Strictly speaking, Anton Chigurh is probably more of a nihilist than an existentialist. He kills wilfully without a second thought, decides people's fate on the flip of a coin, and seems to detest all traditional values and concepts that the majority take for granted. This sort of wanton disregard for the shared foundations of humanity grows out an extreme sort of pessimism that leads individuals to conclude there is no purpose in life. While this outlook does share some similarity with an existentialist outlook, instead of viewing the nothingness as a negative aspect, existentialism chooses to look at it as freedom, a freedom in which to fill the void with your own meaning. However, despite Chigurh's apparent lack of interest in creating meaning above randomness, his devotion to enlightening people to their own freedom, and their responsibility for who they are, merits his inclusion on this list. In perhaps the film's most famous sequence, where Chigurh gets into an unnervingly tense conversation with a gas station owner, he implores the gas station owner to call a coin flip, heads or tails, to which the gas station owner replies, "I didn't put nothin' up." Chigurh responds with the menacing line, "Yes, you did. You've been putting it up your whole life, you just didn't know it." In another scene where Chigurh confronts the contract killer Carson Wells, he asks Wells, "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" This challenging of preordained thought processes makes Chigurh an existentialist, albeit a somewhat tangential one.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.
