The Character of Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men as an Expression of Reflections on Evil and Violence in American Culture

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The Character of Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men as an Expression of Reflections on Evil and Violence in American Culture

Journal Title: Społeczeństwo. Edukacja. Język - Year 2017, Vol 5, Issue

Abstract

In No Country for Old Men, the 2007 film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s eponymous novel, the Coen brothers juxtapose the conventions of the Western against a hyper-realistic portrayal of drug wars fought along the southern border of Texas in the 1980s. The ridiculously incongruous, almost fantastic character of Anton Chigurh – an indestructible hit man, whose cruel deeds transgress the boundaries of conventional logic and morality, can be interpreted as a symbolic representation of the universal nature of violence, an embodiment of the contemporary perception of radical evil, a frightening condensation of brutality inscribed into American culture, an allegory of neoconservative America’s fears or, finally, a metaphorical vision of a deserved punishment inflicted upon the modern, callous civilization of the nation, which allowed consumerism, materialism and vice replace its original, simple values. The Coens’ Chigurh is a postmodern parody of a classic antihero, who evokes both the echoes of the Western with its youthful optimism and a clear code of conduct, and the noir poetics, which accentuates the helplessness of an individual in the face of the ubiquitous evil and the world’s indefiniteness. He is also an obvious allusion to Judge Holden, the menacing, devil-like figure in McCarthy’s Blood Meridian – the writer’s magnum opus which subverts the meanings traditionally attached to the myth of the Old West, thus deconstructing and demythologizing the notion of regeneration through violence, defined by Richard Slotkin as the key concept for the American identity and ideology.

Authors and Affiliations

Jakub Ligor

Keywords

the Coen brothers violence the Western postmodernism Cormac McCarthy the American West Manifest Destiny

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EP ID EP304711
DOI 10.19251/sej/2017.5(6)
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