materiali » No Country for Old MenThe Ghosted OtherEthno-Racial Violence in ‘No Country for Old Men’by Alison ReedIt seems no coincidence that the Coen brothers’ filmic reproduction of Cormac McCarthy’s ‘No Country for Old Men’ erupts in a xenophobic political era obsessed with national boundaries. Set against the historical backdrop of the Rise of the Right during the Reagan administration’s immigration reform in the 1980s, and filmed in the immediate context of the Bush administration’s increased policing of borders in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the plot unfolds near the Rio Grande River, which demarcates between the American subject and its Spanish-speaking racialized Mexican other. In justifying a “limitless war that lacks a concrete, identifiable, visible enemy” (Avelar 269), the Bush administration attaches terrorist potential to foreigners; this attachment is configured by racist visual cues that equate dark features with danger. 
The film is about unknowable borders, but it is also about seeing and who has the power to see: Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), as the film’s radical other, refuses racial interpellation, and kills anyone who threatens to categorize him. Both Chigurh’s appearance and voice defy specific location—his Otherness is absolute in its transcendence of racial, cultural and national bounds. The film’s Texan cowboy, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), also secures power through ethno-racial ambiguity, as he all too quickly slips into otherness. As Llewelyn crosses into Mexico, he sheds his whiteness and is hailed as Mexican. The visual markers constituting his subjectivity reveal the discursive and material violence underlying any act of assigning racialized identity. Both the cowboy Llewelyn and the indestructible force of violence, Chigurh, not only move freely across the Mexican-American border, but enact a quality of transgressive racial indeterminacy. This racial indeterminacy exposes the dominant order’s racist regime as primarily rooted in codified aesthetic and auditory markers: skin color, facial features, hair texture, class status, accent, and language usage. Perhaps the film’s most violent confrontation unfolds not in the chase between Chigurh and Llewelyn, or their entanglements with the Mexican drug cartel, a truck-bed of heroin, two million dollars and a drug deal gone wrong near the Rio Grande—but instead along the U.S.-Mexico border. Concretizing the terms of their mutually constitutive relation, the U.S.-Mexico border, as a spatial signifier of the American subject’s obsessive need to police boundaries, contours the film’s ethno-racial relations. The uneven balance of power between Mexico and the United States spurs the projection of U.S. social issues on “a faceless, dehumanized, horde of Spanish-speaking immigrants” (Gutiérrez 212). America’s militarization of the Mexican boundary exposes its enemy as the dangerous “brown” other. The facelessness of Mexican immigrants conflates them with the figure of the foreigner, and of the terrorist. Chigurh, as the film’s manifestation of this ineluctable force, underlines America’s fear of the other that refuses to be circumscribed within the law and thus subject to the law’s demarcation of her or him as inhuman. As a ghost between two worlds, Chigurh escapes the category of human. He does not appear to be interested in economic gain; he is driven not by money but by the sheer force of violence that trails money—the violent trace of exploitation underlying economic transactions. He represents the brute force of violence, resisting politicization within the legal system. When the El Paso Sheriff describes Chigurh as a “goddamn homicidal lunatic,” Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) replies “I'm not sure he's a lunatic [. . .] I think he's pretty much a ghost”. Chigurh's ghostliness allows him to seamlessly cross borders between the United States and Mexico, the living and the dead, self and other. Chigurh hovers above the binary as a shadow outside of the law and thus not subject to its jurisdiction. He represents the invisible, potential, anticipated terrorist who haunts the popular imagination. Race, as an essentially imaginary phenomenon with violent material manifestations, operates within the social contract through visual inspection. Llewelyn's easy slippage between Mexican and American identity suggests that race is a social construct or set of appearances that can be put on or taken off, yet these appearances locate Llewelyn in a power relation that inevitably enacts a certain violence either on or by his body. Llewelyn’s transgressive identity results in his un-heroic off-screen death as a recently returned immigrant after seeking medical help in Mexico, and Chigurh’s refusal to be interpellated results in the destruction of all who fix their gaze upon him. When Llewelyn calls asking for Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), Chigurh answers the phone and demands: “You need to come see me”. Chigurh is obsessed with the sight of his victims. Those who threaten to “see” him (beyond the literal meaning) have little chance of survival. Wells is shocked to hear that Llewelyn has seen Chigurh: “You've seen him, and you're not dead?”