The Sheriff Quits

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

This is where not having music is especially jarring because usually you have some musical cue that this is wrapping up and we don't have that at all I like that. The sheriff wasn't the protagonist for me rightly so like he does it from Moss's point of view with just intermittent things of the sheriff who is a epiphenomina in this movie. It kind of closes with a real questioning of what's real and what's not even though I've never been attracted to any kind of even an interpretation like Shagor isn't real but there are so many openings for that to be considered as a possibility.

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]