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Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche

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No Country for Old Men: Encounter with

Evil or the Spirit of the Depths?
Karen Naifeh
Published online: 10 May 2013.

To cite this article: Karen Naifeh (2013) No Country for Old Men: Encounter with Evil or the Spirit of
the Depths?, Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, 7:2, 24-34, DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2013.759075

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19342039.2013.759075

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 No Country for Old Men
Encounter with Evil or the Spirit of the Depths?
KAREN NAIFEH

By the time Jung wrote Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912/1991),1 he had embarked
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upon an increasing realization that there is a natural process of transformation at work in the
psyche; The Red Book depicts Jung’s own transformative process. In The Red Book, Jung speaks of
two forces governing our actions as human beings, which he calls the spirit of the times and the
spirit of the depths. Of these he says:
I have learned that in addition to the spirit of this time there is still another spirit at work, namely that
which rules the depths of everything contemporary. The spirit of this time would like to hear of use
and value . . . . But that other spirit forces me nevertheless to speak, beyond justification, use and
meaning. Filled with human pride and blinded by the presumptuous spirit of the times, I long sought
to hold this other spirit away from me. But I did not consider that the spirit of the depths from time
immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit of this time, who changes
with the generations. (2009, 229)

The inner journey that these spirits compelled Jung to make was unique to him, but the same
forces work on all of us. In this paper, I use Jung’s description of the spirit of the times and the
spirit of the depths to trace a process of natural transformation depicted in the film No Country for
Old Men (Coen and Coen, 2007).
No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, is produced
and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. The Coen brothers have an uncanny ability to infuse the
inner world into their films, while simultaneously the story can seem to be about the outer world
alone. Their work also contains an interweaving of the profound and the absurd that takes the
viewer into the depths, and they have done an exceptional job of that in this film; it has
preoccupied me ever since I saw it three years ago.
The film is dark, and so very hard to watch, given that it portrays such violent encounters
with evil. One reason the film continues to grip me is because of early experiences I had resulting
from my father’s encounter with the evil of the Holocaust when he was a soldier in WWII. As a
result, I was a fearful, anxious child and young adult. One of my most shattering, but ultimately
growth-promoting experiences was an encounter with the reality of my own death and the dark
forces in the world around the time of my thirtieth birthday. I was compelled, unrelentingly, to

Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, Volume 7, Number 2, pp. 24–34, Print ISSN 1934-2039, Online ISSN 1934-2047.
q 2013 C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. DOI: 10.1080/19342039.2013.759075.
 Karen Naifeh, No Country for Old Men 25

be with my worst terrors for almost three weeks—there was no place to hide from them. I felt
taken down to my bones. It feels to me that this movie portrays an unleashing of those same
forces. What I learned from my own experience is that, horrific as it is, an encounter with those
forces can be an experience of going through hell and reaching the self. Something of that is in
this film.
No Country for Old Men is a dark and bloody story. In this movie, a dark force irrupts into
ordinary life, dissolving the barriers we erect so that we don’t have to remember it exists in the midst
of us. We assign the police to deal with it; we push it into the periphery of our lives; we hear about it
in the abstract. But in this movie we are with it much of the time and it is overwhelming. The
people we meet are ordinary people who are forced to grapple with, as the sheriff says, something
they don’t understand, something that feels like it “puts their soul at hazard.” Such forces surely
emerge from the spirit of the depths, which Jung describes in The Red Book, in its most terrifying
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form, demanding a new vision or destruction. The spirit of the times holds these West Texas people
in its iron grip of conventionality and paternalism. What happens to them as they encounter these
forces? There is a strong pull for them (and us) to push it all away, to demand that the hero make it
stop and lock up the offenders; it is too horrible. I think people have a hard time watching this film
because it is so effective at placing evil at the center. As Jung said in Aion, “It is quite within the
bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and
shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil” (1959/1978, CW 9ii, {19).
Through this, the film also provokes in us a descent into the depths:
Your shock and doubt will be great, but from such torment the new life will be born. Birth is blood
and torment. Your darkness, which you did not suspect since it was dead, will come to life and you will
feel the crush of total evil . . . (Jung 2009, 239)

and
How hard is fate! If you take a step toward your soul, you will at first . . . believe that you have sunk
into meaninglessness, into eternal disorder. You will be right! Nothing will deliver you from disorder
and meaninglessness, since this is the other half of the world . . . . You open the gates of the soul to let
the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. (235)

