The gerontological threads of “No Country for Old Men”: to W.B. Yeats via the Coen Brothers & Cormac McCarthy

 No Country for Old Men: The Gerontological Threads 

            I do not find books, they find me.

            This is something I speak as though a mantra (but it does not necessarily reduce the adrenaline) as I enter a bookstore or library.

So like a beachcomber looking for something interesting on the sand – perhaps an exotic shell or my favorite: a shark’s tooth – the new book shelving area at the university library promises to offer items recently published – and perhaps a rare or unusual textual gold nugget (in a lot of gravel) in the literature. All disciplines – all fields – all specialties are fair game as you never know what title may leap out and simply beg to be examined – and then most likely checked out for further reading.

So, it was this title that caught my eye/brain because it contained the words – “philosophy” and “Coen Brothers” in the same title. Bam! Good enough for me as it had already reached critical mass with either part on the spine (and front cover) of the book – and there they were – connected together. In my opinion, I could take the movies by Terrence Malik, Stanley Kubrick, Francis Ford Coppola, and the Coen Brothers and spend the rest of your life in cinematic bliss and perpetual deconstruction.

Most of you may be aware of the filmology with the Coen Brothers and perhaps you have your own favorite:

Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing, Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, No Country for Old Men, Burn After Reading…

And I have bolded the one movie – No Country for Old Men – that I throrougly enjoyed and I had reflected on for many weeks after seeing it for the first time – and then seeing it several times over the course of a few months to follow. I knew I wanted to offer some commentary on that film – like I have done with others, espcialyl as it relates to aging issues, but I never got around to seeing that through.

So, here is the book published just recently (2009) – and it is quite the gold nugget – the shark’s tooth on the beach. And it has served as catalyst for me to revisit the book and movie – and follow the threads once again. This book has re-energized some further reflections on that movie which connects back to Cormac McCarthy’s book which then leads back to W.B. Yeats poetry which, in one poem, contains the title for the McCarthy book (and then the movie).

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE COEN BROTHERS (2009)

Edited by Mark T. Conard, University Press of Kentucky - ISBN: 978-0-8131-2526-8

            There are two chapters in the edited book that directly relate to the Coen Brothers movie. One is by Richard Gilmore, No Country for Old Men: The Coens’ Tragic Western and the other is No Country for Old Men as Moral Philosophy by Douglas McFarland. I found both insightful and full of interesting analyses for the film version of McCarthy’s book.

Gilmore thought that No Country for Old Men “recapitulated the patterns of ancient Greek tragedy.” I would agree. And in addition, there is the notion of a very important life lesson inherited from Greek tragedy – “Avoid hubris” – which is written on the wall at the famous Greek temple, the Oracle of Delphi. And I especially liked Gilmore’s connections with the movie (book) and the existential conditions of fate and the great human challenge of “reason” (Apollo) and “passion” (Dionysius) which is assumed to be conflictual in each person and plays out in the characters (Anton Chigurh, Llewelyn Moss, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell) in the movie as though a stage in ancient Greece. Sheriff Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones) is reflective and stoic as he watches the horrific spectre of a powerful force – wild and without remorse – become unleashed across the landscape of civilization. What fascinated me was the theme of generational transition and the sense of a landscape – the context in which we are embedded – is greatly transformed and we intimately sense of being left behind – falling to the wayside – as a new set of virtues and morals and perspective envelopes us – like a wall of clouds across the harsh “country” that is best suitable for the young and the restless – those who are strong and resilient – and not for those who are “old.”

Opening to the movie – No Country for Old Men via YouTube

The country is sparse – harsh – and cruel – with the thin line of “law” between wilderness and civilization. Here is the point where you can (as I did to get into the mood) turn up some Marty Robbins songs from Gunfighter Ballads & Trail Songs – and play “El Paso” or “Big Iron” to get the audio context.

Sure, there is the notion of “law” but it means having to relentlessly stand against it as a rising tide. Gilmore (2009 – in Conrad’s edited book) offered an intriguing perspective about the aging process as it related to the film. He reviewed the “evolutionary logic” for aging (and getting old) in comparison to youth (and Gilmore is quoting another writer here),

“In every species, the most important individuals are those which can reach sexual maturity, because they are the ones with the greatest capacity for propagation. Natural selection, will, therefore, adjust the optimal state of animals to the time of their sexual maturity. In humans, for instance, maximal strength and resistance to disease is reached between twenty and thirty years…Natural selection would tend to accumulate…harmful effects in the postreproductive period of the animal’s life, thus favoring deterioration of the body with age. In other words, vigor in youth should in a way be paid for by senescence.” (p. 73).

