vastness,
incongruity and melancholy. All these are present in varying degrees whenever a camera is turned
upon the American landscape.”
3. According to Warshow ([1954] 1962, 153): “There is little cruelty in Western movies, and little
sentimentality; our eyes are not focused on the sufferings of the defeated but on the deportment of the
hero. Really it is not violence at all which is the ‘point’ of the Western movie, but a certain image of
man, a style, which expresses itself most clearly in violence. Watch a child with his toy guns and you
will see: what most interests him is not (as we so much fear) the fantasy of hurting others, but to work
out how a man might look when he shoots or is shot. A hero is one who looks like a hero.”
4. The very title of Edward Dimendberg’s (2004, 7) study Film Noir and the Spaces of Moder-
nity suggests this pervasive theme, or as he states, “The loss of public space, the homogenization of
everyday life, the intensification of surveillance, and the eradication of older neighborhoods by urban
renewal and redevelopment projects are seldom absent from these films.” Even Imogen Sara Smith
(2011, 3) concurs in a study whose subtitle, Film Noir beyond the City, suggests otherwise, though
she demurs from critics who claim of noir that “the common denominator must always be the city.”
5. As Paul Schrader ([1972] 1996, 58) observes, “The over-­r iding noir theme [is] a passion for
the past and present, but also a fear of the future.”
 F I L M NOI R I N NO C OU N T RY FOR OL D M EN 337

of inscrutable femmes fatales who dictate the seemingly fated plots and the pliant
men they engage to carry out their wills. As if in sheer revolt against Warshow’s
esteem for the “value of violence” in Westerns, film noir luxuriates in mayhem
and bloodshed for their own sake, void of any redeeming virtue, as the mere cul-
mination to action, ending plot itself.6
Different as these genres are, cinematic cross-­fertilization has led nonethe-
less to innovative noir Westerns, prominently Raoul Walsh’s Pursued (1947),
Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952), and Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur
(1953). But each of these films tends to meld noir techniques to the Western
vision celebrated by Warshow, reinforcing both “the value of violence” and mas-
culine self-­restraint. By contrast, McCarthy’s novel and the Coens’ film pose the
genres against one another, drawing on noir techniques to defy what their West-
ern materials seem to solicit.7 Fleeting gestures at wide-­open landscape offer a
teasing prospect soon abandoned; plush narrative embellishments and wide-­angle
shots are forsaken for clipped dialogue, spare descriptions, and intense close-­ups,
locking characters within themselves; and to intensify that effect, the film plays
with an unusual series of overhead shots that immure figures in an unbreachable
present. As much as both the novelistic and the cinematic versions of No Country
for Old Men initially encourage a conventional Western reading, we soon find
expectations sorely rebuffed. A tradition that had led to the cumulative revisions
of Leone, Peckinpah, even Eastwood — each of whom sustained an elegiac mode
that Warshow found so praiseworthy in the genre — now perversely has come
to rest on sheer accident and senseless violence. We are left to contemplate the
aphorism often mistakenly attributed to Oscar Wilde that “America is the only
country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”
The brilliance of McCarthy’s novel, deftly illuminated by the Coens’ adapta-
tion, lies in its willingness to dismantle one of our most powerful popular cultural

6. Some critics follow Schrader ([1972] 1996, 53), who claims that “film noir is not a genre. . . .
It is not defined, as are the western and gangster movies, by conventions of setting and conflict, but
rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood.” But many others treat film noir as a genre (see
Dimendberg 2004; Smith 2011).
7. Michael Shepler (2008) is one of the few to assess these generic crossovers. In a claim that
allows for hybridization even as it establishes the different terms, Smith (2011, 179) states: “At first
glance, the western and the film noir seem too dissimilar to produce a hybrid: wide-­open spaces ver-
sus claustrophobic cities, color versus black-­and-­white, epic grandeur versus knotty, inward-­looking
plots, easy moral clarity versus anxious ambivalence, a robust and hopeful portrait of America versus
a sour and skeptical one. But westerns have always encompassed more complexity than the simplistic
‘oaters.’ ”
338 GE N RE

visions and to do so as much via style as by plot. The foundational principles on

which the Western has long relied are not simply challenged (which revisionist
Westerns have done for decades) but dismissed out of hand. Landscape is no lon-
ger redemptive or even just unremittingly desolate but at last has become irrel-
evant and as such disappears from view. Violence is no longer restorative (as in
classic Westerns) or even brutally exhilarating (as in revisionist Westerns) but has
become simply run-­of-­the-­mill, presented in undramatic forms and at last likewise
removed from view, occurring out of sight, offscreen. Finally, an abiding concern
with testing versions of masculinity, central to our interest in the Western’s stock
figures — the stalwart heroes, amoral villains, drunken professionals, and weak-­
willed citizenry — has vanished, as No Country presents instead figures reduced
to bewilderment, impulse, and irrationality. No one, it seems, knows how to act
in terms of moral integrity, terms themselves no longer even recognizable. If the
characterization of “anti-­Western” has been invoked before to describe film revi-
sions, they have always had the effect of reviving the genre, bringing its central
considerations to life once again. The triumph of the Coens’ adaptation lies in their
having grasped how fully McCarthy’s novel subverts Western conventions and then
in revealing via film noir techniques how much our desire for generic platitudes is at
once misdirected and unavailing. While the Western refuses to remain dead, as the
Coens’ own version of True Grit (2010) confirms, their earlier version of No Coun-
try already brilliantly reveals the skeletal twitchings in such traditional throwbacks.

