If you take “No Country for Old Men” as a simple crime drama film, we can draw several useful lessons from it as follows:
1. You can’t be a thief. Return to the scene of the crime will lead to endless trouble;
2, after getting a large amount of property is best to check thoroughly. Toxic goods swallowed will kill you;
3, do not think you are very smart. Even if they used to be smart, they may not always be smart enough to outwit their opponents;
4, do not sit facing the door end when waiting for the enemy. So that although it looks very powerful, but also very easy to hang up;;
5、Meeting strangers is risky, talk with caution. Especially when he touches a coin to give you a guess, do not say “Head”. There are no heads on the Renminbi.
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The story takes place in 1980 – “This coin was born in 1958 and has traveled 22 years to get here.”
Some people say it’s depressing to watch this film. Say, the values in it are very distorted: in a great country like the United States, both democracy and the rule of law, the bad guys run amok, not bad enough to end up all by the worst people, incidentally, also killed in action a lot of unrelated people. The only one is considered a good guy role of the old police officer, also seems to be breathless, light will shake their heads at the newspaper social news, let go of the first evil, retired in disgrace. Finally the killer was killed in a car accident – the righteous audience thought the director could not stand to see, on behalf of the “wrath of God” – but unexpectedly Xiao Qiang students actually climbed out of the car again, emergency self-help, escaped. There is no justice!
Of course, “there is no justice!” Such an exclamation, in fact, from the understanding of the film has been half a step closer. The Coen brothers are not to present such a “no sense” world view? In the film, the old police officer lamented, “When I was old, I thought God would guide my way, but he didn’t.”
Personally, I think that if the psychopathic killer in the film is not seen as a specific character, but as a symbol, perhaps the interpretation of the film will become easier. A symbol of what? Gloom. Reticent. Quick on his feet. Always able to take out the opponent he sees. Has his own unique principles. –well, that’s right, “death”. The Death Shadow will always be following you, and doesn’t even need a wireless transmitter to guide it to you with any accuracy. Running away doesn’t work. Talking terms doesn’t work. Pleading doesn’t work. Billions of human beings have billions of different-colored lives, but in the end they all come to him – oh, not God, not Marx, but Death.
Most people realize at the moment of death that what they were clinging to before is useless, including money, including “the values you have always held” can not save you from the scythe of death. For hundreds and thousands of years – or should I say, since the birth of the human species, there has never been a lack of people trying to snipe death. Such attempts have yielded brilliant results in the last hundred years – antibiotics, surgery, serums, heart bypasses …… Our increasingly sophisticated weapons and abundant bullets have dramatically extended the average human lifespan and solved many conditions previously thought to be terminal illnesses – there were many times when we thought Death was repulsed by us as he hid in the shadows – but at the end of the day, he would still emerge from outlandish places to deliver the final, fatal blow by the most outlandish means.
There is a little evidence that the killer is death incarnate – when the old cop talked to the young cop about the dead, he said they were “normal deaths” – naturally, according to the killer’s usual Logic.
The film is full of references to illness, aging and death (not including “unnatural” death), such as the hero’s mother-in-law’s cancer, such as the old cop visiting his elderly uncle, who mentions the 1909 attack on “Uncle Mike” and his death …… has more than one scene that mentions “death” and “old age”. When the Chinese refer to a person who has passed away, they often say how he was “in life”, but in fact it is not “in life” but “in death”. As soon as a person is born, he or she moves toward death, and the law of life is unchangeable, just like the weird and hard principle of the killer – it is useless to ask “why” and “by what”. The only answer is a black muzzle of a gun or the nozzle of a gas cylinder (the first time I know that this thing can also kill people), but people still keep asking questions, fearing and running away. What if death comes to the forefront? To quote the old man with the white beard in the film, “So what if it comes to ……? I can’t do anything.”
In order to make this article seem petty, please allow me to quote Murakami students: “Death is not the opposite of life, but lives forever as part of life. When one accepts life, one has to accept death, which is a forced sale, two sides of the same coin. The word age is Age in English, and as a verb, Aging means aging, getting older. The film seems to be talking about “old people”, but who is not “old”? All running towards the known end, the road is also rampant with disease, car accidents and all kinds of falling objects, who do not know which day is their twilight.
The film ends abruptly in the old sheriff’s narration of his dream, while the clock ticks louder and louder, gradually overlapping with the sound of the killer’s rapid footsteps.
Coming back to the world view of the film – if we apply Murakami’s words, can we also say that evil is not the opposite of good, but just a part of the whole world? If you are pessimistic, you can even assert that evil is eternal, as long as good exists for a day, evil will also exist for a day; the values of some people can be the evil of another part of the people (in this film, this “part of the people” is streamlined to “a person”) …… and so on and so forth. There are still many threads to be discovered.