No Country for Old Men is built on a dual treatment of historical time. Written and set in the 1980s as a script and informed by the post-Vietnam era and the Reagan presidency, it was published as a novel in 2005 and adapted on screen in 2007. Underlying the plot are the 9/11 attacks, the ensuing Bush era wars, the building of the Mexican border fence and the ongoing Drug War at the Texas-Mexico border which force a parallel with Frontier violence in the diegesis. The historical background is therefore rich in No Country for Old Men and affects the characters’ thoughts and actions. It is also coherent with the treatment of space which bears the stigmata of time, as evoked by Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in his ruminations on his family story and his allusions to the inherent violence of his country’s “damned bloody history” (284). Reflecting on uncle Mac’s tragic fate, Bell tries to make sense of the past and present violence that cripples the country, but is confronted to uncle Ellis’s stoic statement: “This country was hard on people” (271). The country, which appears in the title of the novel and film as a major actor of the narrative, endorses part of the responsibility for the terrible acts of violence witnessed by several generations of the Bell family, pushing Ed Tom to finally accept Ellis’s conclusion by admitting that “maybe it is the country” (284).
The question of temporality is central to film adaptation and mostly relies on editing (Metz). In McCarthy’s novel, temporality is related to space and to the characters’ whereabouts…