You Love to See It: No Country for Old Men (Patreon)

“The coin don’t have no say,” the widow Carla Jean Moss explains to the hit man Anton Chigurgh. “It’s just you.” Coming as it does at the end of a film concerned primarily with the primate ingenuity and mythologized moral codes of violent men, actress Kelly MacDonald’s quivering line read hits like a broadside, splintering Chigurgh’s conception of himself as a force of fate and principle without agency in his own actions. At once his game of flipping coins to determine whether strangers live or die goes from chilling to contemptible, a set of social training wheels on a dull, self-serious personality.

This man, who can set his own broken bones and remove buckshot from his own flesh, who can walk into a skyscraper and take life with godlike impunity before walking out again, can’t make his own decisions. In many ways his life is built around this inability, his personal ethics so constricting and elaborate that he runs nonsense errands for dead men and butchers his own employers. To take that kind of vicious ronin sensibility and skewer it, in the movie’s last moments, as a childish abrogation of responsibility and human connection is a gutting decision.

Chigurgh, dressed head to toe in black denim and armed with a tool for slaughtering livestock, may resemble the Grim Reaper, but he’s not a workman in service to entropy. Carla Jean won’t let him claim it. Even as she assures her own death, she refuses to allow this hardened killer to fall back behind his code, to say “this is the best I can do” and cruelly invoke his promise to her dead husband Llewelyn that he, Chigurgh, would find and kill his wife. Other men have gone toe to toe with the hit man and lived, or have tracked him, injured him, but only Carla Jean has the courage to look at him with contempt.