The Coen Brothers and Evil - Beauty as Camouflage for Violence in True Grit

Left: The colors in the original True Grit
Right: Deserts and barren landscapes 
predominate in the 2010 True Grit

The Coen's films have been described as aesthetically superior by almost all the critics, even those who gave the film a low score. But that seems to be the Coen's mode of entrapment; making even gory blood something to contemplate in terms of form and color. They could be pardoned for this, since after all, we keep forgetting in this age of slickly reconstructed movies, film has always aspired to be an art form.

Here's what I wrote about the aesthetics in No Country for old Men which is used to seduce us into watching the most horrifically violent scenes:

I’m sure it was the slow-moving, often still camera which is especially good at defusing anxiety in the midst of the story’s madness and mayhem that abetted me into watching scenes from No Country for Old Men. Imagine if the shots had been done in fast motion, with guns rattling away, bullets flying, and bodies falling and writhing. The director chose just the right kind of filmic device--an after-the-fact survey of the chaos--to seduce his viewers to keep on looking. I was even reminded of that great film aesthete, Robert Bresson, who constructed his austere scenes of pathos and nihilism with long, still tableaux, as though beauty would excuse what we saw.

In an article on aesthetics used well to depict violence, License for Asthetics in Wilders' "Fitna", I wrote:

And Wilders makes a bold and correct decision with his film. He decides to go for the aesthetic effect. He places the translations of the Koranic verses on sepia toned pages of the Koran itself with its beautiful script and gilded borders. His images of newspaper, film and photographic footage are placed within diffused frames in soft-focus, once again on the sepia-colored background. Even the terrible scenes of the Nick Berg’s beheading, whose final horror Wilders spares us by substituting the images with the muffled, bone-chilling, sounds of his gagged screams, are presented within these blurred frames on this softened background. The music is two classical pieces by Tchaikovsky and Grieg.

After reviewing photos of the original True Grit, I found them to be superior. And although the landscape is rugged, it is greener and more varied. The Coen's seem to like barren lands and deserts. That was their signature cinematography in No Country for Old Men. This is what passes for beautiful cinematography these days.