7 Craziest Film Fan Theories (That Actually Make Total Sense)

In 2007’s No Country For Old Men, a seminal, heavily stylised neo-western thriller by the Coen brothers, the three major characters – protagonist Llewellyn Moss, antagonist Anton Chigurh and the lawman trying to find them both, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, never actually meet. But while Moss is undone anti-climactically and off-screen, there could be a reason why Bell and Chigurh never bump into one another - the hired killer is a dissociative identity of the genteel sheriff. The two are really the same person.

There are a few hints that perhaps there’s more to Bell than meets the eye. There’s at least one scene where he mirrors a previous action that Chigurh has taken almost perfectly, and in two conversations, something else shows through his genial façade. 

At the beginning, when his wife tells him not to get hurt, he agrees amiably. She then tells him not to hurt anyone else… and there’s a slight pause before he answers. Later, in conversation with Moss’ wife, he is emotionless and monotone for a moment, echoing Chigurh’s own flatheaded killer persona, before his usual pleasant tone reasserts itself.

As portrayed on screen, Bell and Chigurh not only never meet, but are never seen in the same area on screen, or even seem to exist contemporaneously. In point of fact, Bell seems to only have a distant part in events throughout the whole film. Constantly appearing to be several steps behind everyone else, existing purely to follow the action and comment upon it, not to participate in it, Bell’s whole character is completely at one remove. Well… not quite completely.

At the very end of the film, Bell enters a motel room, a crime scene, which we’re clearly shown that Chigurh is inside hiding behind the door, having broken in to locate the money (the McGuffin that drives the plot). Eventually, Bell opens the door, which quietly hits the wall to show that there’s no one behind it after all. 

Bell searches the room, failing to encounter the killer, and notes that the bathroom window – the only other way out – is locked from the inside. Chigurh’s simply not there. Or is he? Because earlier, as Bell stands in the open doorway, a trick of the light casts two shadows of the sheriff against the far wall.