“No Country for Old Men” is a depiction of decent, honest people who lack the “sophistication” to understand and “contextualize” monsters like Chigurh, who patiently and almost politely plumbs the humanity of his victims to savor all the more who he’s going to murder.
The Cohen brothers have done this before in “Fargo” – a world with people like Marge and Norm who are unable to comprehend how Grimsrud (and his partner Carl, prior to being fed into a wood chipper …) can do what they do “for a little bit of money.”
But alas, as Ubu Roi notes, “the modern, humanist left cannot even begin to grasp evil like Chigurh”. I saw both of these films in the company of a kind of NYC audience who importantly and intelligently laughed at all the wrong times.
Of course, they’ve been properly educated to parse and appreciate the neo-post-ironic subtext of the story they think they saw …
