No Country for Old Men: why the motel ductwork?

Cafe Society
1

I was watching again last night—never had seen the very beginning—and began wondering about Llewelyn’s logic when he gets to Del Rio’s Regal Motel.

We’ll overlook the extreme implausibility of a motel having ductwork that connects all the rooms with no dampers or baffles. It’s one thing to choose the ductwork as a hiding place, buy why did he go to all the trouble of pulling the valise through to the other room? He knew nothing of the transponder, which of course would have proven just as problematic in the new room. And he tells the desk clerk he wants an additional room, not a different room—so how do the three Mexicans end up in the original room the next night?

2

When he rolls by his room in the taxi, he gets a bad vibe at the sight of a jacked up pick-up truck outside his room. It’s a similar vehicle to the truck that chased him from the sight of the shootout, and while they’re common in that part of the world, he was being ultra cautious.

3

Yes, after watching it for about the fourth time, I finally got the deal with the connecting ducts / using the second room to escape.

What still puzzles me is the whole scene in the sporting goods store where he’s asking for tent poles. Then he’s told that they don’t sell them separately so he says he wants to buy a tent with a lot of tent poles. Then we see a sort of montage of him creating what I, at least, thought was going to turn out to be some clever contraption( what with the sawing and all) and all he really does is use one pole to push the case far back into the duct.

Am I missing something? Is the whole prep scene just to make it seem more intricate and exciting? A broom stick wouldn’t have worked just as well?

Not trying to dis the film; I’ve watched it four times so obviously I really like it. There are just so many (to me) odd choices made by Messrs Coen that I spend more time trying to figure things out than actually sit back and enjoy.

4

Broomstick might not be long enough. Or maybe he needed something that could be bent at the end. Did he attach the case to the pole?

I need to watch again. I remember thinking that it should have been more difficult for him to get the case out of the ductwork.

Such a good movie.

5

IIRC he tied a string to the case - which raises another question as I don’t think we see him use the string to retrieve it but rather coat hanger hooks tied to the pole, which he uses to grab the handle. So then why the string . . .

Not trying to be nitpicky it’s just that I’ve always thought / read that film makers are supposedly very deliberate and that there is a specific reason for everything in a movie and NCFOM is full of things that puzzle my teeny tiny brain :frowning:

6

That’s it – coat hangers.

My problem with the scene was when he went to retrieve the case. That was a fairly long pole. He had to move the pole and the case to the side, and it should have been more difficult. If the pole had been shorter, no problem.

Attach something heavy to a long pole, raise your arms, and try to move the pole. It’s gonna kill your wrists or your shoulders.

7

It was silly of him to go to a sporting goods store. He should have gone to a hardware store, where you can buy a set of fiberglass rods that are threaded male on one end and female on the other. Anyone who regularly has to fish wires inside a wall has a set of these that connect one to the other, and have set of replaceable ends that thread in - a bullet, a hook, etc.

I thought this was the sort of tool that anyone who is reasonably handy would know about. Which I guess excludes screenwriters.

8

Fiberglass rods for fishing cable weren’t common enough in 1980 to be known and easily available in small town South Texas.

The tent poles were for retrieving the valise, which was left much nearer the first room’s grill than the second’s. Llewelyn duct tapes the hook from a coat hanger onto the tent poles to be able to catch the valise handle and pull it toward him. There’s a moment of uncertainty because it has to negotiate just a bit of a corner, but nothing that would seriously strain his arm or the tent poles.

9

The string was there because initially that’s how he intended to retrieve it from the first room. When he abandoned that room he needed a clever plan.

10

But didn’t he purchase the tent poles *before *he put the valise with the string on it up in the air duct? That’s how he was able to push it so far back, which is when I wondered how he was going to access the string since you can’t see it anymore once the case is in place. Which would then imply he always intended to retrieve it from the other room(?)

Maybe a better question is more about what the Coens were thinking, as opposed to what we’re supposed to think the *character *is thinking.

Great, great film in any case (no pun intended).

11

The IMDB synopsis, which matches my recollection, is that he first pushes the case into the HVAC duct using the rod from the closet. The string is attached and he intends to pull it back out at a later time.

He goes out, buys some new boots, and then returns to the motel. Gets spooked by the truck outside his room and leaves to another motel.

The next morning he buys the tent poles, gun, etc and gets the second room. He retrieves the case and bolts in the night. Chirguh shows up with the tracker, wastes some cartel guys, notices the duct and figures out that Moss is gone. Hilarity ensues.

12

That makes so much more sense; thanks.

13

Then why does he have this conversation with the woman at the front desk?

MOSS Could I get another room?

WOMAN You want to change rooms?

MOSS No, I want to keep my room, and get another one.

WOMAN Another additional.

MOSS Uh-huh.You got a map of the rooms?

