"Grief is worthless": identity, consequence, & close-ups in The Counselor.

Mitchell, Lee Clark

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Critics rejected Ridley Scott's The Counselor (2013) on first appearance and it baffled audiences enough to batter box office receipts, though it has since built a reputation as worth the price of admission. That initial reception had little to do with its inordinate violence or fragmented plot--all too typical of other popular neo-noir thrillers. Instead, resistance seems to have developed against the film's brash indulgence of its louche cinematic pleasures as well as its explicit dubiousness about our moral convictions. The first issue is posed in all but deliberate address to the viewer, when the drug middleman Westray (Brad Pitt) explains to the nameless Texas Counselor (Michael Fassbender) the logic of snuff films: "The consumer of the product is essential to its production. You cannot watch without being an accessory to a murder." That stark judgment suggests something of this film's inculpation of us for relishing its baroque violence, indulging in elaborate scenes of icily heartless barbarism--hardly a reassuring tone to take with an audience looking to be entertained. Yet the second issue may have been harder to swallow, in the unsettling presentation of figures who seem less like those we know than zombies or hollowed-out aliens. Identity itself is challenged in the reiterated presumption that characters' problematic actions, even inadvertent ones, constitute the persons they are. Consequences may seem unfair, but the film holds no quarter with those sympathetic to good intentions, since actions always expose us to a world beyond our control; whatever our motives may be, the way things turn out invariably defines us. Cormac McCarthy's screenplay attests to this disquieting conception of character, exploring in dialogue--sometimes at length--the disjunction between a view of oneself assumed on the one hand prospectively, and on the other a perspective normally taken after the fact. Scott deftly translates that vision cinematically, offering frequent close-ups that fail to bring us any closer to insight, deliberately omitting dialogue to further derail our sympathies, and in general thwarting typical impressions of psychological coherence.

The following argument explores these intertwined issues: of guilt at indulging neo-noir pleasures voyeuristically; and of bewilderment at characters who experience consequences they refuse to accept as their own. Guilt and bewilderment are not unconnected, since hesitating to admit our own pleasure at rapacious behavior on-screen seems little different from characters' confusion at being held accountable for actions never intended. Like them, viewers resist accepting they are what they do. Strangely, the plot makes sense by denying its audience a comforting view of deliberative agents, capable of taking control of their fates and altering their histories. Instead, a beleaguered Westray who actually admits his vulnerability ("In a word? Women") still ends betrayed by one. The motorcycle drug mule Green Hornet (Richard Cabral) flashily heralds his flaw as excessive speed, which just as predictably becomes the means of his self-destruction. The drug kingpin Reiner (Javier Bardem) yearns for his partner Malkina (Cameron Diaz) yet fails to heed the heartlessness of a woman who is hardly eye candy, or acknowledge the hazards of associating with a cartel. Most prominently, the eager Counselor is warned repeatedly against the narrative's key financial deal, with nothing we learn explaining his persistent need to risk so much.

The Counselor turns on this pivotal problem of action divorced from deliberation by pressing to extremes the violence inherent in just being oneself. Part of the way the film enforces this incoherence is by an obsessive reliance on close-ups and a fragmented, dissociative style, which initially led viewers to dismiss it as confusing. Yet the confusion was deliberate, revealed in the creative adaptation of the published shooting script, with McCarthy's provocative breaks in logical sequence transmuted into a similarly disruptive cinematic (and narrative) experience. Employing the camera as a means of enforcing thematic concerns, Scott transforms through close-ups, casting, and editing a central conception conveyed by McCarthy largely through conversation. Moreover, the contrast between McCarthy's sometimes elaborate dialogue and the visual minimalism of Scott's cinematography helps create tensions that sustain the film's challenge to conventional notions of identity. In the failure of intentions to lead to actions, or of characters to seize a sense of self from their own considered behavior, The Counselor offers an indictment of genre itself as more generally lending false hope for either consistency or clarity.

I. Malkina, Rapacious Visionary

Silver nailed and sybaritic, Malkina embodies the film's philosophy, summed up near its conclusion as she recalls her cheetahs in action: "The hunter has grace, beauty, and purity of heart to be found nowhere else. You can make no distinction between what they are and what they do. And what they do is kill. We, of course, are another matter. It is our faintness of heart that has driven us to the edge of ruin." Malkina's admiration confirms a sheer futility to regret, since what we do and who we are remain ever one. Actions simply are intentions, revealing incontestably what our true desires must have been. And though belated self-consciousness may lead us to think we differ from what we have done, or that appetite pitched against circumstance unsettles some inner gyroscope of ethical guidance, the contrary is the case. For Malkina, any supposedly internal guidance is a will-o'-the-wisp that no more defines us independently of what occurs than sheer serendipity.

