At his blog, Glenn Kenny has a great fleshing out of a theory I’ve heard but haven’t, up to this point, given much thought to: the idea that Anton Chigurh, the killer played by Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, could be a ghost, or some other kind of supernatural embodiment of absolute evil.
Kenny’s got some good points, and as far as wildly speculative theories go (always dangerous when it comes to the Coens), his take certainly does offer an easy read on some of the more troubling details of the film’s final act. But I still don’t think I buy it. The film spends too much time on the procedural details of Chigurh’s spree, up to and including a long scene in which Chigurh treats his own wounds, which seems to have been put in there chiefly to tell us that he’s human. But what do I know. If you’ve seen the film and/or are prepared to be spoiled, check out Kenny’s analysis and let us know what you think.








“There are all these people who are like a non-people living here in caravans, 15 to a house in parts of England. Completely under the radar, completely unprotected. Like Dickensian England, it’s all here. These people are working for Sainsbury’s, Tesco’s and ASDA, [they] all pretend they don’t know it’s going on. And the government pretends it doesn’t know it’s going on. They’ve designed everything so that those people can be used to keep the cost of living low. There like this sub-human race and I realized that this is really widespread.” From



