THE TRAILER SCENE WITH ELLIS

Pages 263-280 in "No Country For Old Men", by Cormac McCarthy-the passage where Ed Tom Bell visits his uncle Ellis in a run down trailer. Uncle Ellis is a retired Texas Sheriff, I believe.

You wear out, Ed Tom. All the time you spend tryin to get back what`s been took from you there`s more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it. Your Grandad never asked me to sign on as deputy with him. I done that my own self. Hell, I didnt have nothin else to do. Paid about the same as cowboyin (page 267).

If I waste one more brain cell on "No Country..." I must be a fool, I`ve been thinkin`, but that is exactly what I been doin`. I pulled out a map of Texas and tried to find Sanderson, cuz that is where Llewelyn Moss and Carla Jean`s trailer is at. This looks like it is about 50 miles east of Alpine on the desolate highway 90 that takes you to El Paso. it`s a lttle lonesome out there. I have made that ride a couple of times, and the buzzards were big as planes, and if you got stuck out there you was a gonner. Don`t think that AAA ever would come out there to rescue you. Anyways, when you look at Sanderson on the map it seems to be about 50 miles north of border maybe. The crime scene in the movie would be approximately twenty miles from the border, but that is just a guess. The film was shot in Marfa and in New Mexico, from what I`ve read. Marfa is a little west of Alpine, and is a very colorful town, according to some of the stories I`ve heard from folk on my Yahoo Group. The chilly timbre of the movie comes from the geography of West Texas, I believe, and from the as a matter of fact way that the story is told by Cormac McCarthy. It`s the Old West again, but then you notice that it has changed some since the late 19th century. Much of this story, and it is an internal one largely, is about how it dawns on Ed Tom Bell just how much the West has changed. The recollections about the old days of law enforcement, as expressed in the dialogue between Ellis (Barry Corbin), who was Ed Tom Bell`s uncle, and Ed Tom Bell himself, are my favorite part of the movie. I think it is also the part of the movie that best expresses the theme of things here. Put simply, these are troubling times (early 1980s) that cannot be controlled by the old methods of law enforcement; those methods harken back to the glory days of the Texas Rangers. Those are just memories now and they reside in Waco at the Texas Ranger Museum. I have been there several times, and they have a gun of Billy the Kid and the belongings of Sam Houston himself. They do not have any of Superman`s paraphanilia there though? I didn`t see any compressed-air guns there neither.