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What happens to happen always dictates the judgments we ought to make of ourselves, and her admiration for cheetahs based on what she discerns of her life leads her to transform herself visually as well. Her two-tone hair, black eye-liner, cat paw tattoos and animal-print clothes all herald her feral nature as ruthlessly sexual, dangerously predatory, entirely without misgivings. Cameron Diaz maintains throughout a dead-eyed stare that radiates Malkina's absence of emotional entanglement, comporting herself in vivid contrast to the misplaced value of remorse. She cooly admits never knowing her parents, both having been thrust from a helicopter when she was three; but the larger point is that such a narrative does little to explain Malkina. Her personality corresponds exactly to her behavior, uninflected by psychological nuance or inner recriminations. As Reiner admits to the Counselor, "she'd done everything before," though as he also confesses, his affection for her is "like being in love with ... what? Easeful death?"--a surprising invocation of Keats that acknowledges her inscrutable (sometimes fatal) pleasures.

Much as she may seem deadened, Malkina responds more completely, even rapaciously to experience, without the burden of expectations about how she ought to act. Defying a usual notion of selfhood, she spurns emotions of unease, shame, disappointment, embarrassment, annoyance, or guilt as so much noise, irrelevant to the way we are. Notably, she corrects Reiner, who wants to distinguish between experience and recollection: "I don't think I miss things. I think to miss something is to hope it will come back ... but it's not coming back. I've always known that since I was a girl." Human desire has for her no special sway over events, and the scene ends by capturing the notion that something is "not coming back" in a sunset that fades too quickly, in a swirl so fleeting it seems the film has been deliberately sped up. As she observes, without emotion: "There it goes." Phenomenal experience is evanescent, rarely the result of circumspection, even if Malkina is clever enough to control effects and move others at her pleasure, even when events turn sideways, even as her drug deal falls apart. She realizes things happen as effects, reducing psychology to no more than events as they happen to occur.

Malkina represents a Hobbesian view of life as nasty, brutish, and short, yet too often sequestered off by supposedly humanizing codes of decorum that actually enslave us to a sedate, half-lived existence. Shackles of culture bind us, she realizes, by binding the random events of a personal history into a misleading conception of oneself as a person. She becomes in this regard the film's emblematic figure, embodying it as a woman with appetites. Her playful admission to Reiner that she loved life in Barbados--which she recalls as "a steamy pit of sexual abandon ... Well it used to be. I left"--confirms her insatiable lust. That fervor is corroborated in Reiner's recollection of her "fucking my car," writhing on his windshield in a scene that reveals her as entirely sufficient to herself, having little need for others except as reflectors of her flamboyant subjectivity. And the voraciousness is apparent to all, with her early admission that she's "starving" appropriately echoed in the film's closing word, that she's "famished." Notable as her passions are, other characters similarly share a hunger for more, like viewers themselves compelled into an alliance with Reiner in being unable to turn away. Desire always exceeds satisfaction and therefore invariably leads to regret, at least for those less hardened than her: a dilemma now worth exploring.

II. Cautionary Inconsequence and Irrevocable Actions

Anticipating Malkina's premise is an early sequence where the Counselor consults an Amsterdam jeweler (Bruno Ganz) about an engagement ring. The attraction of diamonds, the dealer explains, has less to do with purity than their perceived "imperfection," as if he were expatiating on the larger theme of forestalled expectation that threads through the film: "The truth is that anything you can say about a diamond is in the nature of a flaw. The perfect diamond would be composed simply of light." Nicely inverting normal evaluative standards, his claim establishes perfection as ever elusive, and that instead of cynicism accompanying the defects that lure us on, we should feel calm acceptance. That is why "every diamond is cautionary," reminding us of our futile thirst for what is not; we need to learn "that we will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives. That we will not thereby be made less." In the imperfection that comprises their beauty, diamonds admonish us toward a kind of Quietism that accepts life as it is, with no undue striving or regret.

