Fairy Tale and Film

Wealth through Stealth 
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tragedy awaits. One of the kidnappers appears, posing as an FBI agent 
asking about the downed plane, and the brothers meet him and the 
local policeman in the woods. The policeman and kidnapper are killed 
at the scene, and Jacob, having had enough of so much bloodshed, 
turns his back to his brother and urges him to pull the trigger. That 
Hank does so is his most reprehensible act. Even as his brother is evi-
dently suffering, his dream of buying back their father’s farm and mak-
ing a new life for himself nothing more than a vain fantasy, Hank acts 
more from self-interest than pity, knowing that his brother’s death will 
eliminate an evident risk. The final irony comes in learning that some 
of the ransom money is marked and therefore traceable, causing Hank 
to burn it all – against Sarah’s protests. The money proves worthless 
in the end, resulting in the loss of his friends and family, and a final 
shot of his cold-eyed wife stacking library shelves affirms that they are 
not simply back where they started (like ‘The Fisherman and his Wife’) 
but far worse off, having to live with what they have done, with noth-
ing to show for it.
11
As the film’s tag line reads, ‘sometimes good people 
do evil things’, and the futility of their experience drives the message 
home. Far from bringing any anticipated happiness, the money tar-
nishes everything Hank had.
The insistence that crime cannot pay is an ongoing and persistent 
theme. The likes of Ali Baba may get away with stolen loot (although, 
like Hank, he also loses a brother), yet contemporary counterparts in 
film don’t tend to be as fortunate. When a man arranges his wife’s 
kidnapping to make some money in 
Fargo
the scheme goes badly 
wrong (another example – like 
A Simple Plan
– where a snow-bound 
setting seems symbolic of an icy amorality at work and a heavily preg-
nant woman again confronts expectations). Detective Inspector Marge 
Gunderson (Frances Mcdermott) admonishes the murderous result 
with bafflement, ‘And for what? A little bit of money.’ The very idea is 
incongruous to her, yet she patently comes from a different world. The 
Coen brothers have made something of a career on the theme of avarice 
and its consequences. 
The Big Lebowski
(1998) reworks 
Fargo
’s botched 
kidnapping plot with postmodern laughs aplenty, yet in 
No Country for 
Old Men
(2007) we are treated with no such humour. A cold-blooded 
killer, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), ruthlessly tracks a man who has 
stolen drug money, annihilating virtually everyone in his way. As the 
tag line reads, ‘there are no clean getaways’, and the moral of the story 
recalls an age-old maxim: don’t let greed get the better of you. Llewellyn 
Moss (Josh Brolin) is the hapless figure who finds $2 million at a murder 
scene and thinks he can get away with taking it, telling his wary wife 

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88 
Fairy Tale and Film
that this is a way for them to escape their bleak trailer-home existence. 
However, despite considerable wiliness on his part, Moss is ultimately 
killed, as is his wife, and all we are left with is a sense of despair. 
The most troubling aspect of such films is that human life is utterly 
negated by murderous maniacs, who are given an odd comic charisma. 
Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers are especially guilty of this 
tendency, presenting hit-men who kill without qualms, complain when 
blood ruins a car’s upholstery or fastidiously seek to keep their shoes 
clean during acts of carnage, sadistically toying with the people they 
torment and kill. (Chigurh’s coin-toss game, used to decide whether a 
person lives or dies, coldly emulates the medieval notion of fate as 
a ‘wheel of fortune’ motif, rendering ideas of innocence, guilt or any 
entreaties aiming to elicit sympathy equally immaterial.) Such mon-
strous humans replace cannibalistic giants and witches, and are espe-
cially disconcerting because their villainy goes unchallenged. No one 
can stop the implacable Chigurh – and the fact that the film concludes 
with young boys willing to sell him the shirt off their backs suggests 
his livelihood is assured. In this bleak ‘country’ it seems greed will 
always exist and fate favours the villainous; a psychopath easily out-
manoeuvres an ageing sheriff when it comes to getting his man, and 
no matter how deserving people like Moss and his wife may seem, this 
is no fairy story where poverty or stealth or even kindness merits any 
reward. When Carla Jean Moss (Kelly Macdonald) encounters Chigurh 
in her trailer home near the end of the film she informs him that she 
has just returned from burying her mother and has a mountain of debt. 
He responds that her troubles will soon be over. Nihilistic to the end, 
only the promise of death, rather than money, offers a way out of life’s 
difficulties. Chigurh is most chilling at this point, we realise, because 
he is so devoid of humanity. Evidently without sympathy for a newly 
bereaved widow, he reveals Moss’ fatal flaw: the fact that when he was 
offered the chance to save his wife, by returning the money, he refused. 
If Hank, the husband in