No Country for Old Men: the Meaning of the Final Monologue
Sheriff Bell’s (Tommy Lee Jones’) ending monologue in No Country for Old Men beautifully sums up the theme of the movie. Many people think it’s utterly opaque and mysterious, but it’s fairly straightforward when you think about it.
Bell’s wife asks him to tell her about his two dreams. He opens with a statement about his father, “I’m older now than he ever was by twenty years. In a sense, he’s the younger man.”
Bell is, technically, a more experienced and wiser man than his father. Bell just never realized it because, psychologically, our parents always seem older and wiser to us, which is certainly not the case. We naturally want to turn to them for advice, but as we grow older and lead our own rich, experienced lives, we often see how insular, ignorant, and prejudiced they were in many respects.
In the first dream, Bell meets his father in town. His father gives him money, and Bell loses it. It’s a cursory description and doesn’t seem to mean much, but helps emphasize the importance of the second dream.
It’s also a way to express that Bell is heading deeper into the sleeping unconscious and a more “mythical” dream experience, albeit concerning a similar theme—not being able to hold onto his father’s gifts. Bell is looking for more than mere money from his father; he needs wisdom, not practical solutions.
In the second dream, Bell describes how he and his father were riding through a cold and snowy mountain pass. His father rides past without looking at Bell, carrying fire in a horn. He was “going on ahead, fixing to make a fire in all that dark and all that cold.”
Bell says, “I knew that whenever I got there, he’d be there.”
His wife asks, “Then what happened?”
Before the movie ends abruptly, Bell says, “And then I woke up.” It’s the last line of dialogue.
For the entire film, Bell has been talking about the violence his forefathers had to experience while enforcing the law. He believes there’s something different about modern violence; it’s more sadistic, meaningless, and extravagant. Life seems to have no value for the nihilistic people who participate in it.
(Note that Llewelyn HAD to die, thematically, for the fatal mistake of his mercy and compassion for a stranger—the Mexican dying in the truck, who he brings water to late at night).
Both dreams point to the fact that we cannot turn to the wisdom or experience of our ancestors, especially our parents and grandparents, in trying to understand the violence of the modern world. Their experience and knowledge cannot enlighten us about the modern world’s viciousness, which has no precedent.
Bell’s father seems to be going ahead to light the way, to illuminate the conditions of the modern world, but Bell can never get there because his father’s experience simply cannot shed light on the world as it is today.
“And then I woke up,” says Bell.
That is to say, Bell realizes the hope that his ancestors could possibly shed some light on the realities of modern violence and inhumanity is a fantasy and a pipe-dream. They have nothing to offer in that regard.
