People assume love is a positive
And they are right. Those who don't assume this are psychologically damaged. It is likely that Dmaria's ex-wife could speak to this confusion in him.
Powerful desires may have more influence than love at any given time, but that does not mean that love is not at all times a positive.
whether moss is better than sugar.
Chigurh is all about control. I think he's a little baby. I think he can't stand the vulnerability of being human and is desperate to defend against that experience. I think his evil is in justifying inflicting his own fate on others and thinking of it as principled -- i.e., as moral. But it's really just a desperate attempt to escape.
The Greeks and their dramatists were very interested in the flow of everything that happens to a person that is beyond their control. They had a word for it, sometimes translated as “luck.” Morality in Greek tragedy is the acceptance of that flow, of our powerlessness before fate. I don't think Chigurh can handle that. I think he tries to cheat, through his "principles," which make him feel as if equal to nature, less like a victim, less a mere mortal. His whole philosophy is designed to shield him from the experience of human vulnerability.
Instead, he makes others victims, inflicts that dread on others, as if by doing so -- such as with the GSO -- he could evacuate it from himself and transfer it. By imposing the toss on others he can delude himself into assuming he's distinct in that he is the one in control, aligned with fate, its representative, while they are the ones who are its passive, powerless subjects.
Who is he to inflict the coin toss on anyone? I don't think he'd ever put his life up to the toss of a coin because he already feels so acutely aware of fate - that he actually has so little control. The coin toss is applied to others, to show them, but mainly to show himself, that they are the ones who are vulnerable to fate.
But of course anyone who places such importance on control, on highlighting victimhood and vulnerability in others and his distinction from them, is just advertising his own terror of being in that position and desperate need to escape it.
In the book, McCarthy makes this more overt. He has Chigurh spell it out:
"She looked at him a final time. You dont have to, she said. You dont. You dont.
He shook his head. You're asking that I make myself vulnerable and that I can never do. I have only one way to live. It doesnt allow for special cases."
I don't think he can accept and live within human limits, in the sense of being at the mercy of fate. Which makes him a coward. To accept it is hard. It allows for pity -- not just words "I'm sorry," not just "the best I can do" being a coin toss.
Moss I think is in some significant ways similar to Chigurh. He's alienated from himself too, although not nearly so much as Chigurh is. He's alienated from his wife. He seems at times to show the amusement of one who sees his life looking outside-in, as if his life is a movie.
He seems to need to confront himself with that same mortal vulnerability by putting himself at great risk. Maybe he needs to see if he can overcome it -- to beat the odds, to put up his life and beat fate. I think it's not just that he's after the adrenaline rush he got used to in Vietnam. It's that, but the source is deeper. In that sense, I think he feels evil in the old sense of the word -- human vulnerability, mortality -- and wants to feel he can take it on. Better to "go out and meet" it, than to accept it and put up with the intense discomfort. That impulse would be similar to Chigurh's.
Of course, Moss's conscience is also a big influence. It's a measure of his self-alienation that he seems to be disagreeing with a third party while in bed, and just afterward refers to his mother, implying that her influence is so powerfully in the here and now that she might as well still be alive, giving her son moral heck. But Moss has at least that tenuous connection to conscience, as dumb as his means are of satisfying it.
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dmariat55
8 years ago
Larks does a long song and dance to avoid what I brought up. If love is so wonderful what good did it do CJ? She married lew over the strong objections of her mother. Lew must love her. Yet by taking the money then going back to the massacre scene in the name of conscience and what he kept on doing he caused her death at 21. That is awful young don't you think?
Maybe zone and Harry will understand it if I put it this way. At least sugar doesn't cause the death of anyone he knows or loves. Isn't moss worse than sugar in causing the death of the one he is supposed to love most?
People who think this movie is about fate are f-ed in the head. CJ's mom echoes sugar. She sees it's not fate but what moss has been putting up his whole life that causes his demise and that of her daughter. If he didn't stumble on the CGF it would be something else.
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Whatlarks
8 years ago
If love is so wonderful what good did it do CJ?
Pavlov didn't understand the 2nd paragraph, and has no access to ordinary human psychology. He assumes that the intrinsic goodness of love is somehow less because someone didn't love well due to being under a stronger influence. That is like saying the intrinsic goodness of water is somehow less because someone is compelled to drink more pop.
At least sugar doesn't cause the death of anyone he knows or loves.
Pavlov has somehow forgotten that Chigurh knew Wells.
And anyway, to be so alienated from himself and humanity as to not be able to access even ordinary human connections, let alone love, does not make him better than Moss. Moss is not good at these things, but Chigurh is clearly worse.
Pavlov has swallowed whole the Chigurh-plum nonsense about everything being your responsibility. That's so extreme it is beyond anyone's ability to assert with credibility. Such a philosophy is inhuman. It's radically mechanistic, the quality McCarthy was criticizing. Missing that, Pavlov has missed what the story is about, and ends up advocating for "pretty much pure evil." He knows not what he's doing. CJ is not responsible for her own murder. Neither is the deputy Chigurh strangles. Neither is the chicken truck driver. Neither is the truck driver in Eagle Pass.
Fate is more nuanced than Pavlov apprehends. They don't deal with that in the Mother Goose books.
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