No Country for Old Cows, but….
by Marcelle Cendrars

“…unless/Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing….” — Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

The Coen Brothers’ film of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men was unlikely to win the Best Picture Oscar, I thought, for a number of reasons. Regardless, it shouldn’t have won the Best Adapted Screenplay award… if faithfulness to the original is a consideration.

For the Coens omitted too much that was very, very special (including the whole of the hitchhiker’s function, the morgue scene, etc. ). Personally, I most missed the novel’s single hopeful note, as the “cutting edge” cinematic pair decided to profile our Wasteland exclusively.

“Hopeful,” admittedly, is a strange word to use in relation to McCarthy, but we always have to turn ourselves and everyone else inside out to invent a meaning that helps us to go on, yes?

Both leading Democratic candidates for President fail to highlight hope by dwelling on the clear outward symptoms of our decline, and ignoring the light within which must be reignited. All the presidential rhetoric is focused on our old “enemies,” and peppered with old approaches/attitudes for solutions. Iraq? We’ll get out at our earliest convenience. Economy? We’ll do this, and if it doesn’t work…we’ll do that. All missing the need to address what each individual must do, for us to collectively rise above Our Situation.

“Vote for me,” is essentially all the candidates are suggesting each individual citizen needs to do to improve our lot. That’s the extent of our responsibility. The simple scenario we need to follow. It’s Hope based on Leader. (1A)

Don’t ask The Leader what is really going to be required to create change, and he/she won’t tell you. It’s fashionable to think that every four years the electoral results will make a difference. Just like it’s in vogue for the Coens to underscore the hopelessness of today. (1B)

But, contrary to the impression created by the dominant common movie reviews, this McCarthy work has a hint of hope, a glint in its stormy eye. That notion goes against the grain of just about every book review of NCfOM too. For good reason, of course.

Nevertheless it’s there, imbedded in McCarthy’s obvious acknowledgement of our downfall. And it’s not couched in political platitudes.

I’m addressing here these lines:
“…I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there.” (2)

For one reason or another, a viewer of the movie will miss the importance of those words. (3A) The line that follows in both the novel (originally a script!) and film, which — to encourage a return to the source — I will not give here (3B), certainly provides some with an opening to label McCarthy as a pessimist (nihilist?).

But that’s only the case for people who don’t believe in the power of dreams… or dreamers. (4)

Neither Barack nor Hillary are pushing positive dreams. They are reinforcing the notion that we are not likely in inevitable decline, that the desecration of our country and the world can be stopped by new policies here and there following old paradigms. That nothing radical need be embraced. Nothing more radical than a return to the trajectories initiated by either Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.

But either a clear reading of McCarthy’s book or a thoughtful viewing of the Coen Brothers’ cinematic treatment of it will put those delusions to rest. Their take on our drug policies ( alone ) in those works — the novel and the film coalesce therein — do the trick on that count. They spotlight The Slaughterhouse. Much more is demanded of the citizenry.

And speaking of Carnage Central, the largest beef recall in U.S. history — based on the recent discovery that a Southern California slaughterhouse was horrifically abusing animals for the purposes of profit — reminds one of the fact that we’ve no more changed vis-a-vis last year’s expose of Michael Vick’s murderous shenanigans than we’ve changed in the realm of foreign policy since Vietnam. The same can be said respecting many other areas and time frames too, of course.

The crippled and sick cows that were forklifted into the slaughterhouse — in clear violation of laws based on very important health considerations — are a symbol, for me, of the lack of feeling nationwide (5)…which none of our presidential candidates intend to address, except peripherally perhaps.

They’d certainly never bring up the question of whether or not it’s compassionate or wise to continue subsidizing slaughterhouses in various guises.

No, this is no country for old cows.

But it is a country that begs for dreamers to rise up and — acknowledging The Momentum found in virtually all of McCarthy’s works — carry fire in a horn the way that people used to do.

Footnotes:

(1A) Tommy Lee Jones’ role as Bell is a symbolic one, in part, symbolic of god, a god who is absent or powerless to stop some abominations, impotent with regard to Our Momentum. Psychologically, he remains too far from people to help them. The possibility that any god might intervene on the behalf of Bell and his people seems ruled out by Bell’s uncle when he has the following exchange with him:
“Do you think God knows what’s happenin?
I expect he does.
You think he can stop it?
No, I don’t.”

(1B) Funny how one can look at Nader in terms of that old half-filled/half-empty conundrum. For me, anyone viewing Ralph as an empty glass ( or anything of the sort ) is like the proverbial parched guy in the desert turning down a drink because he thinks an Arrowhead delivery man is on the way… in his roadless realm.

(2) Bell’s final dream makes it difficult to tell whether Freud, or Jung, should be our guide on the question of whether or not we conjure up matters like morality, and whether or not we project an omnipotent god onto a universe that has none. Freud, of course, derided “oceanic” feeling as a delusion resulting from the failure to recognize “the reality principle”. Jung, on the other hand, believed that such feelings evidenced the truth of collective unconscious.

