No
Country For Old Men
Film
Comment Vol.44 No.2, New York, 2008
(Opening
excerpt only currently published online)
The welding of the USA with the Western is one of the mythic cornerstones of American Cinema. Viewed from today's vantage point, 'western' conjures forth RUV ads, alt-rock videos and post-Deadwood ventures into melodramatic authenticity. The genre's original modernist formulations lie beyond the horizon line. As classical as John Ford's Stage Coach (1939) appears due to its baroque detailing, the genre ur-text of The Searchers (1956) rests in a modernist dimension displaced from silent-movie staging. When the camera creeps imperceptibly towards Ethan Edward's (John Wayne) face, a dreadful silence fills the cinesonic space with repressive quietude.
Insofar as it's a western, Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country For Old Men (2007) is arguably the first to sidestep revisionist historiography and instead occupy the cinesonic space of John Wayne's vacant, glassy stare. Normative discursive operations can chart the thematic map of No Country, but it's in its disquieting silence - recorded, encoded, textured, atomised - that the complexity of the film's genre programme can be perceived.
