Most modern criticism agrees, audiences have a lot of interpretive say. So why do people still talk about media like it's being inflicted on them? Sink your teeth into the difficult films No Country for Old Men and Nosferatu and learn to get your agency back as an audience.
Art, any art, has its subject, and then it has what it thinks about that subject, but "what it thinks" doesn't sit in the art's brain--it hasn't got one, after all--but our brains, the audience's. "What it thinks" is convenient shorthand, really, for a whole relationship, between the artwork itself, the creators and what motivated its creation, the audience and what motivates their reception, and the whole context they all find themselves in. But the text also has qualities, relatively objective contents, and those contents restrict the possibility space of "what it thinks". It would be rude to imagine a bunch of scenes in a novel that never happened and claim the original text says something based on them; we can't put words in art's mouth--it hasn't got one, after all. We do speak for a text, though, and a text speaks for us. We have agency. Older forms of interpretation viewed art as a series of objective authorial intents bundled into a message beamed into our skulls, but most modern interpretive theories agree, more or less, that the audience puts work into understanding.
Somehow, the way we talk about art in broader culture, particularly online, hasn't caught up. That shorthand gets taken at face value, as though the message of art (or advertisements, news articles, press releases, scientific studies, press secretary statements...) is obvious, requiring no engagement from us. I've had people scoff and say I'm misusing language when I apply the word "literacy" to this idea. Maybe that's comforting. Having agency means taking responsibility, sometimes responsibility for having a bad time, or for just being wrong. You ever come out of a movie and turn to the people you're with and say, "hey so what was that... about?" At that moment, you might find out you're alone with your interpretation--that you effectively watched a different movie from everyone else! With all the fearsome experiences art offers, and all its attendant social anxiety, why not wrestle some control back by reinterpreting yourself as a victim of art's impositions? I don't think that feeling of control lasts, though. If anything, in the long term it makes art seem like a contagion vector, full of potentially dirty feelings and memes. Media "literacy" partly just means engaging art confidently, instead of feeling like art's being imposed on you.
To feel that kind of confidence, though, takes practice, and it's a hard skill to teach, at least if what you're actually testing for is a set of "objective" repeatable metrics. A lot of English classes seem to teach a straightforward "x means y" relationship between symbols or metaphors and their meaning. In response to that kind of disempowering rote formula approach, some people reassert their agency by just... pretending nothing means anything, which feels defiant and powerful, but cuts down everything they can say about art to "Yes!" and "No!" What can this kind of audience do when a work puts two characters in contention, has them spell out a core worldview disagreement, and offers a question: who is right? They can only fall back on reliable common sense (you know, all the unexamined stuff they've absorbed from culture and the people around them, or just their gut emotional responses), arriving at what they believe is the obvious only answer.
Too bad, because one of the best ways to train your interpretive agency muscles is looking at exactly those moments of character disagreement. Like, take a look at Anton Chigurh and Carla Jean Moss in No Country For Old Men, maybe, sure. It's a popular movie, a great, iconic scene, and fun to talk about, so let's take a look. At the end of the movie, Anton Chigurh, philosopher-hitman, is going to kill this basically innocent woman; it sucks, and we all hate it, right? I guess it's a bit more than a character disagreement. But it is a disagreement in the sense that they're gonna have a conversation before Chigurh and Carla Jean go to their respective fates, and that conversation is pivotal to the question of what the movie is "about".
Chigurh likes to determine the fates of his arbitrary victims with a coin toss, and we know this is likely where the conversation is going, but they have a few other points of business first. Chigurh tells Carla Jean that her husband Llewelyn gave her life up for his, and she immediately refuses to believe his claim. Chigurh is silent in response, and Carla Jean adds, "You don't have to do this." Chigurh scoffs and complains that "people always say the same thing... they say, 'you don't have to do this'." Carla Jean insists, "You don't." Chigurh makes his coin toss offer, saying that it's the "best he can do". Carla Jean refuses, and when Chigurh becomes more insistent she rejects the premise of this act entirely: "The coin don't have no say," she declares, "it's just you." Chigurh sighs, and offers as a response, "I got here the same way the coin did."
