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The students were tasked to craft a story about a coin toss—the simple gamble of Heads or Tails.

 DANNY…dissects the film, “No Country for Old Men,” and the dispassionate way the film’s main antagonist deploys the coin toss to decide life or death.

Death

Anton Chigurh is one of the greatest antagonists in fiction. This is a spoiler-free review, so no, the open-ended fate of Llewelyn Moss’s wife is not a spoiler. We actually have no idea what happened to her.  Anyways, I will be talking about what he exactly represents. Anton Chigurh is a cold and nigh-emotionless psychopath who is the main antagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men.” The popular movie is directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. The actor for the main antagonist is Javier Bardem.

Anton Chigurh is a hitman, completely devoid of empathy, remorse, and compassion. When set upon a goal, he stops at nothing to achieve it; he kills anyone in his way, and he has an eerie presence of near invincibility throughout the film. He often seems to be ontologically inevitable, which is very significant, but I’ll get into that later. Psychologists have ranked Chigurh #1 as the most accurate depiction of a psychopath in cinema. Chigurh wields a suppressed Remington shotgun and a captive bolt pistol, often used for painlessly dispatching farm animals.

In Cormac McCarthy’s works, such as “No Country for Old Men” and “Blood Meridian”, he often depicts his antagonist as being the ontological representation of certain concepts. It’s arbitrary and implicit pertaining to what they are exactly. For example, in Blood Meridian, the antagonist Judge Holden could be interpreted as many different things. Judge Holden is a pale, 7-foot-tall man with the visage of an enormous infant. He is highly intelligent and indulges himself in the depths of depravity. He enslaves, scalps, murders, and rapes many people throughout the novel, which include children. He proclaims himself to be immortal and declares himself the suzerain or keeper of the Earth. He declares that war is God, and that anything in creation that exists without his knowledge exists without his consent.

He leads a gang of cowboys in the West during the period of westward expansion in the United States. Some believe him to be the devil, some believe him to be war itself, some think that he embodies the dark truth of Manifest Destiny. In contrast, Anton Chigurh does not relish himself in depravity to this extent. Although he obviously isn’t good.
Chigurh’s cold and unstoppable nature makes him seem more like an entity than a real human being. We’ve only ever seen him bleed a few times, and he seems as if fate itself works in his favor, as he wipes out dozens of people against seemingly impossible odds. His infamous coin tosses, which he offers to a select few of his victims, are what define his character. When faced with someone whom he decides is worthy of a chance, he’ll tell them to call a coin toss. If they win, he lets them go; if they lose, they die.

Much of Chigurh’s dialogue gives the impression that he feels as if he’s the arbiter of fate. Human life means nothing to him, and he’ll kill people who even slightly inconvenience him. Because of this, many interpret him to be the embodiment of death. He represents the inevitable fate of all human beings, operating on a nihilistic code that reduces human life to pure chance. Conversely, Llewelyn Moss, the protagonist, is a brilliant depiction of man vs fate. Overall, Anton is a brilliant character, and it’s extremely entertaining to see him operate. I’m excited to read the book, since it was gifted to me recently. I would highly recommend anyone to watch the movie, since there are a lot of interesting things that happen in the film. The ending is very chilling.

Danny Buck
January 30, 2026