Landscapes Disappear, So No Need to Traverse Them

Cinematic adaptations often succeed by diverging from a source text as a means
of establishing visual and auditory tensions that novels achieve through writ-
ten means.8 Where McCarthy’s novel begins with no reference to landscape, the
Coens intriguingly open their film by concentrating on a sense of place, seducing
the viewer with the customary generic suasions of the Western. Following a brief,
black-­screen title sequence, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) speaks for
ninety seconds in contemplative voice-­over as dawn eases over a West Texas
landscape. His rumination is spliced together from italicized openings of three of

8. For recent discussions of cinematic adaptation and the issue of fidelity, see the argument
between Thomas Leitch (2003) and Colin MacCabe (2011). Despite differences, MacCabe aligns
with Leitch in wanting to read “novel and film as illuminating each other” (21). Adaptation studies
and fidelity studies both avoid questions of invidious value (of precursor text vs. adaptation), making
them less opposed than proponents sometimes think.
 F I L M NOI R I N NO C OU N T RY FOR OL D M EN 339

the novel’s thirteen sections, only part of which comes from the actual first entry,
with most evoked from substantially later: “I was sheriff of this county when I
was twenty-­five years old. Hard to believe. Grandfather was a lawman. Father too.
Me and him was sheriffs at the same time, him up at Plain Ellen, me out here. I
think he was pretty proud of that. I know I was” (No Country for Old Men 2007).
This filial pride in shared vocation, of father and father’s father in supposedly
less troubled times, has nothing to do with the novel’s austere prologue. Still, the
Coens place it here as a distinct nostalgic reminder in a sentiment that signals the
classic Western more than any other genre. As if to enforce that generic creden-
tial, a series of West Texas landscapes appears almost like snapshots, first of a
morning star hanging over a butte, then of telephone wires in brightening dawn.
The third image brings the scene alive, making it clear that these are not still
images but live film as grass rustles and the sun imperceptibly rises over a hill.
Wind persists (visually, acoustically) in half of the images, even spinning a tin
windmill, until a panning shot abruptly breaks the rhythm of luminous scenes as
a deputy quietly walks a man to the back of a cruiser, places a strange compressed
air tank in the front passenger seat, then speeds away. Throughout, light shadows
barren hills, starkly desolate and unpeopled, evoking the spare beauty of grassed
terrain and barbed wire fencing in a paean to West Texas that confirms Sheriff
Bell’s words: the allure of a landscape we want remembered.
By contrast, McCarthy’s novel makes none of these visual references and
disdains any hint of nostalgic reminiscence in Bell’s sour recollection of evil in a
world he refuses to engage (the cinematic voice-­over cuts off the novel’s caustic
repudiation: “I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do
that. I think now that maybe I never would ” [McCarthy 2005, 4]). The novel
opens, in fact, with the episode that immediately follows the film’s landscape
shots: an interior scene with a close-­up of the deputy, facing the camera, on the
phone to his sheriff, describing a man he’s arrested. For the Coens, that framing
marks a blunt transition from John Ford’s mise-­en-­scène to something more like
Samuel Fuller’s of visually confining office space, cinder block and gray lino-
leum. Just as the deputy assures his sheriff that “I’ve got things under control,”
the screen explodes in the film’s most violent encounter, with Anton Chigurh
(Javier Bardem) dropping his handcuffed wrists over the deputy’s throat, slowly
strangling him (No Country for Old Men 2007). The question raised by this open-
ing sequence is why the Coens initially add generic markers of the Western (a
tone of nostalgia, an unpeopled landscape) to a novel that initially seems to defy
the genre — indeed, in a film that itself will go on to deny any such affiliation.
34 0 GE N RE

Rarely are wide-­angle vistas lingered over, in contrast to a parade of bleak motel
rooms, cramped bathrooms, shabby exteriors, drab automobiles, mostly filmed
at night with unsettling close-­ups of faces, feet, and odd body parts. And the pre-
ponderance of scenes appear from vertically stressed angles as either extremely
high-­or low-­angle shots. Certainly, the horizontality of the opening sequence (as
of the classic Western) is largely abandoned in favor of the constraining signature
features of film noir. The Coens, in other words, deliberately insert an opening
landscape sequence that abruptly ends as an adaptation of the novel’s own various
solicitations of, yet resistance to, the Western genre.
Only once in the entire novel are we reminded of McCarthy’s skill with
landscape description, in a scene that seems to match the Coens’ opening slide
show of the Permian Basin. Sheriff Bell gazes “out across the desert. So quiet.
Low hum of wind in the wires. High bloodweeds along the road. Wiregrass and
sacahuista. Beyond in the stone arroyos the tracks of dragons. The raw rock
mountains shadowed in the late sun and to the east the shimmering abscissa of
the desert plains under a sky where raincurtains hung dark as soot all along the
quadrant” (McCarthy 2005, 45). Delight in the alluring sweep of high West Texas
land and sky emerges in the characteristic broken rhythms of McCarthy’s prose,
reminiscent here of large swatches of panoramic illustration in Blood Meridian
(1985) and All the Pretty Horses (1992). Yet just as suddenly description subsides
back to brief designations of mere points of a compass or numbers of state roads
or names of generic streets and towns. And the Coens capture that indifference
to place, if again with one major exception, when Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin)
first appears hunting pronghorn antelope against a wide-­screen view of untram-
meled country. The camera concentrates on his face and feet after he misses his
shot, then shifts up and down, back and forth, before making a horizontal pan
to a long shot of a black dog limping away. Other panning shots follow as Moss
searches for “the last man,” with the scene ending as Moss retrieves a satchel
of cash just as a storm develops dramatically on the plains (No Country for Old
Men 2007). Despite Joel Coen’s later insistence that “landscape becomes a huge,
important character,” that shot is the last of any sustained scenes of West Texas
plains (“The Making of No Country for Old Men” 2008).9 Thereafter only a few
brief glimpses appear: one, after Moss escapes from killers at the original site,

