Reply #23: Plotwise, or meaningwise? [View All]

The plot - Mexican gang figures out where Moss will be via shadowing Carla Jean and her mother. They kill Moss, but clear out before they can recover the money, which has been hidden in another air duct. Chigurh goes back later to recover the money - Bell shows up but goes into the other room (probably - the film is deliberately ambiguous on this point - the book is different). Chigurh kills Carla Jean, gets hit by a car.

The meaning - Here you're getting into personal opinion, but I see it like this - Bell feels guilty for failing to protect his charges or capture Chigurh (in the book, he has been carrying around a whopping case of survivor guilt from WWII, and his law enforcement career is in part a penance for that) Worse, he has come to the conclusion that Chigurh is the embodiment of a new society in which being willing to die isn't enough to do his job - to deal with that sort of ruthless monster, you risk becoming one, and he is not willing to go that far. Finally he has an over-idealized view of the past, and fears that society is so far gone that his job is essentially meaningless anyway - he is a useless relic of an earlier, more civil era, hence the title. So he quits.