A following shot where he checks his shoes for blood after leaving the house suggests that he killed her. Boy they weren't wrong, it truly is... no country for young women!
So. Who's right?
Actually, separate that out a little.
Who is right?
Who is right, based on what I understand the text is giving to me?
Who is right, based on what I bring to the text?
Who is right, based on the evidence I can see in the text, through the lens of what I bring?
Is who is right, based on the evidence the text seems to be offering, and who is right, based on the evidence I see buried in the text, in conflict? Is the text confused? Deliberately ambiguous? Or deliberately subverting its own argument for a reason?
You can see how these questions get complex as they multiply, which is why it's a lot easier to just ask "Who does this text think is right?" Convenient shorthand, remember? It's good to get used to asking the wordy questions, though, because art isn't always straightforward. Sometimes that's because an artist didn't understand the full implications of their message. And sometimes, with works of satire, that's because the artist wanted to take a set of cultural conventions (like the heroic action or war movie) and draw you deeper in before tripping you (like Verhoeven having one of the "heroes" in Starship Troopers show up in full SS officer regalia). People like to say satire requires clarity of purpose, but if readers have agency over interpretation, satire also requires a clarity of readership! And Coen Brothers movies in particular can be deliberately obscure and confounding, so if you think there's something more there than random nonsense, it can help to consciously step your way through these layers of questions.
I guess this train of questions arguably starts even earlier. Carla Jean vs Anton is a pretty abstract conversation, after all, and to understand it as a dilemma presented by the Coen Brothers, and by the original novel's author Cormack McCarthy, you have to already be thinking about stuff like the coin toss as philosophically significant. That's the trick with one of these deconstructions of the reading process: it's always a bit hard to know where to stop, especially because that big list of questions above isn't something I go through point by point, like a work book in an English class, but as an ambient mass of thoughts whenever I'm following a story.
So, when I say that this conversation is a pitting of ideas together, it's cause I've already got that notion in my head from earlier scenes. Like, there's this interlude where Chigurh has stopped at an ultra-rural gas station and decides to fuck with the attendant for... no real reason, I suppose. After a protracted back and forth where Chigurh deliberately seems to pick a fight with the stranger, he presents the coin flip choice. Here's where we get a bit of the film presenting this as a philosophy, in the way Anton talks about the coin. It's dated 1958 so "it's been traveling 22 years to get here, now it's here". What the hapless shopkeep stands to win is "everything". To the protest that he "didn't put nothin up" Chigurh responds "You've been putting it up your whole life, you just didn't know it." So, what I have in my head after watching this scene is that the coin represents a moment when chance, or fate, goes one way or another and you live or you die. Possibly, more fate than chance, if it makes sense to distinguish those things: the coin has been traveling 22 years, the stakes have been put up for this guy's whole life, everything was directed towards this moment. Chigurh, after the man wins the toss, demands he not put it in his pocket, because it's his "lucky coin", and it will get mixed in with the others and turn into an ordinary coin--which it is, after all. That suggests to me that fate may be at work here... but it's arbitrary. Most of all, all this says to me that Chigurh sees himself as an agent of fate, maybe even a kind of angel of death, a nihilistic avatar of "shit just happens".
I also come away from the scene with my own opinion: Chigurh is pretty funny at times here, in a way that makes me think the film wants me to think he's kind of a badass. Fair enough. I do love Javier Bardem's delivery of "...Which it is," at the end of the scene, a moment of private amusement from the fairly stone-faced Chigurh. But, I've also been around enough smug men who think they're smarter than everyone else, and BEEN a smug man who thinks he's smarter than everyone else, and so I also come away from the scene feeling like Chigurh is a bit of a blowhard and a pseudo-intellectual using cod philosophy to justify whatever antisocial mayhem he always intended to unleash. The fact that he goes on to kill a bunch of likable characters in the film generally adds to my sense of antipathy toward Chigurh and his purported belief system.