If this seems a peculiar strain for a neo-noir thriller to espouse, its implications are made more explicit in dialogue cut from McCarthy's screenplay. The dealer's description of diamond cutting, for instance, nicely evokes the larger theme of intention's inconsequence: "Once the first facet is cut there can be no going back. What was meant to be a union remains forever untrue and we see a troubling truth in that the forms of our undertakings are complete at their beginnings. For good or for ill." Clearly, this insight informs the film, anticipated by the Counselor's colleagues and later offered as retrospective wisdom by the senior cartel associate, Jefe (Ruben Blades). Yet the reason for dropping this dialogue is that its point about irrevocable action is more dramatically enforced by the absence of such pronouncements. Ever more gruesomely, the film presses these implications, accompanied by more self-conscious injunctions against any choices at all. Repeatedly, the Counselor is warned against Reiner's drug deal, with Reiner himself describing a bolito as a weapon that stands as an emblem for relentless irreversibility: "there's no easy way to turn the thing off. Or reason to. It just keeps running until the noose closes completely and then it self-destructs." The machine becomes an engine of fate, inexorable against protective measures. But even Reiner's early description itself forms a Chekhovian gesture of fatedness that perfectly anticipates Westray's gruesome death near the end.

Westray reinforces the warning, describing the cartel as people for whom neither contingency nor accident suffice as excuses. When the Counselor admits to being "a little taken aback at the cautionary nature of this conversation," Westray can only concur, "Good word, 'cautionary'." As if that were not admonitory enough, he then describes the retributive beheadings ordinarily arranged by Mexican drug lords, explaining that "It's not like there's some smoldering rage at the bottom of it," before pointedly confirming the person they have in their sights is: "You, counselor. You." By this point, the stakes involved are plain to us as viewers, meant to discern more clearly than the Counselor the weight of such ominous exhortations. What makes them seem excessive is that he has not done anything yet, nor been even casually involved, nor otherwise slipped up. And compounding the strange sense of foreboding about actions yet to be taken is that Westray himself feels removed from the conditions he describes, assuming himself somehow immune from forces he depicts as implacable. That lack of self-knowledge emerges in his unduly sanguine claim that "I can vanish, in a heart beat, with my money. Can you? Truth is, counselor, I can walk away from all of this ... I can live in a monastery. Scrub the steps. Clean the pots. Try some gardening." But for all the ostentation on display, Westray actually has little sense for his own exposure, expressing the very self-confidence he is warning the Counselor against. Unable to alter his own behavior, Westray is immured in the same dilemma as the Counselor, as is Reiner, whom Westray describes as "beyond advising. Reiner thinks nothing bad can happen. And he's in love." What yokes the three together is a shared inability to realize how fully contingency governs a world where inner resources are always inadequate. They may seem aware of the risks they run, may even appear to protect themselves against vicissitude, but in fact their prudence is never enough in contexts where accidents always occur.

III. Close-up and Impersonal

Reiterated variously, the film's premise emerges in people who, for all their self-confidence and blithe assumptions, come to seem imprisoned by events themselves. Interlinked contexts define characters from the outside in, blinding them to their impotence in the face of circumstances they have set in motion, however inadvertently. Starting in the pre-credit sequence with the Counselor and his lover Laura (Penelope Cruz) in bed, the film establishes the idea of sexual desire suspending conscious thought in a scene that ends with her playful admission that "you've ruined me," ironically prefiguring the film's conclusion. It is as if the pleasures of their dalliance, like ours in attending the film, could not anticipate the costs that ensue. And costs are the central concern of the film: of what we pay for what we enjoy, of the risks parceled out for behavior to which we will be called to account. Odd as the pre-credit love scene appears as introduction to a narcocorrido narrative, it does introduce the film's disorienting reliance on close-ups, demanding we focus on faces, body parts, familiar activities, even curtains and sheets. And the credits themselves are interspersed with tightly focused shots of cocaine packets being prepared, oil drum tops pounded down, trucks backed up, a drug courier sleeping. The transition to Amsterdam is filmed much the same, following an establishing shot of the city: offering a view through a jeweler's loupe magnifying a diamond, then shifting back to close-ups of Bruno Ganz's wrinkled brow and Fassbinder's impassive blue eyes. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski slides into his characteristic mode, focusing on faces in all their supposedly revelatory detail, presumably in an effort to read beneath surfaces to the psychology beneath. The Counselor, the diamond dealer, Reiner and Malkina are each introduced in tight close-up shots. When the Counselor presents his diamond ring to Laura, we watch their magnified faces intently, as we do thereafter when he speaks in his car over speaker phone about money problems, or later greets Westray in a bar. The face of the inmate Ruth (Rosie Perez) is framed by bars at the Texas State Penitentiary for Women, and scrutinized in close-up as she smokes, as is her son the Green Hornet feeding his dog. Throughout, everyone appears on the big screen as if only inches away, talking about themselves or their past and present troubles, until at last the Counselor is shown conversing via phone with Jefe as the camera slowly pulls in to a tight composition: Jefe sympathetic, the Counselor hysterical.