9. Deakins has accurately observed, “Probably, the bulk of the story takes place in motels,
hotels, gas stations, and on the street, all of which were very evocatively described in the book”
(King 2009, 221 – 22).
 F I L M NOI R I N NO C OU N T RY FOR OL D M EN 341

recovering the next morning near the river; another, the transition to an overhead
shot of a Texaco station; a third, the burning of a 1977 Ford as Sheriff Bell and
Deputy Wendell watch. Far more than panoramas, in fact, what reminds us we are
in familiar terrain is apparel, with cowboy boots, belts, and hats as the costume
de rigueur (Carson Wells [Woody Harrelson] even refusing to remove his Stetson
inside a Houston high-­rise).10
Landscape itself is rendered irrelevant in the novel by being ignored descrip-
tively and rendered invisible in a film that largely takes place at night, in crowded
interior spaces, via intense close-­ups and medium shots. That style is apparent
immediately in scenes devoted to Moss, who returns in the dark to the Desert
Aire Trailer Park, where he joins Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) on the couch
in a tight two shot watching a television movie. Later, wounded, he patches his
shoulder in their tiny trailer bathroom, followed by a severe close-­up of his face
on a bus as he sends Carla Jean to her mother in Odessa. Thereafter, he appears
in additional close-­ups: reserving a motel room; then in a clothing store; later in
a gun shop; getting a cab to the Eagle Pass hotel, again at night. These are inter-
spersed with extended scenes of hiding the satchel in an air vent using tent poles
and Venetian cord interspersed with close-­ups of sawing off a shotgun barrel,
focusing on hands at work. Chigurh is presented the same way, in medium shots
at a Texaco station in menacing dialogue with its owner; later of him looming
over Moss’s landlady. The combination of interiors and night scenes via frequent
close-­ups and medium shots almost seems intended to contradict the expansive-
ness of the opening landscapes, inducing a claustrophobic feeling that contradicts
the Western’s generic tribute to wide-­open space.11 As well in a two-­hour film,
an all-­but-­complete absence of nondiegetic music, so strangely uncharacteristic
of the Coens, corroborates how little landscape (or any other setting) is meant to
resonate psychologically, matching McCarthy’s verbal silences.12
Endorsing this aversion to landscape is the film’s ironic treatment of automo-

10. Pat Tyrer and Pat Nickell (2009, 89) claim that “references to traditional Westerns and to the
history of this region arise periodically in the film, perhaps an homage to the dead, maybe a small
inside joke for the fans of the Western, another dying breed.”
11. Sonya Topolnisky (2011, 111) observes that “much of No Country for Old Men’s visual lan-
guage borrows from that of Western films, setting up expectations and assumptions for the audience
only to challenge or contradict them.”
12. Only twenty seconds of diegetic music occur in the film when a mariachi band serenades
Moss. John Cant (2012) notes only two moments of nondiegetic music: barely heard minor chords
with Chigurh’s first appearance and again in the Texaco station “call it” scene. But even Joel Coen
has said, “There really isn’t any music in No Country” (Baumbach 2011).
342 GE N RE

biles, which normally represent a transecting of space, offering a panoramic plea-

sure in wide-­open vistas. Yet in a film that begins with an inexplicable automotive
arrest (we never learn why Chigurh is stopped)13 and ends with an unexpected car
crash (we never learn why a red light is run), the iconic association of automobiles
with landscape is slyly twisted. In both novel and film, vehicles turn into specta-
torial sites themselves, notably of violence, beginning with Chigurh’s escape in
a stolen police cruiser, pulling over a sedan to murder an innocent driver. Moss
then stumbles upon five trucks clustered at a drug shoot-­out and later that night is
chased by gunmen in a speeding Dodge Ramcharger. When he escapes from the
Eagle Pass hotel, the Coens add a scene to McCarthy’s novel by having him wave
down a pickup truck, all at foot level, offering bland assurances (“Don’t worry,
I ain’t gonna hurt ya” [No Country for Old Men 2007]) just before the driver is
unexpectedly blasted by Chigurh. Wounded himself, Chigurh the next morning
torches a sedan sitting in front of a pharmacy, creating a convenient distraction.
And later, in a stalled stolen truck, he is aided by a jump-­starting Samaritan
chicken farmer, whose death is gruesomely confirmed by Chigurh hosing feath-
ers out of the man’s truck bed. When Moss is murdered (in another elided scene),
Sheriff Bell grimly watches a pickup careen around a corner as Hispanic killers
jump into the open bed to escape.
Sedans, taxis, semis, muscle trucks, station wagons, pickups of varying vin-
tage: all become instruments of impromptu violence but serve only fleetingly in
their proper function, as vehicles of transport. Rarely do we see figures move
from place to place in either novel or film, which lends a curiously mysterious,
even spectral aspect to character. “As we can see with the first line that opens
nearly all of the novel’s sequences,” Stephen Tatum (2011, 89) observes, “Chi­gurh
never journeys, which is to say departs, travels, and then arrives somewhere.
He — like the other characters in the novel — is always arriving somewhere, the
temporal duration of the journey compressed or entirely elided in McCarthy’s
screenplay-­like narration. . . . Chigurh magically appears and disappears.” One
could say the same of Moss and Sheriff Bell, neither of whom actually journeys
any more than Chigurh. In the novel vehicles “back out” or “pull up” as if to
signal movement about to occur or just completed, but movement is never itself

