Morality and the 2008 Western

The Western certainly did make a comeback this year. As the Academy Awards approach, there are two “Westerns” contending for best picture, director, cinematographer, editing, sound editing, and adapted screenplay. Indeed the only differences in the honors for No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood are best lead actor versus best supporting actor, NCfOM’s nod for sound mixing and TWBB’s nod for art direction. Of course this year also served 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to fill out the Western bloc, but compared to the extraordinary NCfOM and TWBB, they become all but ancillary.

In No Country for Old Men by the brothers Coen and There Will Be Blood by Paul Thomas Anderson, we have two films that expand on the conventional Western. They both have been praised for there superb directing and are shoe-ins for receiving Oscars for their respective acting categories. Either could win (and be deserving of) the award for Best Picture of the Year. Both films deal with notions of goodness and badness, morality or the lack thereof. And yet the two films couldn’t be more different.

In what has been described to me by Jeanine Basinger as an essentially “cinematic” maneuver, NCfOM offers the viewer no explanations, backgrounds, or contexts for any of its characters (in the case of Chigurh, Bardem employs such an utterly bizarre accent that we can’t even tell where he comes from). We have the good guys (played by Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin) and the bad guys (played by Woody Harrelson and Javier Bardem) displayed before us on the screen with unidentified, but unambiguous identities. The good, the bad, and the money are the only motors for the plot. And just like the bagful of money, the viewer has no idea where the good or the bad came from or why either has been plopped onto our screen.

NCfOM evaporates from our minds the most base question of Why. Indeed it is the inexplicably and categorically evilness of Javier Bardem’s character that has received the most support from critics and fans alike. Bardem’s character is so completely evil and even evinces rationality in acting so that he exhibits a mutilated banality of evil not in the central and moderate sector, but off the charts.

Unlike with the character of Chigurh, Daniel Day-Lewis’s character Daniel Plainview in TWBB is compelling because of the question Why. Indeed we are left with the strange and resounding aftertaste of the question following the enigmatic final monologue and final scene of the film. Plainview is capable of both good and evil, although both are underscored by ulterior motives (i.e. what were Plainview’s true intentions in adopting H.W.?), and we are aware of these motives. We are thrown into the depths of Plainview’s character, from his beginnings to his rise to his fall. We are saturated by his world—the context to which he is always responding. The movie is very much about the Why. Why does this happen? Why does he do this? It is this context that makes our understanding of Plainview’s morality all the more complex and ambiguous.

Of course the evangelical undertones of the film question the very idea of morality. The farce of Eli Sunday’s Church of the Third Revelation suggests the arbitrariness of moral judgment, the delegation of saint and sinner, altogether.

If Richard Slotkin argues that the Western has long been a consistent commentary on American culture and politics, what do these two movies with such different understanding of morality say about the state of our politic? After eight years of an administration soaked through with religious zealotry, secrets, wars, and mistakes, after eight years of consistent decline in our country’s supposed moral standing in the world, after eight years of a war where each side is convinced of the absolute evilness of the other, our relationship to morality has never been more ambiguous. Does the Bush administration really believe it has been justified in its actions or are they really employing some evil plot? Is there real evil out there or has it been created by unfortunate circumstances and a world context of inequality. And what are our personal responsibilities, stakes, and abilities in this ambiguous moral state? Post-modernity certainly has created problems for our simple and dictated notions of good and bad, and these two films certainly suggest the subsequent confusion over the subject. But, despite the statements on the objective and subjective evil, neither film offers us a peace of redemption. And what does that say about our American culture and politic?

~josh