The story, set near the Mexican border in Texas, is about a drug deal gone bad and the people
drawn into that deal. Anton Chigurh is a professional hit man hired by the Anglo drug buyers to
get the money back. He is trailing the man who’s happened onto the money, a local welder named
Llewellyn Moss. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell has to find the parties behind the drug deal and the man who
killed his deputy. Throughout the film, we see Chigurh pursuing Moss to reclaim the money; Moss
eluding him repeatedly, absolutely determined to keep it and keep going; the sheriff trying to get to
Moss to protect him and capture Chigurh; and Chigurh committing one murder after another in
his ruthless pursuit of Moss. The sheriff is always just behind them.
The setting of the story at the Mexican border evokes in our psyches issues of boundary—who
and what to let in or to keep out, what finds its way across in secrecy and darkness. Drug trafficking
evokes the enormous suffering of humanity in the big city and the way it affects the furthest reaches
of our country. And the people of West Texas whom we meet carry a culture of strong conservatism
with its concomitant patriarchal values. As everyday people, they are deeply unconscious of other
 26 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 2 / SPRING 2013

forces at work, powerfully in the grip of the spirit of the times. This situation reveals an aspect of all
of us, brought home by our identification with the characters in the unfolding drama.
The movie opens with darkness and distant thunder. The narrative of the sheriff and shots of
vast barren West Texas desert landscapes in the early dawn set an ominous tone in the first scenes
of the movie. As Hauke points out beautifully in his chapter on No Country for Old Men in Jung
and Film II, the soul of the desert is palpable in these scenes (2011, 92 –93). We, like Jung, are led
into the desert of our own selves.
Sheriff Ed Tom’s voice has a dreamlike, musing quality as he talks about the old-time sheriffs.
As he tells us, he is a son and grandson of sheriffs, feeling part of a fine tradition of heroes stopping
evil. But he goes on: “The crime you see now, it’s hard to even take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid
of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job . . . ” Scenes of the sheriff’s deputy
arresting Chigurh follow (this is our introduction to Chigurh), while the sheriff’s voiceover continues:
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But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand . . . .
You can say it’s my job to fight it but I don’t know what it is anymore . . . . More than that, I don’t
want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard . . . . He would have to say, okay, I’ll be part
of this world. (Coen and Coen 2007, “Old Timers”)2

Right here Ed Tom is telling us about his dilemma—it’s not lack of courage to do the job, but
something about current crime has passed beyond his understanding, and he has a sense that
working to fight it will pull him into a world that mystifies and horrifies him, a world he wants
nothing to do with. He is confused, groping for deeper answers. Nevertheless, he does do his job,
trying to find Moss and get him to safety, trying to track down Chigurh. As we join him, it feels as
if we, too, may be putting our souls at hazard.
Deepening and then congealing the dark feeling and sense of horror, we come to a gruesome
scene early in the film where Chigurh is choking the deputy to death with his handcuffed hands on
the floor of the jail. The scene starts with the deputy on the telephone telling the sheriff, “I’ve got
everything under control,” unaware that Chigurh has slipped up behind him. As the deputy
struggles and kicks in his death throes, Chigurh’s face has a look of intense determination and even
ecstasy. But there is also a strange banality to the scene that is emphasized by the sight and sound of
the swivel chair spinning and the marks of the deputy’s boots on the floor (forming a gruesome
mandala) as the two men struggle. Familiar sounds rather than music are the “score.” It seems to
me that the lack of music to hold and guide us in our emotions, and the accompaniments of
“disruption” so ordinary and familiar to us, make the murder feel very real. It enters our own lives.
There is nothing to focus on but the graphic struggle before us of life in the grip of death. This is
where, for me, the man Chigurh becomes the archetype of death—the Grim Reaper.
In a close-up of a sink, we see and hear handcuffs fall into it, as bloody hands are being washed
with water from the faucet. Here is where the ordered world, represented by the deputy (“I’ve got
everything under control”) is overwhelmed by the spirit of the depths, who unshackles himself and
is now loose in the world.
The character Chigurh is complicated in that he is not just a monolithic Grim Reaper. He is also
a man who can be injured—physically at least. He sustains serious injuries twice in the film, and we are
with him in his hotel room as he treats his injuries himself. Naked and alone, he washes his wounds,
 Karen Naifeh, No Country for Old Men 27

