Episode 264: The Rule You Follow (The Coen Brothers' "No Country for Old Men")

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes.

[00:00:17] There are other things that need to be taken into account here, like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can't just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else. Welcome to Very Bad Wizards, I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston.

[00:01:19] Dave, a Penn State professor, was charged recently for having sex with his dog near the restrooms at Rothrock State Forest. Wait, so that's illegal? Dude, I forgot about this. I forgot about this. Yes, it is illegal.

[00:01:40] I'm sure there are Peter Singer style arguments that it shouldn't be, as long as eating meat is. And you can verify consent, which I think we've talked about in an earlier episode, how you would go about trying to assess that. That feels like early Very Bad Wizards discussions.

[00:01:58] But the saddest part to me was, I don't remember exactly what I read or what he said or whatever, but I got the vibe of, but wait, let me explain, kind of thing from the professor. He said, I do it to blow off steam. Yeah, that's not helping.

[00:02:17] You should do it because you're under duress. You should be like the mafia told me that, unless I fucked my dog. He's like, no, come on. Who among us hasn't wanted to blow off steam? That's a terrible excuse. In any way, mitigate the responsibility.

[00:02:38] Do something else to blow off steam. Go running, go swimming or something. Jerk off to some animal porn, I guess. Yeah, some AI dog porn. Use like a dolly. Wasn't he also videotaping himself doing it?

[00:03:00] One of the things was like, okay, he got caught because there was like a trail cam that somebody checked. But then I think it turns out he was also like, you know, selfie-ing the thing like for later. It's a collie. That's a poor collie. Is it a collie?

[00:03:16] I don't know. Yeah, I mean, they're pretty, but not my... They were trying to hurt his dick. Not my jam in particular, but you know. Try to have sex with a pit bull. Is there any follow up? Like, is he going to get fired?

[00:03:33] Like, is this a lose tenure kind of thing? He's on leave, I think is the last that we've heard about it. He's 64. I think this means it's time to retire, you know?

[00:03:48] I think this means he's had an ongoing relationship with his dog and who are we to judge? That's something that I will write down and perhaps use in my own defense, my own case.

[00:04:01] If you ever get caught, people are going to be like, he's been joking about this shit too much. I knew it. But why would I joke about it if I was really doing it? Right. Right. Does that sound like somebody who's actually doing it? I don't think so.

[00:04:16] I mean, do you? I don't. Jokes aside for a second, is it something that you think somebody should lose? So I assume it's clearly illegal. There's probably something about mistreating animals. But suppose that he was seen kicking his dog. He probably wouldn't lose tenure for that. Right.

[00:04:38] But I bet you this is like a tenure loss offense. Data fabrication. Right. Sex with the dog. That's the irony is that an act of violence towards his dog would be fine. But an act of love. Here's what I think about it.

[00:04:54] I don't think you can teach as a professor in the age of the Internet if you are caught having sex with your dog. And just for that reason, like, you know, you have to make the guy, you know, because otherwise every student is going to know about this.

[00:05:09] Like there's no student that's going to take this class. It's Penn State. It's State College. It's not a big town. This will be a story. This will be on Rate My Professors.

[00:05:20] You just have to like, this is a good sign that it's time to, you know, the next, the final chapter of your life is beginning now. Do some consulting work. Sure. What field is he in? I forgot. I was about to ask you what. Yeah.

[00:05:37] I genuinely feel bad because you're right. Like there is obviously people have been accused of literal child abuse and rape at Penn State and probably gotten less consequences. What is it about that? Like State College, what the fuck is wrong with these people? They're fucked up.

[00:05:59] You know, not everybody's. You're right about the students. Like, you know, there was a professor at University of Toronto who connected his laptop to the projector and there was porn on it. And he just like apologized and moved on. And I think that's all that happened.

[00:06:19] It is a case though where the kind of porn that was up there would have like a huge role in whether or not you could just move on. If it's just like threesome. Right. If it's like in the top 50 categories. Yeah, it's embarrassing.

[00:06:36] But you can you can move forward and have a continued career. But this is this is just you know, like and I wonder if like in 1984 could you have that? Like, I don't know. Interesting that you picked that year Tamler.

[00:06:53] I bet you there's some things that you could just never do. I bet you there are some things that haven't actually declined. And we've had the same standard. Oh, God. He begged the Rangers to shoot him at one point. Oh, yeah. That is sad. That's sad.

[00:07:14] Cut out like 30 percent of the jokes I made. So this is not I think I for a second was under the impression that this is our opening segment. But it's not. What is our opening segment? Well, I tried to segue.

[00:07:28] We are talking about a paper that just came out in Nature. Andrew Mastroianni and Dan Gilbert called the illusion of moral decline. So this is for those who don't know nature is a big deal. So this is getting a lot of press.

[00:07:43] So what they do is they they document something that I think we all probably knew, which is that people are always complaining that the world is in moral decline. And I think this part is kind of impressive. They look through tons and tons of survey data.

[00:08:03] We'll get into what exactly in the survey data they were looking at. But but for now, 70 years of data across multiple countries and hundreds of question. And they do they do show that people seem to believe no matter when you ask them,

[00:08:19] if you just ask them straight up like, is the world getting worse? They say yes. So here's where the tricky part comes in. They then say, right, because one possibility is just that people are right. Like it's just actually been in steady decline.

[00:08:34] But the sexier claim that they make is that this isn't actually explained by the fact that the world is really getting worse. They want to argue that this is just an error of judgment. Hence the word illusion in the title.

[00:08:47] And they say that we make this error of judgment for a couple of reasons. One is that we just notice negative information more like the news covers shitty stuff. So we're constantly bombarded with bad news about the world around us.

[00:09:00] And that combined with another bias, which is that in our memory, we kind of launder our memories. Like we were more likely to remember positive things than negative things. So because of that, we're constantly thinking that things are getting worse. So they do a few studies.

[00:09:17] They make heavy use of survey data for one set of studies. And then they move on to MTurk and Prolific where they're asking people to report specific questions that they've asked. And I can go through the summary, but why don't we just start from talking there?

[00:09:32] Tam, what did you think of the paper? I think this is honestly like idiotic. Like I think this is really embarrassing. And look, I might even like think that it's true that people are always thinking that morality is on the decline.

[00:09:51] And maybe for some of the reasons that they say. But I don't even know how to fully conceptualize the question of but is that an illusion or are they tracking something? It's like there's a section in this paper called Is Morality Actually Declining?

[00:10:11] Because that's critical for their hypothesis, right? To show that people are being their chicken little and that that world actually isn't declining. And that's why it's an illusion. The idea that you're going to in a small section of a paper

[00:10:29] establish that morality is still just plugging along roughly the same. People are no more or less moral than they were 50 years ago. Not that they measure 50 years ago as the Scott Alexander guy points out in his critique of this.

[00:10:46] A lot of their stuff is focused on like from the early 2000s to now. And I think when people say as he points out that morality is declining, they don't mean since like oh yeah, since the Iraq war, you know, like morality is declining.

[00:11:04] They're comparing it to some sort of past that's probably pre-internet, pre-heavy tech and deindustrialization. But they're probably not thinking since like I remember how moral everybody was in the early 2000s. So that's number one. Number two, like how the fuck are you going to measure whether morality

[00:11:25] is declining or not? That's like a fundamental philosophical question. You would have to know like what are the correct moral views? What's the right kind of moral behavior? And like are people doing more of those things or less of those things than they used to?

[00:11:46] Now they do pick a couple of things like violent crime and stuff like that. But this is something that people don't necessarily agree about. Like fundamental parts of morality. So the idea that you're going to get some sort of objective measure

[00:12:03] of whether morality has declined or not is, you know, as much as I don't like the Steven Pinker way of trying to establish this and the question begging aspects of what he does and whatever, like this is ridiculous.

[00:12:19] This is moronic, like the way they try to go about doing this. But as you say, it is a fundamental part of why this paper is getting a lot of attention. As somebody who considers themselves a moral psychologist, it does, it just immediately raises some flags to me

[00:12:41] that they both on the perception side where you ask like is the world getting worse? And more critically on the is the world actually getting worse? That they gloss over any kind of definition of morality. And yeah, I mean I'll bring up right now something

[00:13:00] that Mastroianni says in his blog post where he tries to defend this against this critique. He says, no, look, we just got what people in general would agree about. So let's move on. So like we're talking about being nice to each other. Can you trust people?

[00:13:13] Were you treated with respect all day yesterday? Obviously those are things that people consider part of morality and everybody agrees on it. So we're not talking about like gay marriage or whatever. But like it importantly turns on like all that other stuff that people disagree about, right?

[00:13:29] Because it very well could be that a reasonable person has a complete disagreement as Scott Alexander points out about whether or not objectively things have gotten worse. And you can't just pick the things everybody agrees on and make a claim that this is enough evidence

[00:13:45] to show that the world isn't actually declining because if I don't even think about like drone warfare as being bad, it doesn't even enter my mind. But I do agree that being kind to your neighbor is important. Now we have two, you know, you could measure two things.

[00:14:02] One, do I think that being kind to your neighbor is moral? And another, do I think that drone warfare is moral? I would probably tell you like the answer to number two is probably more important when it comes to my estimate

[00:14:17] of whether the world is a better place. But they don't do that. They don't make the effort of even doing something like saying we got a thousand people from 20 different countries and we just ask them, what do you think is what makes the world a moral place

[00:14:33] versus an immoral place? Like they don't bother to do that. They don't gesture at any of that. They don't even think that's necessary. And that hand wavy part combined with the confidence with which they're making their claims is something that does really get to me.

[00:14:50] This comes from the actual paper, not the blog, which I do want to get to. At the end of that section they say, the subjective measures we analyzed are not definitive, of course, but they strongly suggest that the widespread perception of moral decline is an illusion.

[00:15:08] Moreover, studies that use the rare objective measures of changes in everyday moral behavior, just that that's rare is exactly the problem, right? Suggests the same thing. For example, Juan et al. showed that rates of cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma game have increased significantly between 1956 and 2017.

[00:15:31] That is not an objective measure of fucking morality. Like that's fucking insane that you would put that in as like your concluding paragraph of this section. It's just- A 10% increase in prisoner's dilemma in the lab, Tamer. I mean, there's no way you're gonna tell me

[00:15:49] that that might be explained by people learning about game theory at a higher rate and therefore acting slightly better. No, it's just that people have gotten a lot more cooperative over the years. You know, this is a sociological question and an ethical question and a philosophical question.

