That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
– Those dying generations – at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
– William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”
One thing I could never stand was to see a filthy, dirty old drunkie, howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blurp blurp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking, rotten guts. I could never stand to see anyone like that, whatever his age might be, but more especially when he was real old like this one was.
– A Clockwork Orange
Comparing A Clockwork Orange to No Country for Old Men takes no more effort than focusing a pair of binoculars. We have two fuzzy images on either side of us: Burgess’s dystopian future, as viewed through the past (1962), and McCarthy’s blood-soaked past (1980), as viewed in a contemporary novel (2005). But dialing the focus bit by bit until the image adjusts, we see that we’re actually examining the same time period from two different perspectives. The 3-D effect seen in binoculars comes, as with human eyes, from overlaying two images from different angles. Thus, too, does examining this chaotic time from two different viewpoints give us clarity.
(I make reference to Burgess and McCarthy’s visions throughout, even though I’ll be focusing primarily on the films – Kubrick’s and the Coens’ adaptations, respectively. Most critics consider these movies to be unusually faithful to their source material, however, and in any case they’ve reached a wider audience)
Real Horrorshow
A Clockwork Orange begins with one of the most sinister opening shots ever conceived: the camera boring straight into Malcolm McDowell’s unsympathetic leer. As Alex, the leader of a pack of teenage hoodlums, he’s getting jacked up on drug-laced milk (m-plus or molokko) before sauntering off into the night to savagely beat strangers into unconsciousness.
A bit of the ol' ultraviolence.
The gang’s first victim is a drunk old Irishman, whose rendition of “Molly Malone” they applaud sarcastically before kicking him in the guts. Next they come across a rival gang raping a girl in an abandoned theater. The girl escapes in the ensuing melee, and we (the audience) get a bit of hope. The girl got away without being raped! Sure, Alex and his droogs are callous thugs, but perhaps they share one or two of our gentler liberal sympathies.
Then they drive out into the country, break into a writer’s house, cripple him with beatings and rape his wife. Ah. Right.
As a capstone on the evening, Alex returns to the decaying block of flats where he lives with his parents. Getting ready for bed, he pops in a micro-cassette and cranks up a bit of the ol’ Ludwig Van: 9th Symphony, 4th movement.
Alex deLarge does not draw much sympathy. He rapes and assaults. He destroys things just to hear the crash. He beats and terrorizes his so-called friends. And he lies to his parents. But he likes Beethoven. Did Burgess throw that last bit in just to be contrary? Or does it all spring from the same source?
Alex, we must remember, is young. Immediately after sleeping off last night’s ultraviolence, the next person he speaks to is his corrections/truancy officer, Mr. Deltoid. Alex is young enough that he must still account to institutions – his school, his parents – for his time. He has no sense of the consequences of his actions: he reacts with disbelief when told that he’s accidentally murdered a woman and is now due for a long stretch in prison. Alex is a boy.
To be a male adolescent is to be overwhelmed with a sense of power. You’re young, healthy, agile and horny pretty much from the moment you wake up until just after going to bed. Even those of us who suffered crippling self-doubt in adolescence (most of us, right? I’ll confess, I did) at least fantasized about power. Even if we didn’t think we were the cocks of the walk, we wanted to be. The desire to exert yourself runs strong.
Alex, the most delinquent of juvenile delinquents, respects power more than anything else. He recoils from evidence of weakness, like the old age and genteel manners of his victims. But he quashes his ultraviolent ways without a hiccup the second he steps into prison. He never talks back to his guards, beats up the other prisoners or makes wise in the chapel. Why? Because in prison, the institution has the power. Alex respects that. Alex has a sixth sense for where the power lies in a given scenario: observe how instinctively he beats up Dim and Georgie in order to retain control of the gang. He wants power – raw, virile, ceaseless power.