but there is little indication that, even though he visibly feels their accompanying pain, he is
suffering because of them. He appears to be completely separated from his bodily experience. If he is a
man, he seems to have given up or killed off so much of his humanity that he is completely taken over
by the archetype—evil, Angel of Death, Grim Reaper. There is no human feeling inside him. (Javier
Bardem, the actor who plays Chigurh, said in an interview that he played him as something not
human.) The archetypal level at which Chigurh exists is brought out in the movie by his appearance—
he is dressed in black; his hair cut in a shoulder-length pageboy, reminiscent of the Grim Reaper’s
hood. He carries a gas cylinder with a length of tubing that ends in a penetrating pointed-bolt killing
device, reminiscent to me of the Grim Reaper’s long-handled scythe. Its use for killing evokes the
grotesque.
Most of the people who interact with Chigurh don’t realize that he is the Angel of Death and try
to relate to him as a human being or to appeal to his humanity or to logic. (More than one victim says
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to him, “You don’t have to do this.”) But Chigurh lives by a bizarre set of rules that he expresses at
various points in the movie; for example, he tells Moss: “You bring me the money and I’ll let her go.
Otherwise she’s accountable. The same as you”(Coen and Coen 2007, “The Best Deal”). He makes
Moss’s wife “accountable” to him and carries that through even when his pursuit of Moss for the
money is no longer an issue. As Carson Wells, the bounty hunter who is also after Chigurh, tells Moss:

You don’t understand. You can’t make a deal with him. Even if you gave him the money he’d still kill you.
He’s a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs
or anything like that. He’s not like you. He’s not even like me.” (Coen and Coen 2007, “Medico”)

Chigurh arbitrarily assigns himself the “right” to take a person’s life or allow him to stay alive based
on a coin flip. He takes these rules absolutely seriously, and yet they are “absurd” by normal social
standards. But as Jung tells us in The Red Book:

I had to swallow the small as a means of healing the immortal in me. It completely burnt up my
innards since it was inglorious and unheroic. It was even ridiculous and revolting. But the pliers of the
spirit of the depths held me, and I had to drink the bitterest of all draughts. (2009, 230)

Chigurh, like the spirit of the depths, brings the absurd, brother of supreme meaning, to bear.
He has an encounter with the proprietor of a little highway convenience store who gets too nosy
about who Chigurh is and where he comes from. The proprietor senses he’s bumped up against
something very dark and frightening and tries to get away (“I got to close [the store] now”) but
Chigurh won’t allow it. In this encounter, Chigurh puts that man up against his own “smallness”;
the pliers of the spirit of the depths holds him. Chigurh looks so menacingly at the man that we
can see he’s decided to kill him out of aggravation. But then Chigurh bows to an archetype of fate
or fortune—he sighs heavily, saying to the proprietor as he tosses a coin:
Chigurh: What’s the most you’ve ever lost on a coin toss?
Proprietor: Sir?
Chigurh: The most. You ever lost. On a coin toss.
Proprietor: I don’t know. I couldn’t say.
Chigurh: Call it.
Proprietor: Call it?
 28 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 2 / SPRING 2013

Chigurh: Yes.
Proprietor: For what?
Chigurh: Just call it.
Proprietor: Well—we need to know what it is we’re callin’ for here.
Chigurh: You need to call it. I can’t call it for you. It wouldn’t be fair.
Proprietor: I didn’t put nothin’ up.
Chigurh: Yes, you did. You been putting it up your whole life. You just didn’t know it. [pause]
You know what date is on this coin?
Proprietor: No.
Chigurh: Nineteen fifty-eight. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And it’s either
heads or tails, and you have to say. Call it.
Proprietor: Look . . . I got to know what I stand to win.
Chigurh: Everything.
Proprietor: (confused) How’s that?
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Chigurh: You stand to win everything. Call it.

Proprietor: (still confused) All right. Heads then.
(Chigurh takes his hand away and turns his arm to look at the coin—it’s heads.)
Chigurh: Well done. (He hands it across.) . . . Don’t put it in your pocket.
Proprietor: Sir?
Chigurh: Don’t put it in your pocket, sir. It’s your lucky quarter.
Proprietor: . . . Where you want me to put it?
Chigurh: Anywhere not in your pocket. Or it’ll get mixed in with the others and become just a
coin, [long pause] which it is.
(Coen and Coen 2007, “Call It, Friendo”)

As I watched this scene I felt, with intense dread and then relief, that what Chigurh said was true—
he held that man’s fate in his hands, and fortune smiled on the man that time. I felt I was in a
liminal space watching death come close and then move away, influenced only by chance.
What happens to Llewellyn Moss as he encounters these forces? Moss, a local working-class man
and Vietnam combat veteran, is out hunting in the desert when he finds the carnage of a dozen dead
bodies, shot up trucks, and a huge load of narcotics. Following a blood trail, he descends into a valley
where the shoot-out took place, led there, reminiscent of Faust, by a black dog. In searching for the
“last man standing,” Moss finds another body and a briefcase full of money. He’s “hit the jackpot.”
He takes the money home with him, but tells his wife, Carla Jean, nothing. They have an easy,
comfortable repartee, but it is clear that he is in charge and does not include her in his deliberations
or decision-making. Here we see the West Texas patriarchal spirit of the times at work, and in
discounting her views and concerns, Llewellyn closes the door on the possibility of a deeper
understanding of his situation.
In the night he can’t sleep; he gets up. His sleepy wife finds him filling a jug with water and
preparing to go out into the night, back to the scene of the shoot-out.
Carla Jean: What’re you doin’, baby?
Moss: I’m fixin to do somethin dumber’n hell but I’m goin’ anyways. (And as he heads for the
door) If I don’t come back tell Mother I love her.
Carla Jean: (sleepy pause) Your mother’s dead, Llewellyn.
Moss: (looks confused) Well then I’ll tell her myself.
(Coen and Coen 2007, “The Getting Place”)
 Karen Naifeh, No Country for Old Men 29

Here, something going on inside Moss’s mind as a result of his finding all that money has pulled
him into a liminal space between life and death.
Llewellyn Moss’s attempts to elude his pursuers and keep the money for himself remind me of
Steinbeck’s short story The Pearl. Both are about ordinary people near the bottom of the economic
ladder who’ve had a great fortune come into their hands and who have the fantasy that all the good
things in life are now theirs to be had. But, in both cases, their lives turn into a nightmare as they are
pursued by violent, greedy men, and both are forced into a dance of death and destruction as they
struggle to hold on to the wealth that has so miraculously come into their lives. In this film, Moss is
convinced that he is powerful, wily, persistent, and courageous enough to succeed against the forces
that are after him. The promise he sees for his life that all the money will bring takes over his better
judgment, and what appears to him to be great good brings on great evil.
In the guise of great good (riches), the archetypal shadow enters Moss’s world. Cinematically,
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this is emphasized with Chigurh ominously knocking on the door, then blowing out the lock using
his compressed air tank, and entering Moss’s trailer home. There is an image of light, then a dark
figure blocking the light as Chigurh stands in the doorway, seeking his prey. His image carries
much more than the personal shadow; yet Moss’s personal shadow has paved the way for its
entrance.
In Moss’s single-minded determination to keep the money and elude Chigurh, he narrowly
escapes death several times as he is pursued both by the Mexicans in the drug deal and by Chigurh.
He himself is seriously wounded, and his evasive actions bring about the murders of one innocent
bystander after another. Moss becomes lost in his hero stance. When Sheriff Bell warns Moss’s wife
that the men who are after him won’t quit until they kill him, she says, “He won’t neither.
He never has. He can take all comers” (Coen and Coen 2007, “Ultimate Badass”). She, too, is lost in
Moss’s hero stance. On the telephone Moss tells Chigurh, “Yeah I’m goin’ to bring you somethin’
all right. I’ve decided to make you a special project of mine. You ain’t goin’ to have to look for me at
all!” (“The Best Deal”). Moss fails to understand where he is and what he is up against.
In The Red Book Jung warns:
Go cautiously as if you were cowards, so that you pre-empt the soul murderers. The depths would like
to swallow you whole and choke you in the mud. He who journeys to Hell also becomes Hell;
therefore do not forget from whence you come. The depths are stronger than us; so do not be heroes,
be clever and drop the heroics, since nothing is more dangerous than to play the hero. The depths
want to keep you; they have not returned very many up to now, and therefore men fled from the
depths and attacked them. What if the depths, due to the assault, change themselves into death?
(2009, 244)

