This post is really only tangentially about the movie No Country For Old Men, so I won't call it a movie review. Somebody told me that No Conutry For Old Men recently won the Academy Award for Best Picture. I saw the movie recently, and frankly, I flat out refuse to believe it.
I'm not even sure that No Country For Old Men is a movie. I'm not sure what it is, exactly. I usually consider myself a fan of the Coen brothers, who made it, primarily because of my appreciation fo their entertaining film The Big Lebowski. I was somewhat less enchanted by Fargo, considering it to be too bleak.
But in No Country, I'm afraid the Coen brothers have gone too far. Lebowski, despite the fact that it is, on many levels, an amoral and debased thing, at least managed to mock nihilism. And Fargo, despite its great emptiness, managed to convey some hope of a normal society in the form of its pregnant sheriff. But No Country is dark, empty, and nihilistic.
The basic premise of the story is that a trailer-dwelling Texas hunter named Llewelyn Moss, played by Josh Brolin, stumbles across a drug deal gone bad in the desert. A dying victim of the shootout, presumably one of the drug dealers, is dying, and asks him for water. The hunter ignores the man. He finds a suitcase containing two million dollars, and takes it. He feels a sense of remorse later that night and returns to the crime scene, bringing a gallon of water for the man. Unfortunately, other parties have also arrived on scene, presumably from the organizations involved in the drug deal, and Moss has to flee on foot, leaving his truck on the scene.
He knows this means he will be pursued by the drug lords, who will track him down from his vehicle information, and so he goes on the lam.
Throughout much of the movie, he is pursued by a professional killer, named Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem. Chigurh is so completely evil that there are absolutely no traces of humanity remaining in him. He is as impersonal as the shark in Jaws. Basically, he kills everything in his path while pursuing Moss.
Following behind both men is a sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones. He is a somewhat sad and thoughtful character, and he simply cannot understand what motivates the two men. He does not know why Moss does not come clean and turn himself in, and he does not know why Chigurh is so completely evil, although he undertsands that he is.
The problem with the movie is the problem of our culture. It is one of focus. The Coen brothers follow the three men, and we're not sure who the hero of the movie is. We'd like to think it's Tommy Lee Jones, but of the three, he spends the least time on screen. We'd like to think that it's Josh Brolin, but it really isn't. He ends up dying rather stupidly, killed in a shootout with secondary characters.
The problem of the movie is that the real hero is Javier Bardem's character, the serial killer, Chigurh. Like Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs, he escapes at the end of the movie, presumably to go on killing people for no good reason. Tommy Lee Jones's character just retires at the end, fed up with a world that no longer makes any sense.
Now, to a point, I sympathize. I too am getting to an age where the world no longer makes any sense, and like Tommy Lee Jones's character, I too consider just simply walking away.
But that's not an answer to the problem. We do that, and no one stops Chigurh.
I look at our culture and I see what it is becoming. It is becoming a breeding ground for monsters. That much anyone can see.
The reason I fear that Hollywood made this movie best picture is because they are, secretly, rooting for the monsters.
Anton Chigurh is, like Hannibal Lecter, a monster on the loose. Both movies end with a serial killer escaping. Both movies have a problem of moral focus, of seeing a killer in a light that if it is not sympathetic, it is at least neutral.
Both movies win Best Picture.
Of course, the differences between Silence of the Lambs and No Country for Old Men are also plain to see. In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter is a rather interesting side character, but he is not the hero. And in Silence of the Lambs, the bigger monster, Buffalo Bill, is caught and killed. In the Silence of the Lambs, the law, as personified by Jodi Foster, is young, callow, and manages to triumph, if not completely, then at least partially.
How far we've progressed in 16 years. How much we've grown.
I shudder to think what Hollywood will teach us next.
I am, as I have related, studying Catholic theology. And I am beginning to see that Catholicism is not merely a part of our culture, or a part of our history, or a system with a lot of truth in it.
Catholic theology is our culture. Catholic theology is our history. Catholicism is the truth.
Now those may seem like rather sweeping statements. But the more I read, the more I am convinced it is so.
The problem with our society is that we have cut ourselves off from our roots. At the root of Western civilization is a lot of Caholic theology. It is the system that makes Western civilization work. It is the thing by which everything else in society can be measured, for good or for ill. It is the culture complete; from creation myth to eschatology, with a good deal of moral thinking and corproate structure in between. Nothing else approaches its scope, nothing else tries to explain the entire universe, nothing else is a system of everything.
Where society ails, Catholicism has not been tried.
Now in my studies i'm slogging through the Cathechism. The Catechism was produced during John Paul II's pontificate, and is the first major overhaul of Catholic teaching in four hundred years. It refers a lot to the documents of Vatican II, but also makes extensive use of Scripture, previous Catechisms, church councils, and the writings of the saints and the church fathers. It is a big, ponderous tome.
But rich. Full of truth. Full of answers.
It was overseen, naturally, by then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is, of course, now the Pope. I am convinced that both John Paul II and Benedict XVI are not only historical figures, but I am convinced that they are pivotal historical figures. I'm convinced that if our culture and our society pulls itself out of the tailspin it is currently in, what with its best pictures that are apologias for serial killers, it will be seen as the work of these two men, these two old men, who lived through enough of the horrors of the twentieth century that they wanted to set something down that could guide people back to what our culture used to be, to what it used to value. If our culture is indeed, unfit for old men, then the Catechism is a book that is a roadmap to a country where both old and young might yet live.
I was recently reading the section of the book on the clergy and the laity, which is near the end of Section I of the catechism, and I came across the interesting section on Catholic lay organizations:
Secular institutes928 "A secular institute is an institute of consecrated life in which the Christian faithful living in the world strive for the perfection of charity and work for the sanctification of the world especially from within."470
929 By a "life perfectly and entirely consecrated to [such] sanctification," the members of these institutes share in the Church's task of evangelization, "in the world and from within the world," where their presence acts as "leaven in the world."471 "Their witness of a Christian life" aims "to order temporal things according to God and inform the world with the power of the gospel." They commit themselves to the evangelical counsels by sacred bonds and observe among themselves the communion and fellowship appropriate to their "particular secular way of life."472
Societies of apostolic life
930 Alongside the different forms of consecrated life are "societies of apostolic life whose members without religious vows pursue the particular apostolic purpose of their society, and lead a life as brothers or sisters in common according to a particular manner of life, strive for the perfection of charity through the observance of the constitutions. Among these there are societies in which the members embrace the evangelical counsels" according to their constitutions.473
I was thinking that church reform comes about through renewal movements, often through monastic movements. In barbarian Europe, the monasteries were built to be islands of Christian civilization in a sea of monsters, self-contained communities that reformed the countryside around them.
I was thinking that it might be time to start thinking along these lines.
Our society is breeding monsters; what we need to do is form communities that fight those monsters. Seriously -- you turn on the news and it is like reading Beowulf -- each week, someone else is snatched from their bed and murdered by some fresh monster. I'm tempted to set up a Secular Institute or a Society of Apostolic Life that is devoted to, like Beowulf, finding the monsters, fighting them, tracking them back to their lairs, and killing them before they kill us.
Not that I'm sure that the Vatican would approve of that.
But seriously, our society is getting so crazy that we're going to have to start organizing communities that agree to live by a certain set of rules. We rise for morning mass, we do our jobs, we say vespers, and at nine o'clock, the doors are barred and a few of us keep watch to keep so that the monsters are kept at bay.
We cannot trust that our neighbors are good people, that the police will even answer the phone, or that society even cares to keep the monsters from growing. Make no mistake -- our culture is growing monsters, and we need to start thinking about the common defense.