 ✓
| ||
|
This Pure Evil was Headlined on June, 2022. | ||
|
|
"Mature Content Warning!" |
| “ | What's the most you ever lost on a coin toss? Call it. Just call it. You need to call it. I can't call it for you, or it wouldn't be fair. [...] Yes, you did. You've been putting it up your whole life; you just didn't know it. Do you know what date is on this coin? 1958. It's been traveling twenty-two years to get here, and now it's here—and it's either heads or tails, and you have to say. Call it. [...] You stand to win everything. Call it. | „ |
| ~ Anton Chigurh gambling a gas station owner's life on a coin flip. |
| “ | I had no say in the matter. Every moment in your life is a turning and every one a choosing. Somewhere you made a choice. All followed to this. The accounting is scrupulous. The shape is drawn. No line can be erased. I had no belief in your ability to move a coin to your bidding. How could you? A person's path through the world seldom changes and even more seldom will it change abruptly. And the shape of your path was visible from the beginning. Yet even though I could have told you how all of this would end I thought it not too much to ask that you have a final glimpse of hope in the world to lift your heart before the shroud drops, the darkness. Do you see? | „ |
| ~ Chigurh rationalizing to Moss's wife her imminent death by his hand in the novel. |
Anton Chigurh is the main antagonist of the 2005 novel No Country for Old Men by the late Cormac McCarthy and its 2007 film adaptation of the same name.
He is a professional and ruthless hitman, characterized as an unstoppable killing machine with a fatalistic code and an unpredictable psychology.
He was portrayed by Javier Bardem, who also portrayed Armando Salazar in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Oogie Boogie in The Nightmare Before Christmas stage play adaptation and Him in Mother!.
What Makes Him Pure Evil?[]
In Both Versions[]
- As a professional hitman, he killed a myriad of people before the events of the plot.
- His twisted philosophy and rules revolving about coin toss can't be considered as a redeeming moment by any means, since while he indeed does spare people who win at a coin toss, he does it mainly to uphold his depraved worldview and delude himself into believing that his actions are justified by the flow of nature itself.
- The story itself emphasizes a fact that Chigurh's alleged standards and "honor" aren't genuine, when his last victim, Carla Jean Moss, appropriately points out that Anton's philosophy is vain and only serves to satisfy his perchance for violence and provide a reasoning for murders (In the movie he even goes so far to straight up kill her without tossing a coin and was visibly annoyed by her notion). All of this proves that he has no honor.
- It is also heavily implied that the ulterior and actual motive behind coin toss is simply to receive a thrill from this, as he evidently enjoys doing so.
- In his murders, he utilizes a captive bolt stunner, typically intended for farm animals, showing how he views humanity as nothing more than "farm animals" who need to be butchered if they lose on a coin toss.
- While he does act rather polite and affable to everyone, this behavior is just a ruse to show how little emotion the psychopath has and manipulate people around.
- He garrotes a police officer with his handcuffs in the incredibly disturbing manner and steals money from his wallet after he has murdered him.
- He kills a man by shooting him in the head with his captive bolt pistol so he could steal his car—a crime he repeats later in the film.
- Making the owner of a convenience store do a coin toss in order to come to a decision of whether to kill him or not. What makes this worse is that Chigurh's reason for doing this (the owner wanted to make small talk) was extremely petty.
- While he doesn't kill the owner of the convenience store, it was only out of his own fatalist worldview rather than honor. Furthermore, he would have killed him without hesitation should he have called the coin toss wrong.
- Upon being hired to retrieve stolen money from the film's protagonist, Llewelyn Moss, he kills two of his employer's men, who take him to the scene where the money was stolen.
- According to Carson Wells, even if Moss gave Chigurh the money, he would kill him anyway just for inconveniencing him, which is pretty accurate considering that Chigurh is a violent man who would kill anyone in his way.
- It is heavily implied that he killed all chickens in the loaded truck which he stole, judging by an amount of feathers that flew there.
- He shoots and almost kills a bird on the way to the motel, for no apparent reason.
- When he tracks Moss down to a motel, he murders several Mexican criminals who are after him once he gets in the wrong room—even when one of them surrenders.
- When he successfully tracks down Moss at a hotel, he murders the clerk, later kills a man trying to give Moss a ride, and critically wounds Moss in the process.
- After getting shot in a gunfight, he blows up someone's car to distract everyone from him stealing from a pharmacy to treat his wound, which could have gotten someone killed.
- When Chigurh discovers that his employer has hired Carson Wells to retrieve the money, he shoots him to death and does the same to his employer, deciding to take the money for himself.
- Even when Moss is killed by Mexican assassins, Chigurh kills his innocent wife, Carla Jean Moss, so he can keep his "promise" to Moss from earlier, when he threatened to kill her if he did not give him the money.
