On-Screen Barbarism: Violence in U.S. Visual Culture

Abstract

No country for old men: a land that once, for Yeats, was a place of sex, sensuality, and procreation, has now become, quite extraordinarily, a place of unremitting and inexplicable violence. This strange inversion of meaning and feeling is not the doing of the Coen Brothers (who may or may not have read Yeats in their college days) but of best-selling author Cormac McCarthy, who adapted Yeats’s line (without citation) for his own version of portentous nihilism. Even the works of best-selling authors, though, are a special taste compared to the nationwide appeal of hit movies; if No Country for Old Men is read through all eternity it will still not have been read by as many persons as saw the movie on its first smash weekend. So the point is not to ask how the change in Yeats’s meaning came to McCarthy, but rather what it means now that an entire culture (minus a huddle of serious poetry readers), invited to wallow for two hours in unmitigated and uninterrogated violence, shrugs its collective shoulders and accepts what it is being shown as reasonable, as a normal vision of “the country,” as “formally beautiful,” as representing its makers “at the height of their powers,” as being an obvious candidate for a “Best Picture of the Year” Oscar nomination. And its chief competition demonstrated a similarly strange trajectory, though in a different vein: Upton Sinclair’s socialist, muckraking novel, Oil, transformed into Paul Thomas Anderson’s cinematic “masterpiece” (as it was hailed by critics), There Will Be Blood.