Pour Some Chigurh on Me, In the Name of Love
“Afterthoughts” is a new Fear of God blog series featuring co-hosts and guests further unpacking thoughts, themes, and ideas that keep them up at night from the conversations and content covered on the show. This entry is by frequent guest and friend of the show, Blake Collier, and is a follow-up to this past week’s episode featuring The Hitcher. Enjoy, then, the latest entry in this new chapter of The Fear of God…
“Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he's real. I have seen his work. I walked in front of those eyes once. I wont do it again. I wont push my chips forward and stand up and go out to meet him. It aint just bein older. I wish that it was. I cant say that it's even what you are willin to do. Because I always knew that you had to be willin to die to even do this job. That was always true. Not to sound glorious about it or nothin but you do. If you aint they'll know it. They'll see it in a heartbeat. I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that.”
-No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy
“When the truth comes down, I'll be just fine.”
-Nash, The Hitcher (1986)
The personification of the impersonal force of “fate” has been with us, at least, since Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey. Moira (“fate”) has normally been tangled up with the god or gods of religion and mythology for they are the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient movers of us lowly creatures. Yet there is scholarship out there that makes the case that even the gods are subject to the whims of Moira, that even they have their trajectory set out before them. Perhaps the true difference between gods and humanity is the knowledge of their trajectory, how Moira speaks unto them? Or, perhaps, Moira is just a literary trick to translate that je ne sais pas of life that we all feel but cannot seem to articulate. That feeling that death is coming or that we are slowly dying in every moment. Or, worse, that we are, in fact, doing the work of Hesiod’s Atropos and cutting threads.
The Hitcher is playing in these same sandboxes but transposing the universal drama to the empty deserts presumed to be in West Texas or the eastern New Mexico region. The highways snake along with nothing in their path, yet for Moira to exist in such emptiness and desolation there needs to be flesh and blood. The opening shot of the film has a lonely car weaving around this empty landscape as the first fingers of the sun stretch into the sky. Ah! We now have need for Moira! Jim Halsey does not know it, but he has stepped into his own Homeric epic. He will be consciously confronting fate for the first time. As Halsey journeys along the high seas of sand and brush, a figure steps out from the side of the camera frame onto the asphalt. Darkened by the morning dimness, yet seemingly human. Halsey opens his door, and the figure gets in. This one action will expose to Halsey the weaving looms of fate that he had ignored his whole life up to this point. John Ryder is the film’s personification of Moira.
Jump into the future some years within the same region of the country. A new epic is unfolding before us, one involving a luckless hunter, Llewlyn Moss, and a haunted, older sheriff, Ed Tom Bell who become, along with the people around them, embroiled in a border drug deal gone terribly awry. Like Ryder before, Moira, in this story, takes the form of the cold, calculated assassin, Anton Chigurh. Chigurh, on his mission to find the money from the drug deal, interacts with main characters and side characters alike and gives them the same opportunity: call heads or tails on the flip of his coin. Whether they call it right decides whether their story continues, or their thread is cut. Moss dies and Bell walks away from the fight, fearing putting “his soul at hazard,” by continuing toward justice against this “true and living prophet of destruction.” Chigurh is injured but walks away into the proverbial sunset—assuming back to the homes of the gods and impersonal forces of this world.
Both stories find the wills of their characters bound up in a greater cosmic struggle. Just like in the epics of Homer, we can’t be sure of her origins, her rules, and just how transcendent Moira’s effects are for we are only human. We are Llewlyn Moss and Jim Halsey and Ed Tom Bell. We are merely caught up in the drama waiting (perhaps dreading) the day we can no longer ignore our fate but are forced to confront it when our fragile wills make one of any number of daily choices. Our choices—benign or otherwise—echo into the past and future, for time is simply a construct, a way to put order on fluid chaos. As far as we lowly creatures know, our actions today might affect the fortunes and misfortunes of those who came before us, let alone those who come after us. We cannot even understand the workings of our own wills within this cosmic drama. How do we expect to comprehend Moira when she stares us in the face, putting a name to that ambiguous feeling we have had our whole lives?
The concept of fate is cruel because it presumes that our lives are not in our control. Yet which one of us can claim such divine autonomy? The central lesson of these stories: we are not our own. Atheists live according to their biology, their social contexts, and their economic standing, very little, if any, of which their will has any say in. We, who claim the way of Christ, are not our own either, but have ideally given ourselves over to this way, forsaking our wills for the greater love of God. Yet who hasn’t felt the weight of specific decisions in their life? Perhaps that weight is our wills aligning with, or rebelling against, the tapestries of fate, one step closer to Atropos’ inflexibility.
I, myself, do not purport to know the answer to the abstractness of the fate vs. will discussion. I think fate, for us creatures, can only be known in hindsight and, even then, we only see the material results of choices and not the transcendent echoes they make. For myself, going back to what I said about the difference between gods and humanity, I find a deep affinity for the plight of the demigods, those offspring of immortal and mortal genes. Knowing that of the gods and feeling that of what is human. These demigods are not mere personifications, like Ryder and Chigurh, but an amalgam of divinity and humanity. For the Greeks and Romans, at least, this often translated into beings that had the ear of the gods, but the foibles, pettiness, and passions of humans. They weren’t necessarily a bridge over the chasm as much as foils to gods and humans alike. Regardless of this, there is a sense that they probably knew the face of Moira and yet chose to embrace her or push her away like their fully human counterparts.
The Hebrews, however, traded in an historical account of a demigod, Jesus of Nazareth. Unlike the Greeks and Romans, their “demigod” was fully god and fully human, no foibles to be found. He was perfect and yet Moira gave him the kiss of the worst of criminals, the worst of humanity. He gave himself to her, knowing it had to be that way from the beginning and did so while sweating blood, the ear of his father seemingly turned away from him. A paradox to be sure. He voluntarily stared down the Ryders and Chigurhs of the cosmos with arms opened wide and rasped “take me” as his blood flowed across those West Texas highways onto the thirsty desert soil that called for it all those years before.
These stories sans salvation, however, strike in me the deepest of fears. They confront me with a human truth that even the simplest, most benign action or decision can illuminate the confounding machinery of fate unto death or suffering. I fear encountering my own personification of Moira. I fear it and yet I hope my fragile will in that moment will be able to cry out to someone who can bridge that chasm for me. Someone who, as Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Bell in the 2008 adaptation of No Country for Old Men, steps forward and says, “Okay, I’ll be a part of this world.”
