NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Joel and Ethan Coen, 2006
… death heightens every tension and permits us fewer
of the half-truths by which we normally live.
Laurence Durrell
This is No Country for Old Men. The young
Llewellyn Moss, a Texan born and bred,
happens upon a cash-bag and some dead
hombres. He’ll join those corpses before long,
dispatched not by a captive-bolt stun gun
to his serenely confident forehead,
as some folks, like our good friend Sheriff Ed
Tom, might well have seen coming—no, he’s done
in off-screen by some nameless killer. Death,
in this rough country, is anonymous
and indiscriminate, indifferent as
the tossed coin that determines your last breath,
or the formula that graphs the curved flight plan
of a bag of cash tossed into no man’s land.
