No Country For Old Men
I didn't have a lot of knowledge on the film No Country For Old Men prior to watching it in class, but I never expected it to have that much violence or gore. The Coen brothers' film was incredibly suspenseful because it constantly kept the viewers guessing. Although the antagonist, Anton Chigurh, always knew what he was doing, the audience was on their seat trying to figure out his next step. Suspense was created in several different ways, one of them being diegetic noises. Chigurh has a detector that beeps while he drives around, but the audience isn't exactly sure what it's for. As he gets closer and closer to Llewelyn and the money, the beep gets faster and faster. This increases the pace of the scene and makes viewers think that something bad could happen at any minute.
Another way suspense was created was how the audience didn't know whether or not Chigurh let his victims live. In one scene, a man asks Chigurh if he is going to kill him. Chigurh responds, "That depends. Do you see me?" The screen then fades to black and the next scene begins. The audience isn't sure how that situation ended, and it occurs again at the end of the film. When Carla Jean finds Chigurh in her house, she pleads with him not to kill her. He basically tells her that he doesn't have a choice, but he flips a coin anyways to decide her fate. The camera switches to a shot of Chigurh leaving her house, but again, we aren't sure what happened. I think this was interesting because it leaves the audience to interpret what happened. It also lets the audience decide on what kind of person they think Chigurh is. If he is purely evil and killed these two people, or if he has a sliver of humanity in them. Do you think that Chigurh killed Carla Jean and the accountant?
I liked how you talked about suspense and how it was created. It made me think back to how we talked about this in the horror film unit and it was interesting to see that there are many similarities despite them being two different genres.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was interesting how you never do see Carla Jean being murder. But in fact, the director wants the viewer to infer it by when he checks the bottom of his shoes for blood after he leaves her house. I think this is interesting because in all the other murder scenes, you see the person being killed in front of you, there is no inferring required, but with Carla Jean, it is up to us as the viewers to infer this for ourselves.
i agree with what you're saying about the suspense in this movie. In many scenes the viewers are left confused and left to conclude their own endings. I know for me personally I was confused when he left Carla Jean's house because we don't really know for sure if she was murdered, but you only have to assume that he did kill her because to be honest Anton wasn't a very forgiving or kind hearted person. For the accountant, I can't be as sure with what he decided to do with him only because we don't even get to see the response from the accountant as to whether or not he sees Anton. Overall though I think that we as viewers have to infer that he killed most anyone who got in his way or that he didn't like because he was a psychotic killer.
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