And Gilmore then makes the connection with Llewelyn Moss as we watch him interact in the country that is NOT suitable for old men – in this regard that the country ages him during the course of the movie (it takes its toll) – and he is facing decline and loss of strength by relentless pursuit of Chigurh – and it will all come to an (inevitable) tragic end. Gilmore also at this point builds the bridge to W. B. Yeats and ‘Sailing to Byzantium” but we will hold off on that for a few more paragraphs. I will, however, add the following analytical points by Gilmore that I think are right on target with the focus on Sheriff Bell as sage-like “Old Man” who has seen plenty across his lifetime – and perhaps he has seen enough – as what “he has done…is bear witness to certain events” (p. 77).  Bell proposed to be the “chronicler of the times” – and what has he seen? Think the line from William Shakespeare in Macbeth – Something Wicked This Way Comes –and the novel by Ray Bradbury (1962); or think of T.S. Eliot’s lament in The Wasteland where Bell can sense that,

“…that things are out of alignment, that balance and harmony are gone from the land and from the people.” (p. 74).

This vision – this perspective – is both haunting and deeply moving. The question is whether or not this “feeling” is a product of generational placement or in fact is a perennial theme of American culture? Do we think that, as a part of one cohort and trapped in time, yet all the while time is moving, that our time was so much different (and better?) compared to each wave that succeeds us? But if we were to have the bird’s eye view – from high above – and with the long view of history, then are things like the dialectics of Heraclitus – We both step and do not step in the same rivers – in the sense that it is always changing, but from the vantage point of being old – we believe, we think, we know how much it has changed. And yet while there are threads still with us from the past, at the same time we are aghast at the slippage, the fragmentation, the disenchantment, the decline (as though aging brings with it the attitudinal evaluation that all is in decline!), and breaking down of predictable and assumed structures that were supposed to hold all in place. To be alive in the time of the First World War and wonder about the “balance”, and then in the 1920’s and then witness the Great Depression, and then to be alive in the 1940’s and then witness World War, and then later, the Cold War, the 1960’s with assassinations and civic unrest, then later…well, every decade has its share of moments and events – both collective and personal – to make us believe that the great unraveling has occurred (see poetry of Yeats below).

When I was writing out this segment for the Rogue Scholarship on Aging blog, I had a moment of serendipity – a thread from the past, something I had read before, was emerging into this line of thinking, and sure enough, I was able to find the excerpt that tied in to the movie and McCarthy’s book. The excerpt is from a favorite paperback book of mine, Conquering Horse (1965) by Frederick Manfred. This was one of my “rite of passage” books – a perfect read for entering into young adulthood – and the epigram at the front of the book is what sparked into my consciousness as I was writing for this segment. It is an excerpt from D.H. Lawrence (Studies in Classic American Literature),

“…When you are in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful disintegrative influence upon the white psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men like some Eumenides, until the white men give up their absolute whiteness. America is tense with latent violence and resistance. The very common sense of white Americans has a tinge of helplessness in it, and a deep fear of what might be if they were not commonsensical. Yet, one day the demons of America must be placated, the ghosts must be appeased, the Spirit of place of atoned for. Then the true passionate love for American soil will appear…”

This assessment from the “visitor” D.H. Lawrence carries significance in this manner: the intersect of wildness, American Indians, westward expansion, Greek tragedy, the “fates”, and our constant navigating with nature and culture – and the tension of reason with passion.

For further analysis, I recommend that you read Mary P. Nichol’s (2008) article – Revisiting Heroism and Community in Contemporary Westerns: No Country for Old Men and 3:10 to Yuma, Perspectives on Political Science, 37, 4 for an extension of interpretation associated with the symbolism deeply rooted in film.

            The book, No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy (2005) was his first novel since Cities of the Plain (1998) which is the third part of The Border Trilogy (see All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing). The writing style of McCarthy is visceral and compact and Lydia Cooper (2009) unpacks this book by highlighting the nihilistic depictions of morality and its use of folkloric tropes and narrative techniques. It is a great article to read and for considering the deeper iconic layers at work in the book (see “He’s a Psychopathic Killer, But so What? – Folklore and Morality in Cormac McCarthy’s No Countyr for Old Men” – Papers on Language & Literature, Winter2009, Vol. 45 Issue 1, p37-59.) Aside from the roles of good and evil and the tensions of reason and passion, there is the heavy weariness of the cumulative effects of time on life itself. Although the title of the film (book) is taken from a line in the Yeat’s poetry “Sailing to Byzantium”, I believe that a stanza from another poem (“The Second Coming”) of Yeat’s was equally fitting to describe the movie and the world through the eyes of Sheriff Bell.