[00:16:07] This is not a question for these kinds of methods. The idea that you're going to get there and just throw some numbers around and run some studies and do the things just shows like when I get really frustrated about the state of social psychology

[00:16:25] and a lot of the quantitative social sciences, this is the kind of stuff that I'm talking about and experimental philosophy for that matter. And to a bad end too, because if it was just a bullshit result, who cares? But like there's a kind of agenda here also

[00:16:42] that this is trying to support. And that's what makes this like slightly, I guess insidious. So let me just say like a couple of things that I just want to get out there. One is their review, their use of all of those surveys across 70 years,

[00:17:00] across all of those countries is really impressive. Like I can't think of another way to ask and answer the question, do people think the world is getting worse? I don't know of anybody who's done anything like that for that question.

[00:17:14] And it's true that that question has been asked a bunch in these like surveys of people's thoughts. So that part, all that said, yeah, this here's what bugs me. One of the things, the amount of effort that they clearly put into like analyses and collecting these data

[00:17:36] and making the case with their numbers, seems so disproportionate to the amount of conceptual analysis that this requires. Like if they had just spent some more time, as Scott Alexander says, if you had just made this a paper about honesty and kindness

[00:17:54] and then you had asked people how honest and kind do you think, is the world getting worse at that? And then just looked at answers about how honest and kind are people now and shown that discrepancy. I mean, it wouldn't make nature.

[00:18:07] I mean, I've heard people have gotten more honest or less honest or more kind and less kind. Like how do you? Yeah. Here's though, I mean, it's hard. I don't think you can, but here's at least an honest attempt where, which is one of the methods they use.

[00:18:22] You could ask people, are people getting less honest? And then look at what they say. People say like, yes, the world is totally getting less honest. And then compare that every year to just the question, and see whether that answer changes. That's like one strategy that you,

[00:18:39] that they do use for the question of morality, but it would be more convinced, slightly more convincing if they were just looking at a specific thing like that. Another way they do it is to say like, were people kind to you today or something like that?

[00:18:53] Which is again, like people, it's totally consistent to believe that. Yeah, I live in this nice kind of neighborhood where people are nice to me, but I think overall kindness has gone down. If you do the kind of conceptual analysis and philosophical and methodological,

[00:19:09] like critical thinking that you would need, you would just say, oh wait, we can't establish in a fucking nature paper whether morality has declined or not. And then you would just junk it. You would just not do that part. And you would focus all on the question

[00:19:23] of why do people continually think that morality has declined? Right. Yeah. And like I was saying to you offline, I think it would be, it's very weird that they didn't just go to a bunch of statistics like Pinker style where they're like, okay, infant mortality is down.

[00:19:43] Charitable donations are up. Like, you know, whatever poverty, whatever it is that Pinker argues, at least Pinker is arguing with whatever data he can get his hands on and just showing, right? So like show a graph about violent crime rates across the world and map that onto

[00:20:01] what people actually think is going on. Like there is a very interesting finding, and this is, I'll say I've been working on a paper with my grad student on a very similar idea. There are findings out there that show that if you ask people has violent crime

[00:20:15] gone up or down, like every year people say it's gone up. And for at least a good chunk of that time it's actually going down. Right? So people are miscalibrated in at least some specific ways. Yeah. If you do it like that, like with something that actually

[00:20:34] can be objectively measured. Now that doesn't mean you don't know what the causes of violent crime increasing or decreasing is. It's not necessarily that people have gotten more or less moral, but that as something that's objective, you can measure it and then you can fight about the causes

[00:20:50] of it and how to interpret those results. But this is a non-starter because we don't agree about what's going on in the world and we don't agree about what morality is. If you think loneliness, mental health, and climate change are key parts of a good life,

[00:21:06] then morality definitely has declined. But they don't ask about that because this is the thing. And this is, I don't know, maybe to wrap up unless you have more to talk about. Well, I want you to get a chance to talk about the blog post. Yeah.

[00:21:24] I think here's where you see the agenda here. So this is this guy, Adam Mastrioni's blog. A more folksy write-up. You know, pop-sci write-up of these results. So the section is Please allow me to watch Paddington 2 in peace. This paper was born out of spite.

[00:21:48] For my whole life I've listened to beat my whole life. Since he was seven years old, he's been a victim of the demise of human goodness. Used to be you could trust a man's word. Back in the day, you didn't have to lock your doors at night.

[00:22:04] People don't care for one another anymore, etc. This drives me nuts. I get worked up about this because these claims actually matter. If you really think that people are less kind than they used to be, you are alleging a disaster. Moral decline would be very, very bad.

[00:22:22] If that's happening, we should do something about it right away. But if it isn't, instead of shouting fire in a crowded theater, you should zip your lips so we can all watch Paddington 2 in peace. So the idea here is leave me alone.

[00:22:38] I don't want to feel like there are moral problems in the world. I just want to watch my shit and go about my business as a very privileged member of society. I don't want to hear that there's actually something that's wrong with the world if there really isn't.

[00:22:54] And that's like a really... I don't know, it represents something larger. An attitude among the elites here that kind of matches what people worry about them. This is what people fear about the elites is that they're just a bunch of fucking fat cats that are just happy

[00:23:16] with how things are going because it's going great for them. He loves Paddington 2. And he's like a Harvard grad, Columbia post-doc or whatever, and just let them enjoy that in peace because everything's fine. Now in the paper there's something equally ridiculous on this front, I think.

[00:23:38] This is in the discussion section. With that said, the illusion of moral decline seems to be a robust phenomenon that may have troubling consequences. For example, in 2015 76% of US Americans agreed that addressing the moral breakdown of the country should be a high priority for their government.

[00:23:58] The United States faces many well-documented problems from climate change and terrorism to racial injustice and economic inequality and yet most US Americans believe their government should devote scarce resources to reversing an imaginary trend. What are they talking about? What are Hammond and Gilbert talking about?

[00:24:18] Is the government spending $2 trillion on a giant morality ray that can zap people to make them more moral and reverse the decline? What resources are the issue here? You ask people, should the government have it be a priority that people are more moral? They don't mean $75 billion

[00:24:42] to a moral character training national required course or something like that. But this is the kind of stuff that's just tossed off. In the last couple sentences, if low morality is a cause for concern then declining morality may be a veritable call to arms

[00:24:58] and leaders who promise to halt that illusory slide to quote unquote make America great again as it were, may have outsized appeal. Our studies indicate that the perception of moral decline is pervasive, perdurable, unfounded, and easily produced. A better understanding of this phenomenon would seem a timely task.

[00:25:14] You're right, people aren't spending tons of money to combat moral decline. It could be that what they're arguing is that people are spending a lot of energy and time in the media trying to combat what they think is like, you know,

[00:25:34] look at all the anti-pride energy that goes into this from the conservatives, look at all of the efforts that they're trying to do to like remove whatever books about race in the libraries. This is all because they are claiming that our children are being ruined by bad stuff.

[00:25:52] Which, fine, like I agree that that's actually a waste of time because I don't believe that those things are bad. But clearly if that's what they believe then you should have put those measures into your fucking study. Right, it's not an illusion for them.

[00:26:08] Like gay people can get married now. That's like for them they're responding to something completely real not illusory. There aren't anti-target campaigns to not be polite to each other. No, it's an illusion because people are more cooperative on prisoners' dilemmas and they'd be like

[00:26:30] yeah, but it used to be that marriage was between a man and a woman and like women were spending more time. But those aren't the measures of morality. If they were then morality would have declined a lot. Yeah, I feel like they just removed whatever credibility

[00:26:50] they might have had for their limited findings by revealing their hand. Like this was what they were trying to show all along. Which look, the view that this is just the like elites making, you know, Harvard grads or Harvard professors making a claim about like I have

[00:27:08] nothing, no sense that that's like what's driving this or that that's what it's promoting. Like I don't, I just think that it's done, it's dividing the country even more. He wants to watch Paddington 2 in peace. Yeah, I think it's divisive. I think our science should

[00:27:28] at least try to be objective. And as Scott Alexander points out, we have the moral foundation stuff that has been saying this for years, that morality is broader than what liberals think it is. And so not to not even, that to me is a slap in the face.

[00:27:50] There's been so much ink spilled about this. Yeah, the Alan Fiske like moral framework stuff, like all of that stuff is just is dismissed in the blog post by first a note to the pedants. This is the section heading. First a note to the pedants. We both,

[00:28:08] you independently texted me about this. You might be thinking morality, that's a loaded term! People can use that word to mean a lot of things as Hegel says, let me stop you right there. This is so smug. This is smugness personified. He goes, let me stop you right

[00:28:26] there. You're right, but fortunately none of the results I'm about to show you depend on using that particular word. You can of course use words to mean anything you want. Blah blah blah blah. When Poulster's asks people for examples of moral decline, the most frequent

[00:28:40] answers are people don't treat each other with respect, things that we can all agree are bad, okay, goodbye pedants, onward to the science. It like doesn't address any of the concerns here and it just is you know like as I read this, okay, goodbye pedants,

[00:28:56] I'm like, well that's dismissive because I could have been on your side about a lot of this stuff and now my number one concern about your paper is being dismissed by calling me a pedant and then telling me onward to the science as if

[00:29:10] my science is not up to like let me tell you what the actual science is. It is, yeah, it's the worst kind of empirical arrogance where you're like I don't care about your silly philosophy, like I'm here to show you free will doesn't exist. Right, exactly.

