There is no hope in this human dump

Rating: 10/10 (9 February 2008)

This film makes Cormac MacCarthy's style ten times more powerful because it provides the words and metaphors with images that are slowly unwrapped and disentangled from the unbearable reality of life. The USA have reached a point when history is the only master of the game, master of ceremonies. The USA have produced a situation that will resolve itself by using its own contradictions till the whole world is destroyed if necessary. This world is dominated by money that has to be easy and does not have to be clean, even would I say that is to be dirty: that gives it more taste and flavor. The world is dominated by the hunger of overstuffed men for anything that will satiate this hunger with something unreal, surreal, over-real: let it be a powder, an injection or whatever but let it erase the darkness of the night, even in the middle of the day, and cultivate some kind of visionary illusion. Then add the third dimension of this world seen through the distorting glass of the USA: violence not for the sake of making anyone suffer. That is no longer funny. Torturing is the pleasure of the simple minded. We are dealing here with a totally psychotic and asocial schizophrenic who can only find his satisfaction, his fun, his pleasure in imposing death in the cleanest way possible. And if a bullet does not suffice let's have a second to prevent any useless suffering. The USA in their immense hunger for money and drugs, speculation and hunger, accumulation and greed, have attracted on to themselves the worst killers ever, the worst predators ever, the worst rotten-meat-eaters you can imagine. They prosper on manure that they distillate in their speculative bank practices. They thrive on human garbage they concentrate in their appropriative confiscation of all they see and cannot accept not to have. Some try to play cat and mouse with them but these are not the cat and the cat knows it and the cat cannot accept any escape. The sheriff though will survive because he will realize the vulture is wounded less than two yards from him and he the lawman will walk away without confronting him. He will resign due to his cowardice and he will dream his father in a typical posture of the Trail of Tears celebrating the end of the Indian genocide, but carrying a horn full of fire as if Satan did not have any matches. No hope for the average American who wishes to have eternal life in this world without death and perfect innocence in a time when even new-born babies are soiled with the grossest crimes and desires imaginable. A hairless teenager at the end will find five hundred dollars kind of not enough for a five dollar Wal Mart shirt sold to the hyena who disappears when no survivor is any longer blocking his way. Pure darkness in which black finds darker shades of black to even make the absence of any light seem to be too light still to be realistic.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines