No Country For Old Men Film Analysis

For filmmakers, music can be a tool that is used to manipulate or augment the audience’s emotions. Background music can set a film’s emotional attitude or tone, particularly with regard to the plot and characters. It can also act as a harbinger for future events by foreshadowing a change in mood, such as in films where dissonant music leads the viewer to believe in the existence of an impending disaster or unfortunate event. Music can also add a sense of continuity in that it may be used to connect different scenes through repetition, thus making more significant specific motifs that the filmmakers wish to portray (Marshall). No Country for Old Men (Miramax, 2008) and Amelie (Claudie Ossard Productions, 2011) offer different takes on the use of music in film, but nonetheless are both successful in engaging their audiences despite the dissimilar approaches of the associated directors.
However, the film, a cat-and-mouse Western, is known for its absence of a traditional score, opting instead for a different form of immersive sound. For most of the film, all that can be heard is silence. The sounds in No Country for Old Men are largely restricted to ambient noise, such as the sounds of wind and gunshots. The sounds of wind, in particular, lend for a sense of uncertainty. The lack of a traditional score commands the audience’s undivided attention and arguably makes the film more suspenseful in that there is no music to prepare the audience for what is to