[00:29:30] It's exactly that. There's a funny footnote, there's a footnote in the Scott Alexander thing and it's like he just throws it in there, it's an old tweet from 2011 by Steven Cass, why idly theorize when you can just just check all caps and find out the actual answer

[00:29:50] to a superficially similar sounding question, scientifically all caps. That's what it is, that is the attitude like we could speculate as to why people think that morality is declining, we could speculate as to whether morality is actually declining but let's actually look to the science

[00:30:10] to tell us and stop just speculating from our armchair but the superficially similar sounding question is exactly right. 10% Prisoner's Dilemma cooperation increase. Who are you to lie with that? Like who are you to argue against that? Like Pinker could have just like ended his book with that

[00:30:32] by the way, bitches. 10% greater cooperation than Prisoner's Dilemma. I will say like if I didn't think it was possible to get me to appreciate that aspect of Pinker's work but like this paper does it. It has at least a methodology that like it's not, it doesn't just hand

[00:30:52] wave like the entire time. I do think that there I don't know if this is an illusion but there has been a decline in social psych papers it's like your ass used to be beautiful you know even if it was even you know like whatever

[00:31:06] with like Zimbardo setting that experiment up having like people brutalize each other like that's fun whatever the methodological problems that was. The Milgram stuff like dime in a phone booth making people nicer like you know like it's ridiculous but it's at least fun. It's like

[00:31:26] I said seven people be hacked but it's fun. I just want like why can't I have both? Why can't I have a happy balance here of both? Go back to not caring about the problems with those things and then just do fun studies. It's hard when I believe

[00:31:44] that there is truth to be discovered. I have that problem. But I'm with you. It makes social psychology great again. Speaking of we didn't even mention the connection. First of all we didn't mention what we're going to be talking about nor the connection which

[00:32:00] is No Country for Old Men is essentially a movie about this phenomenon. The world has morally gotten away from us. You know eight years ago we would have been on top of this. We would have made the connection early. Alright we'll be back to talk about

[00:32:16] No Country for Old Men. Paralyzed by that choice in the moment. There's not going to be some study that tells you what to do. Situation is too complex, too particular to you for that. Therapy can help you stay connected to what you really want

[00:32:56] while you navigate life and help you not get bogged down in cycles of self doubt and indecision so you can move forward with confidence and excitement. Trusting yourself to make decisions is like anything. The more you practice it the easier it gets. Therapy can be hugely beneficial

[00:33:14] for learning positive coping skills how to set boundaries, how to get the self confidence you need to make those big decisions come what may. It can empower you to be the best version of yourself. So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try give BetterHelp a try.

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[00:38:45] who cares? Let's get to No Country for Old Men Alright let's get to our main segment for today, No Country for Old Men the 2007 movie from the Coen Brothers. This was the movie that kind of brought them back. They do Big Lebowski and then after that

[00:39:07] they do Intolerable Cruelty which is a movie that's not good. It's one of the very few Coen Brothers movies that just I don't think is good at all and then the next one I didn't even see because everyone seemed to agree

[00:39:23] that it wasn't good. Their remake of The Lady Killers. Did you ever see that? No, I haven't seen either of those two Yeah. I completely forgot they even existed to be honest You know when you have a track record like them they're just consistent excellence

[00:39:37] you know they needed something I think to bring them back to like oh we can just do one of these mid-budget movies whenever we want and this was the movie adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel which I've read and re-read recently you didn't right? You've never read it?

[00:39:57] No. 2005 novel it was their first adaptation it's very faithful to the book both faithful in terms of the plot structure and even faithful in terms of some of the odd details in the movie and also just faithful to the mood of the novel and the mood

[00:40:15] of Cormac McCarthy in general Have you read Cormac McCarthy at all? No it's funny though I've been meaning to and I actually bought The Road like a month ago or something with the plan of reading it on a

[00:40:29] trip and I didn't get around to it and then he just died. Maybe he'd still be alive today if you had read The Road It's great by the way I read The Road on a trip I can remember reading that. I was going to the Keys to dive

[00:40:47] with my wife. She had never dived before and I was reading The Road during that trip and it's really good I've read that, I've read No Country, I've read and I love this is my favorite of what I've read, All the Pretty Horses and then I read

[00:41:01] the other two in the Border Trilogy The Crossing. To my shame I've never read Blood Meridian but I feel like this summer now I'm gonna read it because I've read like the first 70 pages and then not because it's not good but because it's definitely

[00:41:15] a book that requires like your full attention. I just stopped and then Nowadays I rarely give my full attention to anything. That's why I wanted to start reading again because it really does get you get out of shape You get out of like full attention shape

[00:41:31] It's like push-ups You start, you're doing it and then you're like but then if I go back to it now I'll be still I was doing like three sets of 25 and now I'll be doing like struggling to get to 15 That's the way to do it

[00:41:47] how you did it, just a dedication to reading. Anyway this movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture The only time they've done that Anton Chigurh won Best Supporting Actor Roger Deakins did not win for Best Cinematography although this is the same year as There Will Be Blood

[00:42:07] so I hope he won I don't know Did There Will Be Blood win other things? Did Daniel Day-Lewis win for that? I think so. Again, he better It's very weird that they came out the same year They were shooting at the same time I know

[00:42:25] There was smoke in the background I think the Coens were like what the fuck is going on Yeah because they were doing the fire in There Will Be Blood which we should do someday That is legendary and then one of my favorite places in the whole world

[00:42:39] that West Texas desert area around Marfa I don't love Marfa but that landscape and then down below that is Big Bend State Park and then a little to the east is Big Bend National Park I love that area Amazing time to be there I would imagine

[00:42:59] Can you imagine running into those guys in some little town all of them Daniel Day-Lewis having like a pint Still in character Yeah Because of his method I'm sure he probably was I'll drink your pint Okay This was a big hit

[00:43:23] I think it made a good amount of money not a ton but a good amount for them and it's so good. You've been wanting to do this movie forever. I know this is one of your all time favorites I was telling you off air

[00:43:39] every time I watch it, it keeps climbing up my list for so many reasons It's just a rare movie where it's hard to find anything really done wrong like done poorly. The cinematography the acting, fuck man, the acting there is such good acting here

[00:43:59] and it's not in your face it's subtle Even Chigurh Even Chigurh, yeah The first time I watched it, I'll admit the Chigurh character was too weird for me It felt so out of place that weirdness that it kind of focalized my attention in a way that it shouldn't

[00:44:19] have for the film and so it's the second time the third time I was like, oh man It's not like a Joker from Batman kind of character where it's so charismatic, its evilness is really fun. It's not exactly like that but it's also not fully not like that

[00:44:41] Right, like the flipping of the coins and the odd haircut in the pale face, there's a lot that's yeah. And I didn't know Javier Bardem before this so this is a totally new person as far as I'm concerned, watching it the first time and

[00:44:59] you know, just his accent and his, it's all, it's really well done In the novel, if I'm recalling correctly from what I read, it's completely unspecified where he's from Completely, yeah. He just said, I read that he just picked the name because it sounded cool

[00:45:15] It had like a vibe to it, like there's no etymology Right, yeah, yeah, which makes sense. It really, I feel like the performance captures, now I did read the book, I think for the first time after I saw the movie so, you know, probably that

[00:45:31] but I feel like at least reading the book it captured him and most of the dialogue is straight out of the book Ethan Coen described writing the screenplay as I would hold open the book and read aloud and Joel would start typing, you know That's amazing

[00:45:51] that, you know, that's exactly what I do for my publications What you were alluding to, the capturing the emotional tone of the book I haven't read the book but whatever that emotional tone is which I don't know how to describe it's some sort of fatalism

[00:46:09] and some sort of like dread dread of evil especially Tom Lee Jones' character and his response to what's going on is just like a great a great sort of like living in the face of great evil, like what does that do to somebody And that you

[00:46:33] can't fully like understand, this is a new thing You can see him trying He's trying, he's really trying to understand what's happening and part of that is he's trying to reach back to the old ones for wisdom and it's not getting him where he needs and he is

[00:46:51] pretty much gonna give up He's just giving up, he's like I can't understand this anymore Like this world is something I can't understand anymore And then I guess we'll talk about this more but I think he's part of what's going on is everybody as they age

[00:47:09] at some point thinks that the world is really terrible and he even tells stories about how terrible the world was back then and it's like he's missing It's not that it was that evil It's just that the world is grander now than it used to be

[00:47:25] It's just like you're getting old So that's what in the scene with Alice at the end That's kind of the upshot of that conversation where he says do you know how your aunt Mac died or somebody and it was just the same kind of soul-less murder

[00:47:41] Almost like Llewellyn But I think if the book has a stance it's like it's been with us If anything it might be tied to America because there's like Alice says this country does bad things to people and so maybe it might be tied

[00:48:01] to America but not tied to certainly this specific time On the other hand there is something about Chagor and his just the bleak nihilism of his character and the kind of soul-lessness of what he does and the soul-lessness even of his weapons that does also give the impression

[00:48:27] oh wait this is something if not new then different from the ordinary thing This is different than like the Woody Harrelson being a hitman who just kills people for money or the Mexicans and the Americans doing a drug deal a violent drug deal. This is some

[00:48:45] new thing. So there's also that element of it that has those two things be in tension. Like maybe it's not just that you're old and now you're like scared of the world. Maybe it's there is something new and I feel like that's where I am

[00:49:01] with this. I don't know Sometimes it does seem like just today I was texting you they uncovered this ring of people putting out monkey torture videos commissioning and then distributing these videos of people torturing monkeys. And it's like how do you do this? What kind of a person

[00:49:29] you can't wrap your mind around how there could be a market for this stuff and I know people did fucked up things, way more fucked up than I can imagine in the Crusades or whatever in the Spanish Inquisition and all of that but it just there is something

[00:49:47] where it's like this isn't just sick people in power perverted Roman emperors this is like I don't know. It's like you feel that there's a mood in the air of something that is just makes you your skin crawl. Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me this could be totally

[00:50:09] wrong and I could be misremembering but if I recall in Genesis when it's talking about humans before the flood when God looks around and says like this shit is bad that the word isn't quite evil the way that we use it but it has this connotation of like

[00:50:29] an evil imagination where they're like being creative with their bad. You know, like it's an evil creativity and that's the feeling that you get which is like whoa. How do you even think of this? Like never mind want to do it. So the other

[00:50:45] thing that I think makes me like this movie so much. I recently watched a video essay about modernism, postmodernism and metamodernism and it gave No Country for Old Men as an example of a good sort of postmodern nihilistic film and then when it was introducing metamodernism

[00:51:07] something that I think we didn't talk about in our regular episode but we mentioned in our Ask Us Anything we had a conversation about what metamodernism is and it's it adds back sincerity where there was only like sarcasm and irony before. It's an attempt at that and

[00:51:25] I like the old ways. I like the nihilism of this movie I like feeling that feeling that it gives me and I like that it is so, it's a gift like given our episode on interpreting art this to me is like the Coen brothers handing me like a

[00:51:47] really yummy meal they're just giving us a bunch of open ended things to discuss and interpret and talk about and it's full of symbolism it's full of details and it seems as if maybe they have an answer in mind but they certainly

[00:52:03] aren't going to tell us what that answer is and maybe Cormac McCarthy has an answer. I don't know if the book is a bit more, if the book gives as much open endedness of a feel as the movie but that's what I like. Yeah.