And so the depths keep Llewellyn Moss.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell sees himself as a good man, a courageous, upstanding man like his father
and grandfather, who were sheriffs as well. He commits himself to Truth and Justice, but shows
unconscious racial bigotry (“supposedly coyotes won’t eat [dead] Mexicans”).
Throughout his pursuit of Moss and Chigurh, the theme of modern crime going beyond his
understanding is continued; he is puzzled, confused, shocked, and horrified. He strongly
reprimands the truck driver who is transporting the dead bodies from the shoot-out because he’s
concerned the corpses will fall out onto the road. He would like to “tie things down tight” so they
 30 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 2 / SPRING 2013

don’t get out of control, but seems haunted by the feeling that he is unable to do so. Modern
criminals are beyond his ken; in fact, modern youth is beyond his ken. He commiserates with a
fellow sheriff about modern young people:
Roscoe: It’s all the goddamned money, Ed Tom. The money and the drugs. It’s just goddamned
beyond everything. What is it mean? What is it leading to?
Bell: Yes.
Roscoe: If you’d a told me twenty years ago I’d see children walkin’ the streets of our Texas towns
with green hair and bones in their noses I just flat out wouldn’t of believed you.
Bell: Signs and wonders. But I think once you stop hearin’ sir and ma’am, the rest is soon to
follow.
Roscoe: It’s the tide. It’s the dismal tide. It is not the one thing.
Bell: Not the one thing.
(Coen and Coen 2007, “What’s Comin’”)
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In this conversation, the two sheriffs virtually strip the children they refer to of their humanity
because of their difference. There is an unwillingness to understand why they might dye their hair
green, why they might want drugs, why they don’t say “sir” and “ma’am,” because it’s against what
the sheriffs regard as the accepted way. Perhaps knowing why might make them conscious of
something they somehow don’t want to be conscious of. And so they strip these children of a
common humanity with them in much the same way the “good” people of the sheriff’s
grandfather’s generation stripped the Indians of their common humanity (we learn later that
Indians killed the sheriff’s uncle, also a sheriff). Then we have Chigurh engaged in the ultimate
dehumanizing act: the humanity of the people he kills is irrelevant to him.
Also, there is something about the movie’s use of the drug problem (a huge problem for the
collective today) as a backdrop that calls to my mind Jung’s writings in Psychology and Religion,
where he says that through an individual’s painful shouldering of the shadow, a process of healing
and moral integration can begin for the collective:

Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with
his own shadow . . . he has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic,
unsolved social problems of our day. (1958/1969, CW 11, {140)

The way the Coens stage the movie subtly evokes a sense of Chigurh as an aspect of the sheriff: In
Llewellyn Moss’s mobile home, Sheriff Bell sits down in the same place Chigurh was sitting
moments before, drinking the same milk, seeing his own reflection in the TV set as did Chigurh.
Later, the sheriff goes looking for Chigurh in the motel room where Moss was killed. The door has
Chigurh’s “calling card”—a blown-out hole where the lock had been. The sheriff stands in front of
the door a long time, seemingly trying to ready himself for the confrontation. The suspense is
powerful, as this could be the moment when the hero finally comes face-to-face with the evildoer.
We are given the impression that Chigurh is hiding behind the door. But when the sheriff finally
pushes the door open and enters the room, it is no longer clear whether Chigurh was really there.
A double shadow of the sheriff is projected onto the far wall. The sheriff finds no one, and there is
a peculiar feeling evoked as we see the sheriff alone in the room. The double shadow indicates that
Chigurh represents not only something “out there” but also something “in here.” In opening that
 Karen Naifeh, No Country for Old Men 31

