No Country For Old Men

‘Twelve angry men’ shows that personal experience is the strongest factor influencing human decision-making processes.’ Discuss

John Ford built a standard that many future directors would follow with his classic 1939 film “Stagecoach”. Although there were a plethora of western films made before 1939, the film “Stagecoach” revolutionized the western genre by elevating the genre from a “B” film into a more serious genre. The film challenged not only western stereotypes but also class divisions in society. Utilizing specific aspects of mise-en-scène and cinematography, John Ford displays his views of society.

The classic movie 12 Angry Men opens with clips of a courthouse, ultimately panning to a specific court room where an 18-year-old boy is on trial for killing his father. Despite the case being the central point which the story revolves around, the movie isn’t about the boy or even his father. The movie is about the 12 jurors who are in charge of the boy’s fate. If they decide he is guilty, he is sentenced to the death penalty, which meant death by the electric chair.

The Wild West is one of the most famous time periods in American history. Spanning from post Civil War to the early 1900’s, the West was plagued by outlaws, deadly diseases, and harsh weather. The grim reality of the Old West is often overlooked, due to Hollywood’s portrayal of it. Many movies about the West are generally over dramatic; sending the message that shootouts happened everyday at high noon and other over the top conceptions. The reality of the “Wild West”, America in the 1800’s and early 1900’s, is not how Hollywood romanticizes it.

his quotation indicates us one of the usual aspects or characteristic of American society: Psycho Killers. “No country for old men”, a 2005 novel written by Cormac McCarthy, takes place in United States-Mexico borders, specifically in Texas. Both, the movie and the book deal with concepts of “Psycho killers”, drugs gangs and morality. The last concept is developed by Sheriff Bell, one of the main characters who introduce it by italics at the beginning of each chapter. And again, here we have two versions again, but the two of them are masterpieces. Nevertheless, both versions are very different from other books and movies, because they are not easy to watch and comprehend.

Every since John Ford’s 1939 western Stagecoach, the West has been portrayed in art, entertainment, and literature as a desolate arid landscape of mountains and deserts. The story or movie backdrop was usually set in America’s colonial era and often included small frontier towns with saloons, the local jail, and ranches on the outskirts of town. The main characters were ranchers, handsome gun slinging wayward cowboys donning Stetsons, savage Indians raging havoc against settlers, and outlaw gangs roaming the prairies holding up banks and railroads. Every story pretty much had a similar plot; the pursuit of wrongdoers, lawmen and bounty hunters set on catching that elusive bad guy, guns and gunfights, and the humble settlers protecting his family and land. The heroes that

The question is whether No Country for Old Men and Stagecoach provide adequate examples of the decline in American moral values. From my perspective of today’s world and my interpretation of No Country for Old Men and Stagecoach, I can see how the argument could be made that they have declined or haven’t changed at all. I see a difference between the relationship of Ringo and Dallas vs other members of their traveling group compared to Sheriff Bell vs Chigurh. These relationships, in my opinion, explains a lot about the development of moral values, or lack of, in the western United States. In this paper, I will describe the moral values that are represented in each movie and I will also try to describe my understanding of why American moral values may have declined between No Country for Old Men and Stagecoach.

The southwest is a region of the United States that makes our country unique. Without the southwest, we would undoubtedly lack the spirit, hope, beauty, and truth that this vast region brings to the rest of the United States as a whole. The southwest represents many things, such as journeying, racism, violence, the clashing and cooperation of cultures, and spirituality, as well as primitivism and pastoralism. All of these elements that the Southwest is comprised of is perhaps the reason why the rest of the country feels so captivated by it; why the southwest is considered a place to “find yourself” or to “regenerate”; and why literature and film regarding the Southwest has been and continues to be of the most popular genres. The western film was one of the most popular during the first half of the twentieth century. Audiences far and wide were mesmerized by actors such as John Wayne and Roy Rogers, and their roles as heroes who fought to tame the American frontier. This very concept, ‘taming the frontier’, gives way to a larger theme that was prevalent in many western films and literature of the southwest: ubi sunt, or rather “where are those who came before us?”. Director Sam Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue portrays this idea better than any other western film; the concept of ubi sunt is undeniably the film’s overarching theme, clearly seen through its components.

Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men has created controversial views on the significance of this novel. This piece involves a drug deal gone wrong when Llewelyn Moss, a veteran, happens to stumble upon three dead bodies, heroine, and a briefcase full of 2 million dollars. Told in different perspectives, the story continues with Moss on the run from a psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh in search of the money while also being tracked down by Sheriff Bell. Critics like James Wood from The New Yorker see this novel as “an unimportant, stripped-down thriller” solely based on the novel’s outer surface . On the other hand, William Cobb from the Houston Chronicle refers to McCarthy as the greatest living writer and that this novel “... has conjured up a heated story that brands the reader 's mind...and this is a novel that must be read and remembered”(Cooper 2). The literary merit of the novel becomes noticeable when looking beyond the thriller perspective. McCarthy’s literary merit in the novel is discrete, which is why it just appears to be a western thriller that many believe has no greater purpose other than an entertaining story. No Country for Old Men is a neo western thriller based on its writing style that divides the story into different perspectives containing elements such as fragmented sentences and untypical dialogue. The novel remains within the context of a 1980’s Texas plot which influences the diction so it can reflect a western atmosphere. Although it contains

First, No Country for Old Men centers on the notion of death. Throughout the movie, the audience comes across with unevitable death scenes. The end of need and the expansion of a lot of fulfillment uncovered how regularly Hollywood depicts passing as a serious dream, in this way revealing to us the amount of this dream offers shape to our origination of death. In many ways, we think about existence and passing like a Hollywood film. Our lives have acts, there is often a central clash that drives our lives forward, there are tireless fails to offer that need filling, and around the end, our life will be uncovered to us to have implied something.

Bayless, Ryan S., and Allen H. Redmon. “’Just call it’: Identifying Competing Narratives In The Coens’ No Country For Old Men.” Literature-Film Quarterly 1 (2013): 6-13. Web. 18 Nov. 2013.

In Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, Hobbes writes about the equality between man and man, he believed that mankind is born with equal strengths and talents and that “one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another”. Anton Chigurh, in No Country for Old Men, would be considered the mentally stronger individual in comparison to the others in the film as in he was smart enough to think of using his handcuffs to strangle the officer and to get himself out of the station. He had the intelligence to ignite the car in front of the pharmacy so that no one would notice him stealing the equipment and medicines he uses, later on, to fix his wounds from when Llewelyn Moss shot him. Furthermore, Chigurh was always at least 10 steps

Twelve Angry Men is about a jury who must decide the fate of an 18 year old boy who allegedly killed his father. The jury must determine a verdict of guilty beyond any reasonable doubt and not guilty. A guilty verdict would mean that the accused would receive the death penalty. After a day of deliberation and many votes, they came up with the verdict of not guilty. I believe they achieved their overall goal of coming up with a verdict they were all able to agree with. It seems there were some individual personal short term goals that were not met. One being that the one juror was not able to go to the baseball game. Another was that a juror was not able to take out the anger he had towards his son on the son accused of killing his

This movie is one of many classic movies that have the ultimate understanding of life and the human physiological behavior. This movie entitles three mechanisms of hunting to describe critical aspects of life, hunting for animals, hunting for men and hunting for meaning. Hunting is the act of tracking and taking a life; this act differs from hunting an animal to a human. This particle can teach a lot of principles like being patient, good timing and the art of tracking.

American history teaches us that, going west has always been a regarded as progression. From the earliest settlers to the “new land” to the idea of Manifest Destiny, progressive movement and thinking has always traveled west. The west is always thought of as being more liberal more free. “True West” A compelling play written by Sam Shepard, developed characters that “struggle to define and assert their identities.” <1702> By using the idea of going west Shepard’s play’s “ present a picture of America torn between its idealistic values and the painful realties of frontier paved over for a parking lot, and cowboys enclosed in a move and television screen.”<1702> By comparing and contrasting the lead characters Austin and Lee, Shepard shows the reader that “going west” does not always mean a change in the right direction.