sunlore wrote:My thought was that Chigurh doesn't kill Sheriff Bell because he (Bell) has trancended the topology of fate that is central to the film (and the overarching focus in all of McCarthy's books), and is therefore irrelevant, arrives everywhere too late, &cetera. Bell is free, but he is also dead. Or a ghost, anyway: simply not the map. He goes horseback-riding.
I like this. Certainly, the shadow Bell casts on the motel room when he opens the door is that of a myth: the long-dead cowboy. His being perpetually too late is one of themes that I picked up on.
This reverses my own pet interpretation of the scene, which is simply a magical one: Chigurh was there, then he wasn't. He simply does not exist in the same ethical universe as Bell, or perhaps even the same fictional one.
One can get enjoyment from viewing the film as a circulation of different ethical universes. To my eyes, of the main characters only Chigurh and Carla Jean come out as acting wholly in good faith. In fact, perhaps only Carla Jean... Moss hesitates and changes his mind throughout - returning to the wounded man after refusing him water; rejecting Carson Wells then calling him, fatally; and finally electing to pursue Chigurh having spent the last couple of days running away from him.
Bell, as Sunlore points out, is perpetually too late, which seems to me indicative of his rather passive nature - he reacts out of duty, he never instigates. Fair enough, but at the end he quits his position because he is unsatisfied by this. He claims that changing times have made him obsolete, but this is debunked by his uncle. He ends the film evidently waiting for the death that he has missed in that motel room.
Which leaves us with Carla Jean and Chigurh. I love their confrontation, as it appears as a collision between two very different sets of values; her set is humanist; his is cruel and seemingly tailored with care to his proclivities, which lead him joylessly to her. However, she calls bullshit on him; despite knowing that he offers her a chance of survival, she is honest to her belief. Your coin toss is toss, she says. His final expression in that scene appears uncomprehending to me - he simply cannot understand her logic. So he kills her.
The interesting aftermath to the car crash is the rather shifty aspect he adopts with respect to the teenagers after he pays them. "You didn't see me." Was that a nervous wink? Surely, even he is compromised here.
Another perspective I like is that of watching the film as a play around Chigurh's vulnerability. The dialogue and the framing of Bardem throughout the film ostensibly point to him as some mythical beast, essentially immortal evil; but we also keep seeing him hurt or tripped up. After all, he begins the film in captivity and bloodies himself in his escape. Then there is the perfect moment when he briefly chokes on the peanuts - it disrupts the menace of the scene in the gas station for good reason other than comic surprise. He kills almost everyone who faces him, but Moss still seriously injures him the one time they meet. And then there is the final meeting with Carla Jean with the car wreck punchline. That leaves as with yet another terrifying message: that someone as seemingly dominant, consistent and supernatural as Chigurh is ultimately as vulnerable to the whims of fate as us. You can do everything right according to your ethics and still end up utterly compromised with your arm bone sticking out of your shirt.