[00:52:17] That's a good question whether it does or not. I do think it doesn't support certain interpretations that maybe we'll talk about like the Fight Club interpretation Shakur is just a character versus alter ego but because the book is told even more clearly from the Sheriff's perspective

[00:52:39] than the idea of Shakur more as something that he's conjuring up versus somebody that we should take fully literally and real is it might even be more alive in the book than the movie. That's super interesting because yeah with film like I can imagine the challenge

[00:52:59] you know you could have voiceover for the whole thing where you know that it's all from the Sheriff's perspective but they weren't going to do that in this movie. So you have to have sorry you just have to have scenes where Shakur is alone with other people. So

[00:53:15] like what else are you going to do right? You can't have like the Sheriff looking over No you can't have this all taking place like with him with his head kind of superimposed over all of it Brady Bunch looking down on them

[00:53:29] Alice. No no no but I don't think the book like it leaves it open. I don't think the book is suggesting that at all because I say it's from his perspective. It's because he has these interludes of italicized like reflections that are distributed

[00:53:45] throughout the whole book and that we we get the first one in the monologue at the beginning of the movie but I think that's it whereas in the book it's throughout the whole movie the book it ends the book but then in between those things is the action

[00:54:03] which is told in third person and not it's not necessarily that the Sheriff is imagining it at least that's how I read it. It's really good I think you would like the book like a lot of this period McCarthy also you

[00:54:17] can read it in a few days like at most Anyway the movie So what do you like where we talked a little bit before but where does this rank up there? So I wouldn't call this one of my all time favorite movies I think it's fucking awesome

[00:54:33] though. Certainly up there with my favorite Coen Brothers movie I'm not sure I would put it above Fargo and the Big Lebowski but I also could change my mind about that at the end of this conversation and the thing I love about it number one it just

[00:54:49] their craft in this is like A++++++ Yeah their powers are at their prime This is peak Coen Brothers just knowing how to film an action scene or a suspenseful scene and then also the thing that I love about it is that it's

[00:55:15] a lot of it is shot in Marfa in and around Marfa Texas that West Texas area is one of my favorite places in the whole world and I started going there only during COVID my daughter and I started going there every year to camp to Big Bend

[00:55:31] National Park and State Park and like there is something about that landscape that does something to me that I don't even know what it is but I always knew that I would like it just from seeing the westerns where that area was depicted and then

[00:55:49] got there and it was exactly like it was more than what I thought and I think the Coen Brothers like just the opening of this movie it's almost photographic with the monologue Tommy Lee Jones's monologue The Sheriff it's just so beautiful and like captures

[00:56:07] what I love about that area and the feel of it so perfectly there's a kind of bleakness but there's also an absolute beauty and it's just the space the freedom of the space there is something that I think it gets at both the terrifying aspect of that

[00:56:25] but also just the unfathomably beautiful part of that too. When Ellis says this country's hard on people or whatever I wasn't sure it seemed ambiguous to me whether he was referring to the country the United States or the country as in this land you know this area

[00:56:47] this landscape this desert landscape I think that he's referring to the country in the book they make more of a deal out of just America's sins that this could be kind of part of America's sins this is what it culminates in a person like Sugar

[00:57:09] hit that it's not on the nose by the way one of the things that I think is makes this movie powerful for me is the lack of a score and when you were talking about the landscape it was reminding me of Tarkovsky not like

[00:57:23] shooting the landscapes and not having any music like there is something very emotional about the silence with those shots and I think it's ballsy to shoot without music. You can't manipulate emotions in that easy way when you have the music No. It has a little underlying

[00:57:39] thing that could just be diegetic sound it could just be you know it's like in that way like Stalker like you said it has certain things that you think are part of the world but then if you really listen it's actually something going on. There's like a hum

[00:57:55] there's a hum at points. Yeah exactly there's like a little hum there was a guy like Carter Burwell he's a very like he's worked with them a lot I think it's like really effective in this movie. It just captures the just these people are alone

[00:58:11] and how they feel and what they do is up to them and has that kind of effect I think it's like there's nothing telling them what to do. Yeah and you know the desert landscape is if you're familiar with the desert at all

[00:58:27] you know I grew up not far from the desert like far enough east in California that we were probably in the desert but it was irrigated but all you had to do was drive like 30 minutes and you're just in desert and it is danger like if you're

[00:58:43] out there and you don't know what you're doing like it is very dangerous like it is a bad place to be so even when he's out there in the beginning scene when Llewellyn is hunting I'm like you know I hope he knows where he's going

[00:58:57] like I hope he knows that he had no water with him freaked me out like that freaks me out not having water stresses me out you gotta respect the desert you know you gotta yeah we should I guess get into it so yeah there's this

[00:59:13] opening monologue you know here's this sheriff he's from a small town of Sanderson Texas which has a population of under a thousand people he feels like there's this new kind of bad guy like an evil in the world and he doesn't understand it

[00:59:31] and he doesn't want to meet he says I don't want to go meet something I don't understand and as this is happening you just get the sugar opening sequence him getting arrested we don't know for what and him getting out and we don't

[00:59:49] see they do a good job of like you know monster movie style you don't see him you see like the weird haircut you see him from behind he's getting arrested and then when you finally see him in the sheriff's office sitting in the back

[01:00:03] it really is like a third man scene where he pops out of the shadows and you see him full on for the first time right before he attacks and kills the sheriff and then whatever he's doing in that scene as he's looking up

[01:00:17] at the ceiling as he's choking the guy is crazy it's just like hello I'm an insane fucking psychopath the dark comedy of this movie is just also put front and center like the deputy nice enough guy but he's describing it like probably to the sheriff of that town

[01:00:37] and you know he had a hose he's describing the oxygen tank that run down his sleeve and he's like don't worry I got it under control and meanwhile you're just watching sugar come from behind him with the handcuffs slowly had slipped his hands underneath his legs

[01:00:53] it's just so freaking it's funny like it's actually kind of funny in this bleak way and I would say like the movie does that at times but very sparingly a lot of times the violence doesn't have that kind of ironic Coen brothers like kick to it

[01:01:11] it's kind of incredible to me is an offhand comment that these are the same people who made movies like Oh Brother Where Are They yeah or Raising Arizona although there are a couple scenes that are very much like Raising Arizona in this so then we see Chigurh

[01:01:29] on the long desert road pulling over a driver in the cop car that he stole and I remember the first time I saw this being so confused about what had just happened I was like what is that thing like what a weapon what creative weapon I think

[01:01:47] it's like an invention of Cormac McCarthy's oh really yeah I don't think like you could actually do that but I think it's a perfect it leaves no trace it has no I don't know there's there's a romance about like bullets and and like his weapons even

[01:02:05] when he uses an actual shotgun like the way it sounds the way and the way this thing sounds it's like this is a different kind of weapon you know what I mean it has like there's it's more chilling somehow just because it leaves no

[01:02:21] trace it just like pops a hole in their head and then comes back and what's crazy is I think that the this this scene is the only person he actually kills with that is that right I think so it's crazy right that's

[01:02:35] crazy I would have thought yeah he killed it's true he just blows he uses it more to blow doorknobs yeah he blows doorknobs he threatens the guy at the Texaco right yeah yeah it's so funny because it is like one of those things that's just

[01:02:51] imprinted on your brain when you watch it yeah the calmness with which he kills is chilling it's a very good portrayal of like a chilling killer like that like a cold he's just asking the guy can you just put your hands down like you know and

[01:03:13] then he just kills him and part of the feeling is that I get when I see Chigurh is man he's not even like giving you you know these people he's not giving them explanations they just die for nothing like they don't know why I mean

[01:03:29] occasionally they'll get a philosophical disquisition but like yeah yeah no I agree I also think these early scenes just give a sense of how overmatched this part of Texas is and you know in that sense I think you're right there's something specific about

[01:03:47] this part of the country because they just don't get this like that guy you know a guy who's clearly not a deputy comes out of the car and he just gets out and he's like what's this about it's like they don't they can't they haven't conceived

[01:04:05] of somebody like this and that's the thing that I think Chigurh makes like takes to his advantage so much it's like they're not prepared for this they're prepared for a lot of other kinds of attacks but not this right right the the friendliness of the Texans

[01:04:27] is seems puzzling to Chigurh he's almost like tickled by it he can't quite understand it and I think that if you haven't been around people from this part of the country you might think I don't know you correct me if I'm wrong you might

[01:04:43] think that the Coens are are mocking them somehow or like belittling them in the same way that I sort of thought they might be mocking the Minnesotans in Fargo and like the the way that they talked but I don't think so I think they're

[01:04:57] all given a sort of innocence like you say like they can't imagine that somebody would have this kind of evil intentions and you see it very clearly when he feigns that his car is dead and the guy pulls over and says hey neighbor how can I help you?

[01:05:13] But yeah so this is now the hunting scene we see Llewellyn for the first time and I you know what's his face the actor Josh Brolin I love him I think he's great yeah so we see him hunting he's looking through a scope shooting deer I guess

[01:05:33] he's very careful he picks up he does a shot he doesn't kill so he has to go track it he picks up his casing this is what leads him to find the scene where this massacre yeah so there's just a bunch of pickup trucks and

[01:05:49] dead bodies except for one guy who's alive and asks for water this is all just shot so beautifully you know you have this scene of just a tableau of a deal gone very wrong and just dead bodies dead dogs like a limping dog

[01:06:09] this is a limping black dog like what do we think happened here there was clearly heroin and cash were supposed to be exchanged and then something went wrong and a bunch and a lot of people were killed yeah I don't know like in my head

[01:06:27] it's just sort of like a classic Breaking Bad kind of moment where you know somebody got a little pissed off and then everybody started open firing and there was like lots of different kinds of weapons and you know he says where's the last guy because he's

[01:06:43] he knows there's no money there and he knows there had to have been money there and somebody had to have come away from this alive and the poor guy who has no water he opens the door and the guy is clearly dying

[01:06:57] like bleeding out and all he wants is some water and he's like nope sorry and he doesn't even close the door for him when he's afraid of the wolves. We're already thinking of him as somebody that if this is going to be our protagonist

[01:07:13] it's going to be a little harder to root for than this. Right and it is interesting that once he comes on the scene there is greed seems to kick in you know he doesn't strike me as the kind who would be

[01:07:27] callous to somebody but he knows that there must be money and it's like he gets singularly focused on finding it yeah and then like he's very competently kind of puts himself in the position of this guy he says like okay he would want to go somewhere

[01:07:45] worried that he was going to be shot but he would go for shade and then he tracks him and he finds him and he finds a briefcase the MacGuffin of the movie just like a good old fashion Coen Brothers noir there is a case of money yeah

