Fatalism and Quietism

Rating: 7/10 (3 December 2007)

The Coens have withheld the dramatic resolution that the setup promises: There is no final confrontation between Moss and Chigurh or Bell and Chigurh. Somebody else kills Moss, Chigurh evades Bell, and it isn't even completely clear, though it is hinted, whether Chigurh recovers the money. Instead, Chigurh kills an innocent because his peculiar idea of integrity requires him to, and he is himself almost undone by a random act of fate, while Bell decides that the world has simply gotten too hard for him to deal with any more. That may be how things work out in real life, but drama is supposed to impose a structure that real life lacks. The Coens willfully refuse. (Since I haven't read the novel, I don't know how much it dictates that decision. Even if it does, the Coens decided to use that novel as the material for the movie, rather than something else.)
You can write anything you want on the resulting blank slate. What I put there is a terrified but emotionally distant fatalism. As Chigurh sometimes tells his victims, everything they have ever been and done has led them to the point where he kills them, without foresight or avoidance being possible. Fate, or History, or God, or the Universe, or whatever you want to call it is at best unrelenting and indifferent to our individual concerns. Worse, it may even be cruelly amused at our illusion that we know what is going on and can control events.
Our age is pervaded by apocalyptic thinking. The fundamentalists are all dreaming of the End Times and the Rapture. The secular leftists are half fearful, half ecstatic over the same thing with the God part left out, either through the fatal crisis of capitalism, or through environmental catastrophe as our material civilization inflicts incurable damage on the planet, or by good old nuclear holocaust driven by events in the Middle East. Crossing all party lines is the fascination with the killer asteroid. What I think the Coens are saying is that the End is coming in one form or another, that there's nothing we can do about it, and that our individual wants and needs will be worthless and meaningless when it gets here. The only thing to do in the meantime is to live quietly, abandon the illusion of control, and cultivate our own garden for as long as we're allowed. That's a profoundly anti-American conclusion, dismissing all of our native optimism, and the culture optimism built, as a childish illusion.
Bell decides to live that way. Carla Jean Moss faces death that way. She's perfectly right, of course, that the coin toss has only such meaning as Chigurh chooses to give it, and she refuses to pretend that her will has any influence on what he will do. I suppose that once you realize you're in the gas chamber at Auschwitz, all that's left you is the dignity of taking a deep breath instead of trying to claw down the bolted door.