Instead, he takes control by asking a clarification question of his own. But it’s not a question Chighur likes, so he doesn’t answer it. The Proprietor innocently starts a question-answer adjacency pair. It’s the unconscious nature of adjacency pairs that will draw the Proprietor into this tense and dangerous exchange. We use adjacency pairs habitually questions lead naturally to answers, comments lead to acknowledgements. Chigurh initiates the dialogue with a question, the proprietor answers. Game theory, as I’m using it here, refers to the way people make ‘bids’ to take the dialogue in this or that direction. CA is concerned with the mechanics of dialogue, particularly the back-and-forth of its parts. Two items in my bag of tricks are Conversational Analysis (CA) as elucidated by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, and game theory, especially Bill Mann’s Dialogue Macrogame Theory (or DMT). Unlike the dialogues I study, it’s a fictional conversation, but it lends itself really well to analysis. He draws the Proprietor deeper into the conversation and thus deeper into trouble. At the counter of a gas station, the Proprietor bumbles onto Chigurh’s bad side with a casual question about where he’s come from, and Chigurh won’t let it go.
#NO COUNRTY FOR OLD MEN HOW TO#
It’s a model of how to write film dialogue. One of the most memorable scenes is the ‘coin toss’, which appears early in the film. Even so, Chigurh has a formidable willingness to dispatch you for the sake of getting your car and continuing his pitiless and emotionless pursuit of Moss, as well as anyone else who crosses his path or even looks at him. He’s as omniscient as the next psychotic villain, but he’s not invulnerable Moss, his quarry, can injure him, and you wonder if that means Moss will be able to turn the tables. The key ingredient in the film is the antagonist Anton Chigurh, a remorseless killer with a Prince Valiant hairdo and an air tank. It’s one of those that keeps coming back to you days later. I’ve only just watched it now - I don’t often have the chance to sit and watch a movie. By now, everyone must have seen ‘No Country for Old Men’.
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