Adolescence is when we start forming our opinions of how the world Should Be. Alex may look like a shiftless thug, but he actually has a clear and rigid code of ethics: might makes right. The strong should subjugate the weak. Note how, after assaulting Dim and Georgie to get them back in line, he goes on to support their original plan to rob the health farm. Note how his reaction to the gang’s first victim – the drunk Irishman – is disgust at the man’s age and incomprehensibility. Note how quickly he becomes subservient around Mr. Deltoid, his parents and the officers in prison: he’s no longer the strong one, so he ducks his head and knows his place.
Finally, note Alex’s passion for Beethoven. Alex likes classical music, sure, but it’s not gentle chamber pieces: it’s the power and bombast of the Ludwig Van. He likes Beethoven’s 9th, not Haydn’s 101st.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsFvnL7e1cE
The Punishment Element
So we have an adolescent like Alex who has started forming his opinions of right and wrong. These opinions are, frankly, monstrous. How do the institutions of society deal with such a beast?
Educating him should be the first call, but education doesn’t seem to work. Alex lies his way out of going to school, complaining of a “pain in the gulliver.” His parents don’t seem convinced, but they’re powerless to stop him: his mother, hearing of his staying abed, deflates and returns to breakfast. The truancy officer, Mr. Deltoid, would rather lord his power over Alex, wheedling and assaulting him by turns. We never get a sense of what the schools of London look like but, given the condition of other public buildings of the time, it can’t be that effective.
Imprisoning him is the next step. But Alex has no problem insinuating himself into the prison power structure, becoming an aide to the chaplain. He’s able to game the system. He knows when to stay quiet and when to speak out, which he does at just the right moment to nab himself a ticket to the Ludovico Technique. Furthermore, we hear a constant refrain through the last half of the film on how British prisons are failing. They’re overcrowded; they’re breeding grounds for brutality; if the current Government doesn’t do something about them they’ll lose the next election; etc. So prison isn’t doing it either.
Does the social order have any solution for a terror like Alex? Just one: the Ludovico Technique, a form of torture which relies on forcing an association between evil acts (violence, rape, voting for Nazis) and a near-death illness. Alex is repeatedly brought to the point of nausea and despair with his eyes pried open until he’s rendered unable to attempt violence without collapsing, helpless. Society has responded to Alex’s monstrosity with a monstrosity of its own.
If the criminal justice system can’t handle a thug like Alex except by rewriting his psyche through torture – the same thing Alex does to his victims, in other words – it has no solution at all. The institution cannot handle a boy like him.
What sort of nightmare future is this, where torturing prisoners becomes acceptable?
Carrying Fire in a Horn
No Country For Old Men isn’t really about Anton Chigurh. He’s the most dynamic, vivid and quotable character in the whole movie, to be sure. He moves with a mountain lion’s terrifying coolness. But he’s not a real person. He’s no more real than John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, or Mr. Sunday in The Man Who Was Thursday, or Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia. He’s a philosophy made flesh. Like all of Cormac McCarthy’s better stories – and most of the Coen Brothers’ better movies – No Country For Old Men is about the futility of human planning in the face of inevitable death. It’s just that, in this movie, Javier Bardem is the Face of Inevitable Death.
No Country For Old Men‘s ghost ship moment comes in the very last frame when (SPOILER ALERT) Sheriff Bell realizes that, by having lived to an older age than his father, he has aged past the point where he can effect change in the world.
Sheriff Bell and Anton Chigurh never share the screen in this movie. They never interact. The closest they come is when Sheriff Bell finds evidence of Chigurh’s presence: the shootout in the desert gulch. The shot-out doorknob in Llewellyn Moss’s trailer. The motel where Moss breathed his last. Bell is not, and cannot be, an agent of change. He can only show up after the fact, report on what he’s found, and drive away shaking his head.
Throughout the movie, Sheriff Bell shares his observations about the baffling state of the modern era (“modern,” remember, being Texas in 1980). He reads in the newspaper about a couple that would rent out rooms to seniors, kill them, then fraudulently collect their Social Security checks. But they would torture the seniors first. Later, he kvetches with a fellow sheriff over the insensibility of drug-related violence. They complain about kids with green hair and piercings who no longer say “sir” and “ma’am.” Really? That’s what the problem is?