[01:08:05] and it's what like two million dollars two million dollars yeah and so he takes it he's taking the guns too like he takes this guy's pistol grabs the case full of money hides the guns under his trailer and goes and sees his wife and their communication I think

[01:08:23] could use some help here it's funny cause I actually think in the movie it's pretty you get the sense they're a good couple even though they're kind of sniping at each other a little bit in the book that makes it even more clear like

[01:08:37] they have a more extended conversation where he's like you keep that up I'll come back there and screw you she's like can you stay up or he says I can stay up to do that she says that's what she said and I think

[01:08:53] in the movie you get the sense that he loves her yeah for sure I love when she says where did you get the pistol he says at the getting place there is also you know they capture the penchant for sayings that you have

[01:09:09] in Texas there's a saying for everything we just say penchant you say penchant but yeah there's a bunch of good ones like that like if this ain't a mess it'll do until a mess comes or something like that like later in the movie is a great

[01:09:29] example of that by the way the woman who plays the wife is in Boardwalk Empire and also Trainspotting oh shit really she's very good at this if a little whiny maybe a little whinier than she needs to be she seems like it seems like the dynamic is

[01:09:51] that he married a woman much younger than him like she might have like just be a little less mature it's dark now right the thing the events that have unfolded have happened during the day when he was hunting he goes home it's dark and he decides to now

[01:10:09] go back out to take the guy water and it's like wait why like what is going on here yeah one of these opportunities for interpretation right yeah so what do you think do you have any so we should say that you posted a video on twitter

[01:10:25] a while ago in the context of our interpreting art episode and this guy argued that Llewellyn was actually Shagor in a fight club situation and one of his big pieces of evidence is some of the incongruities in the otherwise fairly tight story like why is he going back

[01:10:47] later I don't know if it's 8 hours later like he says it is in the video but it's a good amount of time later well it makes him think this guy is clearly almost dead and if he's gonna come why just bring a jug of water and not like

[01:11:03] other ways of medically treated treating someone who was shot in the stomach so it is very puzzling I don't buy that this means he's Shagor but his motivations for the most part are fairly they're understandable he might be in over his head but like you find 2 million dollars

[01:11:25] you're gonna probably wanna do something with that you're not gonna wanna just give it back and but this is a bizarre choice on his part that has a bunch of different consequences like kind of somewhat like good consequences for him but also bad consequences certainly bad immediate consequences

[01:11:45] for him what do you think? I don't really have a good idea. I don't either it's very hard to know what the motivation is because you can't believe that he actually thinks that he's gonna offer comfort to anybody one candidate is that he just felt guilty

[01:12:03] about what an asshole he was so he's going back out there and maybe that's right he does bring a gallon of water and he does check on the guy. Yeah I only thought of this now but if you're building a case that he's actually

[01:12:17] Anton Shagor one piece of evidence might be that Shagor explicitly is described as quixotically going back to the scene of his own crimes and so the fact that he's going back out there with how ballsy is that to go back to the scene

[01:12:35] of your own crime? It's no more ballsy than going back to the scene of somebody else's crime. I suppose so yeah but when he goes back he gets he gets found by I guess some other Mexicans looking for the money who you know they're looming over the hill

[01:12:53] in these four by four these 80s four by four trucks with the big ol' lights and a pretty scary chase scene ensues it's in the dark and he's being chased and shot at and narrowly escapes by jumping into a little river and is followed

[01:13:11] by a dog in a really cool scene I mean aside from the dog dying it's like a pretty cool looking he's just floating down from the current of the river and the dog is just swimming like a good good boy he's about to do what

[01:13:25] he's been asked to do. It's so good the way they film this like you always get a sense of where everybody is and like him diving into the water and them shooting and then the dog you know they set him free and he just is like

[01:13:41] a cannon out into the river chasing him and yeah I hate to see a pit bull die but it is fucking well done. And so the timing of when the dog is attacking him he pulls out his pistol he empties it to

[01:13:59] clear it out to make sure it will fire properly he's trying to get the clip back in and load one into the chamber as the dog is running and he times it just basically the dog jumps at him and he shoots the dog

[01:14:11] the dog still lands on him but he's killed the dog and then he runs away And the dogs to I don't want to get too into this guy's thing but the way the dog then is dead on the side of the riverbed is like

[01:14:25] is exactly the same position or close to exactly the same position as the dog they find in the later scene Sheriff and Garrett Dillahunt they find Wendell I guess his name is in this. Mr. Walcott That dog looks like almost like the same dog

[01:14:43] so if you want to play this that could be his imagined this is how that dog died instead of I just mowed them all down And yeah and for the I don't think either of us buys that theory but it's an entertaining video it's it illustrates

[01:15:03] what I like about this movie which is somebody could could play with taking a lot of different directions Okay so here we get an incredible scene Yeah Chigurh just goes to a little Texaco gas station and he's getting a snack and he's filling up his car

[01:15:21] and the guy behind the counter who must be a character actor that he's been in a bunch of things just as far as I'm concerned steals the scene just with his reactions Chigurh essentially starts questioning him about how long he's there it's chilling he's a chilling guy

[01:15:43] so the guy is getting this bad vibe a bad feeling about Chigurh and what he's up to. The way that Chigurh interrogates people somebody who was taking the words literally might have a hard time understanding people who speak like that but he's doing it just to be cold

[01:16:01] I guess. So he makes the most innocent remark about is there rain up in Dallas or something because he saw him coming from the north Chigurh just immediately takes offense to that and once he does he does that thing

[01:16:19] this is a good example will there be something else and he goes I don't know is there you know he will repeat what the person said before him it's very like and they all look just confused like what the fuck

[01:16:33] they don't know what this is they don't get this the way it's so funny like friendo like the way that he talks it's like you know Javier Bardem has a fairly heavy Spanish accent so to hear some of the phrasing come out of his accent

[01:16:49] it's kind of funny because he's kind of mocking the guy this is as much of an asshole as he is when he asks about like how they got the place and then he says well it's my wife's father's place and then he almost like cracks up so you

[01:17:03] married into it and all this is from the book too and then he's like well you know I guess that's one way of putting it and he's like I don't have a way of putting it that's the way it is and yeah it's so also masterfully shot

[01:17:15] like you're getting tiny bit closer on their faces as all this is going on they do that so well the tightening tightening of shot into face yeah it's and so here's where we get the scene where he makes him flips a coin and makes him call it

[01:17:31] he doesn't know that what he's doing for is playing for his life but some part of him knows that this is a very bad game to be playing and he has just this fear in his eyes you know Chagall says I can't call it for you it wouldn't

[01:17:45] be fair it's interesting like what like what is Chagall's rules you know exactly what is Chagall's rules and what's his philosophy that's the thing like maybe we could talk about this now because he said about the coin like did you see the year it's 1958 it's been traveling 22 years

[01:18:05] to get here that's how we know this movie is set in 1980 and he says and now it's here and I'm here I've got my hand over it and it's either like and it's either heads or tails and you have to call it like what is

[01:18:19] what is this that's animating the Chagall character as I've thought about it it's hard to find a consistent answer given his actions throughout the movie but it does seem as if he has some view that fate is a thing it exists and what's gonna happen is gonna happen

[01:18:39] and a lot of times it's bad shit that happens but he's sort of given himself up as the agent of fate like he is now almost like well there's no control over anything so like I will be the instrument of fate in this world

[01:18:57] which he gets pushback from Carla Jean at the end for this very thing what makes him toss the coin it's almost like he has this deterministic view and he says like we make choices to get where we are and those choices have led us

[01:19:13] to this place but then he also tosses the coin which could as in this case let them off the hook or could kill them what like why do that in this fatalistic I am the agent of fate kind of view the coin toss makes me feel

[01:19:33] like he is so if the universe is random then whether this guy lives or dies should be random so he's gonna let the universe decide by tossing the coin although weirdly then the guy gets to choose whether it's heads or tails and that's important

[01:19:51] to Chagour that he actually calls it it's almost like you have to play a role in what happens it's almost like Chagour is watching it unfold like he just wants to be an observer like let's see what's gonna happen now I'll flip a coin you call it

[01:20:07] what will the universe have decided between those things but that is inexorable like whatever the result of the coin is has to happen yeah it's very weird this is a very weird thing about Chagour he has this deterministic sometimes almost moralistic kind of streak where he's like

[01:20:27] you make choices and it leads you to this point you know like when he says to Woody Harrelson like if your rules he says if your rules have led to this of what use are your rules but is he talking about choices there like I

[01:20:41] it could be consistent by saying like look your rules are obviously useless they haven't really saved you and with this guy this Texaco guy is he saying that you're just letting life happen to you that's how you're here in this Texas place

[01:20:57] you used to be somewhere else and now you're here and it's your mother's maybe that's what the thing that drove him in this case I feel like we've talked about this before like this idea of somebody trying to jog people out of letting life happen

[01:21:15] to them by doing something violent yeah I definitely think there is something that he seems very bothered by that this guy lives the life that he lives yeah this politeness I give this bullshit small talk I live here I go to bed at 930 I close it dark

[01:21:33] it's like you're not an agent and I am going to now make you the ultimate agent which is so weird because he treats destiny and fate as if nobody really yeah it's a weird juxtaposition it's like he's making this guy make a choice that his life depends

[01:21:51] on because he's never done that yeah yeah the most important decision you're ever going to make even though it's like completely random it is a choice and his life depends on making the right choice yeah he's never made a choice with that much skin

[01:22:09] in the game and of course Chigurh makes those choices all the time alright you know it's funny like we haven't gotten much of the sheriff who so far I don't think we've seen him we've only heard the opening monologue and we have no context for that yeah right

[01:22:31] so Llewellyn basically tells Carl Lejean that after that whole chase scene he goes back and he's like you gotta go to Odessa and I was like why Ukraine? is this Ukraine propaganda? I'm sure they just like put it into the movie to get us to like support

[01:22:51] more military spending Odessa, Texas and we get Chigurh out at the scene of the shootout and he's there observing it with a couple of other guys who we don't really know you know we just know like these guys are higher up in the drug deal

[01:23:11] we have no clue what's going on so Chigurh pulls the VIN number from Llewellyn's truck and then just kills the other two guys for no reason I guess I was reading maybe what's pissed Chigurh off is that the main drug dealer guy who's

[01:23:33] the guy in the office has hired multiple people to retrieve his drugs and that pisses him off yeah and gave them the transponders so now he has a transponder now we don't know anything about the transponder who these people are or why he's killed them but

