No Country For Old Men - running blog

 No Country For Old Men (Coen, 2007)

























Opening Monologue - Generations:
Long-term jobs
Same jobs as parents
Felt safer - didn't carry a gun
Family is very important - especially father figures
Landscape hadn't changed - roads and cop cars have

Tropes in Westerns:
Cowboy costumes - gunslingers, hats
Desert - sandy colours, mountains in the background, wide open space
Violent but confident men - slow, take their time before they shoot
Wild West - nobody knows who everyone is - ghetto - only news is rumours by word-of-mouth

Discovery Scene - Old vs New:
Cars contrasts the long walk through the desert
Binoculars - not usually in Westerns
No music 
Wristwatch but kept in his pocket - new thing used in an old way
Wild West - less isolated as he drove there - feels safer
Leaves shotgun and picks up machine gun

Notes from The New York Times reviews (Scott, 2007)
Coen Brothers are such familiar auteurs that they have their own subgenres within their filmography which No Country For Old Men can fit into
Uses familiar elements of American pop culture and American landscapes to build worlds that are both familiar and alien to the viewer
Draws from the same themes and ideas that the novel does

Familiar Western Tropes in...

The Searchers
Wide, desert landscape
Women treated as secondary characters - housewife role
Cowboy clothes - hat and cloak and gun
News travelling by gossip - "been to California" 

Unforgiven
Silent, stealthy gunslinger comes out of nowhere - click of the gun
Man walking into a bar - everyone stares at him
"Who's the fella who owns this place?!"
Witty, confident threats and remarks
Reputations proceeding them - "killed women and children"
Massive shootout - main character doesn't even get shot

How The West Was Won
The valley - vast desert
Family - singing together, very close
Vocal, chanting music
Dramatic narration
Subverts tropes by showing modern-day America at the end

Comments

  1. Lisa SocratesJanuary 6, 2021 at 1:54 PM

    Good notes on each film. Please also note racist ideas at the centre of the 'pioneering' tradition where Native American Indian is represented as the outsider and threat.

    ReplyDelete

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