The Coen Brothers and Evil - Violence in True Grit

Left: The original John Wayn, in the original True Grit.
Right: Jeff Bridges, shady character, in the 2010 True Grit remake.  
Changing his eye patch around won't make him any better...


True Grit is a Western in which [Jeff] Bridges plays a U.S. Marshall hired by a young girl to find her parents' murderers. True Grit is a remake of an old Western with the same name, starring John Wayne who won an Oscar for his role.

Some of the reviews for the film looked good, even impressive. The critic at the New York Times gave the film a perfect 100%. Yet, the New York Observer gave it a 25%. I have never seen such a low score alongside a perfect 100. But I trusted the one or two which described the violence in the film. The reviewer from the San Francisco Chronicle, who gave the film an unimpressive 25%, writes:

If there's one big difference between this version and the old, it's in the attitude toward violence. The new version may be more graphic, but it doesn't present violence as inevitable or necessary, just ugly.

I had already seen the matter-of-fact way in which the Coens incorporate brutality (even evil) into their films, where they determine horrific violence as "inevitable or necessary".

The last film I watched by the Coen brothers was No Country for Old Men in 2008. I included it in the article License for Aesthetics in Wilders' "Fitna", where I compare its gratuitous (awful, terrible) violence with Geert Wilders's calculated and intelligent manipulation of violence in Fitna, which Wilders uses to make his point on Islam. Here is what I wrote:

Then there’s "Fitna," Geert Wilders’ film on the Koran. More precisely, Wilders’ film on the violence prescribed by the Koran, as followed by Muslims. Juxtaposing footage from newspaper, television, and photographic sources with Koranic verses, "Fitna" documents the destruction of the World Trade Center, beheadings, train and subway bombings, child suicide bombers, female genital mutilations, gun-executions of women, hangings of gays, and much more, to show how Muslims are mandated to act in violence. And with a license to kill and destroy.

This 21st century seems to relish violence. More so than the previous one. Or maybe we're just getting immune to it, and we need to up the ante. Many shows and movies have their standard violent fare - audiences seem to need that fix. But we're subtly entering into the domain of excessive (the journalist-speak is "unnecessary") violence, which I think only leads to evil.