So that's what I arrive with when I come to this scene.
Who's right, based on what I understand the text to be giving me?
Well, Chigurh kills Carla Jean. So, that's a point in his favor. And he's already presented his ability to kill as, fundamentally, proof that he's right about both his general outlook on the world, and his self-perception as a death-dealing hand of fate. Earlier he asks another character, "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" If I take Carla Jean's side, well, to what end? She's dead, and he's alive. The universe of the story seems to be arbitrary... but in a way that always seems to come out infuriatingly all right for Anton Chigurh. If he was really culpable, if he was really more than just a coin pinging along through space and time, shouldn't there be some sort of punishment?
Who's right, based on what I bring to the text?
Well, despite it all, I do take Carla Jean's side, in some sense or other. Some of this is identifying with her, having made a conscious choice (via taking estrogen and also trying to be less of an arrogant dick, though jury's out on how well I do) to be more like Carla Jean than Anton Chigurh. I tend to think of the universe as a pretty meaningless and hostile place, but I like to think that humans have agency within that chaos to do things like not gun down innocent women because they don't play our stupid coin toss game.
Who's right, based on the evidence I can see in the text, through the lens of what I bring?
There's a lot of little performance quirks in this scene that render it at least ambiguous to me. The text itself seems to be compelled by the idea that there's a crushing inevitability to the plot, but when you drill down to the specific thing Carla Jean suggests at the climax of the scene, that it's "just you", it does feel like the façade is breaking here a bit, that she sees through Chigurh somehow. In fact, the whole scene feels like it pushes toward that point. If the film is fatalist, Carla Jean is a fatalist heroine, going to death with profound dignity. She says she "knowd what was in store" as soon as she saw Chigurh, knew that he was crazy and was going to kill her, and does not really try to bargain for her life the way other characters in the film do, save for demanding one thing: that Chigurh accept his own agency.
This seems to anger Chigurh, who up till that point seems to be enjoying tormenting the woman. She is refusing to play along with the sadistic game, and the nihilistic philosophy underpinning it, and in my opinion there's a faint suggestion of anxiety when Chigurh insists for the final time that she call the coin flip. It punctures his whole Angel of Death, Agent of Fate persona, as does the buildup throughout the scene, where Carla Jean repeats his statements and almost interrogates him with an air of skepticism, even a little bit of derisive disbelief. Chigurh might collect his composure, put himself back together, when he hits on the notion "I got here the same way the coin did", but the fact that he has to puzzle it out for a moment, and shows what I read as relief when he delivers that line, suggests that it is, again, a front, a self justification that allows Chigurh to abdicate responsibility. The fact that, according to the AV, Carla Jean refusing to call the coin flip is an invention of the Coens and a deviation from the book suggests that they saw this refusal as significant. All this suggests to me that the film leans towards Chigurh's self-mythologizing and philosophy as applied to his own actions are hollow and insincere.
Is that satisfying, as narrative compensation for this distressing plot resolution? Maybe! That's a question further down the road, and is even more subjective, tied up not just in our intellectual experience of the film, but the immediate, pre-cognitive affect, the jolt of feelings, that we get when watching it. Or those feelings as we watch it again later, having thought about it for many years, as I did before rewatching scenes for this article. The objective qualities of the text provide a scaffolding for our experience, but our experience remains our own.