door and stepping across the blood-stained threshold, Sheriff Bell consciously enters that world he
dreads even though it puts his soul at hazard; he is now willing to confront his own shadow.
Sheriff Bell has always been the good guy, placing evil firmly “out there.” He is all of us “good
people,” and the depth of the evil portrayed in the film may reflect the sum total of all the shadow
material that we as a society put elsewhere, rather than each of us shouldering it ourselves. But
Sheriff Bell becomes increasingly aware that the way he has always acted in the world (moved by
the spirit of his time) no longer works for him. Chigurh is acting as the spirit of the depths for
Sheriff Bell, making him drink the bitter draught of failure. He fails to save Moss, and he fails to
capture Chigurh. He feels “overmatched,” as he says later.
He goes looking for a way to deal with it. He asks old Ellis, a former deputy for Bell’s grandfather,
if he would go after the man who crippled him, and Ellis says: “Wouldn’t be no point to it. All the
time you spend tryin’ to get back what’s been took from you there’s more goin’ out the door. After a
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while you just try and git a tourniquet on it” (Coen and Coen 2007, “Overmatched”).
The sheriff has decided to retire. The theme of old age enters, bringing with it a different
attitude. He says to Ellis: “ . . . I always thought when I got older, God would sort of come into my
life somehow. [pause] He didn’t. [pause] I don’t blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion
about me that he does” (Coen and Coen 2007, “Overmatched”).
Sheriff Bell is pessimistic about finding God now, but paradoxically, in his letting go of the
external struggle, he is finally making room for God. A quote from The Red Book captures for me
the state of mind at which Ed Tom Bell has arrived:
He who enters into his own must grope through what lies at hand, he must sense his way from stone
to stone. He must embrace the worthless and the worthy with the same love . . . . Judgment must fall
from you, even taste, but above all pride, even when it is based on merit. Utterly poor, miserable,
unknowingly humiliated, go on through the gate. Turn your anger against yourself, since only you stop
yourself from looking and from living. (Jung 2009, 246)

The film ends with Ed Tom telling his wife two dreams he’s had:
Both had my father. It’s peculiar. I’m older now’n he ever was by twenty years. So in a sense he’s the
younger man. Anyway, first one I don’t remember too well but it was about meetin’ him in town
somewhere to give me some money. [pause] I think I lost it.
The second one, it was like we was both back in older times and we was on horseback goin’ through
the mountains of the night. Goin’ through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow
on the ground. He rode past me and kept on goin’. Never said nothing goin’ by. He just rode on past,
and he had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down, and when he rode past I seen he was
carryin’ fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it.
About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin’ on ahead and that he was
fixin’ to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever
I got there he’d be there. And then I woke up. (Coen and Coen 2007, “Overmatched”)

As we watch and listen to Ed Tom tell his second dream, we see that he and his wife are gripped by
it, as are we. There is much emotion in his face and voice as he tells it. He shudders as he says, “all
that dark and all that cold.” The film ends with his look of utter emotional absorption in his
dream. Maybe his last statement is saying he is “waking up” to his inner world.
 32 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 2 / SPRING 2013

There’s something about his letting go of the pursuit of evil as if it’s outside him, and turning
to his inner world, to his dreams, that seems a positive thing for the sheriff and his development.
There is room now for the sheriff to confront his own shadow. He has made a beginning in his
acknowledgement of failure and of disappointing God. He did enter that world he dreaded, with
“all that dark and all that cold,” and put his soul at hazard. But his dream points to the existence of
light up ahead—the light of the moon holding fire, and perhaps redemption.
The title of the movie comes from the first line of Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium,”
which is about turning inward in old age: “THAT is no country for old men.” The second
stanza is:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
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For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
(Yeats, 1928/1996, 193)

Sheriff Bell, like Yeats, and like many of us, has a soul that wants to sing, that wants to reach the
“holy city” of the self. The spirit of the depths has brought the sheriff closer to his inner world.
And he is gripped by it.
Recalling Sheriff Ed Tom’s reflections at the beginning of the film:

But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand . . . .
You can say it’s my job to fight it but I don’t know what it is anymore . . . . More than that, I don’t
want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard . . . . He would have to say, okay, I’ll be part
of this world.
(Coen and Coen 2007, “Old Timers”)

