The Coen Brothers and the "Outlawyer"

From the top: 1)Leonard Smalls, in Raising Arizona (image found here)
2) Charlie Meadows, Barton Fink.
3) Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men (image found here.

My colleague Lynnea the movie-lady (who has not lent me anywhere nearly as many movies as Larry the movie-guy has but who is co-editing a collection of essays and interviews on the Coen Brothers) lent me her copy of No Country for Old Men last week, and I watched it Friday night. I'm only now getting around to posting on it because it is, in the best sense, a difficult film to approach. Aesthetically, it's very different from not only the Brothers' usual, highly-stylized work, but also from just about everything else out there.

One enormous difference in this film, often remarked upon, is the near-absence of a soundtrack. I noted only two moments in the film in which music was used to reinforce the scene, and even then it was barely audible. It's not until we encounter the absence of such a commonplace that we realize just how dependent film-makers assume the audience is on the soundtrack to telegraph to the viewer how we should respond to what we hear and see onscreen.

I'd like to suggest here that the Coens' not having a soundtrack for No Country does more than the obvious of getting us to really watch and listen--and, as a result, really heighten the suspense. It also contributes thematically to the development of a recurring character type in the Coens' films, what I'm calling the Outlawyer. [Aside: I'm sure there's a better name for this type; I'll happily take suggestions in the comments.] This is someone who, because he is a true outlaw--literally, someone outside (that is, beyond the bounds of) the law (not just legal codes, but also systems of morality), cannot be--or refuses to be--judged by that law. These figures are something other than mere criminals. In that aural vacuum of no-music, the Outlawyer establishes his own code; he rules and is ruled by it; thus, the "lawyer" part. At its most effective, we are in thrall to that code--a code, moreover, that we do not fully comprehend and thus cannot predict. This is the realm of horror--a genre that someone in the "Making of" featurette on the No Country DVD says this film partakes of to a certain extent.

Below the fold, some sketching out of this.

Leonard Smalls (played by Randall "Tex" Cobb) in Raising Arizona is the first of these characters, but as his first appearance in the film shows, he's actually what will prove to be a caricature of the Outlawyer, and it's in large measure the accompanying music that signals this:


We're meant to laugh at Smalls, with his "Mama didn't love me" tattoo and bronzed baby shoes--Raising Arizona is a farce, after all--but in No Country there's a brief but telling moment that links its Outlawyer to Smalls, when Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) also takes a pot-shot at an animal from the truck as he's driving. No pleasure but in meanness, as O'Connor's Misfit, perhaps the Coens' prototype for this character, would say.

Except. Neither Smalls nor Barton Fink's Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) nor Chigurh appears to derive any pleasure from their meanness--indeed, for us to say that, or to characterize their behavior as meanness, would be to read them in accordance with what we assume is true of such behavior. Each, instead, figures himself as performing something of a service for at least some of their victims: Hy sees Smalls as an avenging angel "unleashed" to punish him for his sin; Charlie tells Barton that be knows what it's like for people when things get balled up at the head office and so "I help them out;" and in this early scene from No Country--which alone may have won Bardem the Best Supporting Actor Oscar--Chigurh makes the gas-station attendant focus on the here and now in a way that, one is certain, he had never in his life done before:

"Will there be something else?"
"I don't know--will there?"

It's like peering into an abyss, that moment, which the remainder of the scene only reinforces. Tellingly, the ambient noise--is that some sort of droning note?--gets just a bit louder at the 2:43 mark, "What's the most you ever lost on a coin toss?" then gradually grows louder (though it remains very faint--less like music than like blood rushing in the head) till it suddenly ceases at the 3:57 mark--the revelation that the coin is "heads."

Never to me have fanbelts looked so much like hangman's nooses as they do in this scene.

Whereas in earlier Coen Brothers films the Outlawyer has not been the protagonist, I'd make the argument that Chigurh is No Country's central figure: his actions render the film's world as blank as the west Texas landscape. The film's trailer, you'll note, isn't about Josh Brolin's Llewelyen Moss or Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Ed Tom Bell: as with all good horror films, it's about the monster--or, more precisely, their attempting, and failing, to understand the monster:


By the way: it's no accident that you hear far more "music" in the trailer than you do in the entirety of the film. The point of the trailer is to introduce the audience to the film--that is, it's supposed to provide some clues as to how to approach it. But the "music" we hear is more like sounds, some of them almost ambient or "found" in quality. Melody is absent; it's all atmosphere, and not a pleasant one at that.

I have some vague ideas as to why the Coens might find the Outlawyer such a compelling figure, but the operative word here is "vague." I'll let you know when I figure out something about that.

UPDATE: My good friend R. Sherman of Musings from the Hinterland has also posted a review of No Country, this one focusing on the correspondences between McCarthy's novel and the film. For what it's worth, I think he's spot-on.