The New Modern Way of Killing

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

"It's this new modern way of killing that we get an interesting scene where the sheriff is talking to Wendell and he tells the story about the old people who were tortured," she says. "I love Tommy Lee Jones's delivery of it too because he's not laughing at all but he's forgiving us for laughing but he's just horrified so we get we get Luellen crossing the border again getting back into the US going to buy some clothes these are weird scenes with him in the boot guy I know I kind of like them and I don't know why yeah they seem significant."

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]