This is the final part of a three-part series from Fuller professor J.R. Daniel Kirk on the Bible’s wisdom literature and the films of the Coen brothers. The first part was on True Grit and Proverbs, and the second examined Job and A Serious Man. Here, we wrap-up with Ecclesiastes and No Country for Old Men. SPOILERS FOLLOW
___________________________________________________________________________________
The Hebrew Bible enshrines a diverse wisdom tradition ranging from Proverbs’ tight connection between human righteousness and God’s blessing in the world, to Job’s wrestling with a God whose work in the world is inscrutable, to Qoheleth’s angst that the God in heaven works all too little in the world in Ecclesiastes. Joel and Ethan Coen have worked this very diversity of voices into their recent films True Grit, A Serious Man, and No Country for Old Men, and offer some reflections on creating a film catalog that enshrines such competing views of the world.
The final film for our consideration is No Country for Old Men. Here, I am venturing into a less widely acknowledged connection between a Coens film and the biblical wisdom tradition. I am suggesting that No Country for Old Men operates within the world of vanity, an absent God, nothing new under the sun, and unaccountable actions that we discover in Qoheleth.
The film, like the Cormac McCarthy book it is based on, tells the story of Sherriff Ed Tom Bell hunting Anton Chigurh who is, in turn, hunting Llewelyn Moss, a character we first meet when he is, yes, hunting. But the story of Bell versus Chigurh represents a larger story: the question of whether the violence besetting current-day society is worse than what those who came before had to face.
The themes of the film are epitomized in the scene entitled, “Overmatched.”
The scene as it stands now is largely the product of Joel Coen’s screenplay writing.
Several elements in the scene’s dialogue point in the direction of Ecclesiastes as providing the framework for interpreting the story. First, there is the tension between whether Bell is up against a new, worse enemy than law enforcement officers have had to face before. While he interprets this time in his story as a new nadir in human evil, Ellis tells him, “What you got ain’t nothin’ new.” The Preacher’s wisdom seems to be peaking through: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl 1:9). Ellis tells a story about an uncle, a Ranger, who died: shot on his own front porch. Gross acts of violence are nothing new. When did he die? 1909 – some 70 plus years before Bell’s encounter with the handiwork of Chigurh.
Another theme of Ecclesiastes that plays out throughout the course of the film is the lack of just desserts here on earth. In the scene we just watched, Bell says he looks toward retirement because he is overmatched. But he’s not. Throughout the film we catch hints that he knows the mystery of the pressurized cattle rod that Chigurh is using to kill his victims and break into locked rooms. The problem is not that Bell is overmatched, but that there is no reward for his labor. In other words, the wicked sees a reward to his work as much, indeed much more so, than the righteous. All his toil is vanity and a chasing after the wind. “Moreover I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, wickedness was there, and in the place of righteousness, wickedness was there as well” (Ecc. 3:16).
The idea there is nothing new under the sun, and that there is no profit in righteousness both derive from an understanding of God and the world that is, in essence, the opposite of what we find in Proverbs. As we argued with respect to Proverbs and True Grit, the reason that this world is a place of justice is that God superintends the economy of the world to make it so. Qoheleth’s cries of futility derive from what appears to be the absence of this God’s hand at work in the world. “Absence” may not be the right word, because God has acted and given to humanity: “It is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with… What is crooked cannot be made straight and what is crooked cannot be counted.” God is known in the unhappy business of fruitless, futile labor, not as the God who makes himself known so as to enable people to transform God’s world.
Sheriff Bell says, “I always figured when I got older God would sort of come into my life somehow. And He didn’t.” Bell’s God problem is Qoheleth’s God problem: God is in heaven and we are on earth, life under the sun bears too few signs of the active hand of God working to set the world to rights. When Ellis tells Bell that Bell doesn’t know what God thinks of him, this not knowing, not having any way to know, is precisely the problem. Shouldn’t we be able to tell, based on Providential blessing, when God is pleased with us? Should the righteous not see a return for their righteousness? Apparently not.
These thematic indications point in the direction of a Qoheleth-like assessment of the world in No Country, but the scene may contain a stronger allusion as well. Ellis tells Bell, “You can’t stop what’s comin’. It ain’t all waitin’ on you. That’s vanity.” “Vanity. Vanity of vanities, says the preacher, all is vanity.” Not only has the film introduced the word “vanity” that so clearly encapsulates Qoheleth’s message, the idea that the great sheriff is powerless to change the course of events here on earth is precisely the reality that makes labor under the sun “vanity” in Ecclesiastes. This is the scene that, it seems to me, invites the viewer to “read” the film with the wisdom of Ecclesiastes as its interpretive key.
