The Ghost of Shagur

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There's a scene with the sheriff the local sheriff that Tommy Lee Jones is talking to where he says can you believe it he just strolls right back into a crime scene how do you defend against that? I feel like this is once again a little sort of like he went into that room looking for the evil but maybe he wasn't. Shagur wouldn't just shoot him if he was really in the room but he would suffer the indignity of a crawling through a vent. Even though he is there he's very relieved to see the vent open and so maybe it's a little bit of a okay I gotta retire because even when he was joking about hiding you.

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]