Compatibilism and Morality in the Coen Brother’s No Country for Old Men (2007). Could you stop reading this essay right now? Surely denying yourself the experience of a great written work just as you’ve begun. It is something you shouldn’t do, but this is more than a question of ethics. Whether you realize it now or not, this question challenges if making the right choice of action is truly yours to make. It is obvious that you can in fact stop reading right here as long as you have the physical ability to and the will to match. If you’ve gotten this far, in some sense, you have chosen to continue. Reading for whatever your reasoning may be and it’s intuitive to believe. That you’ve lived your entire life up to this point the ultimate agent of all your personal decisions. However, if you’ve decided to watch the multiple award winning Coen brother’s film No Country for Old Men. You may already be a little bit shaky on the grounds of free will.
The neo-western released in 2007 is an adaption of the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name and on the surface. Follows the thrilling development of turmoil in Texas after a drug deal goes wrong. When a retired welder by the name of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) providentially finds. Two million dollars in cash left behind from the bloody affair. He’s pursued by both the film’s engrossing sociopathic hit-man. Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and a customarily venerable sheriff named Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones). Unlike the more traditional westerns of cinema history, No Country for Old Men utilizes its characters not only for drawing the audience an exciting plot but also to remind them how inseparable the questions of ethics are from the far more puzzling question of whether or not we even have autonomy of choice in our actions in the first place.
The Coen brother’s No Country for Old Men pays homage to America’s most indigenous genre of film by maintaining the essential elements of a true western. The film opens up with a sequence of landscape shots that immediately places the audience in the bare and harsh terrain native to Texas and much of Trans-Mississippi North America.
The setting is in fact the most defining element of the Western genre (hence the name), and highlights the traditional themes of man’s conquest of nature and wilderness found in the motion pictures that comprise it. The separation of human beings from animals and the civilized from the savage is deeply rooted in the environment of Trans-Mississippi through the historical western tales of Native American subjugation. The European colonizers of Native lands often wrongly described Native peoples as “untamed” and used this to justify their horrific treatment of the Natives, all the while attempting to self righteously force “western” culture upon them. Furthermore, the distinctions drawn by the conflict of the invasion entailed the concepts of reason, will, and morality, which would later heavily characterize the Western genre of cinema.
Although the debate about what makes homo-sapiens unique from the rest of the animal kingdom has nowhere reached consensus, the answers most likely will be found in the exploration of our cognitive ability and capacity for reasoning. Human beings are able to communicate a logical process in which our actions are founded, seemingly unlike most other animals. We are able to analyze information and think about the best or most sensible method of action before we do it, which begs the question of morality. The theme of “good” vs “bad” is arguably the second most essential aspect to the plot of a traditional western film, most notably depicted through a final face off between the white-hatted protagonist and black-hatted antagonist.
