The Dark Side of the Coin
Anton Chigurh, the serial killer from the movie No Country for Old Men is widely considered
a mad man. Anton Chigurh is not mad or
crazy, but highly intelligent, efficient and effective. Anton Chigurh is an actual psychopath, a murderous
psychopath. He is a man of certainty and
a man of chance. He is a man of chance
because Anton will often tell his murder victims to call the flip of a coin as
he flips it. This means that if they
call it right he will not kill them. There
are two writers who attempt to explain the reasoning behind this, and they got
it wrong. Stacey Peebles believes that
Anton uses the coin toss as a divining tool to seem to have some twisted
control over fate. Douglas McFarland
believes that Anton Chigurh uses the coin toss to remove responsibility or
blame from himself. Neither of these
ideas about Anton’s coin toss seems to take in account that Anton is a
psychopath. When this is considered, the
coin toss has a deeper, darker purpose in Anton’s murders. The coin toss is a chance for Anton Chigurh
to provide his psychopathic mind with a feeling of emotion that he would not
normally feel like mercy, or even an intense pleasure.
From observing the movie No Country for Old Men, it can be concluded that the main antagonist, Anton Chigurh is a psychopath; as mentioned in papers written by Michele K. and Erica Moctezuma. He has many of the characteristics of a psychopath. He is like a cold and calculated machine. Anton rarely shows any emotion like fear in any given situation. Anton never applies morals in any decision making he may take. All of his decisions are made rationally and logically without emotional or moral attachment. These are tell tales of a psychopath. In Andrei G. Zavaliy’s scholarly article, “Absent, Full and Partial Responsibility of the Psychopath,” he describes what a psychopath is and describes how they think. Zavaliy says “psychopaths are void of moral considerations and moral reasoning from everyday actions and decisions” (92.) Instead, the psychopath makes everyday decisions with an overwhelming egocentricity; and act purely on desire and impulse with a lack of ability to restrain themselves (Zavaliy 90.) This means they are absent of a conscience and lack the ability to transcend one’s egotistic desires and preferences to consider the interests of others in making a decision (Zavaliy 90.) Hence they will never feel guilt or remorse for others affected by their actions. Not all psychopaths are violent but the ones that are, are usually murderous. Anton Chigurh is a murderous psychopath that kills people in order to feel a sense a pleasure.
It is very possible that Anton Chigurh and other psychopaths like him partake in the emotion of schadenfreude in order to feel anything at all. In Andrew Shaffer’s Article, “The Joy of Watching Others Suffer Schadenfreude and the Hunger Games,” he explains that Schadenfreude is the emotion that allows enjoyment to be obtained from the suffering of others (77.) Many consider schadenfreude to be diabolic and evil. In comparison, many would consider Anton Chigurh to be evil as well. In Andrew Shaffer’s article he explains that schadenfreude is caused by the chemical in our brains called Oxytocin (78.) Oxytocin is widely known as the love hormone and is responsible for social behavior and empathy. In the scholarly article “The Criminal Psychopath: History, Neuroscience, Treatment, and Economics,” authors Kent A. Kiehl and Morris B. Hoffman explain all psychopathic patients in medical studies have shown structural damage to the frontal cortex in their MRIs (N.P.) This part of the brain contains many important structures, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala, many of which are associated with moral reasoning, affective memory and inhibitions (Kiehl N.P.) Oxytocin receptors are expressed by neurons in many parts of the brain, including the amygdala and ventromedial hypothalamus, all in the frontal cortex. It seems there is a scientific connection with areas of the brain responsible for oxytocin, schadenfreude and psychopathy. This can definitely be considered a scientific theory for Anton Chigurh's darkness.
A philosophical look at Anton Chigurh's darkness may shed some light as well. "I really need to kill somebody.” “People fake a lot of human interactions, but I feel like I fake them all, and I fake them very well.” “You can't play on my feelings, I don't have any.” These are quotes by the character Dexter Morgan from the academically acclaimed TV show Dexter. Right away when I realized the character Anton Chigurh is a psychopath, I immediately thought of Dexter because Dexter Morgan lives and kills by a set of principals like Anton does. Dexter Morgan is a psychopathic killer that plays vigilante and kills other murderers. In the show, Dexter explains that he has a psychopathic void in his being that he fills with the rush and pleasure of killing people. This is a ritual that takes on its own entity within Dexter and he calls it his dark passenger. The dark passenger is the need to kill in order to feel. In one of Anton’s first scenes in the movie No Country for Old Men, he kills a police officer and it seems to give him almost a sexual pleasure. Anyone familiar with the Dexter phenomenon would recognize Anton Chigurh’s darkness, his dark passenger. This would be an unspoken topic in the movie No Country for Old Men, but the movie purposely leaves a lot to the imagination, like the coin toss.
