Happily for me, I did not come across David Denby’s much-better-worked-out thoughts on No Country For Old Men until I had recorded mine, fragmentary as they are.

Interestingly, he seems to get to roughly the same place as I, wondering at the spectacle of such plainly apparent technical mastery deployed in the service of what he, too, characterizes as nearly nihilism.

I left out Lebowski the other day, primarily because its’ themes are sufficiently distinct from No Country that I didn’t want to drag the Dude into the discussion.

Denby doesn’t leave him out, and rightly so.

(In passing, I find it amusing that parts of Lebowski, like There will Be Blood, were shot at Greystone Mansion.)

In Lebowski, Walter dismisses the comic badmen that have hassled the bowlers, later also describing them as cowards:

“No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

It sure seems unlikely that the Coens intend the ineffectual clutch of Eurotrash as a self-portrait. Yet it certainly does not seem outlandish to assume that they have wondered about their own work’s relation to nihilism, even if one assumes they would, like Walter, dismiss the idea.