Animals in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and the Coen Brothers’ Film Adaptation

ABSTRACT

A critical animal reading of No Country for Old Men, both McCarthy’s novel and the film adaptation, demonstrates both a representation of human cruelty toward its companion species and a sustained if fraught argument against that cruelty in the novel. The physical presence of animals is lessened in McCarthy’s novel as compared to his previous works, those set in premodern spaces driven by the blood and sinew of the animals cleared to make room for a human presence. But that presence is still there, and the lessening itself makes its own argument about the consequences of those earlier deaths. The Coens’ adaptation maintains many of McCarthy’s nonhuman presences and adds several others, elaborating on the author’s original animal argumentation and using filmic techniques to make immediate the human violence that both works critique. The consequences for animal characters in both works are much the same, each feeling the effects, along with their human counterparts, of the animal violence that created the Texas habitats in which they find themselves and the institutionalization of such violence that ultimately brought modernity to the sun-drenched plains.