The Good in the Ugly

Recently, my wife and I attended a day-long event promoting new evangelistic efforts in our church. While polished and well intentioned, the talks and music at this event came across as triumphalist and superficial. Afterwards, my wife and I felt spiritually deadened by the kitschy Christianity we had experienced. We felt a need for something more honest, raw, and serious—so we spent the evening watching Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men. The Coen brothers’ film masterpiece contains much that is ugly: depictions of ugly emotions and events, morally ugly acts, and the intellectual ugliness of stupidity and hubris. And yet, the film is beautiful: it is a pleasing, fitting whole that reveals significant aspects of reality. It is beautiful not despite its ugliness, but because of how that ugliness is skillfully depicted and integrated into the whole film. Its half-hopeful grappling with the problem of evil thereby appears far more spiritually rich than any amount of happy-clappy religion.