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The Coens frequently test the morality of their characters in their films to see whether their principles will come before a temptation of the criminal or immoral variety. These temptations are primarily of the monetary variety, however, but also encompass the duality of justice and loyalty to one’s companions, friends or family. The consistent presence within this theme is the Coens punishment of the characters who stray away from their morals in the pursuit of these temptations laid in front of them.
When discussing the Coen brothers and morality, one would be remiss to neglect No Country for Old Men (2007), based on the 2005 novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, which contains a character who can be argued to be truly amoral, that character being Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem.
Protagonist Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across the MacGuffin of the film, two million dollars in a briefcase found at a drug deal gone wrongs aftermath. Moss returns to the crime scene later the same night as taking the money to bring water to a wounded Mexican criminal left after the shoot-out. This act of moral goodness is ultimately his undoing as he is exposed as the thief of the money and remains on the run for the rest of his time alive. This money was too valuable of an opportunity for Moss to pass up, and thus the corruptible nature of the human psyche kicked in and led to his demise.
Anton Chigurh, Clark Buckner argues, is seen as deaths impossible possibility with Jim Welsh corroborating this idea saying Chigurh is like death itself, essentially akin to the grim reaper, an unstoppable divine force who enacts the will of death. However, Chigurh is clearly no such unstoppable force as Buckner and Welsh suggest. Chigurh, like Llewyn and Sherriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), is human and only acts as a harbinger of fate due to his amoral outlook on human life. Chigurh himself acknowledges himself as a non-divine being when he states he got there the same way the coin did, when explaining his presence in future victim Carla Jean’s home, showcasing the importance he places on the fairness of fate. Chigurh views man the same way he views beast. This is made abundantly clear in the first act of the film when we are shown the contrasting views of Llewyn and his eventual pursuer. We are first introduced to Llewyn as he is hunting pronghorns in the desert, he mutters to himself hold still as he views his target in his crosshairs. In a prior scene, Chigurh asks the man whose car he intends to hijack to step out of his vehicle and hold still, before promptly firing a bullet through his head with a cattle gun. This reflects the difference in view between Llewyn and Chigurh, with the latter treating human life as it were the same as a hunter such as Llewyn would game. Chigurh views human life this way as he sees himself as an agent of fate, often deciding whether to kill a potential victim or not based on a coin toss and places no value in the freedom of the individual and is against the idea of self-determination, so he sees man and beast as equal. This, however, does not suggest that he is an unstoppable force manifesting death as Buckner and Welsh suggest, but that he is amoral, which had served as his protection from the corrupting factors the Coens often entice their characters with throughout the film, such as money, up until his confrontation of Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald). Chigurh separates himself from traditional Coen characters here as he is one of the few who is not motivated or swayed by the offer of monetary gain, evidenced by his refusal of 14,000 dollars from Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) as he moves through the stages of grief in the minute before he is executed by Anton. Chigurh up to the point when he confronts Carla Jean has been primarily protected from moral repercussions of his murders by his use of the coin toss to decide the fate of his potential victims, which Carla-Jean correctly exposes as a way of shifting blame away from himself and that the murders he has committed were of his own doing, and he was not servicing some divine being. This is showcased when after Carla refuses his coin toss proposal and he kills her, he is immediately t-boned by an oncoming vehicle as he flees the crime, perhaps being punished for a murder that he cannot blame on fate. When Chigurh is hit by the car, the shot looks out of the window on the opposite side of the car to where the impact takes place. This leaves the audience blind to what was about to happen, and similarly, places emphasis on the idea that Chigurh is not above the laws of the universe and this is the Coens way of shocking the viewer by making the accident completely unpredictable from a visual standpoint.
Chigurhs morality is not broken and tested by money like most other corruptible Coen characters, such as Llewyn, but by losing his blame bearing coin toss.
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