No Country for Old Men
What was this film about? Chance, evil, the human condition.
The environments, especially earlier on, focus on industrial architecture: motels, strip malls, trailer homes, modular, geometric, standardized.
Chirugh is insane, but he is not irrational: he is hyper-rational, his mind moving in tiny circles that are consistent and complete. He finds vagueness and contradiction intolerable (Chesterton).
The use of the cattle gun to murder: reflecting the industrialization of the abattoir? A theme of the film, voiced especially by Jones' character, is that everything has gone to wrack and ruin. Everything is getting bigger, faster, depersonalized. The way the second murder is conducted, with a bolt to the forehead, is exactly how the stunner kills a beeve going to slaughter.
(The implication may even be that Chirugh used to work in a slaughterhouse. Certainly, his familiarity with a cattle gun would indicate this. Those who work full time in slaughterhouses have a higher rate of sociopathic tendencies.)
Chance, fate: Chirugh's use of the coinflip. Another reflection of the reductive view of human life? No purpose: we are all just chance occurances.
The environments, especially earlier on, focus on industrial architecture: motels, strip malls, trailer homes, modular, geometric, standardized.
Chirugh is insane, but he is not irrational: he is hyper-rational, his mind moving in tiny circles that are consistent and complete. He finds vagueness and contradiction intolerable (Chesterton).
The use of the cattle gun to murder: reflecting the industrialization of the abattoir? A theme of the film, voiced especially by Jones' character, is that everything has gone to wrack and ruin. Everything is getting bigger, faster, depersonalized. The way the second murder is conducted, with a bolt to the forehead, is exactly how the stunner kills a beeve going to slaughter.
(The implication may even be that Chirugh used to work in a slaughterhouse. Certainly, his familiarity with a cattle gun would indicate this. Those who work full time in slaughterhouses have a higher rate of sociopathic tendencies.)
Chance, fate: Chirugh's use of the coinflip. Another reflection of the reductive view of human life? No purpose: we are all just chance occurances.