Surplus meaning walking the land

I saw No Country for Old Men two nights ago, the new movie from the Coen brothers, based on Cormac McCarthy's book of the same name. Its fidelity to the book is as close as any that I can remember. It's there in the details of the plot, in much of the dialogue and in the atmosphere of moral desolation that McCarthy's story relentlessly builds towards. For that very reason I find the film hard to estimate comparatively against the best of the Coen brothers' other movies. On one level, this doesn't matter, of course. No Country for Old Men is superb in its own right, a riveting drama, fixing one's concentration from beginning to end as it unfolds its bleak tale, with the typically McCarthyian theme at its centre of an evil abroad and not far off. But the film's accuracy to the spirit of the novel means that it lacks the quirkiness and surrealism common to most of the Coen brothers' other work. Is it the best thing they've done - as more than one critic has said it is? I don't know; I find this hard to decide on a single viewing and without letting the time elapse for it to sink in and enable me to judge whether I'd place it above Fargo and The Big Lebowski. There's a review here by Philip French.

One footnote. David Thomson affects to read in No Country for Old Men (among other current releases) something about the present mood of America. He's aware of the perils of doing so, for he says: 'Of course, it is a tricky game, trying to read a nation's mood in its films'; and again, 'It may be fanciful to read national impulse in the tropes of art'. But that doesn't hold him back. On the contrary, the themes of this new movie are linked, very particularly, by Thomson with the crisis of conscience in the US over the use of torture. He writes:

[T]here is immense anxiety in the land, too, which accompanies a lack of trust in nearly anything. Americans have faced two crises of conscience in the last few years: they acknowledge their government is employing (and lying about) the practices of torture and prisoner abuse and they are not sure what to do about it. This has made for a fascination in cruelty akin to looking in the eye of a deadly snake and wondering just how close you can get without it striking. The sensation is ugly, terrifying and insane, but it is there.

So just because the movie audience has rejected all signs of warfare this year [Thomson is referring to the box-office failure of movies covering the Iraq war], don't think it isn't preoccupied with dread and bloodletting. The most striking recent films have this violence as their threat: No Country for Old Men, in which nothing less than a figure of Death walks the land, is malign. More than that, this figure endures, and a battle-weary sheriff concedes there is nothing he can do. Paranoia reigns.

How can No Country for Old Men carry the significance Thomson ascribes to it, when it's a safe bet that such a movie, released any time in the last 50 years, would almost certainly have enjoyed the same critical success it has in fact enjoyed, and had the same appeal for movie-goers? I contend that it would have done, partly because of its kinship with longstanding filmic traditions that have been popular - noir, the quest, a conflict between two key protagonists and its violent resolution - and partly because of its quality. As critic, David Thomson isn't someone to be taken lightly, I'm aware. All the same, to me his use of this movie exemplifies a bad critical practice. It is one endemic in the activity of cultural criticism, and it consists of what might be called assigning 'surplus' meanings to the work being examined - surplus because they have no intrinsic or evidential connection with the content of the work, but are brought in on the basis, more or less, of free association. This enables the critic to find any meaning he or she wants in the work in question. Thomson will find a certain 'figure of Death walk[ing] the land' in Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark, first published 40 years ago.