[01:23:53] you kind of get the sense that it's probably for tracking purposes but it's showing nothing now and I guess like seems like you have to be pretty close to it absolutely yeah it's not like a GP this is pre-GPS it's a weird device in that sense

[01:24:11] it's like you have to be within two football fields from it so it does play this interesting role sonically to build suspense you know and it's like yeah I don't even know if that technology is a real thing and so here's where we get Tommy Lee Jones

[01:24:33] for the first time, the sheriff and we see Mr. W for the first time Jared Dillon so good to see you I think the first time I saw this movie I didn't know who that was of course, I had no idea

[01:24:49] and so they're just trying to figure out what went on interesting scene you get the sense that he's a very competent sheriff by the way he's analyzing the scene he knows immediately it's a 1977 Ford and they find Lewellyn's car and he recognizes Lewellyn's car

[01:25:05] I think Gwendo also notes that these are two separate events they are good and yet throughout the whole movie always one step behind what's going on they don't accomplish anything yeah, right that's right I hadn't thought of it that way alright so we get Chagour finds Lewellyn's trailer

[01:25:29] which as you just said they would have been there but they're not and he picks up some bills which gives him some critical information a phone bill, weirdly drinks milk a very villainous thing to do to pull out the milk from the fridge and just start drinking it

[01:25:45] and then the sheriff does the same thing we get a great scene with that receptionist that he asks where Lewellyn is she won't give out any information I love this scene, she's the one person that bests Chagour like she gets the better of Chagour in the whole movie

[01:26:05] she just stares him down and will not tell him where Moss is she wins you can tell he's pissed but then he hears the flushing of a toilet and then he's like ah fuck it and he gets out, nobody else does that to Chagour that's true

[01:26:23] I like that from that we learn a little bit, he's not just an indiscriminate killer it's hard to know what will set him off and what won't you almost get the feeling I know he left because he hurt someone else there

[01:26:37] you almost get the feeling that he respected her in a way that he didn't respect the Texaco girl for sure and maybe it's because she took a stand she's like I'm sorry I'm not telling you I like it, she also looks great by the way her hairdo

[01:26:57] is perfect I used to be one of the people who complained about the Coen brothers being condescending towards their characters you see a character like that they're not being condescending I know, that's what I was trying to say I used to think the same

[01:27:13] I thought in Fargo they were being mocking and I don't think so I think they want to find interesting human beings from all kinds of walks of life and they do, and they find these amazing character actors and they give them these amazing characters to play

[01:27:29] and they are all scene stealing in their own way and at this point I feel like if I were laughing at these characters I would be the asshole you're telling on yourself although I don't say it just like you don't say steal man

[01:27:49] but you've been saying it a lot ok so Llewellyn puts his wife on a bus, I guess to Odessa, or to her mother's Sheriff when Sheriff gets to the trailer like you said they're always just one step behind Wendell when it hits him

[01:28:09] when Tommy Lee points out that the bottle of milk is still sweating he's like, oh we just missed him it's aggravating it's aggravating he keeps saying and he's like alright we're going to put out an all points bulletin or whatever he's like, find somebody who just drank milk

[01:28:29] he's like for who? we have nothing the Sheriff never sees Chigurh so he really doesn't know what to call in so Llewellyn goes in the opposite direction why does he go to Del Rio? I don't know all I could figure is that he was

[01:28:49] you see that on the phone bill that's as far as I know the only connection oh no I'm sorry I think it's because he wants to buy he wants to buy a truck from his friend Roberto who is in Del Rio and we hear Roberto's voicemail

[01:29:05] ain't you rich Roberto? this is my Mexican accent so he checks into a hotel in Del Rio and he finds a vent he's very clever this Llewellyn the procedural aspect of this movie is really fun so there's one scene when Chigurh is driving to Del Rio

[01:29:25] where he shoots the is it a pigeon? some kind of black bird and he misses I don't know what it's trying to say but obviously it's included for a reason it's a callback I think to Raising Arizona where the biker from hell shoots at little animals

[01:29:47] for no reason and there are a couple the scene at the tax association so I think it's that I don't know maybe western bad guy trope to be cruel to animals I do love that the bird gets away yeah me too and maybe it shows

[01:30:07] that Chigurh's heart really wasn't in it it doesn't seem like the kind of guy to randomly shoot a bird it's very weird to know what he is and in fact the difficulty that I have in figuring out what Chigurh's motivations are and what kind of

[01:30:23] a killer he is are kind of what feed into the thought maybe he is just the leviathan of the sheriff's imagination or some opaque new form of evil that we can't understand which I think the movie is pretty effective at suggesting that too, like he has principles

[01:30:45] but what they are might not be something that a normal person can understand yeah you can't work it out but you know the Woody Harrelson character which we meet now and I love Woody Harrelson I love that. Woody Harrelson is hired by the whatever drug

[01:31:05] who's behind the office desk the drug deal is hired this guy thinks Chigurh is a loose cannon and so he sends the next best hitman which who is very un-Chigurh like even though he's obviously a skilled killer he's like the opposite yeah he's very personable he's like empathetic

[01:31:31] you get the sense and weirdly he admits that he is not principled in the same way that Chigurh is he doesn't really follow the rules, like he is doing it for the money yeah I'm killing people for money and I'm good at that

[01:31:45] so you met Chigurh basically in a shootout with Llewellyn not with Llewellyn the Mexicans are just already there when Chigurh gets there and he kills the Mexicans he kills the Mexicans he finds Llewellyn gets spooked and so he gets the room on the other side

[01:32:05] and that's when Chigurh finds it and kills the Mexicans in a very scarface scene knocks off the three Mexicans waiting including one behind the shower curtain in a very cool scene, you see like the blood splatter on the shower curtain from behind

[01:32:21] he closes the curtain, which is funny it's almost like he wants to spare himself the sight of another dead body maybe yeah, but he's also a little bit obsessive about not getting blood on him yeah, that's true that's why he keeps removing he takes off his socks

[01:32:39] so Llewellyn gets away yeah, Llewellyn gets away hitchhikes away and goes to another hotel the Eagle Pass hotel and here's where he figures out as he's sitting on his bed in the dark wait a second, how could they have found me that easily

[01:32:55] and he digs through the briefcase and finds that there's a tracer there but can't get away in time because Chigurh has already found him and we get the really nice tense scene where Chigurh is clearly coming up to the room to look for him

[01:33:13] and he's there in the dark, cocking his gun Chigurh blows the lock off with his little compressed air cattle gun into him, it knocks right into him and he fires, probably why he didn't hit him dead on. This is a great scene this is such a good shootout

[01:33:31] just scene like him then diving out the window with the money, coming back into the hotel and then going out onto the street all of that is just so fucking good and you get like there's just cool stuff of he sees where Chigurh is with the reflection

[01:33:49] on the store window it's awesome and he injures Chigurh here but one thing in this scene that I want to ask you as he's driving, trying to get away from Chigurh this is what really makes Chigurh seem like he has superpowers Chigurh is literally shooting sniper level

[01:34:07] shots into the car as it's riding away which just doesn't seem like he had a weapon that could even do that he's carrying around a shotgun with a silencer on it that's blasting pellets but he's just knocking all these bullets, kills the driver of the car instantly

[01:34:27] he gets into the car, he's like I ain't gonna hurt you I need you to drive me on out of here and the guy's looking at him like what the fuck is going on and his head is like gets blown off by this bullet

[01:34:37] and then it's like that choo choo choo you're right, it has this feeling this is what I mean when I it seems soulless and precise it's got like this power there's something cold about it the sound of it, the precision of it

[01:34:57] I don't know, I guess it was a shotgun before, presumably he could also have a rifle though we don't, all we see him is with that big old silenced shotgun shotgun it does make me think that there is something to the like actually all of the violence

[01:35:15] that is being committed is being committed by multiple people like drug dealers and he's personifying the evil with Chagour so maybe there were other, it really felt to me like there was somebody else shooting but it's supposed to be Chagour maybe he's just a badass

[01:35:31] and Chagour is also really hurt at this point as we'll see so the fact that he can still get off these perfect shots he doesn't end up getting them but yeah, that's right that's totally fair, if you wanted to run that idea that he's a kind of umbrella

[01:35:51] character for all these other characters. And he is almost Mexican he's a Spaniard although I don't get the sense that the evil is only the Mexicans it's, yeah it's the world it's the world right now it's the kids with green hair and bones through their noses

[01:36:13] which is like, wait, who does that? like, from the Flintstones yeah so yeah, Chagour is hurt and we see him creating a diversion to go in and get some pain meds he's like, yeah he just so overdoes it but so calculating he wants to steal

[01:36:33] painkillers to help himself he's gonna basically clean the big ol' wound that he has but in order to do it he basically makes a Molotov cocktail out of a car, blows it up and with the diversion goes and steals the lidocaine

[01:36:47] and I couldn't tell if the other one if he was shooting himself up with morphine after the lidocaine we've both had that fantasy blowing up a car, walking into a pharmacy taking whatever the fuck we want I mean by any means necessary

[01:37:05] but I love the way that's shot because you get a shot from inside the pharmacy at him and it's just a normal pharmacy and then all of a sudden behind him the car explodes he does not hesitate, he does not break stride, like everybody starts

[01:37:19] running out, what the fuck's going on it goes right into the... It's almost styled like the badasses in an action movie who don't turn around for explosions except for he's a weird looking guy who's limping over to get some lidocaine and his little limp

[01:37:35] what a good performance here we also get the sort of psychopath scenes where he is cleaning himself and almost operating on himself with very little emotional display it's also very body horror-ish like it's really graphic in terms of what it is when he dumps the alcohol onto his...

