Belgian psychiatry professor Samuel Leistedt watched 400 films to come up with a list of psychopathic characters to study. In terms of realism, No Country for Old Men’s antagonist took first place. Played by Javier Bardem, Anton Chigurh is a near-emotionless murderer who self-monitors every interaction he has.
Heads or Tails
According to the researchers, movie psychopaths are mischaracterized as sadistic, emotionally unstable and violent. Chigurh is none of these things. Numerous other studies have been done on movie characters to show accurate psychopath traits. The best example of his psychopathy comes in my favorite scene in the movie: the coin toss. Leistedt and his team claim Anton is “invulnerable and resistant to any form of emotion or humanity.” He’s almost robotic in conversations. If asked something casually, Chigurh repeatedly forces the cashier to specify exactly what he means.
This culminates in the toss itself. He takes out a coin, flips it, and forces the cashier to call heads or tails. Chigurh refuses to explicitly state what’s at stake, and his only response, when asked, is “everything.” The cashier wins, but before he can put the quarter in his register, Chigurh ominously orders him to keep it visible as a good luck charm.
Chigurh doesn’t have any issue with murder, and main weapon he uses could be a symbol for that. For most of the film Anton doesn’t use a shotgun. He kills with a cattle gun. There are two ways I interpret this. One is that he finds the most effective tools for the job, and the other is that he literally doesn’t see his victims as human.
Other psychopaths were noted as being caricatures, or at least less accurate, like Tommy Udo in The Kiss of Death (1945) and Cody Jarrett in White Heat (1949). Many of our favorite movie psychos, like the infamous Patrick Bateman and Hannibal Lecter, aren’t even psychopaths at all – their traits didn’t fit the study in the first place. Most of the psychopath characters were written more as “boogeymen” or as archetypical villains.
