No Country For Old Men Close-Up (“What’s Coming” Sequence)

The ideological approach of chance is backed up the by nature of Moss’s death. All the film, he has been built as a protagonist who will engage in a climatic shootout with the villain. He engages in idle conversation with a random woman during a bright day, a relatively pointless scene that feels safe for the audience. However, we then see the aftermath of a random shootout with Moss, with almost no buildup to it, from a relatively uninvolved characters perspective. Moss was killed, in an undignified way, offscreen by a group of characters we never knew. This reinforces the role of chance, alongside the uninvolved woman’s death by the pool, showing that death is uncaring of your role in events, and is so random that it may even come, abruptly and without warning, at the hands of something you were not expecting. This unnatural, unsatisfying ending for the audience confirms the films primary ideology of chance/its role in death, or life.

Bell’s lack of direct involvement with the main narrative in the film, and his role as one of the films few survivors and the one who contemplates the chaos once it is over, reflects his luck at surviving death merely by not being too closely involved in events.