Chagor and the Coens

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

"It's a very good portrayal of like a chilling killer like that like a cold. He he's just asking the guy just put just can you just put your hands down like you know, and then he just kills him." "I also think these early scenes just give a sense of how overmatched this part of Texas is," says Coen. 'They're prepared for a lot of other kinds of attacks, but not this'

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]