13. McCarthy’s novel does make this clear on page 174. More generally, film noir often focuses
on scenes in automobiles (much of They Live by Night and Gun Crazy takes place in cars), while the
major crimes in both The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity occur in automobiles,
which function as amoral spaces.
 F I L M NOI R I N NO C OU N T RY FOR OL D M EN 343

described. We are given a vague sense of direction without temporal motion, as

Bell “and Wendell pulled onto the paved shoulder in front of the unit and parked
and got out” (McCarthy 2005, 42), or Bell “drove out in Torbert’s four wheel drive
truck” (95), or “it was almost a three hour drive to Odessa and dark when he got
there” (125). The Coens effectively capture these narrative lacunae interspersed
by McCarthy throughout by avoiding the feeling of being in motion, crossing a
landscape, lingering over vistas (a feeling frequently celebrated in their other
films and in any case central to the Western genre). No one looks to see where he
is, or where he might be going, or what the landscape displays — with the notable
exception of Chigurh eyeing his electronic receiver, hunting among cheap motels
for the transponder and stolen money, slowly perusing hidden possibilities on the
basis of sonic frequency, not visual fields. Instead of looking outward toward the
horizon, surveying the landscape (in an automotive variant of horses traversing
the cinematic frame of the Western), the film regularly focuses on being closed
in, as characters duck into or slide out of vehicles or simply stare sightlessly off,
sitting motionless behind the wheel.

Strained Close-­Ups, Angled Shots:

Enforcing an Inscrutable Psychology
As if to confirm this cinematic flight from space — in the focus on cramped inte-
riors rather than wide-­open spaces and in the concomitant shunning of vehicular
freedom — Roger Deakins’s cinematography stresses unusual angles that even
more self-­consciously close down broad perspectives, first visual but also tell-
ingly psychological. McCarthy’s novel achieves this effect through a brutally
pared-­down style in which stichomythic dialogue occurs with little indirect dis-
course accompanying it, offering meager insight into characters’ feelings about
what is being said either by others or by themselves. And the narrator is appro-
priately tight-­lipped, offering minimal or nonexistent physical descriptions of
figures and events, often in detached paratactic constructions that reinforce a
scene’s disconnectedness. Deakins registers this isolation of McCarthy’s charac-
ters cinematically by tightening the camera frame on actors’ faces so intensely
as to seem to sequester characters within themselves. Visually, this noir style
compounds the narrative’s isolation of character from character (never, for
instance, having the three central figures meet, isolating them physically from
each other), focusing so intently on figures constrained within the camera frame
34 4 GE N RE

that the determinants of character themselves come under pressure. Billy Wilder
anticipates this technique in Double Indemnity (1944), isolating the faces of Fred
MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward G. Robinson from each other and
frequently separating their characters from each other as well (via flashback and
voice-­over) — an effect grotesquely exaggerated in Orson Welles’s The Lady from
Shanghai (1948). Yet more than simply isolating characters within themselves,
No Country generally undercuts an affirmative, Western ideology by repeatedly
registering the irrevocable hold of a shadowed past, once again much as film
noir regularly does. The very title of Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947)
reflects the inability of a reformed Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) to escape the
relentless, vengeful gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas). And John Huston’s
Maltese Falcon (1941) likewise traces a violent plot inescapably aligned with the
fateful legacy of the titular statue. In each of these noir films the very constraints
of the past are enforced by the framing of the camera itself, which seems to close
in on characters, to heighten the temporal coercions of their lives through spatial
suppressions displayed cinematically.
Take the scene of Moss reserving a motel room, having put Carla Jean on
a bus to her mother. The owner offers a rate card as she intones, “You pick the
option that goes with the applicable rate” (No Country for Old Men 2007). The
scene, expanded from McCarthy’s novel, is filmed with extreme close-­ups — of
the owner, of Moss, of the rate card itself — that echo Chigurh’s encounter at the
Texaco station. And the frequency of single head shots increases as the scene
progresses, with faces seemingly constrained by the camera frame itself. Some-
times the focus is even tighter, initiated in the deputy’s opening arrest of Chigurh
as he places the stun gun in his cruiser, then replicated in the low-­angle shot of
Chigurh’s feet and compressed air tank as he strides up to Moss’s double-­wide
to blow out the cylinder lock. Deakins’s camera moves from boots to hand in an
intense close-­up repeated multiple times in the film: of Chigurh’s feet as he slowly
strides to a motel room to kill three Hispanics with only socks, silencer, and tank
visible. Later his socked feet stride into a Dallas high-­rise, where he shotguns a
corrupt businessman — an image soon echoed in a low-­angle close-­up of Moss
limping along the Rio Grande, approaching three college boys to purchase a coat.
At other times the camera centers tightly on faces: Chigurh sits on Moss’s
trailer couch watching TV precisely as Moss did the night before and as Bell
will do in a few hours. Here the Coens offer a shrewd identification of Bell and
Chigurh that is only barely suggested in the novel (McCarthy 2005, 80, 94). Later
 F I L M NOI R I N NO C OU N T RY FOR OL D M EN 345

