Why the book is always better than the movie

Last week, after a long time, I read a novel that I’d seen as a film already — Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men.

One problem with this is that your experience of the novel is pre-filtered through the cinematic rendition.

So I imagined the main characters, Llewelyn Moss, Sheriff Bell, and Anton Chigurh as Josh Brolin, Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Bardem respectively. But you also find that the novel evokes a far richer experience of the story than a film ever could. I guess you can put it down to the limitations of the medium. When made into a film, a novel gains in terms of spectacle and reach, but loses out on depth and complexity. This is partly also due to the nature of the reading process, which is not as linear, and passive, as watching a film.

For those not familiar with the story, here’s the plot summary: one day Moss, a welder, while hunting antelope in Texas, stumbles on the scene of a drug deal gone bad: dead bodies, guns, a stash of heroin, and a satchel with $2.4 million in cash. He could either walk away, or grab the money and run. Moss chooses the latter, setting off a chain of events where Chigurh, a killer, is hired by one of the drug bosses to track Moss down and recover the money, while Sheriff Bell tries ineffectually to investigate the drug-related killings and protect Moss and his wife.

Unlike the film, the book resonates with multiple layers of meaning. For instance, it explores the endlessly fascinating question of whether a human being can take what is not his, and expect to live without consequences — his life unstained by that crime. Moss only attempts to take what is anyway illegal money, and it does not belong to him. Is this then, an allegory about the American nation itself — which stole the continent from native Indians, and yet has always believed itself to be destined by god to be a leader of the Free World (the doctrine of manifest destiny, American exceptionalism, etc)?

Will the theft and genocide on which America was born, and continues to live off — the theft of land from the Indian peoples, the theft of the lives of millions of slaves trafficked from Africa, and today, the theft of oil from the Middle East, not to mention innumerable other thefts of lives and resources from different parts of the world — catch up with it someday, as Moss’s theft catches up with him?

Moss knows there is little chance of his getting away with $2.4 million of drug money, but he thinks maybe he can because he is special. Perhaps, in this dilemma, and in this choice, McCarthy, often hailed as the true heir of Hemingway and Faulkner, has managed to capture the existential history of America, and the radioactive nature of the American dream.

In the book, Chigurh’s character, who the film depicts as the purest incarnation of evil, doesn’t see himself as evil. He believes himself to be the instrument of fate. Hence his use of the coin toss. When a victim begs him for mercy, he flips a coin and asks him to call it. Invariably, the ones he knows he’ll have to kill call it wrong, and those who call it right are people he knows he can spare.

In a brilliant scene, Chigurh has a chat with Moss’s wife, Carla Jean, who knows he has come to kill her. When she begs him not to kill her, he offers her a glimmer of hope: a coin toss.

She calls ‘tails’, but it is ‘heads’.

Chigurh says, “I’m sorry.”

A terrified Carla tells him, “You make it like it was the coin. But you’re the one.”

In a revealing comment, Chigurh tells her, “I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person’s path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning.”

Here was a bad guy, so to speak, who killed seemingly good people — not out of greed or jealousy or hatred, but almost from a sense of duty, as a matter of principle. In the film, you are either terrified of Chigurh or you hate him. But as you read McCarthy’s novel, you find the evil of Chigurh refracted through the prism of your own self — the evil things we do, and justify, as a duty we have to perform. The patriotic killings of a soldier comes to mind, as do the lay-offs a CEO perpetrates as part of his professional duty, or the peculiar logic that justifies the evil and forcible displacement of adivasis from their land in the name of economic development and progress (a logic apparently as inexorable as fate and Chigurh).

While watching the film, you’re rooting for Moss, but it is not until you read the novel that you understand that in real life, our allegiance, whether we like it or not, is with Chigurh.