What this ongoing series of closely-viewed faces confirms is how fully individuals need to talk about themselves, to tell their stories in hopes of being understood. Yet the accounts have little effect, leaving people just as isolated as ever. Laura wants to hear about the Counselor's earlier sexual experiences, but then declines, and later tells Malkina of her dream of her, but is uncertain why, or what she wants. Reiner tells the Counselor the detailed story of Malkina masturbating on his Ferrari, then realizes he should not have, as both wonder "what it is that you're trying to tell me." Still, they have no idea what it might mean to '"Forget it.' ... 'How do you propose that I do that?'." There is a lingering sense that telling others about ourselves should reveal something of ourselves, yet the film never reassures us that this might be true; quite the contrary. In the bizarre scene in which Malkina attempts a church confession, she seems to exemplify this notion of conversation, of opening oneself to another, of being understood. Yet for her, it is just a game, driving the priest (Fdgar Ramirez) from the confessional with her brazen revelations, even though her plea--"All you have to do is listen"--speaks as if to the impulse shared by everyone else. Alone in the film, the priest resists such cheaply unearned disclosures, in part because he is beyond psychologizing, already aware of what the film strives to prove in collapsing intention and action. As interesting cinematically is that when he storms from the confessional booth, the camera pulls back from its habitual framing close-up, with Malkina's shouted "Where are you going?" accompanying him out of the shot, out of the film. Here, he defines himself as utterly different from us as viewers, refusing to hear or to see any more, walking away from the suasions of a deeply anarchic inclination.

Predictably, the film aligns itself against the priest's confessional role, resisting any such swerve backward to the past, denying the very notion of narrative recursiveness. Each scene registers an all but chronological sequence in its relentless forward motion, which would also seem to defy the film's neo-noir credentials. After all, among noir's characteristic features is the irrepressible burden of past transgressions as they keep intruding on the present, revealed through flashbacks and muddied recollections. The Counselor offers instead a series of interconnecting narratives that move along an inflexibly forward-moving temporal line, acknowledging that the past might dictate the present but permitting only the present itself to matter. Regret is again beside the point, counter to the prevalent strain in noir; or as Jefe resolutely counsels, "grief is worthless." Nothing can be achieved by revisiting the past, which always remains inexorably past, explaining why only one flashback occurs in the film--the scene of the speeding Green Hornet presented after Ruth has informed the Counselor that her son has been arrested. This helps explain why Wolski so regularly pulls closely in, cutting people off from their bodies, offering fragmented views of their faces alone. The effort to justify oneself never quite succeeds, confirmed by a camera that exposes how any concern with intentions, motivations, psychology, or drives is regularly placed in doubt by countenances that remain so frequently inexpressive. The cinematography itself, that is, discounts the rationales characters offer. Take the unexceptional scene of the Counselor uncorking a bottle of wine in a normal medium shot as he talks on the phone to Laura. We are shown only his side of this exchange, as the camera slowly shifts closer to him describing his imagined desire to take off her panties, then realizing he is having phone sex. That very dollying in for a closer view suggests a greater intimacy, a fuller knowledge, than the scene itself can provide. Laura is unseen, unheard in this one-sided conversation; the Counselor is merely titillated, left staring off into space: the whole ends without resolution or knowledge other than unassuaged lust.

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IV. Narrative Fragmentation

In part, this enigmatic quality is reinforced by shrewd casting, in the practiced inscrutability of actors we are repeatedly urged to see close up. Cameron Diaz, with her glossy sheen and dead fish eyes, offers a routinely blank-expression that culminates in a dazzlingly fake smile to the Blonde (Natalie Dormer) she has hired to seduce Westray. But just as notable is Michael Fassbender's vacant stare, his relatively unflappable demeanor that only late in the film sheds a tear, then becomes hysterical. Javier Bardem plays a flashily-dressed entrepreneur, with spiky hair and colorful dashikis that seem of a piece with his swashbuckling demeanor. Even so, the flamboyance of his performance likewise keeps us at a psychological remove, as does Brad Pitt's amused, twinkly-eyed middleman. It is as if Wolski's camera could not break through the facade of character, moving ever closer to faces that resist divulging their psychologies, lending an irony to close-cropped "talking heads" revealing stories that are finally discredited because so often self-exculpatory. As Westray observes, the Mexican cartel "doesn't believe in coincidences," which is to say in accounts that do not match its own reductive reading of human behavior. And the irony of this cinematic style is compounded by the brutal fate suffered by so many: being decapitated, actually enacting the figurative beheading performed by Wolski's framing technique.