[01:38:03] He's irrigating his wound and you just see There's a few things like that in the movie, it has a kind of David Lynch body horror element, Flammenberg This whole sequence is just phenomenal There's so many great long scenes set pieces, but to go right from the Eagle Hotel

[01:38:25] shootout into this is pretty awesome It's awesome. In the meantime Llewellyn has actually gotten himself to the Mexican border because he's shot through the gut looks like and he... It just shows how different things were in 1980 He just basically gets himself to Mexico by walking across the border

[01:38:49] If you want to make this prejudiced anti-Mexican the border guard for Mexico is napping as he walks through and then wakes up as he crosses and he's like... To be fair, it was the middle of the night We also get the scene where he basically pays three

[01:39:13] It goes right into the mariachi Sleeping, napping Mexican border guard and then to him waking up to a mariachi band singing to him on the corner So absurd Very absurd Waking up. It's clearly very early in the morning and a mariachi band is just playing for him

[01:39:35] It's not clear It's hard to take some of these things literally in that sense Why would they just... It's like 7 in the morning. Why are they even there? It's not a good time for making money as a mariachi band and they're just leaning over him on the sidewalk

[01:39:55] I wonder what the words for that are Did you look that up? No, I wasn't paying enough attention I bet there's some significance to what they're singing Now we get Woody Harrelson's character I forget the name Carson Wells In the hospital He's tracked Lewellyn to the hospital

[01:40:19] and he basically tells him about Chagour and why he should be worried and Lewellyn just can't get past the name He calls him Sugar But also this is an interesting scene in terms of Moss to this point Yeah, he's almost gotten himself killed multiple times

[01:40:37] He seems like he's kind of maybe equal to this task given that he's still alive right now and Carson Wells is like No, you don't know what you're dealing with here Do you think he might be on his way to Odessa? And he's like Why Odessa?

[01:40:55] He's like, oh man, you're in over your head You're not cut out for this You don't know what you're facing here And this is where he also says He's not like you. He's not even like me But I think there is this kind of waffling

[01:41:07] about Moss, whether he's really competent and some of the tracking stuff that he does and certainly he gets himself out of a lot of scrapes but you also get the sense that okay, this is something like the sheriff he's never seen before Right, he has no idea

[01:41:25] He has no conception of it Greed is a bit of a theme here like in some of the other Coen Brothers noir movies where he just at some point he can't let go of the idea of having those. Those two million dollars are his now. There's nothing

[01:41:45] that's going to stop him and not even the threat from Woody or the information that this guy is a monster And that he might kill Carla Jean He might kill Carla Jean And you get a couple of these the three kids that he runs into

[01:42:01] and one of them pays for a shirt One of them starts asking for more money for the beer You see the kids at the end sort of fighting over who's going to get the, should they split the money There is that, a little bit of a theme

[01:42:15] of greed being the downfall of humans We're behind all of this and there's just different levels of it because the kids at the end are mostly not greedy but then all of a sudden once they have Once they have the hundred dollars They didn't ask for it

[01:42:33] But once they have it They were trying to not Same with Lou Owen Once he had the money It's like, ok now I can't give it up That's the original sin Oh we forgot to say that he threw the money over on the riverbank Right on the border

[01:42:55] But Woody Harrelson smart enough to figure out He probably would have leaned on a pole if he was going to throw it So I think he kind of found it We don't know if he accepted the deal that Carson Wells is offering him Because Carson Wells is saying

[01:43:11] the only way I'm going to protect you and your wife is if you give me the money It cuts there before we know but he is looking for it on the river Maybe he just deduced that I think I could go either way

[01:43:27] Oh that's right, no that makes a lot more sense that he might have told him because he's desperate Because it seems again almost impossible that he would know where to look That's like a very specific place that all of a sudden he's looking Except that he knows

[01:43:43] that he almost got killed right across the river and now he's here So it also could be that he figured it out on his own So Woody has told him, look this guy can find you and that's exactly what happens to Woody, like Chagour finds him

[01:43:57] They have a little philosophical discussion One of my favorite lines here is when Chagour has found him and he's sitting right across from him Woody has to know that this is his last conversation and he's trying to haggle and Chagour says

[01:44:15] you should admit your situation, there would be more dignity in it And I think Woody Harrelson agrees but then also wants to live and I think that's the difference Like Chagour will not be very happy to risk his life for whatever principle of dignity he's upholding here

[01:44:35] Whereas Woody Harrelson is like, no you're right it would be more honorable But I have to take like the one in a 10,000 chance It's a little pathetic that he offers him like $14,000 from an ATM It really is sad But I think he knows there's virtually no chance

[01:44:55] but virtually no chance is better than no chance And we get kind of again, even though this is like a full on this is your last conversation He just gets shot It's not an expect, like the phone starts ringing and boom, like that's it

[01:45:11] And it turns out to be Llewellyn on the phone Here's where he says you're going to bring me the money He doesn't even want to look for the money that would be beneath him No, he's got to bring it to me Because of the inconvenience that he's caused

[01:45:25] He says to him like if you do that I will spare Carla Jean Otherwise she's accountable Same as you I don't know if you care about that but that's the best deal you're going to get I won't tell you you can save yourself because you can't

[01:45:41] So he gives Moss now the chance He's being sincere here I think he 100% would not kill Carla Jean if he did it but Moss doesn't So this is a big choice This is one of those life or death choices for Moss

[01:45:57] but it's not life or death for him It's life or death for Carla Jean Yeah, and I can't blame Llewellyn for not believing him Like why would you believe Why would you take the word of somebody who's just like some fucking killer criminal

[01:46:11] But he should have listened to what Woody was saying He has principles and if he had listened to that In between we know we've seen the sheriff has asked Carla Jean to tell him where Llewellyn is He says like look I'm your only chance here

[01:46:27] I can help you Just tell me where Llewellyn is And here's where he tells her a story about the guy who's killing a steer and wrestling with it and this sort of crazy story about trying to shoot the steer turns out not to be dead

[01:46:43] and he starts going crazy bucking around and all he can do is try to shoot him in the head the bullet ricochets and hits him and then at the very end he says that wouldn't happen nowadays Nowadays they have all kinds of modern ways of killing

[01:46:57] and he describes the exact gun and that's what makes me think again that he's created chagour in his head and in his head and that's what's given him this modern way of killing More efficient way of killing It's not like the romantic I'm wrestling a steer

[01:47:15] like man versus beast This is a much colder way It's a cold, yeah I think that's totally right And then it's funny because they will undercut anything Like later when Carla Jean calls the sheriff and he says that story you said about Charlie whatever and he's like who?

[01:47:39] It's kind of implied that maybe he made that up Yeah, right. No, totally Yeah, he was trying to make a point and he just created a parable in his head Right But I think that's totally true That's a really good point

[01:47:53] that it's this new modern way of killing We get an interesting scene where the sheriff is talking to Wendell and he tells the story about the old people who were tortured to get their checks Their social security checks and they're just like tortured and killed

[01:48:11] and buried out back and people didn't even notice So he says the only reason they noticed is because an old man run from the premises wearing only a dog collar Yeah, and Wendell gives a nervous laugh That's alright. I laugh myself sometimes

[01:48:29] Ain't a whole lot else you can do So this comes from one of those italicized monologues separate from the narration of the action of the book But it's word for word like the same description except that it's just you hearing it from the sheriff

[01:48:49] So he says what it took was the guy with the dog collar and then says that's alright, I laughed myself when I read it So he's saying that to the reader Right, interesting You do kind of laugh when you read it, you know like that it's

[01:49:07] but this time instead of it being Wendell it's us and it's very effective I love Tommy Lee Jones' delivery of it too because he's not laughing at all but he's forgiving us for laughing but he's just horrified So we get Llewellyn

[01:49:21] crossing the border again, getting back into the US going to buy some clothes because he's basically just in his hospital clothes These are weird scenes with him and the boot guy I know, I kind of like them and I don't know why They seem significant

[01:49:35] So he calls Carly Jean and says meet me in El Paso, I'm going to give you the money send you away and then I'm going to deal with this guy And there are these weird series of scenes with the mother I got the cancer! Right

[01:49:52] Ah, you don't want to know how many people I know in El Paso This many people It's funny because all this is setting up for going to El Paso and the Mexicans are on their trail too and Shagur and it's all converging on

[01:50:08] what's called the Desert Inn in El Paso or something And then we just see the tail end of it and this is also in the book he's already dead It's great I love it It's jarring, it's anticlimactic There is part of

[01:50:26] you, if you watch the movie in a certain way Llewellyn is your protagonist and it's disheartening the way that they kill him off screen, completely off screen You know that woman that's hitting on him she says something like when she's like what are you looking at

[01:50:46] he's like I'm looking to see what's coming and she says no one sees that And then he's just dead in the hotel room, like right in the door and we get the sheriff on the scene Just got there, just a little too late He literally sees people shooting

[01:51:00] out of the hotel but Moss is already dead by then as he pulls up It's this big shootout and we don't see any of it We get a little shot of Moss dead and then that's the last we see of Moss That's it There was no farewell

[01:51:20] to Moss It's a new kind of movie killing Yeah I'm so confused It happens behind closed doors off screen I wanted to ask you in this scene, there's a scene before this where Chigurh goes and confronts the big boss man behind the office and he kills him basically

[01:51:42] mad that he gave the Mexicans also the transceiver and then he talks to the accountant and says Did you see me? He's like, are you going to kill me? And then it cuts Are we to believe that he just spared the life? I assume Very strange

[01:52:00] I took this as another Have some fun with this one Am I a ghost? Because also in close proximity of this scene the sheriff says Is he real to the El Paso guy? Or is he a ghost? There's a lot of ghost-like features of Chigurh

[01:52:20] If I had to guess emotionally I feel like emotionally Chigurh is not in the mood to kill him As you said, there's a scene with the sheriff the local sheriff that Tommy Lee Jones is talking to where this is where they talk about

[01:52:36] green hair, bones in their noses what's with this new generation? And this is also where he says Can you believe it? He just strolls right back into a crime scene How do you defend against that? It's like, you kind of assume your villains are rational

[01:52:52] Yeah, and if you can't If you can't What the hell? How are you supposed to do your job? Now this is a big scene that I want to ask you about When the sheriff This makes the sheriff go back to the crime scene When he goes in there

[01:53:08] we get a shot of Chigurh in the shadows Yeah, like in a closet Yeah, and then he opens the door with his gun pulled and nothing Yeah, he sits down on the bed So, was Chigurh in the room? I feel like this is

[01:53:26] once again a little sort of like He went into that room looking for the evil The big bad The evil was in that room But maybe he wasn't really there Yeah It doesn't make sense Like a few things don't make sense

[01:53:44] That he went there at all doesn't make sense Because there's nothing for him to really learn Yeah, right From the crime scene And that Chigurh wouldn't just shoot him if he was really in the room But he would suffer the indignity of crawling through a vent I think

[01:54:02] like this is a dream maybe triggered by the conversation about him going back I think it's also like him just reckoning with the fact that he doesn't want him He doesn't want to confront this guy So, like even though he is there

[01:54:20] he's very relieved to see the vent open and so maybe it's a little bit of okay, I gotta retire because Even when he was joking about hiding You remember he hides behind you to the deputy He really is, I think deeply distressed at confronting the evil

