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[OM] Re: Coen Bros., was financial markets

Subject: [OM] Re: Coen Bros., was financial markets
From: Winsor Crosby <wincros@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 06 Jan 2008 11:37:24 -0800
Of course he did. That is the point, better made than I made it.  No  
character in the film with enough in the way of clues to know what he  
or she thinks is really ethical with the exception of Sheriff Bell.  
Every one of them makes major choices that are unethical and the  
presence of the remnants of an ethos does not really save them.

The sheriff is of course a law man and in the film I think the law  
represents ethical standard.

Chigurh, early on, decides he wants the money and kills two people who  
would know that he was doing the old double cross. The whole movie is  
about his chasing the money and killing anyone who gets in his way. It  
is not his money and no effort is made to show that he thinks it is.  
The faint trappings of an ethical system in some of his decisions that  
result in gratuitous killing do not describe an ethos. It also seems  
to me that if stoicism is the choice here, the point of that  
philosophy is that you make the best of your place in society, embrace  
it and make it yours, but working according to the rules within that  
niche. Chigurh breaks all the rules and is a fugitive. If stoic, it is  
badly gone wrong.

Moss does come back to the scene of the drug deal gone bad and brings  
water to the still living drug runner, but it is incidental to finding  
the money and taking it. It is not his money regardless of where it  
comes from and he has committed a crime besides endangering his life  
from the "bad guys" who also want the money.

His wife is concerned about his actions, but only insofar as they  
endanger him. She is an accessory after the fact.

Of course there are all the dead drug people.

What is interesting is that that all the unethical people are killed  
off, except Chigurh. Why is that?  Avenging angel? I may have been  
wrong about that. He wallowed too much in the ethical mud. Even if his  
emotional motivations are hidden from us there is nothing that  
separates him ethically as you say from Hitler, or Torquemada.  But  
then again who knows what Cormac McCarthy believes? He could believe  
in avenging angels which would allow Chigurh to walk away for "the  
next job".  I think the Coen brothers like that he is the only one to  
walk away because it shows the lack of any ethical element in the  
universe. The fact that it breaks the usual Hollywood morality play  
ending and we know Chigurh is not going to be brought back as the  
terror in a series of slice and dice movies kind of reinforces that.

The brothers Coen seem to play with the nihilistic view a lot and I go  
back to my earlier idea that much of  their point of view is to show  
ordinary people, knowing and unknowing, up against real horrors and  
that there is no moral center, just people pleading for their lives.  
You may disagree, but the whole direction of Tommy Lee Jones(he is  
good, isn't he?) at the end underscores, at least to me, the  
disappointment of his retirement. He expressed that he could not  
longer cope with the world as it is. He knew that had he entered the  
motel room where Moss was killed a minute earlier he would have been  
dead and the fallacy that he was in control in his niche in life was  
exposed and he was not strong enough for it. As the carrier of the  
only ethical sense in the movie based as it was on the law which he  
enforced, then retirement was abandonment of his ethical role and its  
failure. The character is stoic in the sense that he availed himself  
of an option available to someone in his station in life, but the  
moral center of the story is gone.

So we have all the major players dead, Chigurh walking away, not  
punished like the others, and Sheriff Bell stepping off the ethical  
stage.  Nihilism.

Or it could be a twisted version of the Wizard of Oz.  :-)



Winsor
Long Beach, California, USA




On / January 6, 2008 CE, at 2:13 AM, Andrew Fildes wrote:

> Aristotle claimed that everyone is trying to do
> the right thing. problem is that they all have a unique view of right
> - Hitler thought he was right.


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