No Country for Old Men - The Ending Explained

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?

Yeah, I know. It happens to everyone. You’re waiting for the final showdown and then that happens. It’s an ending I’ve been thinking about for quite some time now, so here’s my take on it.

“Once you quit hearing ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am’, the rest is soon to follow.”

Sheriff Bell’s traditionalist attitude is the main target of criticism in the book and film. It’s parodied slightly in the discussion with the El Paso sheriff, where he laments the rise of “kids with green hair and bones in their noses” and dismantled by Ellis (you know, the cat man), when he describes a similarly brutal murder which took place years and years ago in 1909. Likewise, Wells and Chigurh are both arguably psychopathic killers and yet both address people by “sir” throughout the film, in spite of what Bell says.

It’s a pretty obvious theme – but worth bearing in mind when it comes to the death of Llewelyn. See, No Country for Old Men takes its name from the first line of ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ by William Butler Yeats. The poem’s central message is that in order to be happy in old age we should abandon the world’s more primal pleasures and turn to the spiritual and eternal instead. This, then, explains the tonal shift that occurs in the final fifth of the story. Like a person, as the film approaches its end, its focus changes from the external to the internal; the money fades into insignificance.

And that’s why Llewelyn dies off-screen. This is the moment when the film reveals that the plot is not important. Nor was it ever, really. Rather than being a cat-and-mouse thriller, No Country for Old Men is a coming-of-age tale in which the real protagonist, Sheriff Bell, comes to understand his place in the universe.

I actually think this story has something of a happy ending. When Bell details his final dream, I think it’s the inception of his self-forgiveness. He’s realised the set of goals he’d set himself were always too great and that, like lighting a fire, you can only produce so much warmth and protection in an otherwise cold and hostile world.

It sounds like I’m trying to hammer hope a strange, nihilistic ending – but this makes more sense when you consider that Bell was a WWII deserter in the book and never truly forgave himself for leaving his comrades to die, even though he surely would’ve died alongside them.

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

Before Carson Hwells finds out exactly how dangerous Chigurh can be, he is confronted with the question above. The funny thing is, in the context of this scene, Chigurh seems to be mocking Carson’s ability as an assassin. His principles led him to his death, therefore, Chigurh’s methods > Wells’ methods.

But let’s look at it from a different angle. How about we think of “the rule” as having a similar usage to “the law” (meaning “set of laws” rather than “one individual law”.)

The penultimate scene shows our antagonist incapacitated by a car crash. This represents an uncaused event: the traffic light was signalling red and yet – contrary to the rules of the road – the opposing vehicle failed to halt, smashing straight into Chigurh.

Could it be, then, that Chigurh’s quote actually relates to the status of the universe? We tend to presume there’s this underlying simplicity to everything – but things may simply not be so. Maybe Occam’s razor is blunt. Maybe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony – but chaos, hostility and murder.

“You hold still.”

There are a lot of similarities between the three main characters of this film. All three men walk back into crime scenes, a lot of the shots are the same, there’s echoes in the dialogue. No two characters really appear in the same shot together (okay, Llewelyn and Chigurh kinda do – but it’s very brief and in the dark.) There’s a kind of ‘three parts of the same person’ thing going on. Llewelyn and Chigurh both suffer gunshot wounds in the same standoff, both get injured in what either is or appears to be a car accident, both hand over money for a shirt to dress their wounds. There’s probably tonnes more.

Could this be the directors’ way of showing the underlying reality of the story? Far from Anton being “a ghost” or some kind of contemporary grim reaper, he is just a man like Llewelyn and Ed Tom? People always describe Chigurh as a form of unstoppable evil, however, I think they ignore the fact that this story may be coming from the memory of Sheriff Bell – and may therefore be coloured by his feelings towards it.

“The same way the coin did.”

The final confrontation between Chigurh and Carla Jean seems like a fairly straight analogy for the dilemma of determinism: either CJ must accept her fate and be killed, which is no kind of choice at all, or she must resign to the randomness of the coin toss, in which case she still has no control over her outcome.

However, unlike the Texaco man, Carla Jean refuses to comply. I think this is an important aspect of the story. Many philosophers believe that the key to our freedom is our ability to do thing for a reason, rather than some confusing ability to do otherwise. So, this could be seen as an intellectual defeat for Chigurh. Carla Jean chooses to die rather than play by Chigurh’s rules, demonstrating that she is free in ways that he is not.

Well, alright. It’s worth saying that the book has a different ending, where CJ gets the coin toss wrong and is killed, so maybe I’m reading into this a bit too much. Actually, on that…

“Life is a tale told by an idiot,

Full of sound and fury;

Signifying nothing.”

No Country hints at notions like conservatism, nihilism, free will, morality but never says anything definitive. Maybe this is the point of the story. That, although it seems to be discussing something particularly profound, it is actually ‘a tale told by an idiot’ – a jumbled mess of happenings which cause you to look for a kind of depth which, on greater inspection, simply isn’t there.

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