Absurdity of Lifekarma doesn’t exist. There is no inherently good person or bad thing. What happens happens - subjectivity yields the meaning (THE TRIAL - FRAZ KAFKA / Jean Luc Godard’s Two or Three Things)

● How art can show ‘the outraged acknowledgement of the limitations of human thought” (Sartre [1946] 2007: 81)

● It is certainly true that they are stories, but it is also true that they are in their own ways true stories, that reveal true things about the way the world is and about our ways of being in the world. It is precisely in this way that their movies function like philosophy. (Gilmore 2009: 76)

● “This fatalism...is definitely based on the idea that you are what you do and that what you have done cannot be undone, what decisions you have made cannot be unmade, and finally what you do, what you have decided, will have its natural consequences in the world, and there is no avoiding or evading those consequences. (Gilmore 2009: 70)

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Existence Precedes Essenceconsciousness creates life meaning / not labels or roles (Facticity - we should accept our past and our origins but not feel trapped by them)

● “Chigurh evokes the twin existentialist paradigms of essence/existence and choice” (131)

● In contrast to Sartre’s Paul Hilbert, the unwitting existentialist who misapplies his legitimate disgust, Chigurh is bereft of any existential teleology and takes pleasure in murder for its own sake. He kills not for a cause or a passion but for the sake of it - and for money.” (132)

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Loneliness / Introspective Thought - (TAXI DRIVER - IRIS / interview confessionals / language)

Existential Angst (“Man who couldn’t take it anymore” / detatchment from prostitution)● Thinking too much● Common to many Ext. thinkers - negative feeling arising from freedom and responsibly● One can take measures to remove the object they fear / no such object with angst● Actions have consequences and nobody to blame but ourselves (Responsibility / Guilt)

○ Chigurh feels no remorse● Movie opening

○ “the law, in effect, was the supreme arbitrator; faith in it was unquestioned because the law guaranteed solutions, results and the punishment of wrongdoing.”

○ The Sheriff regrets the passing of an era where a crime of passion was literally a crime motivated by selfish passion and thus morally and legally unambiguous.

Bad Faith - assuming the role of an object in the world and not a free agent - It us the Free decision to deny inescapable freedom.

○ “ He doesn’t exist , and then be free later. He is free by the fact that he exists...But man, who is thus condemned to freedom, still has to free himself, because he doesn’t immediately recognize himself as free, or, because he misunderstands the meaning of his freedom. (Sartre (1945) 2009: 17)

○ “Chigurh’s crime...is a means to an end and thus ‘counter-freedom’. He is not free because he has not been able to commit himself to anything other than profit.

■ Sartre describes this type of false freedom as the freedom of indifference, freedom in the abstract, freedom for nothing. (sartre 1945 2009 : 18

Despair - So long as a person’s identity relies on qualities that can crumble, they are in despair.Despair is universal because there is no essence on earth

Chigurh:● ”Chigurh is a throwback to the Sartrean fictional character Paul Hilbert in the

short story “Erostratus” from The Wall.” (Sartre [1939] 1975)○ Hilbert is a loner and a control freak...widely interpreted as a maniac whose

crime highlights the impossibility and futility of physically revolting.○ Both Anton and Hilbert sling weapons and reject society’s values.○ Hilbert’s crime is situated in ’L’Humain’

■ Hilbert rejects humanism as an impeadment to his life,■ “Don’t think I didn’t have more serious reasons for hating them” ( Sartre

[1939] 1975: 42)■ Hilbert’s disengagement with his crime disqualifies it as a crime of

passion and makes him a hero of existentialism. ■

● Chigurh would appear to embody the doctrine of existentialism in action and in philosophy. Chirgurh evokes the twin existentialist paradigms of essence / existence and choice.

● The process of how roles are inherited, socialized, and institutionalized, and then legitimised (in this case via marriage) is anathema to the killer chigurh, whose own existence has to be reinvented after each murder.

● “Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

● “in a veiled sartrean allusion to the metaphorical waster of a life predetermined by values

and rules hat ‘tell you what you ought to do’, Chigurh juxtaposes his own vacant ‘values’ of disdain and worthlessness before shooting Carson in cold blood.

● Carson says he doesn’t have to do this; repeated in scene with Calra jean -○ Chigurh does not respond to the moral reproaches inferred by the riposte; to do

so would be a tacit acknowledgement of the secular morality he opposes.○ In both instances, he subjegates his desires to the flip of a coin, to chance. That’s

his principle. It is the principle that keeps him from a certain kind of vulnerablility (Gilmore 2009: 65)

● “Chigurh is not just deferring choice to the realms of gratuity, but he is also handing responsibility over to ‘fate’ in an act of bad faith that prevents him from taking responsibility for his own ethical choices.