It's this dialectic that lets us talk about art's subjectivity... while also being able to discard readings that we just think are flat out wrong, which can be useful and important to do sometimes. Actually, I set out to write this not cause I really had a particular interest in writing about No Country for Old Men, but because I wanted to write about the Robert Eggers reinterpretation of Nosferatu. Actually, even that's not quite true: I wanted to write about a conversation in the show Black Sails, and another different monologue in the movie The Brutalist (not in the same article--I'm not, like, completely crazy), and I thought, oh, actually, these share a focus: I'm looking at something a character is saying, and how it's presented, and concluding that even though this character appears to be relaying The Moral Of The Story, practically turning to the audience (literally doing so in The Brutalist!) to tell us exactly what to think of what we've just watched... despite this, I actually think both the show and the film want us to see those characters as profoundly compromised and untrustworthy. I didn't want to have to re-explain my whole methodology for reading media twice in back to back articles. So, I turned to another recent film, Nosferatu, and how it takes a particular character and deliberately and gruesomely undermines that character. Having written that, I realized I needed to lay groundwork for the reading process in general. So, I just spent 2700 words on a film I didn't intend to talk about at all; and now, let's talk about Nosferatu.
Heir to about a century and a half of vampire stories, particularly vampire stories derived from Bram Stoker's Dracula (I mean the book, not Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula", though that's also an important influence), Nosferatu depicts the gruesome haunting of a young couple by the ancient supernatural malevolence Count Orlok. Set in 1830s Germany, the focal character Ellen Hutter is seduced at a young age by Orlok, and becomes the focus of his predation once more when her unwitting husband Thomas gets sent to the ancient vampire's castle to do some land speculation. So far so Stoker--the story should be familiar if you've watched or read any number of Draculas, or any number of Nosferatus for that matter. The plot indeed follows fairly beat for beat the 1922 silent film: Orlok arrives in the town of Wisburg on a plague ship, unleashing a swarm of rats. As the city is overtaken by sickness, Ellen sacrifices herself, offering her body up to the vampire to distract him until the rising sun annihilates him. Director Robert Eggers's main intervention, besides fleshing out a number of side characters, is adding a more explicitly sexual bent to all of this, establishing a sexual connection between Orlok and Ellen that goes back to her childhood, and sexual violence and seduction as a central part of the vampire's nature and actions. So what does the film think, or Eggers think? Well, this inherited plot of the self sacrificing wife, paired with the heightened sexual content, inspired some viewers to conclude the film thinks women... are bad.
I get it, actually! If you're arguing the film has a misogynistic message, there's certainly evidence to draw on. Ellen is treated by other characters in the film as a vector for contagion, a wanton female whose uncontrollable, problematic sexual urges have unleashed a curse on her whole community, and who needs to die in order to lift that curse. There's even characters who essentially voice this opinion, charging Ellen with essentially madness and degeneracy. She charges HERSELF with it! I do understand how you can come out of the film with the opinion that it's a fundamentally misogynistic text.
If that's your hypothesis, I think it's safe to suggest the film essentially agrees with the character of Friedrich when he denounces Ellen and her effect on his nuclear family. Friedrich is really the emblem of middle class nuclear family respectability, impatient with Ellen's eccentricities, enthusiastic about business and shtupping his wife, a guy and a dude, rational, and in control. If you want someone to give voice to the sexism you see in the film, he's surely the one to do it, and he basically does, saying she ought to have been locked in an asylum, and furiously denouncing her lack of dignity and respect for the help he has offered her and Thomas. The film even follows this confrontation where he turns Ellen and Thomas out of his home with a profoundly unsettling sexual encounter between the two, as though to underscore just how far Ellen has fallen.
So, what is Friedrich's fate in the film? Well, Count Orlok eats his whole family and in a fit of grief, dying of the plague overrunning the city, he exhumes his wife from her tomb and dies having sex with her corpse. By this subtle storytelling I think we get a suggestion that the film and director Robert Eggers don't find Friedrich's attitudes and behaviors all that sympathetic, or at least are skeptical of the utility of his rational solutions for female hysteria (just put her in an institution and have done with it). If we go back to those first questions, I think the film thinks Friedich's paternalism is at the very least fragile to the point where it can curdle into something as monstrously perverse as anything Ellen does, if not more so. And hey, conveniently and happily, I happen to agree, and even take some perverse pleasure in seeing just how far the film will go to undermine Friedrich's claim to patriarchal authority. My understanding of what the film thinks, based on what it's giving me, is that it's sympathetic to Ellen and her experiences, even admires her, and thinks Friedrich's middle class, small minded, paternalistic attitudes are ruinous, which appeals to my own feeling that Ellen is a heroic figure being unfairly blamed for her own victimization.
