Holding up a mirror to America: views on ‘No Country for Old Men’

‘No country for old men’?  Texas looks eerily magnificent though in Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest take on the western genre. Horses gallop, men drawl, and gals do the listening as the heat seeps out of the screen and into a cinema near you. It’s nice perhaps to be reminded of what the sun looks like in these winter days – but NCFOM is hardly this season’s latest feel-good movie. A spring in the step and a song in the heart are not the most likely reactions to this strangely irresolute – but relentlessly downbeat – narrative. The movie’s title-being a line from W B Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ has the kind of cultured ambiguity we’ve come to expect from Hollywood’s artiest film directors. Yeats celebrates the ‘sensual music’ of ‘the young in one another’s arms.’  Souls may become ‘sick with desire’ but then find relief by being gathered ‘into the artifice of eternity.’