. At a gas station Chigurh buys a bag of cashews, but this transaction quickly goes awry when the gas station proprietor makes friendly conversation: Gas Station Proprietor: Y'all gettin' any rain up your way? Chigurh: What way would that be? Gas Station Proprietor: I seen you was from Dallas. Chigurh: What business is it of yours where I'm from, friendo? This man's attempt to pin Chigurh down geographically triggers the chance chain of events that wagers his life on a coin toss. Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald) thus irreversibly seals her fate when she says: "I knowed you was crazy when I saw you sitting there. I knowed exactly what was in store for me". Chigurh hovers above the dialectic between self and other by physically silencing the self's speech and thus rejecting his bifurcated position as other. Resisting his position in the self/other binary, Chigurh literally rends apart the Western subject and in so doing, reconstitutes himself in the center. The scope of Chigurh's material violence falls outside the law; he is at once visually aligned with and materially pitted against the Mexican drug traffickers and the white businessmen. Refusing to work for either side, Chigurh defies all ties to the social contract and its mediating gaze. Thus, when the accountant in the businessman’s office asks if Chigurh is going to kill him, Chigurh responds: “That depends. Do you see me?”. The accountant’s lack of sight and resulting inability to fix a racialized identity on Chigurh saves his life. Chigurh’s desire to control and redirect the gaze also explains the outcome of Sheriff Bell’s encounter with Chigurh. After Llewelyn’s murder Bell returns to the crime scene, noting that the door has seemingly been opened using Chigurh’s trademark weapon. Suspecting of Chigurh, Officer Bell draws his gun. Bell and Chigurh see each other’s reflections in the shot-out lock, but Chigurh does not murder Bell because Bell does not acknowledge this moment of seeing. Bell’s pretending to have not seen Chigurh suggests his own resignation to the force of inexplicable, lawless violence in the film: the force that Chigurh wholly embodies. Yet what goes unsaid in this scene, and the politics of visibility therein—explain Chigurh’s motivation for not killing the cowardly, unseeing accountant and for killing Llewelyn’s brave, seeing wife—Chigurh murders those who fix meaning on his appearance. Between U.S. and Mexico border stations lies the Rio Grande River, which disrupts the fixed line between the Spanish-speaking, dark-skinned other and the Western cowboy. In this fluid, ambiguous space on the bridge between Mexican and American land, Llewelyn first confronts the American subject as racialized other. Suffering potentially fatal wounds from Chigurh’s semiautomatic machine gun and leaking blood from his boots, Llewelyn stumbles past the U.S. border checkpoint. In this in-between space, Llewelyn meets a group of college-aged men returning to the United States: Man on Right: Were you in a car accident? Llewelyn: Give you 500 bucks for that coat. Man in Middle: Let me see the money. Man on Right: Were you in a car accident? Llewelyn: Yeah. Man in Middle: Okay give me the money. Llewelyn: It’s right here . . . give me the clothes. Man on Left: Let him hold the money. Llewelyn: Now give it here. Llewelyn: Give me that beer too. Man on Left: How much? When Llewelyn’s appearance cannot be explained by a car accident, these white men in turn codify him as the Mexican other. After paying five hundred dollars for the man’s jacket and an already opened Corona, Llewelyn pauses on the bridge. Dripping blood, eyes twitching uncontrollably, gasping for air, speech restrained, and near-death, Llewelyn vomits almost directly into the camera lens. As the figure of the abject at the border between Mexico and America, life and death, self and other, he decides to throw the rest of the money over the bridge before entering Mexico. His jacket, concealing his blood-stained shirt, and his beer, excusing his sweaty, dirty, damp and otherwise unkempt appearance, carry him safely into Mexican territory without hassle from the uninterested border patrol guard. Upon entering Mexico, Llewelyn forfeits his markers of whiteness—the cowboy hat, the crisp white work