Nobody's perfect.
What do you think the car accident is all about?
again I think it reiterates the whole point that whatever comes is coming and theres nothing you can do to stop it. And I would have to agree that Chigurh is a man of principle, he does what he asks to do, never for a second did I think he wanted the money for himself, which is not to say that he's a decent human being but he does have morals...albeit extremely bloody and violent morals. I was wondering if anyone here has read Flannery O'Connor's short story A Good Man Is Hard To Find because the final confrontation between Lewellyn's wife and Chigurh reminded me a lot of the confrontation between the serial killer and the old woman in this story and I remember Cormac McCarthy a while back when he wrote No Country stating that he felt his material shared a connection to O'Connor's work. If thats the case then Chigurh is way more then the average serial killer, in O'Connor's story the serial killer represents the abscence of God in the modern world, and the suffering that people will be forced to go through until the accept god back into their lives, and seeing No Contry gave me the same vibe. If you notice the people who dont die are the good Christians, the man who took over his father-in-laws business even if it meant living in the middle of nowhere, the landlady that protected her clients with a mother's love, the lawyer just doing his job, and finally the sheriff who managed to maintain compassion when the rest of the world has gone to shit. Yes the one character that defies this is Lewellyn's wife who didnt do anything wrong and still dies but lets not forget she abandoned her husband, something a good christian wife does not do. Now maybe im reading to much into this and I doubt either McCarthy or the Coens are making a statement for us all to start going to church more often but all im saying is maybe the film is indeed deeper then most people are giving it credit for
I know I'm pretty late to the game here, but I just saw the movie last night and this comment seemed like a good place to chime in.
Although I come to some pretty different conclusions, I really like your reading here; and I think you're right on bringing in O'Conner.
Like you said, the point of the film is "You can't stop what's coming." The question posed by the film is, "who or what sent what's coming?" Like most people I agree that the film offers two answers: no one sent it and everything is random chance, or God or a higher power controls the world and causes things to happen for a reason. Most people align Jones' Sheriff Bell with the God side and Anton Chigurh with the chance side, and I think the characters see themselves that way at the start of the film. However, at the end of the movie they realize they live according to the opposite. Bell has realized that he has no understanding of the world and God never stepped in to give it meaning or order; its all chaos. Chigurh has believed in order throughout the movie, but he covers it up with his flimsy chance games. He never holds himself culpable for what happens; he is just following the paths before him and doing what must be done. In the same way the quarter traveled 22 years to that Texas store, Chigurh moves with impersonal purpose. I'm not certain that he comes to realize that his coin flips are never about chance, but the confrontation with Carla Jean certainly calls it into focus-- both with her recognition that the coin toss doesn't matter and that he doesn't have to do it.
To go back to the question that prompted your response, the car accident can be read according to each perspective. Either it was planned, the car had been traveling for X amount of years to get to that intersection with Chigurh's car, or it was completely random. The film doesn't tell us the reason, which is one of its more brilliant aspects. There are all sorts of holes, most of them have been mentioned in this thread-- who killed Moss? was Chigurh in the hotel? did Chigurh kill Carla Jean or the lawyer?-- and these holes put us in the position of Bell/Chigurh: are they random acts of violence or are they part of a coherent story? Like the God Bell looks for, the Coens (and McCarthy) step back and stay silent, and we must decide if its order or chaos.
This silent God aspect is why I would question your pro-Christian reading. If God exists in the world of
No Country, then He is either the negligent God of Stephen Crane or the hateful God of Baudelaire. He may be the God of Flannery O'Conner, but I would position her someplace between Crane and Baudelaire, despite her Catholicism. Either way, Bell's American/Texan Christianity certainly doesn't earn him any peace, and Chigurh's determinism makes him a soulless monster. Neither perspective is a ringing endorsement for God.