Augmenting the film's disquieting dismissal of psychology--dissolving any distinction between what characters (or cheetahs) "are and what they do"--is its fragmentation, shifting among disparate locations, personalities, and events with little regard for narrative sequence. It is as if the disorienting transition from El Paso condominium to Arizona high plains camp to Amsterdam canals to Ciudad Juarez trucking station seems to be intended less to confuse the viewer than to infuse a sense of arbitrariness in both action and consequence. McCarthy's script nicely exaggerates this fragmentation by offering disparate scenes in quick succession absent any dialogue at all. Scott modified what he must have construed as a disorienting melange without lessening a sense of discontinuousness, of individual stories that seem unrelated. And in the process, he reshuffled the order of scenes, slowing their transposition--though less to straighten out a presumed narrative logic than to engage a mildly more sympathetic cinematic rhythm. McCarthy's premise still stands: that the order of scenes requires only the strict chronology of disparate, unrelated scenes as sequence, so that we are still unclear by half an hour into the film what is going on, or what a putative deal involves among the Counselor, Reiner, and their drug suppliers. That narrative instability continues throughout. The question of why Malkina visits a priest has already been addressed, but why must the Counselor head to Amsterdam only a day after returning to Laura, as she complains (certainly not just to buy her a ring)? Why the scene of delivering cocaine to a Chicago re-packing center, or the revelation of the fetid corpse jammed into an oil drum (certainly not to establish further the drug cartel's ruthlessness)? Why the scenes of African cheetahs hunting jackrabbits on Arizona plains (certainly less bizarre testimonials to hunter and prey could be imagined)? McCarthy's discordant, fragmented sequences both tantalize and bewilder, but always as gestures that endorse the film's radical vision of human psychology.

In the end, answers to questions of motive or means matter little, if at all, which comes as a surprise in a film that so regularly presses those very questions. The film invokes generic thriller and noir materials for little reason other than to make us aware of them as noir--a kind of post-modern pastiche that excites the viewer simply by recognizing them. Consider the extraneous nature of much of the film's dialogue, giving us more information than we need about topics inessential to the plot. The diamond dealer goes into inordinate detail about carets, facets, and grades--an expertise then matched by a sharp-eyed Malkina when she inspects Laura's gaudy ring ("Probably an F or a G. Nothing visible so it's at least a VS-2. Do you want to know what it's worth?"). Similarly, Westray responds to the Counselor's surprise at the "cautionary nature of this conversation" by citing Scots Law ("it defines an instrument in which one person stands as surety for another"), as if offering a law school response to a street-corner conversation. Admittedly, this is part of McCarthy's signature style, but it is also part of the familiar attention so often paid in noir to skills and techniques only incidental to plot. The loving attention lavished on otherwise meaningless details itself establishes the genre's credentials, as when the cartel truck driver expertly carves a plug for the bullet-ridden vehicle he has just stolen to stop the sewage flow, or when Jaime the Wire-Man (Sam Spruell) deftly measures the showroom motorcycle in anticipation of carefully setting up his wire-and-lights trap for the Green Hornet.

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These otherwise inessential scenes--consisting of either unduly erudite conversations or elaborately technical performances--do nothing so much as draw attention to their own specialized detail and thereby distract us away from larger psychological matters. That tends to constitute the "furniture" of noir in the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, diverting our eyes from the supposedly central plot mechanics that are finally generic, nothing more. Exteriors reveal little of disposition or psychology, and Scott translates this premise via an electric cinematic style that sometimes resembles a slick Michael Mann film (or even Scott's own Hannibal [2001]). Wolski's camera once more closes in, but now on objects for their texture and appeal, whether diamonds, oil drums, or semi tractor rigs. And while those close-ups are occasionally interspersed with brief distant vistas, more often they remain uninterrupted, as if the binoculars and jewelers' loupes that pop up throughout were meant to signal an attention to the same kind of irrelevant details with inordinate consequences that characterize the dialogue. Pitching itself in this way toward tightly-framed close-ups, the film registers its larger thematic concentration on the effect of circumstances, as if minute details could somehow catalogue a realization of our own helplessness, in the unceasing if modest fear of what will invariably ensue.