By the end of the film, he does push his chips forward when he enters the motel room with a vision
that Chigurh is in there on the other side. He does so without understanding what it is that he is
dealing with. He feared that in trying to understand what he was fighting, he would put his soul at
hazard, would have to say “Okay, I’ll be part of this world.” His confrontation does demand that he
somehow become or take ownership of being a part of this world that he does not understand. The
audience is given hints that the uncanny evil has something to do with Sheriff Ed Tom. The viewer
can see that the sheriff has imperceptibly, like Llewellyn Moss, taken steps toward a place between
two worlds: the outer world he knows and a world in his depths he knows not. The sheriff has to
enter liminality, in spite of his fear of its severe risks, if he is to pursue understanding of what that
evil is “out there.” In so doing, he seems by the film’s poignant ending to be enduring a
transformational process of soul retrieval.
One of the things I most appreciate about this film is that it, like the pliers of the spirit of the
depths, holds us and makes us drink this bitter draught so that we might heal. We are brought face
to face with forces in this world, in us, that will manifest as external evil if we do not recognize and
 Karen Naifeh, No Country for Old Men 33

claim the darkness, the evil in ourselves. Otherwise we are susceptible to fatal confusion between
self and other, inside and outside, as was Llewellyn Moss.
To suspend judgment about the “other,” to be curious rather than hateful, to stay and
encounter honestly rather than pushing something away or condemning it, even when it is
very hard, ugly, frightening, dangerous, or just distasteful—that constellates our redemption.
Jung observed in The Red Book, “You all have a share in the murder” (2009, 239). We, the viewers,
have to consider what our share might be in the murders that so horrify (and fascinate) us in
this film.

ENDNOTES

1. Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido) was written in 1911
and published in 1912. The English translation has the title Psychology of the Unconscious and was
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published in 1991 as supplementary volume B of the Collected Works (see Bibliography). In 1952, Jung
rewrote it as Symbols of Transformation, CW 5.
2. In citations from the screenplay, the relevant scene is included, as here, “Old Timers.”

NOTE

References to The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph
number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press
(USA).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Coen, Ethan, and Joel Coen. 2007. No country for old men. Based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy,
No country for old men. 2005. New York, NY: Vintage. Directed by Ethan and Joel Coen.
Hauke, Christopher. 2011. Soul and space in the Coen Brothers’ No country for old men. Jung and Film II:
The return. Edited by Christopher Hauke and Luke Hockley. New York: Routledge.
Jung, C. G. 1959/1978. The shadow. Aion. CW 9ii.
———. 1958/1969. Psychology and religion. Psychology and Religion: West and East. CW 11.
———. 1912/1991. Psychology of the unconscious: A study of the transformations and symbols of the libido.
CW B.
———. 2009. The red book: Liber novus. Edited by Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W. W. Norton &
Company.
Steinbeck, John. 1945/1973. The pearl. New York: Penguin Group (USA), Inc.
Yeats, William Butler. 1928/1996. The collected poems of W. B. Yeats. Edited by Richard J. Finneran. New
York: Scribner Paperback Poetry, Simon & Schuster, Inc.

KAREN NAIFEH, PhD, is an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. Her analytic practice
with adults is located in San Francisco, Berkeley, and San Mateo, California. Her areas of special
interest are trauma, the Shadow, and alchemy. She holds a doctorate in medical physiology as well as
clinical psychology and was Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California, San
Francisco, for eleven years, where she did research in the areas of sleep, meditation, and biofeedback. She
presented a multimedia version of the present paper at the 2011 North/South Conference in Carmel,
California. Correspondence: One Baywood Avenue, Suite 3, San Mateo, CA 94402-1537, USA. E-mail:
karenaifeh@sbcglobal.net.

ABSTRACT

The Red Book depicts dynamic forces of the spirit of the times versus the spirit of the depths. The author
employs this dynamism to amplify the film No Country for Old Men, a story showing dark forces irrupting
 34 JUNG JOURNAL: CULTURE & PSYCHE 7: 2 / SPRING 2013

into ordinary life. In the film’s stark archetypal drama, the author traces both the positive and negative
transformational impacts of these forces on two of the film’s characters—conventional people who are forced
to grapple with something that feels like it “puts their soul at hazard.” The use of cinematography to
elaborate symbolic meaning is woven into the exploration of the film.

KEY WORDS
archetypal shadow, Ethan and Joel Coen, dream, drug war, evil, film, finding God, Grim Reaper, hero,
Cormac McCarthy, Mexican border, murder, No Country for Old Men, old age, “Sailing to Byzantium, ”
sheriff, soul hazard, West Texas, Yeats
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