- While he does offer her a chance at life with a coin toss and get annoyed when she refuses to play, it is far from a redeeming moment, as Chigurh still kills her because she refuses to play his game and to uphold his twisted principles. Even if he did feel reluctance to do it, it is short-lived and still ghastly overshadowed, not to mention that she tells him that it’s not the coin; it’s just him and the coin, and his twisted principles have no meaning other than to justify his killings.
- While he doesn't murder the two kids who witness his car accident and instead pays them off, it's only because he was severely injured and running out of time before the police arrived, in addition to being in broad daylight and them not witnessing him commit a crime.
- Whilst him paying them off, even after they offered to help him for free, can be seen as a "pet-the-dog" moment, it is clearly pragmatic and merely demonstrates his detached personality and inability to understand genuine compassion from other people. Not to mentioned he was demanding them to take money in a very threating and authoritative manner
- He receives no retribution for his crimes, making him a shining example of an effective Karma Houdini. Although he did get into a car crash and it's possible that he could've succumbed to his severe injuries or was found by lawmen, this is only assumption at best as we didn't get to see what subsequently happened to him.
Exclusive to the Novel[]
- He said that he murdered someone who made a bad comment about him in a cafe parking lot in front of his friends (And he apparently did so with his bare hands). Then allowed himself to be arrested just to see if he could escape, which is exactly what he does.
- He said he used birdshot while killing Well's employer because he was sat in front of a giant window and didn't want glass to rain onto the people below. Though Anton himself doesn't directly say so, it is pretty evident that he did this in order to not draw any unwanted attention, as opposed to not wanting any random civilians to get hurt.
- Before killing Jean Moss, he makes her call a coin, and she gets it wrong, and he kills her, but while he did give her a chance to live and tried to justify his principles, it’s implied that he sees himself as the passenger of the dead, but it doesn’t justify this as he killed just because he made a promise to her husband.
- He appears to try to make her feel better before killing her and has apologized to her several times, but he is shown as a delusional individual, and it is evident that he believes shooting her is the appropriate choice.
- Even though she tells him that her death is pointless and that he is using the coin just to give himself a reason to kill her, even after she got the coin wrong, he responds, "maybe it's for the best" and later claims that her life and choices led to this and cruelly shoots her.
- He appears to try to make her feel better before killing her and has apologized to her several times, but he is shown as a delusional individual, and it is evident that he believes shooting her is the appropriate choice.
- Even though he returns the money to its owner, it is just because he wants to continue working and also to change things around and not let them be how they were before.
Trivia[]
- He, alongside Judge Holden, are the only two Cormac McCarthy villains to be Pure Evil.
- Javier Bardem won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Chigurh in the film.
- In a study that involved the viewing of over 400 films, psychiatrist experts labeled Anton Chigurh as the most accurate depiction of a psychopath ever put on screen.
- Due to his hatred of violence, Javier Bardem has a negative opinion about his own character. Moreover, he wanted to see no weapon and asked that of the Cohen brothers, the directors.
- Anton is widely acknowledged as one of most terrifying Cinematic and Book villains (Or fiction as whole), which is mainly contributed by his malevolent, unpredictable, cold-blooded and, what excessively important, disturbingly realistic nature, along with fact of him being mostly shrouded by mystery.
- To cement Anton's status as pure evil, the author of original book, Cormac McCarthy, stated that he considers him to be a such.
- The Simpsons has a parody of him in the episode Waverly Hills, 9-0-2-1-D'oh. But he is anything but Pure Evil, as he not only has a genuinely kind moment in validating Homer’s parking ticket and making sure he has enough parking time, he is honorable since he lets the family go when it looks like his kids live there. More preventions are that he is also too comedic as he is a complete parody and fails the standards entirely.
- There's a theory that Chigurh was a soldier in the Vietnam War much like Moss, which could explain not only his talent for improvising and endurance, but also his psychopathic and detached personality. It is, however, wholly speculation, since in the story nothing indicates that he was a former soldier altogether, and psychopaths should be born with distinct genes, not just molded by event.
- His personality may be partially inspired by another Pure Evil villain from another Cohen Brothers' movie, Gaear Grimsrud, as they're both hired psychopathic murderers and men of few words. Chigurh is visibly more cunning and strategic than the brutish and impulsive Grimsrud, though.
External Links[]
- Anton Chigurh on the Villains Wiki.
- Anton Chigurh on the Mental Ranking Wiki.
- Anton Chigurh on the Wikipedia.
[]
 Pure Evils
| ||
|
See Also | ||
 Pure Evils
| ||
|
Animated Features Live-Action Features Live-Action Television See Also | ||
 Pure Evils
| ||
|
Animated Films Live-Action Films Other Animated Television Live-Action Television Novelizations Scripts Video Games Fanon See Also | ||