Deakins focuses on the back of Chigurh’s head when he’s on the phone to Carla
Jean’s mother, repeated on two other eerie occasions: when he has just killed His-
panics in the motel room, as he ponders where the money is stashed, and when he
has just shot the businessman in the Houston high-­rise, as we stare from behind
at his “Dorothy Hamill wedge-­cut” (Tyrer and Nickell 2009, 96). The effect is
to make him not more understandable but less, seen so obviously from behind,
turned away, resisting our gaze. And both earlier and later Deakins focuses on
nearly anything but introspection — on cotton balls and taillights, on gas tanks
and wounded legs, on close-­ups of conversations in hotels and hospital beds, right
up to the point where Chigurh drives away after killing Carla Jean only to be
unexpectedly hit by another car, with a side close-­up of his eyes on the rearview
mirror increasing the shock of the crash.
The cumulative weight of these cinematic choices is to foreclose psychol-
ogy, to make character seem somehow inscrutable or otherwise unavailable.
Signaling this premise, the Coens cite a black-­and-­white film, Flight to Tangier
(1953), which Carla Jean is watching on television when Moss first returns home.
Corinne Calvet, driving a car with Jack Palance, is presented in a close two shot,
concluding, “My place is wrong.” That is all of the film presented, lasting only
seconds, but it registers a distinctive cinematic style (facial close-­up, shadowed
interior, automobile) along with a portentous warning that any place is unsuitable,
granting neither shelter nor security, simply “wrong.” Of course while McCar-
thy’s reference to William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” ([1928] 1967)
reminds us that “an aged man is but a paltry thing,” his novel itself more gener-
ally questions whether “no country for old men” is also no country for anyone
else. No secure place here exists, even if leaving West Texas seems inconceiv-
able (the obvious solution to Moss’s dilemma, after all, would simply have been
to take the money and fly away, an alternative never considered). In short, “my
place is wrong,” inserted arbitrarily, echoes as a silent reminder throughout the
film, marking at once the need to escape, to find another place, coupled with the
constant frustrations of that desire.
Tellingly, the structure of the Coens’ film is mirrored in Charles Warren’s
Flight to Tangier, which is filled with characters in cars who do succeed in tra-
versing a Moroccan landscape that looks suspiciously like the Permian Basin.
Journeying through Tangier and south in search of stolen money, the three main
characters flee past checkpoints and escape, pursuing criminals, hiding, and
sleeping in their vehicles. Chigurh’s dramatic search for stolen loot with a beep-
34 6 GE N RE

ing receiver forms an updated version of the search in Flight to Tangier for a
missing $3 million. But more compellingly, Warren’s film aligns three disparate
characters who are far from what they seem, disguising themselves and their
pasts almost melodramatically from each other — and from us. Appearing greedy
when they are not, selfish when actually self-­sacrificing, they enact a plot similar
to McCarthy’s but as psychological presences who are the converse. It is as if the
film made the Coens realize how much the body at once expresses and withholds,
involving a certain obscuring of character even as the body is visually exposed to
ever greater (if unrevealing) scrutiny.
This again seems a distinctive feature of film noir, especially in contrast
with Westerns, where character itself is so frequently obvious as to seem all but
allegorical. Western figures rarely wonder about motives or psychologies or pasts,
their own or others’, in narratives pitched toward historical crises that variously
resolve issues of justice and law. Noir figures are precisely the opposite in persis-
tently mulling over what has gone wrong (often in extended voice-­over), reflect-
ing all but obsessively on others’ inscrutable behavior (most commonly femmes
fatales) or one’s own disastrous missteps. Double Indemnity forms a perfect
match for these generic fixations, embodied in Stanwyck’s brilliantly implacable
unreadability, and Jane Greer’s chameleonlike inexpressiveness in Out of the
Past regularly masks an encyclopedia of feelings and ambitions. Westerns place
everything on the surface of faces, while film noir seems to suppress conscious
revelation. As Dan Flory (2011, 118) observes, perhaps aware of such generic
tendencies, “One of the more remarkable features of McCarthy’s novel is the
number of times he describes characters thinking about and contemplating their
lives.” Yet as he adds, far from being reassured by such self-­consciousness on
the part of each of the main characters, we are placed in “an anxious, perplexed,
and nostalgic state of contemplation” (121), largely because their efforts do little
to make them less inscrutable. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is persistently bewildered
by the decline of civic standards; Anton Chigurh embodies a bafflingly prin-
cipled malevolence, as he patiently, sociopathically expounds his philosophy to
befuddled victims; Llewelyn Moss seems merely capricious, alternating between
rash opportunism and equally rash charitable gestures. Yet if each of these three
seems somehow fated, coping with untoward events, it is hardly clear why they
act as they do or what drives them psychologically.
Part of this obfuscation is conveyed in the novel’s unusually vivid devotion to
otherwise minor details, as if the very irrelevance of certain objects called atten-
 F I L M NOI R I N NO C OU N T RY FOR OL D M EN 347

tion to the lack of any larger psychological coherence. The Coens aptly adapt this
random narrative pattern in the visual celebration of different brands of cowboy
boots; or in Moss’s careful assembling of a tool out of tent poles, cord, wire hang-
ers, and duct tape; or his hiding the money bag in an air-conditioning system; or
his shopping for clothes and guns; or simply Chigurh’s cleaning, anesthetizing,
then repairing a leg wound. As Jay Ellis (2006, 235) observes: “Usually, when
loving detail is lavished on something possessed by the hero of genre fiction, it
will save his neck. Here, the details prove meaningless.” Yet details are never
insignificant in fiction or in film, and we might better understand both McCar-
thy and the Coens lavishing “loving detail” in terms of Roland Barthes’s effet
real: the theory that “useless details” are an inevitable part of a “referential illu-
sion” (Barthes 1986, 142) and in doing little to convey specific meanings actually
establish a general “category of ‘the real’ (and not its contingent contents)” (148).
Analogously, one might say that characters are established as genuine yet inscru-
table, vivid yet somehow unfathomable. McCarthy implicitly understands this
aspect of realist narrative practice, an aspect conveyed in the film via cinematog-
raphy itself, which offers a series of lingering, sometimes probing images of each
figure that nonetheless at last remain unrevealing.
The effort to make character unrevealing might seem strange, though Joel
Coen has described the film’s opening as a literal attempt to do just that, as a
means of engaging the audience by “controlling the disclosure of the principle
of characters through an extended sequence. . . . So you don’t see Javier’s face
until that overhead shot where he’s strangling the deputy. . . . We were going, let’s
deliberately keep these characters, let’s shoot it all from behind, let’s keep them
rim-­lit, and not exactly see them until they stop and the light changes. That was
sort of a way of sort of bringing you into the story” (Baumbach 2011). Once “into
the story,” however, that “principle of characters” continues, informing much of
the rest of the film. The Coens’ insight into McCarthy’s antipsychological bias in
fact may help explain why they omit the novel’s most explicit engagement with
the issue by making overly explicit what is already clear about character in the
film. Moss has picked up a hitchhiker traveling to California to begin a new life
and soon protests against her free-­spirited belief that she can simply escape the
past, as if picking up stakes in a classic Western and just starting over:
The point is there aint no point. . . . It’s not about knowin where you are. It’s about
thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about startin
over. Or anybody’s. You don’t start over. That’s what it’s about. Ever step you
take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. You understand what I’m
348 GE N RE