He’d Have To Put His Soul at Hazard
Who are the “kids” in this movie?
Llewellyn Moss, the retired welder who finds the two million in drug money, is younger than Sheriff Bell by several decades. While not quite a kid, he retains the athletic optimism of youth. He slaps away Col. Wells’ offer of aid while laying up, bleeding and exhausted, in a Mexican hospital – even once Wells lays out the danger Moss is in. He thinks he can evade not just the law (in the person of Sheriff Bell), but a gang of drug-running Mexicans and an unusually persistent assassin. That’s action movie logic, and Llewellyn Moss doesn’t live in an action movie.
Looking badass won't save you.
Moss’s common-law wife, Carla Jean, treats Sheriff Bell’s offers of aid with skepticism. “They won’t stop,” Bell warns her. She counters: “He won’t, neither.” Bell’s best effort is to tell her a story of questionable provenance, regarding a cattle man and an unfortunate injury, and hope that she gets the drift. She calls Bell in on her own accord, but only after the situation has grown desperate.
We do meet two sets of actual children in the movie. Moss meets a trio of partying college kids as he crosses the border into Mexico and Chigurh meets a pair of biking pre-teens after his car accident in Odessa. In both cases the men, grievously injured, buy an article of clothing off the children (a jacket in Moss’s case; a shirt for Chigurh). The kids both express concern over the state of the men, but eventually fall to bickering over the money. It’s clear that these men are criminals: who crosses the Mexican border on foot while bleeding profusely? who flees the scene of a car accident, telling the witnesses, “you never saw me”? But it doesn’t take much money to lure these children in as accomplices.
Of What Use Was The Rule?
Both No Country For Old Men and A Clockwork Orange are about the inability of social institutions to deal with the violence of youth.
The source of that violence springs from different sources, depending on which film you’re watching. Alex’s violence in A Clockwork Orange comes from his deep, weird views on beauty. He hates weakness and corruption; he loves power and vitality. He will do whatever it takes to inflict those views on the world, remaking the world in his image and likeness. His is the exuberance of youth without the constraint of law.
The violence of the various youth in No Country For Old Men – the Mexican gangs, the accommodating teenagers and Llewellyn Moss – comes from something simpler: a lust for gold. Moss could have avoided the trouble by leaving the satchel full of money where it lay. He could have saved his wife by leaving the money where the Mexicans, or Chigurh, could find it. But he didn’t. The teenagers who find Moss and Chigurh in their injuries go from compassionate to sickly curious to openly covetous once money enters the picture. Wealth, and its corrupting effects, free the youth of Texas from social order.
The criminal justice system cannot deal with the children in either case. The English prisons resort to psychological torture, seeing Alex’s inhumanity and raising it in turn. In Texas, meanwhile, Sheriff Bell throws his hands in the air. He won’t strap on his gun to go hunting Chigurh in the night; he won’t chase Moss down if Moss refuses to come in. Tommy Lee Jones, as Sheriff Bell, projects nothing throughout the film except a state of tired reluctance: a weary chuckle that lacks even the venom to be called ‘cynical.’
The system of justice – the institution of law and order – aims to impose sense on a chaotic world. But different generations operate on different logic. “The virtues of war are the virtues of young men,” observed Prince Feisal in Lawrence of Arabia. “The vices of peace are the vices of old men.” The old cannot make sense of the young, despite having once been young themselves. The young sell out, becoming cops (like Dim and Georgie in A Clockwork Orange) or hired guns for the men in suits (like Col. Wells in No Country for Old Men). Then they turn old and forget the ambition and lust of youth.
Social institutions should be shaping the youth of today into the old men of tomorrow. What do children look to when they don’t have guidance? Cheap thrills. Easy money. Rough violence. Casual sex. Beethoven.
The senselessness of the young means they live in another country from the old, and can only be made to fit in by reassembling them like clockwork.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
– William Butler Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”