Portrait of a Principled Psychopath

Rating: 6/10 (30 January 2020)

No Country for Old Men accurately portrays the comportment of a bona fide psychopath, whose intransigent inner logic and ¨principles¨ drive him to eliminate human beings as though they were flies. The film smacks of Tarantino in its extreme and unsettling violence but carries the Coen brothers´ peculiar stamp of smugness. These filmmakers love to make fun of hicks, losers and lowlifes, which always makes me wonder whether they might be fundamentally petty, a bit puerile, and not quite as intelligent as they take themselves to be. Their targets are such low-hanging fruit that there is really no point in illuminating such persons´ pathetic qualities. Yet I suspect that through this ploy the Coen bros lure many viewers into believing that they, too, are superior, since they can laugh along with the insults and insinuations. This may explain part of their success. Of course they are also highly competent filmmakers who know how to follow and break the rules in creative ways, which naturally charms critics and (therefore) wins them awards. But there is no denying that their sense of humor nearly always involves a profound snarkiness which lures the viewer into identifying with the tone, leading them to believe they they are closer to the filmmakers than to their objects of ridicule.
The story of No Country for Old Men is about as nihilistic as they come. There are only losers and lowlifes and bad guys, in various degrees. Perversely, the Javier Badam character, who is the bad bad guy against whom everyone else is opposed, is the best bad guy in the sense that he acts on principles, while everyone else is just winging it. What makes the story quite creepy is that we know that in reality murderers do get away with murder--one of every three cases in the United States is never solved. So the more proficient and ¨principled¨ a psychopath is, the less likely it is that he will ever be tripped up.
I do not believe that this is a great film. It certainly is a clever film, but it strikes me as a symptom or sign of our ¨banality of violence¨ times, when governments snipe suspects using lethal drones (often from thousands of miles away), effectively ¨convicting¨ them of capital crimes (without indictment or trial) through state execution. A very ¨principled¨ and sociopathic practice (just like that of serial killers), but accepted by many (most?) people today as a part of ¨just war¨, even though it smacks of the Nazis. This is about as unromantic a view of the world as there could possibly be. Is it harshly realist or somehow decadent? Perhaps this creation represents, more simply, a surrender to nihilism.