No Country for Old Men - Sound

Sound in No Country for Old Men is purely diegetic. There is no music in the film except for the mariachi band playing as Llewellyn wakes up on a set of steps. The lack of sound really puts the viewer into the movie. All of the diegetic sound seems heightened. All sounds are very clear, simplified, yet heightened since there is no soundtrack. That lack of sound adds much more suspense to the film. You can hear every footstep, every grain of dust being crushed under boots.

While the dialogue in the film isn’t exactly sparse, it is certainly functional. All characters besides Chigurh speak with the typical West Texas drawl. Most of the language in the film is how one might expect rural Texas to sound like – “at the gettin’ place,” “…all swole up,” “I don’t wanna get into some kind of jackpot here.” Chigurh has an accent that is hard to place. It’s easy to say it’s Spanish because of Javier Bardem, but as far as the character goes, it’s still hard to place.

The only narration is at the beginning of the film by Sheriff Bell. It sets up the movie perfectly in the sense of the meaning of the title. Sheriff Bell goes on to compare the times of him never carrying a gun to a boy killing a 14-year-old girl because he had always planned on killing someone. He is caught in the middle of the cat-and-mouse game Moss and Chigurh are playing. Though Bell is always a step behind both men, and doesn’t quite understand what has happened to in the world, he is the only “good” character. Moss, despite deciding to take water to a dying man in the desert, is the same side of the coin as Chigurh. Every decision he makes winds up putting his family at risk and causing his and his wife’s death. Chigurh has a sense of morals and fate to him, though clearly misguided.

If there were no dialogue in the film I think it’s fairly clear that Moss wants a better life for him and his wife. He says he’s retired and lives in a double-wide with his wife, so two million dollars would be a nice future for them both. Most of the film is him fighting for survival. From the outset of the film, Chigurh is clearly evil incarnate. We might not know immediately that he is after the money, but that becomes very clear a short time into the film. We might lose his wayward sense of morals and fate with his conversations with the gas station worker, but that only complicates his character. While we might not understand his lack of understanding with today’s society, we know that Sheriff Bell is one of the only characters in the film that’s trying to put a stop to the violence.