Cycnos | Volume 28.2 - Le cinéma américain face à ses mythes : une foi incrédule | Du western

Résumé :

No Country for Old Men (2007) was the Coen brothers’ first literary adaptation and it met with unprecedented commercial and critical success. If the movie takes up the directors’ favorite themes (greed, chase, violence, evil), it is also tempered by Cormac Mc Carthy’s dry and hypnotic writing. The excessive and cynical nature of the previous movies – which triggered as much praise as criticism – gives way to contemplation and nostalgia. The Coen’s artistry reaches a point of equilibrium.My contention is that the success and specific beauty of the film come from its questioning of American myths, be they cinematic or historical. The aim of this paper is to examine the evocation of generic and genetic myths and how they fail to overcome evil in the movie. Similar to retinal persistence, the Coen brothers develop aesthetics relying on what I would call “mythical persistence” – where an image, which has subsisted in the collective psyche, is invalidated by the immediacy of evil.

Mots-clés : history, blood, frontier, gangster, genesis, incarnation, mythical persistance, rétrospection, western

Date de publication : 2015-05-19