Those Dying Generations

• Main Author: Cubitt, Sean
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2020
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190065713.003.0007

Like other films analysed here, No Country for Old Men (Ethan and Joel Coen, 2007) abandons humanism, but rather than offer recoding as a solution for historical impasses, it acts out two modes of history: as obligation, and as predestination. The border setting of the film’s action is more than metaphorical of these forms of history. It evokes both the fraught political-economic relations between the United States and Mexico and is acted out on a landscape whose emptiness and moral threat, the chapter argues, derives from the genocide of First Nations. This is revealed in a critical moment when a minor character tells an anecdote from the area’s history, the only mention of indigenous peoples, which reverberates in the depiction of Chigurh, the dark angel of vengeance who haunts the narrative.