shirt, the stiff denim—and thus all too easily slides into otherness. After his encounter with the three American men, he wakes up in a Mexican hospital with the bounty hunter Carson Wells at his side. The bouquet of flowers that Wells holds out in front of him starkly contrasts the white walls and sterile furniture of the small hospital room. Llewelyn, stripped of the visual cues that mark his whiteness and instead draped in a nondescript hospital gown, appears Mexican only in relation to his environment: his darkly tanned skin, slick black hair, moustache, and four o’clock shadow juxtaposed against the whiteness of the hospital walls and of Carson Wells. Wells, hovering over him with blond hair, blue eyes, and a cowboy hat, replaces Llewelyn as cowboy: without the visual markers of his Texan identity, Llewelyn no longer clearly reads as white. When Llewelyn walks back into Texas, still wearing his white hospital gown, he must convince the Border Patrol agent to admit him back into the United States. Unconvinced and threatening, the border patrol agent admits Llewelyn only at the moment in which Llewelyn secures his status as a Vietnam War veteran. Unable to be pinned racially, Llewelyn proves his whiteness only by virtue of his military service. As a veteran, he has participated in protecting the country’s self-defined limits. Chigurh evades the dominant order’s gaze by escaping un-interpellated from white suburbia. In Chigurh’s final scene, he is hit broadside at a suburban intersection. With one of his eyes bulging from his skull and a bone poking out from his elbow, he sits down on the sidewalk. In addition to the noonday sun, this scene has an under-saturated, bleached-out quality, and Chigurh is momentarily paler due to the impact of the crash. Two boys riding bicycles approach him, at which point Chigurh offers one of the boys money for his shirt to fasten a makeshift sling for his arm. The boy tries to decline, but Chigurh replies: “Take it. You didn’t see me. I was already gone”. Almost immediately, an ambulance begins to wail in the distance. In contrast to the border patrol agent’s unseeing eyes, an observant neighbor has presumably summoned the ambulance. After Chigurh limps off-screen, the other boy accompanying the first retorts: “You know part of that’s mine, Franklin,” to which Franklin responds, “You still got your damn shirt”. Chigurh ultimately escapes unseen into white suburbia on the nearly corrupted innocence of a kid, who does not identify him as the other. His inability to “see” Chigurh also saves his life. Chigurh quickly leaves the scene of the car accident, and in so doing, remains outside of the law. Llewelyn’s symbolic occupation of otherness enacts a certain discursive violence on the materiality of the Mexican’s invisibility within the film. Bringing the ethno-racially ambiguous Llewelyn into relief is the Mexican other—unspoken, unspeakable, dangerous. The Mexican actors in this film, all extras, are the butt of racist jokes. For instance, Bell notes that “Supposedly, a coyote won't eat a Mexican” and Carla Jean’s mother exclaims that “It’s not often you see a Mexican in a suit”. The film’s sensationalist depiction of Mexicans as drug trafficking criminals goes unrecognized because they are depoliticized, nameless faces. Llewelyn’s and Chigurh’s visual ambiguity points to the ease with which categories of race and ethnicity slide into indeterminacy. At the same time, the violence enacted on and by the Mexicans in the film remains secondary to the chase between Llewelyn and Chigurh; in the viewer’s assessment of Chigurh’s path of destruction, are the Mexicans merely collateral damage? The absence of a more explicit critique of U.S.-Mexico relations in the film, and its positioning only as the scenery against which Chigurh’s ghosted otherness is played out, holds the viewer accountable for wondering if the unspeakability of the ethno-racial violence is not perhaps the most violent of all the film’s various violences—much more so, perhaps, than Chigurh’s destruction of everyone who wields the gaze within a country that excludes him on the basis of that violent act of seeing.
Works Cited Avelar, Idelber. “Xenophobia and Diasporic Latin Americanism: Mapping Antagonisms around the 'Foreign'." From Ideologies of Hispanism. Edited by Mabel Moraña. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2005. 269-283. Dunn, Timothy J. The Militarization of the U.S.-Mexico Border, 1978-1992: Low-Intensity Gracia, Jorge J.E. “Race or Ethnicity?: An Introduction.” From Race or Ethnicity?: On Black Gutiérrez, David G. Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the No Country for Old Men. Dir. Ethan and Joel Coen. 2007. DVD. Paramount Vantage, 2007
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