The Importance of Music in the Film

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I wasn't sure it was seemed ambiguous to me whether he was referring to the country, the United States or this country as in like this land. There is something very emotional about the silence with those shots. I think it's ballsy to shoot without music. You can't manipulate emotions in that easy way when you have the music. It just captures the just these people are alone. And how they feel and what they do is up to them.

David and Tamler dive into the Coen brothers’ bleak and beautiful adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel "No Country for Old Men." What’s the underlying philosophy that animates Anton Chigurh? Does he have a code of any kind, or is he just a ghostly symbol of human brutality and a pitiless indifferent universe? Does he represent a new kind of evil or is Sheriff Bell just getting old? What elements, if any, in the film are more dream than reality?

And speaking of moral decline, a new Nature study claims that we have the illusory belief that people are getting worse - but can they really establish that it’s an illusion?

Mastroianni, A. M., & Gilbert, D. T. (2023). The illusion of moral decline. Nature, 1-8.

Mastroianni blog post about the illusion of moral decline

No Country for Old Men (movie) [wikipedia.org]