Other moments of the story may point in the same direction. When Chigurh is having his last exchange with Carson Wells, he asks him, “Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this. Of what use was the rule?” Yes, Wells is a mercenary. But in this case, he’s a mercenary who offers a brief glimmer of hope for Llewelyn Moss’s deliverance from Chigurh. His rule, whatever that rule may be, has brought him to the end of death, the fate that, according to Ecclesiastes, awaits us all. What, then, is the point of following the rule, of acting righteously instead of wickedly? In the case of No Country, there is no point at all.
In the end, Bell retires, in fulfillment of his words from the opening voiceover:
“I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard, he’d have to say, ‘Ok, I’ll be part of this world.’”
Although we do not want to confuse embodying a worldview with an allegorical embodiment of the biblical book, we find in Sheriff Bell a learned wise man, befitting the claim that the film as a whole reflects the world of Qoheleth.
In a recent discussion of wisdom in No Country for Old Men, Tim Gombis reflects on the scene where Bell tells Llewelyn’s wife, Carla Jean, about the danger Llewelyn is up against. To convey the potential gravity of the situation, he tells her a story.
“You know Charlie Walser? Has the place east of Sanderson?” She doesn’t know him. “Well, you know how they used to slaughter beeves, hit ‘em with a maul right here to stun ‘em, and then truss ‘em up and slit their throats? Well here Charlie has one trussed up and all set to drain him and the beef comes to. It starts thrashing around, six hundred pounds of very pissed-off livestock if you’ll pardon my… Charlie grabs his gun there to shoot the damn thing in the head but what with the swingin’ and twistin’ it’s a glance-shot and ricochets around and comes back hits Charlie in the shoulder. You go see Charlie, he still can’t reach up with his right hand for his hat… Point bein’, even in the contest between man and cow the issue is not certain.”
As Gombis points out, a couple scenes later Carla Jean calls Bell, and begins her conversation by asking, “Sheriff, was that a true story about Charlie Walser?” “Who’s Charlie Walser? Oh! Well, I uh … True story? I couldn’t swear to ever detail, but … it’s certainly true that it is a story.” There’s a truth in the story that does not depend on the story’s being true. It is a wisdom tale: designed less to tell what has happened than to produce wise action in the person hearing it.
Bell is a wise man. He has cultivated skill, the skill of his fathers, in his sheriff’s work. But what profit is there in all his labor with which he has labored under the sun? He tells Llewelyn he can make him safe, but he is never able to do so, and never able to catch up with Chigurh. In the end, all that awaits him is not the reward of his labors, but going the way of his father. Death, the looming reality that haunts Qoheleth, is all that Bell sees before him in the film’s final scene.
Wisdom is always a messy affair—even the apparently black and white world of Proverbs confronts us with the proverbial pair: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly or your will be like him,” followed immediately by, “Answer a fool according to his folly or he will be wise in his own eyes” (Prov 26:4-5). But place Job, Proverb, and Qoheleth in the same canon, and matters are complicated immeasurably.
As a whole, the wisdom tradition, and the reintroduction of the wisdom tradition into our modern vernacular through the Coen Brothers’ films, invites us to reassess what we think we know about how the world works. Those who think they can get away with anything, pursuing the follies of youth, might need the sobering wake up of a world where God superintends the distribution of justice. The cries of Job, or Larry Gopnik, are there for those who live within “the truth” of the just world in their communities, but experience the suffering and loss for which “there is not answer” becomes the only viable answer. And, when all sense of order has given way to utter helplessness and the existential angst that only death awaits us all, there is the voice of Qoheleth—agreeing, yet urging us onward. There is the small assurance that things are not worse, and yet the stark reality that we cannot make them better as well. We are left with the hope, if it is hope, that our forebears have gone ahead, and that they’ll be there when we get there. And that is all.
___________________________________________________________________________________
J.R. Daniel Kirk is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary. He also claims “living in San Francisco cool guy cred, diligent parenting of two wee ones daddy cred, and struggling farmer to 1 hen and 4 chicks urban crunchy cred.” He blogs admirably at jrdkirk.com, tweets at @jrdkirk, and recently unveiled a new book, Jesus Have I Loved, But Paul? that you should probably check out.