Yes, I noticed that, too.
I thought that both the car accident and his reaction to the kids was evidence that even his view of the world was shaken a little. You can see it in the distressed, almost panicky look on his face when Carla Jean refused to call the coin toss. All he does is get that panicky look and say “Call it” again. I imagine that he’d never had someone stand up to him like that, even though it would mean her death.
He then gets in his car and gets hit on the side without ever seeing it coming. For the first time, we see him get caught off guard. Even when Moss shot him in the leg, he was able to react quickly to avoid a kill-shot. Here, he doesn’t even know it happened until after it was done. It throws him off his game so much that he’s too disoriented to really do what comes naturally to him (killing) with the kids. At least that’s how I saw it.
The real question that I haven’t been able to answer in any way was this: We obviously see Chigurh being a total bad-ass the entire movie, killing anyone in his way. So how in the hell did the cop in the beginning manage to arrest him?
I’ve got a theory that I figured I’d run by the lot of you to see if you can puncture holes in it.
It seems that Anton kills his fellow gangster types with his big silenced shotgun and kills relatively innocent folk with his cattle air gun. I realize he killed the cop at the beginning by strangling him but he really had no choice in that case. Anything to this?
Maybe someone brought it up…
This is explained in the book (which is, again, not canon for the movie): he let the guy arrest him on purpose, basically so he could test himself.
And my view of the ending: Chigurh is fond of talking to people about choices and coincidences and the reasons they end up in the situation they find themselves. He’s big on fate. And the car crash at the end is, basically, where the situation flips on him: what are the choices he made that put him in that intersection at that moment? Does the car crash tell him anything about the rules he follows? “If the rule you followed brought you to this, what good is the rule?”
Things fall into place.
That’s an interesting way to look at it. I’m always annoyed when villains don’t get their comeuppance (I’m a traditionalist that way) but now I think he really did get a sort of punishment. Throughout the movie he’s killing people left and right and rationalizing it by saying it’s their random set of choices that ultimately led them to their death. This philosophy suddenly catastrophically betrays him, when by his own set of decisions he is randomly caught in the path of another car. He’s left alive, but mentally shaken.
The friends I saw it with thought of him as a sort of force of nature, which the titular old man could not stop. One of my friends even saw him as the hero, and said he would’ve been very disappointed if he’d died. I can’t really get behind such an interpretation, but to each his own.
Interesting, thanks for the info.
I was a bit confused about the car accident, but someone said basically this same thing to me about it. Well put.
Greetings from trial membership man –
This was the best movie I’ve seen in a very long time. Firstly, the locations were beautiful and excellently captured. The last time I saw Texas look that good was in Fandango.
It was brilliant that the film was so methodically paced, featured very terse dialogue, and yet was incredibly suspenseful. The “pitbull in the river” chase scene is some of the most effective and primal storytelling I’ve seen. Moments like that absolutely spit in the face of of every overblown jump cut explosion laden special effects fest from the last twenty years.
My appreciation of the Coens came more from The Big Lebowski than Miller’s Crossing and Fargo, but this film went beyond standard entertainment for me; I dug it as an example of mastering one’s craft.
I don’t know how or if this character is established in the book, but I thouht it was clear from the dialogue that the old man in the wheelchair had been Bell’s father’s deputy. Did I misunderstand that? I’ve not read the book and saw the movie on Saturday, so I might be fuzzy.
What a draining movie. I was tense for nearly the entire movie, and how wonderful to have ambient sound instead of a musical score! Yay!
The only other exposure I’ve had to Cormac McCarthy is from reading The Road. I was struck by how some of the themes from that book echoed in this movie – the absence of longed-for divine presence, the meaning of fatherhood, and how a son’s role is shaped by his father’s. I remember how the father in The Road told his son that the boy “carried the light,” and how interesting that a similar idea was expressed in Bell’s dream. His father carrying the light ahead, and waiting for him.
As I brought up in my post, Ed Tom had told a story about how killing steer with bullets was sort of risky, but someone devised the “head spike” to take the randomness out of it.
Given that, the shot-gun might represent the random nature of death, and the head-spike might represent the inevitability of it.
But, as you pointed out, the people who really had it coming were the ones who typically got the shotgun, and the one’s who stumbled across Anton tended to get the head-spike.
So, I don’t know what they were trying to say. Maybe the Coens (or McCarthy) just used whichever one fit the scene better, and didn’t think it over too much.
See, I’m not sure if Anton was really supposed to be “evil” or just “death” (death as in the “inevitable force of nature”, neither good nor evil). He acted motivated by forces greater than himself. . .abiding the laws – however unnecessary – because he had principles.
Even the scene where he took out the 3 Hispanics had a nice touch. Recall earlier, when he was in a hotel room, he had checked the thickness and structure of the panelling of the walls. He shot one of the Hispanics through it. There was nothing lucky about it.
Yeah, that’s exactly how I’ve been looking at Anton. The head spike/shotgun thing is one of the little things that just adds so much to the Anton character.
Gah, I want to see it again.
I checked the book out of my library when I read it, so I don’t have it here to look up. But I thought the old man in the wheelchair was Bell’s uncle or great-uncle – his father’s brother or father’s uncle – in addition to being a deputy. Is that right?
It occurred to me a little while ago – thinking about this thread – that Anton never used the head spike on people who were actively seeking to challenge him.
So, people killed with head spike = cattle
People killed with silenced(!) shotgun = prey
I agree. To be effective, the cattle-spike “weapon” requires the victim to be passive and ignorant. Doesn’t he ask the guy on the highway to “hold still”?
It’s too specific a reference not to be intentional.
I hadn’t thought of that but you might be onto something. Within Chigurh’s own idiosyncratic " ethical" system, shooting someone with a shotgun might even be seen as a sign of respect. The cattle bolt is for “objects,” the shotgun is for “people.”
re: The car accident
My take on this - He was planning on killing the two kids, just for the fun of it (kind of like the scene where he shoots at the bird on the bridge), or perhaps because they may have been able to ID him coming out of the house after killing Carla Jean - and is so wrapped up watching the kids in the rear view mirror that he doesn’t see the car coming at him at the intersection. So his own fate ‘told’ him not to kill the boys.
Oh, did anyone else see that car crash coming from a mile away?
Yeah, I saw it coming too. There was something about how the camera “focused” my attention on the fact that the light was green a couple of times. I almost said something to my wife but it was too late.
Yeah, but it still made me jump.
Nope. Damn near gave me a heart attack.
The movie is definitely one of the best I’ve seen this year. The villain was absolutely terrifying.
Boy, can you say that again.
I gave it a 10 in IMDb (the only one this year) but it’s on my “Glad I saw it; never again” list. I don’t think my heart could stand it.