WOMAN Yeah we had a sorta one. (she finds a laminated card)

MOSS What about 142?

WOMAN You can have the one next to yours if you want. 120. It ain’t took.

MOSS No, 142.

WOMAN That’s got two double beds!

14

IIRC, the 2nd room is next to the first in the sense that they share a back wall. Not in the sense that they are consecutive rooms (and sharing side walls). This makes sense in terms of the ductwork running down the middle of building and therefore be above the shared walls of these two rooms. This is why a map is helpful. What the number of the room that shares the back wall is wouldn’t be obvious.

15

I’m not sure I get the confusion, he wanted that room so he could retrieve the case? I’m struggling to get what is confusing about it.

I just recently watched the movie as well, so to clear up some confusion on sequence:

  1. Arrives at motel, takes string from the hotel curtains and ties it around the handle of the cash case / valise.

  2. Using the rod from the closet, he shoves the valise very far back into the ductwork and then leaves the hotel to buy new boots and probably do some other stuff off camera (he’s gone long enough it goes from day to night.) Note the string is positioned so that from this room, he could have retrieved it by pulling the cord.

  3. On the way back to his hotel, he spots the truck outside his room that gives him a bad vibe, so he insists the cabbie take him to a completely different motel. The cabbie tries not to, and “don’t want to get into some kind of jackpot”, Llewellyn tells him he’s “already in a jackpot, and I’m trying to get you out.”

  4. Llewellyn goes to another motel for the night.

  5. First thing in the morning (he’s waiting outside for it to open) Llewellyn goes and buys a shotgun and the tent (for the poles.)

  6. In his other motel, he saws off his shotgun and prepares for his trip back to the original motel.

  7. Arrives back at motel, gets his additional room that shares the back wall with his original room.

  8. Starts assembling what’s basically a long hook using the tent poles, duck tape and coat hangers.

  9. Chigurh tracks the valise with the transponder, finds the Mexicans in Llewellyn’s room and kills them all with his silenced shotgun (extremely unrealistic weapon btw.) Before doing this Chigurh also books his own room and surveys it to get an idea as to the layout, thickness of the walls and etc. This works to his advantage as he knows exactly where anyone might be hiding when he busts into the room with the Mexicans.

  10. Llewellyn is in the process of extracting the valise as the Mexicans are killed, and hears some of the commotion. He books it out of there with the valise before Chigurh is aware of what he’s done.

16

Thank you, Martin Hyde. I had missed a couple of the plot elements (the curtain cord, the night in the other motel) and thought the retrieval from the second room was Llewelyn’s plan all along.

17

No, wait. If Llewelyn still has the original room (he asks for an additional room; he’s not yet sure the tent pole retrieval will work) then how have the Mexicans checked into it?

18

They didn’t check into it. They broke into it.

19

You mean they’re also tracking the transponder?

20

Yes, note that just like the novel it is based on this movie doesn’t club you over the head when it explains things. You have to really watch for it, and sometimes it doesn’t explicitly explain them at all, and you have to draw your own conclusions.

So the guy who hires Carson Wells and works in the big office building, you probably remember that later in the movie Chigurh arrives at the office and kills him.

While never explicitly stated, it is presumed this is also the man who hired Chigurh in the first place to recover the money. After shooting his employer, Chigurh speaks with the accountant who was in the office with him, and says, “he gave the Mexicans a receiver.” The accountant explains that he felt that having more people looking for the money would increase the likelihood of it being recovered. Chirgurh says that is foolish and you should instead carefully select the right tool for the job. So from that discussion, we know that the Mexicans were given a transponder.

Interestingly, Chigurh also knows that this guy hired Carson Wells to kill him, but he seems less concerned about that–to Chigurh the fact that his employer had someone else doing the job he was tasked with was in and of itself a grave and lethal offense. Hiring Carson probably didn’t make him happy either, but just giving the Mexicans the receiver was enough to seal his fate as far as Chigurh was concerned.

The man in the office by the way appears to be some type of “facilitator.” He’s not the money side of the drug deal himself, because in an earlier scene he mentions that the Mexicans are pissed because they are out their drugs, and “our clients” or something are pissed to be out their money. So whatever it was he did he wasn’t making drug deals himself but facilitating them in some way and obviously he had responsibility for fixing things when they went South.

I won’t openly spoil the book where it isn’t shown explicitly in the film, but:

In the movie, we never find out precisely what happens to the valise full of cash. The presumption is that Chigurh ends up with it, although if you look carefully at the opened air vent in the motel room where Llewellyn is killed the duct is far too small to hold the valise so however he ends up with it he probably didn’t retrieve it from there but perhaps another hiding place in the room. Anyway, we never do know for sure what happens to the money. In the novel it is explicitly said Chigurh ends up with the money, and he returns it to a third party–presumably the money side of the deal, Chigurh does not keep it for himself.