[01:54:38] And maybe he's imagining Chigurh waiting in the shadows for him It's just a powerful image in his mind There's one thing in the book that is not part of the movie at all which you get a backstory of him being in sorry, World War II

[01:54:54] and he got a bronze star for essentially like ditching his unit and he has never lived that down and one of the whole reasons he wanted to do this job is to try to make up for it and protecting Moss was going to be one way of

[01:55:12] maybe making up He's definitely trying to be a hero, yeah And he gives up on that too This is very much Cormac McCarthy It's so spare and bleak even though there's a lot of kind of beauty to it but ultimately it's like the evil is

[01:55:32] too much and it's too soulless to really confront unless you're... yeah I think he his arc is admitting to himself that he can't he's not up for this, he's overmatched In fact he goes to his uncle Ellis and we get a great scene there where he's basically

[01:55:54] telling him, he's like, why are you retiring? and he's like, basically, I can't do this anymore I'm overmatched and he says, I always thought when I was old God would come into my life and he's sort of feeling sorry for himself and I like, Ellis is basically like

[01:56:08] shut the fuck up like this isn't all about you, kind of He kind of tries to snap him back tells him it's vanity to think these things Yeah, he says, ain't nothing new, this country's hard on people, they ain't waiting on you that's vanity

[01:56:26] but I do think it's interesting the thing about God it's like he's also coming to realize that there's no God and that connects to Shagor to some degree it's almost like Shagor views himself as an agent of a godless universe yeah the deterministic fate somehow

[01:56:50] with a bit of chance just blind chance and you know, I can't help but think that this is a I've used the words Leviathan or Behemoth before this is his monster his version of the Job story is not a theodicy, he's not questioning God

[01:57:10] he's now questioning just this cold universe that could have created such a monster yeah, and he just doesn't feel God's presence though so he retires and he has a great wife we get the sense but it's a sense of failure yeah, which is not your typical protagonist, right?

[01:57:36] his arc isn't one of redemption in the end he doesn't end up saving the day by getting there just in time and proving that he was still up for the task he gets none of that even if he dies in the process with Llewellyn Moss this is revisionist

[01:57:54] in a way that Unforgiven is not right? he does at least kill the Gene Hackman at the end of Unforgiven even if he loses his soul in the process but in this, there's just no closure that's one of the things I think that really makes it distinctive

[01:58:14] yeah, absolutely we also, by the way we get the scene where Carla Jean has buried her mom who died from the cancer, presumably and Chagour is waiting at the house for her when she gets back and he's just sitting on the sofa and he says that Llewellyn gave

[01:58:32] her up, basically. He had a chance to save you but he chose the money over you and she doesn't want to believe it, she says no, not like that but he makes her do the, call the coin flip and her response I think is just the response

[01:58:46] of sanity, she says no but it's not like why are you making me do this? I'm not gonna call it, like it's not, it's you who's making the choice to kill me, it's not the coin she's fighting against and it's like one way of dealing with

[01:58:58] fate, it's to insist that no matter what you know, there is still some degree of control over our fates in this universe and she's not gonna play the game she's calling him out on his shit it's like, no, don't make it seem like the coin

[01:59:16] is to blame here, you're making this choice, you're doing it and it throws him off briefly that she does that, you know? In the book she does end up calling, they have the same conversation but she does end up calling it and it's not, it turns

[01:59:30] out to be she was wrong but I like the way they do it in the movie because she won't do it, she's taking a stand and this is something that separates her from some of his other victims even though she says some of the same

[01:59:44] things like, you don't have to do this she also is principled enough not to call the coin, although I guess it does she had a 50% chance of winning I know, I mean it's weird, it's pride it's pride and it's almost like and maybe it's because

[02:00:02] she just buried her mom and she just found out that maybe her husband sold her out maybe she's a little bit like, fuck it but I also think she wants him to take responsibility, she's not gonna let him spin the narrative that it was

[02:00:18] the coin and not him that's doing it and she's willing to sacrifice whatever chance she had to live She says, I ain't gonna call it, the coin didn't have no say, the coin don't have no say, it's just you, and he says, I got here

[02:00:32] the same way the coin did. So basically he's trying to absolve himself of the choice too, like he views himself as maybe a mechanistic force Yeah, yeah of a cold bleak in a different universe And then we get the car accident which I think you know, so Chigurh

[02:00:52] Yeah, Chigurh escapes and gets somebody runs a red light or he's not paying attention because he's looking at the kids and driving riding their bikes behind him and he gets t-boned by a station wagon and he's not even mad, like he never gets mad

[02:01:10] I feel like he's just like this is just, in a very pragmatic way, I have to deal with the fact that my bone is sticking out of my arm The kids of course are horrified by this, they're like, mister your bone is sticking out of

[02:01:22] your arm. But he's just like eh, give you some money, give me your shirt, I'll tie it up and I'll walk away This is the admirable part of Chigurh He just rolls with whatever is happening He does and he tells the kids you didn't see me

[02:01:38] Again, this idea of like is he real or is he not because that's the last we see of Chigurh, we don't know what happened to him He's walking, yeah, he walks away and that's the last we see and there's like a nice little crossfade cut

[02:01:54] to the sheriff at the table where he ends the movie by telling his wife about two dreams that he had Which, yeah I don't know, do you have any thoughts about the dreams? His dad Yeah, he dreams about his dad carrying fire Yeah, weirdly

[02:02:15] I don't have that many thoughts about it I was gonna say the same In some way, everything about this movie is anti-climax The dreams are as well You don't know enough about his relationship with his dad for that to be meaningful

[02:02:33] Yeah, it's unclear what it's trying to say He even admits like dreams are only interesting to the people who had them I feel like it's just wistfulness that maybe if I could be, because he even says in the dream we're in the olden times

[02:02:47] Like if I could be back then you know, maybe things would be different And maybe the torch that his father is carrying him will be some sort of wisdom He goes on ahead and he says, you know I'm gonna go then and get the fire from him

[02:03:01] But it's the least interesting. I know that it's almost like cries out to be interpreted but it is, I think, the least interesting thing to interpret And the movie just ends there. And for the first time you see this, like the first time you see

[02:03:17] the end of the shootout, I was like does this theater, like do they have the whole movie? And then when this ends They forget to play to the next reel Yeah, you know I remember really liking this movie the first time I saw it, but

[02:03:33] I didn't know what to make of those The way this just wraps up is so It had been kind of a procedural cat and mouse with some philosophical overtones Up until about three quarters of the way in, and then it's just you know, they threw out

[02:03:53] the rule book And you know, this is where not having music is especially jarring because usually you have some musical cue that this is wrapping up and we don't have that at all I like that, so here's what I like about Ending with the Dreams

[02:04:11] It gives a certain vibe to the whole thing, like this, it's an end cap of like I don't know just mystical isn't the right word, but dreaminess I like that it ends on that and describing a dream is always a little bit weird

[02:04:33] You obviously can't get into the world of whatever the person was seeing and he's trying to give us that It adds like a touch of not surrealism, but something like that to leave you with And also gives you the sense maybe this is more

[02:04:51] about him than you thought Totally, the first time I saw it I didn't The sheriff wasn't the protagonist for me Rightly so We get a lot from Masa's point of view with just intermittent things of the sheriff who is an epiphenomenon in this movie, like he gets

[02:05:11] nothing, he accomplishes nothing Yeah that's a good way to put it Epiphenomenal sheriff He's like That's also why he quits Parallelism It doesn't matter if I'm here or not He is like the Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense It kind of closes with a real questioning I guess

[02:05:37] of what's real and what's not even though I've never been attracted to any kind of even an interpretation like Chagor isn't real I think it's undeniable that there are so many openings for that to be considered as a possibility And this is why I like

[02:05:55] bringing up The Sixth Sense it's a good comparison In The Sixth Sense the mystery is that there are rules When you go back and look at the movie you can tell that nobody but the kid sees Bruce Willis Sorry, spoilers And that matters

[02:06:11] Here Chagor clearly has to play a causal role in the scenes as we see them So in some sense he's real and true They're creating a movie where he might be more symbolic than anything that they don't have to answer the question really whether he's real or not

[02:06:29] It suffices that he is both this huge symbol of whatever it is that the sheriff is feeling about modern evil rightly or wrongly and also a pretty cool character in a movie where there's action scenes It's perfectly pitched It's not full on surreal at all

[02:06:51] In fact, it gets pretty naturalistic You could get high and it might feel that way I think there's a chance that if you watched the movie that way you might get into that vibe But as someone who has watched the movie that way I think there are certain

[02:07:05] scenes like at the end of the shootout with his reflection and there are certain lines that give this kind of surreal But I think the way it's shot The only shaky cam is at the end when he goes to see the hotel, the aftermath of the hotel

[02:07:21] in El Paso That's the only Everything else is shot so kind of traditionally Straightforward, yeah And you could the camera movement when they're moving in on the face in his conversation with Ellis It's so slow to the point of imperceptible until you realize

[02:07:45] his face is much more in the frame than it was They do that in a bunch of scenes, really effective And the Coen brothers can do surreal At a certain point in that movie you get the sense you're breaking from reality but it's shot that way

[02:08:01] in a way that I don't think this movie ever is I do think they felt their goal was to put onto screen the tone and spirit of the novel And that's like the huge success of it I think they did that

[02:08:17] They don't want to leave any more questions than the novel leaves or any fewer, I think No, I think that's right. It's shown a talent of translating that onto the screen It makes me want to see them do that more Yeah, I think they only did it

[02:08:31] one other time in True Grit which is also a really faithful adaptation of the novel And that one I read the novel first and was just shocked at how given that there's another movie of True Grit that doesn't do that I think they can

[02:08:51] do that when they want to It's funny that in all their filmography, I think it's pretty much just those two I'll just say the last thing I want to say really is Tommy Lee Jones' performance here is to me, phenomenal in a way that's so understated

[02:09:09] but his face at the end. I don't care what he's saying about the dreams as much as I care how he's expressing himself It's just so good And then I woke up That's the last time I agree. He's great. Javier Bardem is awesome Down the line

[02:09:29] The Mexican in the suit He's a Mexican, he's a Mexican in the suit They're like, aside from maybe Scorsese, if you just look at the quantity of A movies that they've done, it's freaking unbelievable It's incredible A world where the Coen brothers never made movies

[02:09:49] is a world that I don't want to live in That's the soulless Alright, well we talked forever about this And I woke up