Which is great, but I don't want to be misunderstood here. I'm not saying "the film is good because the right people get punished". Or, to put it in a way that I've seen online, it's ok to depict something bad if you make sure the audience knows you don't endorse that depiction, by having the bad thing punished. I'm trying to use Friedrich's case to open the conversation up, not shut it down by placing the film in a simple category of "morally good" or "morally bad".
This is important to me, because I care about ambiguity and open-endedness in art. I also care about art that transgresses, art that challenges, even art that explores fantasies we'd rather not admit we have. Remember, I'm talking up interpretive agency in part because I find this contagion theory of art, where wicked art beams wicked ideas into your head, disempowering and paranoid. So, watching "depiction doesn't equal endorsement" slowly grow this appended clause, "...as long as the thing depicted is Punished or Denounced so the reader can't possibly get the wrong idea", disturbs me. It's a weirdly Calvinist take on art and the world, isn't it? It posits a just world where those beloved by God, or the narrative, or the threefold rule, or the marketplace of ideas, or Sigma Grindset or whatever, can be obviously perceived by the rewards they get on earth, and the sinners, malingerers, addicts, and beta cucks are where they are due to their folly.
But, I like art that reflects life, and in life sometimes the good guys die and the bad guys win. Actually, one great reason to get into sports, in parallel to getting into art, is that sports will quickly disabuse you of any notion that there's some sort of cosmic justice looking after the protagonists (the team or athlete you're rooting for, obviously). There is, however, cosmic irony. There's nothing like saying "God is really reaching down from the sky to fuck up Max Verstappen's F1 race, specifically" right before a series of ludicrous events that result in the bastard coming in second. You hate to see it, folks. But it's good to see it, sometimes, because that's life.
If realism isn't enough, consider what role this seemingly benign idea--that surely you should be trying to impart good moral lessons in your art!--have posed in society. This was, in fact, the exact position of both the Hays Code which was used to censor films from the 30s to the 60s, and the Comics Code Authority, which strangled the comics industry from the 1950s all the way, astonishingly to the 2000s. In fairness, I've seen people claim that "the guilty must be punished" is a Hays Code mandate, but I've read a couple versions of the code and didn't find anything that explicit. It's repeated so often, though, that I suspect this was an unwritten shorthand studios adopted anyway to deal with the lengthy diatribe in the code against presenting evil alluringly or presenting a plot where an audience member could ever be confused about good vs evil. Not so with the Comics Code Authority, which jumps straight for the damn throat with: "In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds." Aside from a whole bunch of stuff designed to clear the way for superhero comics once Ed Gaines specifically was out of business, the CCA makes sure to mandate respect for parental authority, police, and traditional marriage (no divorce allowed!). The Hays Code meanwhile forbids "sex perversion", race mixing, and saying "Jesus Christ" in anything but a reverent tone. All of this rested on the fundamental belief that audiences, particularly audiences of unrefined patrician morals, could not be trusted with mass media. Without spelling out a moral for the lower classes, they would just hoover the Bad Thoughts up.
I remember the first time I watched No Country feeling deflated by the ending. It seems for a minute like Chigurh is going to get his just desserts, crushed by the very hand of God in the form of a car running a red light and t boning his. Then, the agonizing minutes where a generous boy gives him the literal shirt off his back and Chigurh hobbles away. I wanted to howl at my laptop, "don't help him, can't you tell he's a MONSTER? Is there no justice in the world?! Truly, this is no country for old men! Or 20something closeted trans women either!"