sayin? . . . You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday don’t count.
But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of
the days it’s made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and
change your name and I don’t know what all. Start over. And then one mornin
you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who’s layin there? (McCarthy 2005,
227 – 28)

Here Moss suggests a perspective closer to film noir than to Westerns in the sheer
unchangeable intractability of our lives: that character is blindly cumulative,
built up ineradicably over time, explicable as a series of customary gestures per-
formed, a pattern become inescapable, “your life is made out of the days it’s made
out of. Nothin else.” The statement could easily describe the leading characters
in Out of the Past or Double Indemnity or Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945), all
inextricably bound to their histories, all trying desperately to flee from yesterday,
all unable despite a fervent resolve to “live like other people” (as Keechie [Cathy
O’Donnell] pleads in They Live by Night [1948]). Yet for all Moss’s Emersonian
earnestness about the intransigency of our lives, what proves curiously paradoxi-
cal in both novel and film is how little one’s actions reveal of psychology.14 More
important than Moss’s conviction that we cannot alter ourselves because we are
bound to our pasts is the realization that we cannot even know why we are as
we are in a world less Western than noir. Looking at oneself, however intently,
discloses very little.
The film self-­consciously stresses this effort at idle gazing, taking a page
from the philosophy Moss expresses in the novel — “you wake up and look at the
ceilin and guess who’s layin there?” — and translating it into recurrent overhead
and low-­angle shots that supplant the Western’s more characteristic horizontal
pan. Deakins not only focuses on faces but as part of a signature style gazes
up at them, then down, as if immuring characters in thought, hinting at mental
removes from the present that are as futile as that present — as “wrong” imagina-
tively as any actual place in the novel.15 That typical elevated camera perspective

14. In “Self-­Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1990, 48) claims that “travelling is a fool’s para-
dise” and goes on to anticipate Moss’s statement: “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on
the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting,
identical, that I fled from.”
15. Deakins seems to have responded to Barry Sonnenfeld’s cinematography in Blood Simple
(1984), where the camera looks up and down through a ceiling fan on multiple occasions or the aerial
shot of the field where Ray buries Marty shows tracks of the car left perpendicular to the plowed fur-
rows. Likewise, in Fargo (1996) Deakins offers an overhead shot of the parking lot where Carl Sho­
walter murders Gaear Grimsrud in a ransom exchange. This technique is hardly unique to the Coens,
though it is characteristic of film noir, beginning with Lang’s M (1931), as Tom Gunning (2000, 183)
notably argues of high-­angle topographical shots that signal not only “a new style of abstraction” but
a style that “entraps” Beckert (186) and visually “pursues him” from above (193).
 F I L M NOI R I N NO C OU N T RY FOR OL D M EN 349

underscores how little can be done. “The Coens offer rhythmically the extreme
high over-­head angle,” Joan Mellen (2008, 28) observes, and by doing so they
“distance themselves from events that no one has hope of mediating.” She goes
on to contend more pointedly that “the high angle creates an abiding sense that
the film itself is frightened of Chigurh.” That observation certainly explains the
violent opening of Chigurh strangling the deputy, dragging him to the floor, as
both men strain face-­upward in a scene extending for a full half minute, estab-
lishing immediately a stark contrast with the horizontal, postcredit sequence of
landscape images. Then Chigurh washes his bloody wrists, viewed from a cam-
era directly overhead, pointed down on the porcelain sink and its mirror image;
seconds later the camera focuses down on Chigurh’s pointed boots as he picks
up his bolt gun.
Accurate as is Mellen’s visual reading of Chigurh, she ignores how often the
film enforces an identical perspective on Moss and Sheriff Bell with the same noir
effect of estranging the viewer, making us pause at the suddenly unstable workings
of character, denying us any fuller knowledge. In the very next sequence Deakins
repeats a set of high-­angle shots as Moss trails a wounded antelope, looking down
at blood spoor, followed by a reverse shot back up at him (a sequence matched by
Chigurh later gazing down at the bloody footprints of Moss himself after their
Eagle Pass hotel shoot-­out). That first night, as Moss returns to his double-­wide
with the drug money, the camera angles down on him crawling under the trailer to
hide his H&K machine pistol. The next night the scene is reinforced dramatically,
as he recovers the pistol despite being wounded, with Carla Jean peering down
in a high shot as he glares back up at her in response. Earlier he awakens in the
night, staring up at the camera, which slowly zooms in to capture him swayed in
a fateful moment of sympathy, deciding to fetch water back to a wounded His-
panic (“All right”). That pivotal scene is later repeated almost exactly when he
wakes in his Eagle Pass hotel room, staring upward, as the camera again zooms
gradually down to register his face suddenly grasping that a transponder must be
in the satchel (“There just ain’t no way”). Overhead shots proliferate throughout,
as when Moss buys boots, then retreats to the bathroom, with a view below on
the narrow space as he changes bloody socks, spraying them with disinfectant.
Likewise, Chigurh retreats to a motel to nurse his wounded leg, relaxing in a
bath, rinsing his thigh, all from either overhead or extreme upward-­looking per-
spectives. Even Sheriff Bell is filmed eating at a café first looking up at Deputy
Wendell explaining a lab report, then Wendell in a reverse shot looking severely
350 GE N RE

