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This is a blog post I’m writing for MYSELF.
That’s why it rambles and roams, as I try and analyze – for myself – the theme and message of a fascinating movie I watched today… “No Country For Old Men”.
I felt a thrill of satisfaction and deep appreciation for the way the directors handled the finish – and because it was so counter-Hollywood (or indeed any other -wood), I wanted to see what others thought about it.
So I searched online for reviews and analyses, only to find that the few early results I explored were too superficial or casual for my taste. So, I’m going to do my own analysis – in light of my own work and experience as a pediatric heart surgeon.
The parallels, to me at least, are startling and close. Sherriff Tommy Lee Jones is in the role of ‘good’ fighting against ‘evil’. I’m in the role of surgeon battling disease. And both roles, in a sense, are seemingly futile, fought against stunning and forbidding odds.
Also, the longer you are in the field, the more harsh and scary the odds become, until one begins to wonder if there is really any point continuing to fight on. No Country For Old Men!
The scene where a psychopathic killer and drug smuggler walks away from an accident scene, probably to survive and continue his activities, is a reflection of ‘evil’ always having its place in the sun. Try as hard as we may to curtail it, survive it will.
So should one try to fight it at all? Is the battle worthwhile? Can a difference be made?
That’s the dilemma Sheriff Tom Ed (Jones) faces throughout the film. There’s always a tinge of the nostalgia he feels for those ‘good old days’ – and shocked, dismayed and un-understandable confusion about the way things have turned out… like Texans “with green hair and bones in their noses”!
And the dream he narrates in the end, of his father carrying a light to dispel the gloom, overtaking him in the darkness – only to be waiting for him when he arrives – is symbolic representation of the role that is thrust on everyone who chooses a specific path in life.
Be it law enforcement agents who choose to fight against criminal elements; be it soldiers who choose to defend our borders; be it doctors who pick impersonal diseases and birth defects as their antagonists; the fight is always bitter, and to the finish.
Triumph is neither guaranteed, or even probable. Yet, the alternative is so stark, harsh and hopeless, that one’s duty is clear. That’s what Sheriff Ed’s grandpa (I think it is his grandpa who’s in that scene, Ellis) tries to explain, when he tells the story of how Ed’s uncle was shot on the front porch of his house by five bandits – in 1909.
Good versus evil has been around forever. In all likelihood, it will be around forever, too.
Becoming too disillusioned, cynical or weary to stick on to one’s task in diminishing the odds isn’t, however, an option. This is, no doubt, “No Country For Old Men”.
That’s why I felt this was a movie I needed to have seen. To view my work in the right perspective. Not as a hopeless battle to eliminate completely the spectre of congenital heart disease that claims thousands of young lives every day. But more as an effort to improve the odds. To carry the light. To be there for others who will follow. And in the following, make a difference, albeit small or transient.
It’s a sentiment echoed in these memorable words I have copied down in my personal diary in 1984, from “The Last Frontier” by Alistair Maclean:
“Love for our enemies should be confined to where it belongs – between the covers of the Bible – and only the insane would have the courage, or the arrogance, or the stupidity, to open the pages and turn the principles into practice. Madmen, only madmen would do it – but without these madmen, our Armageddon will surely come.“
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