Call It: Thoughts on the Coin Toss Scene in No Country for Old Men

Anton Chigurh teaches a philosophical point to an elderly man 

who owns a gas station in No Country for Old Men (2007)

 

 

I. 

 

I'm not alone in admiring the 2007 film directed by the Coen brothers, No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel of the same title [1]. And I'm probably not the only one whose favourite scene in the movie is the one set in a gas station, involving a tossed coin ...

 

In this scene, fatalistic psychopath and assassin Anton Chigurh - played by everybody's favourite Spanish actor Javier Bardem - terrorises the elderly proprieter of the gas station, obliging him to stake his life on one toss of a coin: click here.     

 

 

II. 

 

There are many aspects we could comment on in this scene; Chigurh's contempt for the banal nature of small talk upon which human interaction is founded and, indeed, the small, pitiful nature of most lives, for example. Or how it is Bardem manages to convey such mocking malevolence and menace in his performance; is it the voice? is it the look on his face? is it the haircut? 

 

But it's what Chigurh says about the coin - a quarter, dated 1958 - that most interests. He says that it has been travelling through space and time for twenty-two years (the film is set in 1980), just to be flipped and slammed on a counter in order to determine what happens next. 

 

The coin exists, in other words, in all its here and nowness, in all it's thingness and dual nature (head or tails) and although of little monetary value, it's invested with the greatest weight at that moment.  

 

And that's fascinating when you think about it. But then, of course, the same is true of any other object; they all have an astonishing presence and some queer relation to us; our fate and theirs is inextricably linked [2].

 

And that's why we should treat all objects with a certain respect and never unthinkingly put a lucky quarter in our pocket, where it will become just another coin: which it is.    

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In fact, the movie was not only a huge commercial and critical success, but won numerous awards, including four Oscars, three BAFTAs, and two Golden Globes. It would surprise me if there's anyone who doesn't like this film. 

 

[2] Having said that, we need to be wary of slipping into a lazy relationism in which we view objects only in terms of their connections (particularly their connections to us) and forget about their radical non-connectedness (i.e., their withdrawn nature).