I'm more reconciled to the ending now, ideologically speaking, for all the reasons above. Sometimes you gotta swallow a bad end in the name of inoculating yourself against the Just World fallacy. My initial discomfort, though, was partly because it felt like an endorsement of Chigurh's all encompassing nihilism. Shit just happens, arbitrary cause and effect, and there's no justice. But now I also see things from another angle. There may not be a divine providence reaching down to punish the wicked, but Chigurh is also not death embodied, a transcendent inhuman force imparting truth to mortals. He's a piece of shit who happens to be very good at a very bad job, and he's just as mortal as anyone else. I mean he puts on an impressive façade in the face of a bone sticking out of his arm, but there's a real panic and urgency evident in the performance. I am, ultimately, not sure what the film thinks of all this. But I know what I think, and I can cite the language of the film when I say that I think Chigurh relies ultimately on this persona (let's not exaggerate it by calling it a philosophy) that lets him divorce himself from his actions, see himself as a mere agent of the universe. Ultimately, though, he's just as mortal as anyone else, and making choices just like everyone else, which is of course exactly what Carla Jean asserts even in the face of her own death. I'll take my own responsibility here for reading that, and my admiration for Carla Jean, into the text.
From that perspective, Friedrich's bad end can feel a bit on the nose. In Eggers's defense though, neither Hays nor the CCA would have tolerated how much necrophilia and cannibalism is in Nosferatu. Maybe we can give the film a pass for a moment of heavy-handedness. Moreover, there's all these complexities and uncomfortable qualities to the film that have sparked all sorts of engagement, particularly among women who see themselves in Ellen. For some, the film is an affirmation of her victimhood and the evil of the man who groomed her. For others, the seduction by a grotesque monster has a forbidden thrill to it, the film affirming that their dark fantasies don't damn them. The two camps don't necessarily get along but the film permits, even encourages, both perspectives. It provides this platform for women to assert their interpretive agency. And I think that giving Friedrich such an ignoble and humiliating end helps open up space for a much more interesting engagement and active process of reading, individually and collectively, by closing the book with force on the reading "Eggers thinks women are wicked and need to be taught a lesson."
I'm bringing more to the text of course than just what the film is giving me and a basic understanding of a kind of moral cause and effect. I'm also noticing things like: this is set in the Biedermeier period between the Napoleonic wars and the 48 revolutions that swept Europe. It's a period of growing bourgeois middle class dominance in Germany, and a cultural domestication of romanticism into comforting clichés, not that different from the turn inward to home and hearth during the Victorian era. But there's also this brewing tension that will erupt into revolutionary upheaval, pitted against aristocratic counterrevolution. I notice that Orlock is not summoned to Wisburg by Ellen but by a land speculator, Ellen's love sold for capital. I notice how Orlok asserts aristocratic privilege, but also despises superstitious peasants and Roma. He is an aristocrat but a modernizing one. There's a lot more going on here that undermines the idea that Eggers just is taking the side of the Biedermeier German patriarch, denouncing the ruin that befalls civilization when a woman has desires for more than housework. (God I just imagined Friedrich giving his wife one of those "porn for women" books from the 2000s that was all pictures of men using a vacuum cleaner or whatever. Awful.)
There's this mix here of stuff that's in the film, stuff I know from outside the film, history, culture, genre convention even (never have sex if you want to survive a horror movie!), all of this stuff going into my interpretation... all making it my interpretation. I have the power to apply or not apply any of this stuff. Maybe some of it fits poorly, or contradicts other elements in both the text's reality, or my repertoire. It becomes a negotiation. A dialogue. The film isn't just something beamed into my brain and imposed on me, and if I'm coming away with a particular feeling, I have to, kind of like both Ellen and Carla Jean, own my part in making meaning.
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