"Award Winning Structure" No Country for Old Men

This project was examining Aristotle's three principles of structure and applying them to a film of today. Aristotle's three principles of Harmatia, Peripeteia and Anagnorisis are meant to be three story elements that are found in any good plot. 

The project involved choosing an Acadamy Award Winning Film for "Best Screenplay or Adapted Screenplay" and identifying the three elements in the main characters. I chose the 2007 winner for "Best Adapted Screenplay" No Country for Old Men and identified the elements in a brief essay.

Aristotle’s terms of Harmatia, Peripeteia, and Anagnorisis may have fallen by the wayside with a lot of Latin in today’s society, but clearly the ideas that they represent are still present in the cinema of today. This can be clearly represented in the film “No Country for Old Men” and its characters. The 2007 academy award winning neo western still made a strong case for Aristotle’s three principles.

Beginning with Harmatia, or the fatal flaw within the character, there are a few characters, which exhibit flaws, which are specifically needed to drive the plot forward. The fatal flaw that is found in Llewelyn Moss, for example, is greed; this greed is driven by good intentions (obtaining a better life for him and his wife Carla Jean) but this causes Moss to take the satchel of money in the first act of the movie. The real flaw is that Moss sees a scene, which will come under intense scrutiny by multiple parties, but against his better judgment, Moss takes the satchel of money and sets off the chain of events, which makes the story progress.

 

Peripeteia is also present in the movie in general aside from any one character in that it is an extremely surprising reversal in the end of the film. The audience’s expectation going into the movie is that Chigurh can be stopped, has to be stopped, for the film to end and that someone, Moss, Sheriff Bell, or even the Bounty Hunter Carson Wells, will defeat Chigurh in a climactic battle. What happens is on the contrary; Chigurh is able to kill Moss and Wells and escapes Sheriff Bell’s justice. This makes the car accident in the end of the movie more satisfying at first in that it gives the audience a feeling of resolution that karma is finally giving Anton what he deserves. This doesn’t pan out either with Chigurh being wounded but simply able to walk away from the scene, presumably able to continue doing what he has always done. This disappoints the audience in a classic unexpected reversal, which also gives the film more emotion.

The Anagnorisis that is left to be determined is seen within Ed Tom Bell’s realization (however subconsciously done) that his time in the world is over and that a new age has dawned. All through the film the Sheriff trails behind Chigurh and Moss, and the thing that Bell never really registers is that criminals like Chigurh are from a different time, one that Bell no longer fits in. The Sheriff comes from a time where the law is respected and some Sheriffs don’t even carry guns, whereas the time of Chigurh is one that is increasingly more violent, and dangerous; conflicts like Vietnam that gave people like Moss military training are points which split the eras between the characters, with Moss being in the violent post war period, and Bell remaining in the older times.