The Man.
Or, That Man.
You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's layin there?
-Cormac McCarthy2
Surely it wasn’t much of a coincidence that in the same week, Ted Kaczynski, Silvio Berlusconi and Cormac McCarthy died. Wasn’t even a full one. They were all in very different and maybe even apposite ways case studies in how being a man will make you or make you very fucked up or both. That’s not to say that their conditions, such as they were, were consequences of masculinity, but they all did embody a certain kind of masculinity that by the time they had all shuffled off this mortal coil became more important than anyone could have imagined.
McCarthy could’ve imagined it. He never got the Nobel, but he surely imagined it, many times, but probably, towards the end, he got less worried about it, a little more carefree. He was writing up until the end and he would’ve gone on and kept writing as he had most of his life in obscurity and sickness and health and prosperity and the sort of name-brand recognition that is pretty damn rare for a novelist in America unless you’re Stephen King and he kept writing until the end and the only thing that kept future novels from us was death.
He wrote about death a lot, but the beautiful, wonderful thing about Cormac McCarthy was that in the six odd decades he was writing there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot he didn’t write about at one time or another. I encountered him through the movie of No Country and, aided by the sort of beneficial librarian that usually has to be made up, but in this case was and is very much real3, started with the literary oeuvre— I don’t remember the order in which I read the books, but it makes sense to me that I probably read No Country first and was shocked by the style and then read Blood Meridien and was probably just shocked. I would’ve read The Road around then too.
Blood Meridien was like someone setting off a bomb, and not a ‘clean’ bomb, but an IED packed with the nastiest shrapnel you can imagine, in my brain. I was sixteen or seventeen, and in an odd way, am very glad I read it when I did. It changed my relationship with violence, certainly, in a way that was probably for the best.
He is often described as a violent author, but even in Child of God, it’s hard for me to see that. He describes violent events and violence, better than most authors, seeming to have a very precise sense of when less is more and more is better. What surprised me is that often when authors describe violence, there is an element of voyeurism, of titillation at the transgressions described. You don’t get that in McCarthy, for all the lyricism, never romanticizes, or, when he does, immediately sets you back down to earth. And, Lord, he did write about it a lot.
He was, I suppose, probably and maybe, in retrospect, some idea of the Great American Author— he fit a lot of the cultural stereotypes that developed around such an individual, the boot-strapping mythology, being stale, pale and definitively male, having gone west, being associated with the frontier, being a ‘working intellectual’ who was suspicious of intellectuals, and an anti-establishment figure (vaguely) who was absolutely an institution.
He wrote one film, The Councillor, a movie so bad that I was almost kicked out of a movie theater in St Andrews for heckling. It didn’t feel like heckling, but in the moment the sense of disappointment was so great; you couldn’t blame the actors, everyone from Bardem to Fassbender to Cameron Diaz and it was just blush-makingly awful, with dialogue so stilted you’d think the characters were in some kind of medieval parade and a sexual politics that made you acutely, uncomfortably aware that a 70-ish year old man of a particular orientation had written it. Every other line sounded like someone had stolen it off the back of a hallmark card, all the characters were so stereotypical (‘the morally compromised lawyer’, ‘the naive fiancee’, ‘the rich flamboyant foreigner’, ‘the femme fatale’ and on and on and on) you could predict the movie basically from the first few scenes and the central premise (which was the central premise of most of McCarthy’s work) was that the world was governed by forces beyond our powers to control or even comprehend translated into a muddled mess of Fassbender looking increasingly worried and out of his depth and (literally) every other character remarking on this as if it were some terrific secret of the universe.
This worked in No Country for Old Men, because it was adapted by the Coen Brothers, who took the material literally, but not seriously (to paraphrase a popular legal defense) and, also, because the Coen Brothers have throughout their career(s) dealt with the central theme of individuals finding themselves in a world beyond their comprehension and the mayhem that results from that.
The film they made right after No Country was greeted to the extremely mixed, usually slightly confused critical reception that every other Coen Brothers film used to get- Burn After Reading and Barton Fink had similar issues, and so did The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Hudsucker Proxy and Intolerable Cruelty, but to be fair, those films weren’t that terrific. The movie I’m talking about is called A Serious Man and it was released (immediately falsifying the above statement) the year after Burn After Reading came out. No Country was, to put it mildly, critically acclaimed, and this was in the same year as There Will Be Blood; critics were confused by the Coen’s turn to more comedic fair after this dramatic success (though there are actually a number of very funny moments in No Country) and were more confused at the seemingly very dark humor of both of these films.
I think they’re two of the best movies the Coen’s ever produced, though for very different reasons. They are both, essentially comedic tragedies, where terrible things happen and you laugh along the way, because what’s happening is both essentially unavoidable (and extremely avoidable, if people were other than what they were).
No Country for Old Men
Thanks Mr. Blank.