I certainly can’t settle between those two in this space, but I can insist upon the importance of The Dreamer drawing out the positive from dreams… and using that as a point of departure for action. Look at the following from McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses:

“The boy who rode on slightly before him sat a horse not only as if he’d been born to it which he was but as if were he begot by malice or mischance into some queer land where horses never were he would have found them anyway. Would have known tht there was something missing for the world to be right or he right in it and would have set forth to wander wherever it was needed for as long as it took until he came upon one and he would have known that that was what he sought and it would have been.”

(3A) This could be Jung himself in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Jung’s transformative dream of a candle surrounded by darkness was interpreted by him as a the place of consciousness moving forward through the never-ending space of an unconscious too dark to be held away beyond that small sphere of light.

“It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive.”

But Jung sees himself carrying this light, and when he looks back, the “gigantic black figure following” him proves to be threatening “vita percata” — the life already accomplished, lived, and perhaps ended. Here, the leading figure is the dreamer, breaking free with every difficult step from that dark figure that would negate its progress. All reminiscent of Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium and Byzantium.

One attempts to realize dreams first and foremost in response to the necessity which surges within one’s soul. Neither odds, history nor daunting other considerations matter. Higher principles are not the fundamental catalyst for The Dreamer. But one is obligated to search out the positive light that might be embedded in the most nihilistic of works… as per this article.

This is heady stuff, and the final speech begged for a different cinematic approach.

(3B) DON’T READ THIS IF YOU DON’T WANT ME TO GIVE AWAY THE LAST LINE OF NCfOM!!! The final line is “Then I woke up.”

(4) Although the stars may wheel indifferent above our morality in McCarthy’s worldview, it doesn’t mean he believes morality doesn’t exist, or isn’t important. Not any more than the inevitable failure of dreams to be realized means that their force did not create life against that inevitable darkness. It is simply the case that such force remains the imaginative provenance of humans, and that it cannot be confirmed by the natural world, or some god, or by chance. It can only be confirmed in the imaginative attempt that will inevitably fail.

(5) Sheriff Bell laments the disappearance of the courteous “Sir” and “M’am” in common conversation as a signal that all downhill from here. The misuse of forklifts are a natural consequence of that for him.

So interesting how the sweet response to the film Once contains the spirit of a counterbalancing force to all this. Interesting too how neglected the film vis-a-vis the Oscar nominations. Its not being nominated for Best Picture seems inevitable now. There’s simply no financial gain for the mainstream players in touting a successful film which can be made for so little money. It did have a very positive set of messages, very necessary for today.

NOTE ADDED AFTER ZERO RESPONSE FROM OUTLETS AND VIRTUALLY ZERO RESPONSE FROM MY FRIENDS: Perhaps the title of the article should have been “No Country for Old Cows” (omitting the “but….”). When one considers the silence from all quarters — including the absence of dialogue in Hollywood among so-called socially-conscious players — concerning other countries, it is extremely difficult to entertain the notion of hope. When a high-profile star such as Spielberg dramatically “drops out of” the Beijing Olympics citing China’s role in Darfur… and there’s zero response from the likes of Clooney, Jolie, Garafalo, Glover(?), Asner, Robbins, Pitt, Cheadle, Sarandon et. al. respecting the USer role in Palestine, Cuba, Kosovo and the Congo… one has to be overwhelmed by the combo of (double-standard-based) disingenuousness and ignorance. No, STUPIDITY. That means not wanting to learn anything.

I recommend two sources to put this all into a healthy perspective. One is the King James Old Testament testimonial vis-a-vis Jeremiah. The other is Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium. Those will show you where McCarthy drew his inspiration, in part, and whether or not you find “hope” embedded in his work… a more valuable something will be tapped — a mystery — than what is afforded by mundane concerns, ego-based exercises or intellectual masturbation.

In McCarthy’s Blood Meridian The Kid fails to oppose The Judge, BUT…he nonetheless refuses active union with him, even as that means becoming another one of his victims. Our celebrities will risk nothing that threatens their careers, let alone their lives. We’re not talkin’ Paul Robeson when we talk about the “contributions” of a Clooney. In fact, the silence, as per Martin Luther King’s words, means complicity here. There’s a twilight that’s descended on heroism in Hollywood which cries out for a Chaplin or a Trumbo.

I don’t think many viewers of NCfOM take in the sigificance of the moment when Bell points out to his colleague that as drug dealers make inroads into the lives of children, the kids make the decision to buy the drugs. That’s of enormous significance in the story. And it resonates again –that point– when Chigurh buys off the young boys (their pledged silence) toward the end. That silence has a parallel among the lives of celebrities. “Don’t say anything,” is what Anton Chigurh tells the boys as he hands them a large bill. That kind of thing is understood in Hollywood (and all other power centers, of course). It doesn’t have to be spoken.

There are strains of irascible, reactionary politics throughout some of McCarthy’s works, including the grumblings of Sheriff Bell. Such frightened a lot of critics with regard to NCfOM. But that doesn’t mean that McCarthy should be sized up, and dismissed as if he were Bell.

“The ceremony of innocence is drowned,” said Yeats. Let The Ceremony of Innocence begin.