The coin toss is such an important part of Anton Chigurh’s character that tells us more about him than any other aspect shown in the movie No Country for Old Men, although they do not show much of who he is at all. It is hard to agree with what Stacey Peebles and Douglas McFarland wrote about Anton Chigurh’s coin toss and what it means. Stacey Peebles writes in her article “Hold Still: Models of Masculinity in the Coens’ No Country for Old Men”, about the coin toss being used for divining the fate of his victims and that it represents some twisted form of control (130.) This would assume that he is worried with his victim choosing their own destiny and he would be the mastermind to make this happen. This is a valid opinion and with more thought and support Peebles could have been more convincing of this but, that is not the fact. Peebles was more worried about masculinity in her article. It is not likely that Anton’s character would be trying to divine someone else’s fate, because psychopathic serial killers do not consider other people’s lives. Whenever Anton decides to flip a coin he has already decided to kill that person anyway. Douglas McFarland writes in his article “No Country for Old Men as Moral Philosophy,” that Anton Chigurh resorts to flipping a coin while considering killing someone in order to transfer responsibility for their life off of him and onto the coin or chance (174.) This could be believable if it wasn’t considered that Anton was a psychopath. However, it is a wrong assessment because psychopaths do not accept the blame for the actions they make or consider morals while doing them. On top of that, Anton Chigurh is a professional assassin and wouldn’t be concerned with dodging responsibility for a kill even if he wasn’t a psychopath. It is likely that Anton flips the coin for different reasons.
The want to feel an emotion, is one of the reasons why Anton Chigurh decides to flip a coin and give his victims a chance at survival. The act of flipping the coin in itself could be a rush for Anton, as the coin cuts through the thick tension while flipping in the air. The victim watches the coin with anxiety as it seems to be moving in slow motion, but ends so quickly. Most likely, Chigurh wants to provide himself with an emotion that he wouldn’t normally have access to like empathy, in order to give him a false sense of mercy. Psychopaths cannot feel certain emotions but they know that they exist and that others feel them. Some psychopaths can get curious about these unreachable emotions. They might wonder how it would feel to experience mercy. The psychopath can use the known facts about that absent emotion and try to logically apply them to themselves. They could create a façade to make them think they have achieved this feeling. Chigurh probably wants to try and feel mercy because it might fascinate him. If a victim would call the coin toss right, then Chigurh would attempt to or make himself think he is feeling merciful. This act is not out of any concern for the victim whatsoever, because psychopaths are overwhelmingly egocentric. It isn’t about giving the victim a chance to live at all. The coin toss is just a chance for Chigurh to try and grasp a twisted sense of mercy.
The other side of the coin is hope. The coin toss provides Chigurh’s victims with a sense of hope. For a moment there is a beam of light shining through the dark situation. The thought that they may have a chance to survive this encounter thickens the tension. The importance of this comes from a quote by the character Bane in the movie The Dark Knight Rises, “Hope is really the key to torture.” It is possible that Chigurh knows this and uses it to draw a more intense pleasure from his victim’s downfall. If this is so then the coin toss can build up the victim’s hope of survival, and Chigurh can shatter that hope if they call the coin toss wrong. In this way the situation can build even more emotion and tension between the victim and Chigurh, for him to feed off of. This means Chigurh gains more pleasure from a kill that resulted in a coin toss called wrong. This may be the maximum effect possible of schadenfreude in psychopathy. Either way the coin falls, the coin toss is a win/win for Anton Chigurh, and he gets to fill his psychopathic void with an out of reach feeling of mercy or a more intense feeling of pleasure from a kill through mental torture. It is pretty twisted how the two sides of Anton Chigurh’s coin are the side of mercy and the side of hope.
Scientifically speaking, psychopaths are not by definition crazy, insane, or mad. Their brain just physically lacks a moral conscience. A psycho like Anton Chigurh would not worry with the control of other’s destinies and fate, nor would he worry about responsibility for someone’s life. Anton Chigurh would only think about his task and what he would get out of it. As you can see from watching the movie No Country for Old Men, Anton is the kind of psychological killer that likes those intimate, up close and personal encounters to savor all the little emotions and details. That is why he likes to use a coin toss in his murders. He is definitely someone you would not want to cross paths with in a dark alley. In America, 25% of prison inmates are psychopaths and 78% of them are extremely violent (Kiehl N.P.) Those aren’t such bad odds for you though, because only 3% of the American population are incarcerated or under correctional supervision (Kiehl N.P.) It isn’t very likely that you would encounter a psychopath in your daily life, but if you do, how would you call it, heads or tails?
