More on "Outlawyers": A note on inadequacy

In its immediate context, an affirming statement . . . but imagine Anton Chigurh wearing this. Image found here.

I was distracted by yesterday's posts and so didn't get around to posting this: Apologies for not earlier acknowledging Zunguzungu's kind mention of a post of mine here. His post (about which more below) is of the sort that makes you wish that your own work were worthy of mention there but you feel that maybe a little merit-by-association accrues to yours thereby via that mention. Anyway, some people have found their way here via that post and his cross-post over at The Valve. If you're here via those routes, welcome.

Zunguzungu's post, titled "You Know Who I Blame? The System!: The Wire, Barack Obama, and Omar for President," indeed covers all that and more: it ends up being a meditation on a version of the American archetype of the Rugged Individualist as embodied by Omar, who is Barack Obama's favorite character on The Wire. After noting some affinities between such characters and my idea of the Outlawyer, Zunguzungu gets to his post's central claim:

[A] true American is someone who makes his own justice.

In this sense, Indians are never the real villains of cowboy movies (and The Wire is not innovative in encouraging us to sympathize with the state‘s enemies); exactly because of the inevitability of their deaths, Indians could even become a figure of romantic attachment, valued almost precisely because every death seems to signify a step forward for progress. No, the real villain in Westerns, gangster movies, noir, and Mafia films is the same villain as in The Wire: “institutions” or an even more amorphous “the system.” And you don’t have to dig very deep into The Wire’s dvd commentaries or interviews with the creators to discover a very basic and overriding cynicism about the possibility of positive reform; as David Simon put it (in a quote I got here), The Wire “overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” These failures are, again and again and again, attributed to “institutions.”

I've not seen any episode of The Wire, but the bit here about "institutions" and The System being villainous made me think back on my Outlawyer post and No Country (and, for that matter, McCarthy's work generally) and realize that the Outlawyer doesn't find the System villainous. Rather, it's the System that finds itself inadequate even to articulate, let alone deal with, the parallel universe that is the code of the Outlawyer.

More below the fold.

In the novel, though not the film, Sheriff Bell says something to the effect that it's not that the people he's dealing with disrespect the law--it's that "they don't even think about it." Exactly: even disrespect for the law would signify a tacit admission that the System, ideally, will ultimately judge their behavior. In McCarthy's take on things (as I quickly survey his novels in my mind), the System is so ignored as to be finally rendered irrelevant and thus inadequate, impotent, pitiable: a neutered villainy. We, too--those of us who say the System still has relevancy--are to blame for this in McCarthy's mind because we collectively pay little more than lip-service to the notion of relevancy. It's a reiteration of Nietzsche (and, in her own way, Flannery O'Connor): "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." Perhaps it's this that lies at the heart of McCarthy's works' power: the realization that he may just be right about this and, holy you-know-what, what the hell are we going to do about it?

This theme is most forcefully given expression in Blood Meridian, chiefly in this cheery little homily by judge Holden:

Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all questions of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural. (Vintage paper edition, 250)

Because language is expressive of Systems (in case anyone cares, if I have an a priori theoretical point of reference, it's Structuralism), language, too, will be found inadequate in the face of that which occurs beyond our Systems' abilities to account for them, as I've tried to get at before. To circle back to something I noted in the Outlawyer post: this inadequacy of language is analogous what I was getting at with regard to the near-absence of a soundtrack--a film's world's language, its unspoken road-map for the viewer regarding how to respond to what s/he sees--in No Country. Or, as I put it to Lynnea the movie-lady as we talked about No Country at graduation this past Saturday, compared to other Coen Brothers films (which, according to Tim Blake Nelson in the "making of" featurette on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD, look as though "they've been directed within an inch of their lives"), it's as though No Country "has no director." I meant that as a compliment, by the way.

None of this is to say that finding a System inadequate is always a bad thing, as my choice for an image for this post indicates, I hope. Indeed, as part of my project over at Domestic Issue I'll be fleshing out the claim that, if squinted at in a certain way, the term "New World" is a potential undoing of the the ultimate System, History (as embodied for my argument by the term "Americas"). Historicizing certainly has value for the establishing of immediate contexts, but too often (certainly in literary studies and, perhaps, in our politics as well) the tendency is to become emsnared by that past to the point that everything, no matter the point in time, seems a perpetual Present--to miss the very particulars that the goal of historicizing was to reveal to us in the first place: "'Twas always thus." What is bad about finding a System inadequate is if we have no adequate substitute for the inadequate one:

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

UPDATE: As it happens, 3 Quarks Daily, almost exactly on point, has posted this poem by Czeslaw Milosz.

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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.

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