Interesting perspective on NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (Spoilers abound within)

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 3/14/08 at 3:40am

I got into a discussion about this film today about how younger people view this movie and, specifically, one of its characters Anton Chigurh. He's a ruthless psychopath who murders people, often helpless, in the coldest of fashions.

Younger people tend to romanticize this character. There were a few watching this film with me who regularly shouted out "He's a badass! He's an awesome character! Look how he just capped that guy!"

Ironically, many of the characters in the movie were much older (Tommy Lee Jones) and would continuously remark on how awful the world's violence is getting. Do you feel that people are romanticizing horrible violence or just merely becoming more desensitized to it?

To me, most of this generation's only exposure to violence has been through filmed images. The big event, September 11th, was shown ad nauseam from the comfort of your home encased in a TV screen. It didn't look fully "real".

It also didn't help that the media would rarely focus on the aftermath of the act itself but would only show THE ACT ITSELF (The planes crashing into the towers). What happened inside the towers, what happened in the city, most of that was just second-nature to the image of the act which, relatively, was bloodless and "clean."

Compare that to older generations who actually had to fight in wars, staring an enemy down face-to-face.

Are we being fed tragedy through a tube?

[Cruel_Sandwich]

Posted: 3/14/08 at 2:45pm

What do you think?