No Country for Nihilism

‘The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you,” Carla Jean Moss says to the psychopathic killer Anton Chigurh. He demands she play his game and call the coin flip that will determine whether he kills her. The coin allows Chigurh to view himself as an instrument of destiny. But Moss, sensible and grieving, exposes the pretense. In the film, directors Joel and Ethan Coen follow this verbal scene not with a cut to black and the sound of gunfire. Instead, we see Chigurh silently exit the home he invaded. When he checks his boots, the theater audience sighs, realizing that he is checking for blood, evidence. He killed her.