No Country for Old Men

I promised a "quirky feminist" read of this film to a friend some time ago, but only now finally saw the film and will do my best, given the scarcity of women.

In an obviously poignant scene, Carla Jean refuses to live or die based on the flip of a coin in contrast to an earlier scene in which the serial killer allows a man to live because he happened to choose correctly. Carla Jean chooses a good more important to her than life and that good is her denial to the serial killer that life is an arbitrary occurrence that he can take or not (Carla Jean standing up on this point, despite her subsequent death, shows that it is possible to value some convictions of life and its purpose over life itself in a manner that is meaningful). Carla Jean over any other victim impacts the killer and reaches him. She reasons intuitively, drawing on her womanly strengths--she says that it doesn't seem right that the killer should kill her just because he made a promise to her husband.

The sheriff's wife also fills a uniquely womanly role when she draws out of her husband his dreams by allowing and encouraging him to open up to her.

Carla Jean's mother fills the role that I would fill--she announces their plans to everyone and his brother, leading to her son-in-law's death.

The film's title is significant--Men are the ones relied upon in the film to stop and counteract the evil. This is the duty that the sheriff realizes he cannot fulfill. He can handle normal bad actions, but he cannot handle the senseless and psychotic killer (nor the teenager whose intention to kill from when he was fourteen he notes at the beginning of the film). The film makes little effort to give excuse or reason for the killer's actions and character--rather he is foreign to the viewer, even in the principled part of him, for his principles are very far from anything I, for one, can identify with. The sheriff's uncle advises him that we can't turn the world around, but simply put a tourniquet on it to stop the bleeding.

I wonder if that isn't what women in the film show us how to do--Carla Jean, through her face to face interaction with the killer draws him closer to sanity than he arguably has been, the sheriff's wife allows him to talk through his struggles and acts as a correspondent to his uncle, keeping up communication. While the sheriff struggles with the evil that is being expressed by the world on the whole and in the abstract, the women deal with the particular evil that is in front of them, as best they can. As Carla Jean said, "I can deal with anything; I work at Walmart."