Recently watched Old Country For No Men and RIP Cormac McCarthy, one of my favorite authors so here we are.

There are like no significant female characters in this movie, but that’s okay. All opinions are my own and my opinions are obviously trash; however, my criteria for a good female character loosely is:

1. Their removal would affect the plot
2. They undergo some change/character development, good or bad
3. We see different sides of their personality
4. They have a plot of their own that doesn’t revolve entirely around a male character. OR
5. They are well-developed within the confines of the role they are written to play 
6. They don’t toss away every traditionally feminine trait in an attempt to be a strong, independent womyn

*Spoilers ahoy!*

Receptionist Lady

• an absolute queen
• hair shaped like a beehive cause again she’s obviously the queen bee
• refused to tell Anton anything about Moss and stood her ground when he pressed her since she’s an absolute goddess
• saved by a toilet flush

She has like 3 lines of dialogue but she’s like the sole character who basically told Anton to buzz off with his whack haircut and ghostly pallor and survived. She also likely prolonged Moss’s inevitable death like a true kween.

Receptionist Lady Ranking: 9.5/10

Sheriff’s Bell’s Wife Loretta Bell

• does she have a name

Loretta Bell’s Ranking: 0/10

Lady By The Pool

• dies off screen, just like Moss
• two second firtationship

We never even really see her face clearly and the next time we see her she’s a corpse inside a pool.

Lady By the Pool’s Rating: Chigurgh’s sawed-off Remington 11-87 semiautomatic 12 gauge shotgun with a suppressor that somehow doesn’t make any noise/10

Carla Jean’s Mother

• reason Moss gets killed
• probably also the reason Carla Jean gets killed somehow
• also going to blame her for Carson Wells death
• gonna say she’s also the reason Chigurgh gets hit by a car
• does not grasp the gravity of the situation
• probably also the reason Sheriff Bell’s father died

Carla Jean’s Mother’s Rating: 100000000/10

Carla Jean

• obviously the Goat
• The MC’s love interest
• calls Anton out on his bs fate flipping coin nonsense, which actually seems to upset him
  • she probably inadvertently causes Chigurh to get hit by a car and eventually caught

Carla Jean basically dies because Moss is a nitwit who stole money from Mexican drug dealers. That said, she seems to be the only one in the movie to have actually rattled Bad Haircut McGee and her role from the book was much improved from near child-bride to a grown woman who annoys Chigurgh.

Carla Jean Rating: 9.7/10

The ending is what makes No Country For Old Men a literary masterpiece to me, because it’s a subversion of the typical Western thriller which would normally end in the protagonist facing off with the villain aka Moss and Chigurgh. For most of the movie the viewer expects that and Moss is one of the few people Chigurgh goes after that not only evades him but injures him, so it makes their confrontation seem rather equal.

Their final phone call sets that shoot-out up, but then Moss is killed anti-climatically off-screen by the cartel, and we get the double whammy of Bell who is 100 years old deciding to nope out of his career entirely.

One of the overall themes of No Country is that the world is violent and that violence is random, pointless, and unforgiving and Moss dying not by the hands of the villain, when you expect it, drives home that point. Chigurgh believes he’s an arbiter of fate and it’s the choices of his victims that lead them to encountering him, thus he’s just doing what fate wants to happen (obvious cope). Flipping the coin gives the illusion of leaving things up to fate despite the fact he chooses to pull the trigger. Ironically, the only one to call him out on his bs is Carla Jean, who is a true queen and faced death with her head held high (she still died tho lol).

While the ending is no doubt polarizing for some, this is one of the few movies that is *chef’s kiss* for me.

No Country For Old Men Rating: 10/10