down at Bell, followed by an aerial shot of Moss strolling into a gun store. Carson
Wells hunts along the Rio Grande trying to locate Moss’s abandoned money in a
sequence that opens dramatically from grass level upward through a chain-­link
fence against the sky, finally focusing on Wells’s face. Throughout, establishing
shots are frequently high-­or low-­angle: of the Texaco station on the plains, of the
clothing store where Moss stops, even shots of Chigurh’s bolt gun or of Moss and
him staring up at air-conditioning vents.
At a minimum Deakins’s cinematic gestures are mildly disruptive, keeping
the viewer visually off balance, even as they link the three main characters via
common, repeated associations of angles, perspectives, and body parts. More
importantly, such cinematography reinforces our sense of human character as
unknowable, somehow slant. In this the Coens dramatically adapt that tendency
of McCarthy’s novel rarely to indulge in subjective prospects if only because each
character seems imprisoned in his own understated narrative construct. We are
who we are, attests the telegraphic prose, with pasts that can only be regretted,
not changed, with presents we can but rarely control, pointing toward futures we
can never predict. The Western may protest the idea that one is bound by a web
of unsolicited consequences, of fractious events and hapless circumstance, but
film noir regularly stresses this worldview. That explains the bleak vulnerability
of Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson) in Lang’s Scarlet Street; nothing Mildred
Pierce (Joan Crawford) can do will alter the pathological destructiveness of her
daughter Veda in Michael Curtiz’s 1945 film Mildred Pierce; nor can Bowie Bow-
ers (Farley Granger) turn over a new leaf in They Live by Night, saddled as he is
by prison obligations. This strain of nihilism, which McCarthy’s novel articulates
through Moss’s advice to the hitchhiker, is verbalized in Sheriff Bell’s judgment
that “whatever you do in your life it will get back to you” (McCarthy 2005, 281).
And that intractability is echoed in turn by Chigurh before he kills Carla Jean:
“When I came into your life your life was over. It had a beginning, a middle, and
an end. This is the end. You can say that things could have turned out differently.
That they could have been some other way. But what does that mean? They are
not some other way. They are this way. You’re asking that I second say the world.
Do you see?” (260). The persistence of this premise among all three figures — that
nothing about our personal wishes, misgivings, or dispositions has any effect on
events or can alter our view of what has ensued — diminishes the relevance of
individual psychology, even could it be known. And in translating that vision to
 F I L M NOI R I N NO C OU N T RY FOR OL D M EN 351

the screen, Deakins gets us to view characters in terms of trajectories, intersec-

tions, obliquities rather than as recognizable personalities, familiarly understood.
One of the few occasions in which a character ruminates over this intracta-
bility occurs when Sheriff Bell expresses regret that he “cut and run” during the
battle in World War II for which he received a Bronze Star.
If I was supposed to die over there doin what I’d give my word to do then that’s
what I should of done . . . and I didn’t. And some part of me has never quit wishin
I could go back. And I cant. I didn’t know you could steal your own life. And I
didn’t know that it would bring you no more benefit than about anything else you
might steal. I think I done the best with it I knew how but it still wasnt mine. It
never has been. (278)

That sense of remorse, however mistaken, seems to lend Bell a certain moral
conviction. Yet the notion that “you could steal your own life” or derail it by
acting at odds with character ironically corresponds to the novel’s actual vision
of character as simply an accumulation of fortuitous events. Bell’s remorse is
unearned, both novel and film seem to say, since the conventional Western ideal
he here expresses is invalidated by the noir world he inhabits. Just as the novel
undercuts psychological depth through its reliance on clipped descriptions and its
avoidance of emotional elaborations, so the film achieves a similar effect through
an array of partial perspectives, bewildering close-­ups, disarming high shots,
even a shrinking from landscape itself in favor of dark, closed spaces.

Sustaining a Failed Vision in Shades of Noir

In short, both novel and film resist the generic suasions they seem to invite in
refusing the Western’s broad turn to landscape, its Turneresque notion of frontier
progress, its perpetual promise of Americanizing self-­transformation in prefer-
ence for a bleak concession to the corrosive forces that make any civilizing ges-
ture seem futile. As Uncle Ellis (Barry Corbin) reminds Sheriff Bell near the end
in what sounds like an unexpected retort to Bell’s own fear of stealing his own
life, “Well all the time you spend trying to get back what’s been took from you,
the more’s goin’ out the door, and after a while you just need to get a tourniquet
on it” (267). Significantly, that very scene echoes a charged encounter in High
Noon between Sheriff Will Kane (Gary Cooper) and ex-­lawman Martin Howe
(Lon Chaney Jr.), as Will pleads with his predecessor: “You’ve been a friend all
my life, you got me this job. You made ’em send for me. Ever since I was a kid
352 GE N RE