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Again, I connect back to Sherriff Bell and his reflections as the appear in the book as italicized monologues in the McCarthy’s novel,

“I’ve lost a lot of friends over the last few years. Not all of em older than me neither. One of the things you realize about getting older is that not everybody is goin to get older with you.”‘He said I was bein hard on myself. Said it was a sing of old age. Trying to set things right. I guess there’s some truth to that. But it aint the whole truth. I agreed with him that there wasn’t a whole lot good you could say about old age and he said he knew one thing and I said what is that. And he said it don’t last long.”  

“I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you’re just too close to it. It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong.”

“But there was part of me too that wanted to pull everybody back into the boat. If I’ve tried to cultivate anything it’s been that. I think we are all ill prepared for what is to come and I don’t care what shape it takes.”

            And finally, I end with this excerpt which will serve as a nice segue to the poetry of Yeats. This is taken from the very end of the book and I think it serves as cryptic and zen-like koan to contemplate for a while. Just let it sit and ferment and hear Tommy Lee Jones talking as you as the warm morning breeze comes in from the Texas landscape that is parched dry and with only a few clouds here and there (we will get to the dream sequence for Sheriff Bell at the very end of this segment)

“The other thing is old people, and I keep coming back to them. They look at me it’s always a question. Years back I don’t remember that. I don’t remember it when I was sheriff back in the fifties. You see em and they don’t even look confused. They just look crazy. That bothers me. It’s like they woke up and they don’t know how they got where they’re at. Well, in a manner of speaking they don’t.”

            This all sounds a lot like the story of Rip van Winkle, written by Washington Irving (1783-1859), where the Sheriff is describing the sense of a great slippage of time and the “old people” are lost in a wasteland. They are awake(n) (a la Rip van Winkle) and discover that everything around them had changed. There is disbelief and disillusionment.

Perhaps McCarthy is capturing the need for an intergenerational anchor point – the calm of eye of the storm – while all else that rages onward with the onslaught materialism and the sprawl of humanity.  To me, it sounds like cultural “shell-shock” – the changing landscape has created a “gerontological concussion” – the young adapt (faster) while the old are seen as benign at best, and fodder at worst. Step aside – the train, the bus, and the mechanized disorder of it all – is coming through.

            And now we can leap to the final connecting point along the thread. No Country for Old Men is a line from “Sailing to Byzantium” is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1928 collection, The Tower (my copy is the “The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats”, 1956, Macmillian, New York)

That is no country for old men. The young  

            In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

            – Those dying generations – at their song,

            The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

            Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

            Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

            Caught in that sensual music all neglect

            Monuments of unaging intellect.

It depicts a portion of an old man’s journey to Constantinople. Through this journey, Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on how immortality, art, and the human spirit may converge. Through the use of various poetic techniques, Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” describes the metaphorical journey of a man pursuing his own vision of eternal life as well as his conception of paradise.

or see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_to_Byzantium.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,  

            A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

            Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

            For every tatter in its mortal dress,

            Nor is there singing school but studying

            Monuments of its own magnificence;

            And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

            To the holy city of Byzantium.

Yeats in his old age (via his poetry) travels to the magic city to leave behind what was and perhaps to discover a sense of the infinite – before he would have “shuffled off this mortal coil” and into the “undiscovered country.”

            Despite all of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” that Sheriff Bell might have endured, there is still hope beyond the country that is lean and full of hard edges. There is hope beyond the evil and the vanity and the reckless passions. There is even hope beyond the cold and calculating mechanism that we have created.

            It may be a dream – a whisper – a cloud.

            And for some it is a glimmer of light. A protected cocoon of warmth.

A small flame that is to be used in the near future – when we need it.

But it will be there – to protect us.

            It is time for the old men of this country to begin the change – to start making this country – one for all ages – for all time. It is time to face the monsters – and I will join this band of brothers to assure protection for both young and old.

The Dream – Sheriff Bell

Thanks, Scott D. Wright