Retrospective: No Country for Old Men (Patreon)

No Country for Old Men follows a series of hunts. Anton Chigurh is tracking $2 million in cash, which carries a transponder which seems to guarantee that he'll discover it eventually. Llewelyn Moss begins the movie on a literal hunt, wandering the plains of West Texas for antelope (he misses his prey, foreshadowing his luck for the rest of the film). Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is searching for Moss, racing against time before Chigurh can get to him first. All three men fail as they scour the West for their prey, caught in the old ways of Manifest Destiny, doomed to scrounge for the American Dream that never was.

The Coen Brothers movie, like McCarthy's book, is set in 1980, the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Both works depict American men in crisis, clinging to a masculinity that has long since ceased to function, perpetuating brutal violence in an attempt to stay alive. In the post-Iraq era, American films grappled with this crisis incessantly, but never more elegantly and intelligently than in No Country for Old Men. A drab color palette has never looked so good.