Cute kids update — economics division
Sam (6) has discovered money, and the power of money, and the glory of money. Money, he has realized, can buy Star Wars toys, and a great deal of money can buy big Star Wars toys.
So Sam is willing to do just about anything at this point to get some money.
My wife, seizing upon this new capitalistic streak, has put him to work around the house, performing more-or-less useful tasks that pose no immediate threat to his health or to local property values.
Yesterday she puts him to work washing our patio doors (which, to be fair, need washing). For the performance of this task she offers him two dollars. The deal is accepted and he goes to work with a pail and sponge.
Enter Kit, kid sister (5). Kit sees Sam washing the windows and wonders how she ever felt fulfillment playing with Polly Pocket. She now wants to wash windows too — not for the money, but to be included, and for the sheer giddy joy of it.
In another time, in another story, Tom Sawyer once put the whole neighborhood to work whitewashing a fence because he was lazy and canny, and he knew it would make a good plot-point in a deathless novel. But in the year 2007, kids and household tasks have changed. Kit approached Sam and asked if she could help and Sam became hysterical. Cries of rage and dishonor echoed around the block. Sam was furious, not because Kit might be cutting in on his window-washing fun, but because he was worried that if Kit was willing to wash windows for nothing, the job could be done without Sam and Sam would be out his two dollars.
Just another example of skilled workers struggling to keep their jobs against a tide of newcomers willing to do the job for less — California economics in a nutshell. And the WGA strike too, I suppose.
But what does that have to do with No Country for Old Men?
Ah, but my dear Mr. Holman, it has everything to do with No Country for Old Men. Both are stories about skilled workers angry about Management hiring cheaper day-labor to compete with them for their jobs.
And, as long as we’re on the subject, I read your review of No Country and must disagree with you on one point — neither McCarthy nor the Coens lay the blame for the escalation of violence in the story at the feet of the “younger generation” — rather, the blame is laid at the feet of corporate greed, the “breakdown of mercantile ethics” where men in ties make decisions in office buildings, designed solely to make themselves wealthy, and somewhere way down the line, a bunch of Mexicans get shot up in the desert in pursuit of that wealth, and assassins must be hired to recover it. (This is, pretty much, the impetus behind Michael Clayton and There Will Be Blood as well.)
In the book, McCarthy takes it even further by having Chigurh’s car bashed into not by Anonymous Station Wagon, but by a carload of drug-addled Mexican teens — Chigurh becoming a casualty of the very business he’s helping to flourish.
“Ah, but my dear Mr. Holman, it has everything to do with No Country for Old Men.”
LOL, as the kids say.
I wouldn’t presume to argue with your rich and far-reaching analysis, which would be a mismatch along the lines of H.I. McDonough vs. the Biker of the Apocalypse. (I’m HI in that scenario, with no hand grenade.)
But in the film and particularly in the soliloquies in the book, the generational aspect made a strong impression on me. In Bell’s opening speech in the film, the youth of the condemned sociopath seemed to be his definitive trait.
Did you or anyone else mention that No Country has two scenes with a wounded guy offering younger males money for clothes to conceal his injuries and abet his getaway?
Thanks for reading.
Bell, or McCarthy (I couldn’t tell you which) has a “reactionary crank” aspect to him that is mostly smoothed over for the movie (there is another monologue in the book where he equates abortion with euthanasia and states that what some people call “right wing” to him is just common sense). Part of his character is that he thinks that evil comes from the younger generation. Uncle Ellis sets him straight on that — it is pursuit of great wealth that leads people to irrational violence.
The kids at the end of the movie, narratively speaking, I don’t think are supposed to be more or less susceptible to greed than the other characters — it’s more that Chigurh, in his purist pursuit of wealth at the expense of all compassion or even interest in humanity, infects him with his easy solutions. This is made even more clear in the book, where, after Chigurh gives the one kid $100 for his shirt, the two kids steal Chigurh’s abandoned pistol out of his wrecked car and sell it to someone else, and many years later it’s used to kill a man during — what else? — a hold-up.
“Bell, or McCarthy (I couldn’t tell you which) has a “reactionary crank” aspect to him that is mostly smoothed over for the movie (there is another monologue in the book where he equates abortion with euthanasia and states that what some people call “right wing” to him is just common sense). Part of his character is that he thinks that evil comes from the younger generation.”
THAT’s it! Now I remember. When I read the book, all of that stuff made me wonder if McCarthy set the book in 1980 because it was the year Ronald Reagan got elected.
Part of it may be Reagan’s election, but I think it’s set in 1980 because that’s when the “Greed is good” decade began.
Here I thought washing windows on the ground floor was the very definition of unskilled labour. 😉
Well, he is six after all — pretty much all labor is skilled labor to him.
Who are these writers who will work for free? And, do they have a screenplay ready?
Hollywood is filled to bursting with writers who will, and do, work for free. It’s called “spec work,” and one of the things the AMPTA is trying to do is make it so all work in Hollywood is spec work — even assignments.
Pay for assignments?! Oh, fer cry eye! Next, they’ll be wanting taxation with representation.