I — I wanted to be like you, Mart. You’ve been a lawman all your life.” To which
Martin scornfully retorts: “Yeah, all my life, it’s a great life! You risk your skin
catching killers and the juries turn ’em loose so they can come back and shoot at
you again. If you’re honest, you’re poor all your life and then in the end you wind
up dying all alone on some dirty street. For what? For nothing. For a tin star”
(High Noon 1952).16 Yet if Martin Howe expresses a jaded repudiation of all that
civic service and law enforcement have become, Zinnemann’s film pulls back
from that bleak vision to confirm a marginally more optimistic (and Western)
ending. The irony of McCarthy’s novel is that Uncle Ellis’s speech does the oppo-
site, giving voice in a noir setting to a more traditional Western vision of renewed
community in which the effort to stave off forces of havoc and destruction, even
if foredoomed, cannot be abandoned. Of course that vision is introduced only to
be soundly rejected, supplanted by further scenes in the novel of Bell’s inquiry
into Carla Jean’s murder, the reluctance of witnesses, the violent intransigence
of events. Against the film’s notion of character as somehow external, arbitrary,
unknowable — manifested guilelessly in the circumstances that have brought one
to this point in life — Uncle Ellis’s more traditional understanding seems futile,
part of a nostalgic lost cause, a sentimental gesture in a narrative that offers little
reason to agree.
Still, the gesture is made and in its generic futility alerts us to how to under-
stand the conclusion of both novel and film. For at the end Sheriff Bell divulges a
desire not to feel as he has throughout but rather to align himself belatedly with
a sentimental Ellis, to cherish “some sort of promise in his heart” (McCarthy
2005, 308). Against all the cumulative forces of senseless mayhem and persis-
tent failure, Bell attests to another possibility, as if holding fast to a traditional
Western sensibility in a noir context, one that would appear to make it a vain ges-
ture. And that possibility occurs in the odd revelation of the dream he has of his
father, a dream that seems mildly disconnected from nearly all that has happened.
The moment comes as a surprise in its apparently dislocated placement until

16. Notably, Floyd Crosby, the cinematographer of High Noon, had studied Mathew Brady’s
Civil War photographs to achieve a similar high-­contrast, unfiltered look. He also anticipated Dea­
kins’s noir style, focusing on body shots (Kane’s legs walking, his hands over his pistol) with frequent
close-­ups of Kane’s face, of clocks, of Amy Kane; with low-­angle shots of Kane in a bar, then on the
street; or with the arrival of Frank Miller, seen only from the back. A different kind of Western echo
occurs when Sheriff Bell exclaims to Deputy Wendell, “Who are these people?” (No Country for Old
Men 2007) — which seems a reference to the question that repeatedly punctuates George Roy Hill’s
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), “Who are those guys?”
 F I L M NOI R I N NO C OU N T RY FOR OL D M EN 353

we realize that this desire for a connection to fathers has been part of the film’s
dynamic all along, beginning with Bell’s initial voice-­over. There the silent hope
represented by a western landscape was confirmed in his ruminations (thoughts
expressed much later in the novel), as he introduces the issue of issue — of pater-
nal guidance, of filial pride, of civic self-­improvement. Each of these possibili-
ties has been persistently undermined throughout via noir techniques that have
exposed generic Western hopes as unavailing. Still, Bell finally realizes he has
not talked enough of his father and at that point conveys his dream:
It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on
goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped
around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was
carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the
light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was
goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that
dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.
And then I woke up. (309)

The dream, which becomes the basis of McCarthy’s next novel, The Road (2006),
invokes the possibility of generational continuity, expressing a desire for filial
transmission of culture as the civilizing “fire in a horn” carried by his father
riding west — an enactment Ed Tom Bell must reenact in his own turn. Yet the
surprising swerve at the end of Bell having “woke up” from his dream alerts us
to the split between Western desire and noir reality, of the persistent hope for
cultural transmission that is part of the fabric of American myth, and the just as
persistent reminder of what exists day by violent day in contemporary America.
At the end of their film as at the beginning the Coens play with generic
contrasts as if to remind us of the way genres dictate understanding, with some
genres more powerfully suasive than the facts allow. Refusing to visualize Bell’s
italicized ruminations from the novel, they offer a revision to McCarthy that is
as significant generically as their opening landscape slides of West Texas. Bell’s
dream narrative, revealed by McCarthy as intoned subvocally to himself, is trans-
formed by the Coens into a domestic scene between Bell and his wife Loretta
framed once again in tight facial close-­ups. In so doing, the film ends resisting
the Western dream’s visual promise even as it gestures toward a faintly expressed
(Western) hope of communication, transmission, conciliation. We realize the
allure of a belief in stalwart, civilizing character, much as the classic Hollywood
Western always claimed. But we also confront the tension between that nostalgic
allure of character (“I knew that he was goin on ahead”) and the stark realiza-
tion of its impossibility (“And then I woke up”) — a tension defined in the image
354 GE N RE

of the dream father himself, head down, wrapped in a blanket, vividly there but
unseen, unknown. McCarthy’s brilliance is to have invoked, however fleetingly
and belatedly, the Western’s most pressing and enduring question: what it means
to act with honor in a time too late, a country too harsh, a cultural environment
that seems no longer recognizable, where “all neglect / Monuments of unageing
intellect” (Yeats [1928] 1967). The sign of his brilliance, however, was not to
capitulate to the allure of that question but to recognize it as an ignus fatuus, a
false glimmer of possibility, with Sheriff Bell himself a victim of our culture’s
dominant generic way of thinking. The Coens’ adaptation succeeds precisely by
sustaining that failed vision both in its power and in its inadequacy. By the end,
as the lights come up we realize again (having also read the novel) how little we
understand individual characters and yet are nonetheless swayed by a vision of
character that exists nowhere in the world we have seen. Film noir techniques
have finally laid to rest the falsely sustaining vision of the Western, whose appeals
at last seem fully inadequate to the world we have inherited.

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