That ineluctable visual field is in turn confirmed by the strangely suggestive, mildly repetitive music composed by Daniel Pemberton, whose forte is video games and advertising clips as well as television compositions. But the effect of his score in The Counselor is to offer an incessantly forward-moving, incremental sonic pressure that encourages the audience extra-diegetically to believe in a fated narrowing down. The sound track breaks time into cumulative units that represent not variation but the lockstep repetitive structure of a minimalist piece. Again, the fragmentation of sequences, the lack of continuity, the strangely irrelevant exchanges, the conspiratorial mode of the whole, is all part of McCarthy's and Scott's joint impulse to produce a thriller on the basis of scrambled materials that deliberately do not pull together. That cinematic rationale disorients even as it offers a deterministic, almost fatalistic aura evoking a view of human behavior unlike anything familiar to us. We start with a film that calls on recognizable genre conventions, only to discover its confusions about identity and character are such as to undermine expectations for genre--indeed, our expectations for the way in which behavior itself should be understood.

V. Quietism

The Counselor offers a narrative that defies our persistent expectation for change, reflecting the impossibility of altering consequences at all. Adding to this disconcerting air of inevitability, of events paradoxically resisting the assumption that they can be modified or cancelled, is the growing realization that individuals themselves are largely unknowable. That revelation is first dramatically highlighted as the Counselor dines al fresco with Laura, when a former client interrupts. Annoyed at some past negotiation gone wrong, Tony (Tony Kebbell) finally announces to Laura that the Counselor's "thin skin makes it OK in his eyes to make you lie under the bus." Apart from what we can surmise here about the Counselor's unsavory past practice, the scene more pointedly suggests how little Laura knows of him, and why such ignorance later contributes to her fate. Lacking familiarity with each other, basing our knowledge on things that happen to happen, forms an exceedingly fragile basis on which to build alliances, and for all its conversational self-reflections The Counselor does not make that fragility any more palatable. Still, the culminating scene of this film that masquerades as a neo-noir thriller is apropos: a philosophically-charged conversation between the title character and Jefe, who explains at length why he can do nothing to help, and why the Counselor is likewise impotent to avoid a fate already in process. Finally, issues central to the plot become clear.

One of the more intriguing changes made from screenplay to film involves Jefe, who has lost his own son to abductors two years earlier, just as the Counselor loses Laura. Yet in dropping this admission, the film declares that sympathy has nothing to do with Jefe's response, nor is his wisdom therefore more valuable for having been earned. The philosophical theme has been clear throughout, not to be diminished by so sentimental an addition: the need for taking a stark view of one's situation; the realization that supposed mistakes we make in life cannot be reversed; the doubt that one can designate substitute prospects or choose alternative paths, rather than weather the adverse events we somehow author. As Jefe admonishes, in tones that suggest a reliance on patience and perseverance, all one can do is endure: "The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you make is different from the world where the mistakes were made. You're now at the crossing. And you want to choose, but there is no choosing there. There's only accepting. The choosing was done a long time ago ... Are you there Counselor?" That question itself already marks an estrangement, as the Counselor continues to plead against the patient explanation of the inefficacy of such efforts. Ending the conversation in order to take a nap, Jefe seems at once cold and correct, even as the film's continuing logic suggests that his response can be read neither way, but only according to the possible consequences that ensue.

After Jefe hangs up, the Counselor is left to reflect on this metaphysical fatalism. Like us, he cannot acquiesce that regret is somehow waste energy, refusing to bow before "the understanding that life is not going to take you back. You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist." It is Jefe's understanding that prevails, explaining a logic sustained by the entire film: of how little profit accrues to bewailing circumstances, since those very circumstances made us what we are: "the world is in fact oneself." In that regard, the film fulfills the script's demand to confront a dehumanizing realm without self-pity, and yet as well to discredit an unearned humanism. We are left impressed by the transformation of McCarthy's thoughtful dialogue into Scott's visually minimalist polish. Yet the whole culminates in the inherent paradox of Jefe's pontifications, warning against any regret for choices already made by encouraging the Counselor to actively choose not to feel regret, as if one could effect a cessation of sorrow by an effort of will that Jefe himself suggests is unavailable. He summarizes the powerful contradictions lying at the heart of the film--embraced in both its gruesome action and its fragmented cinematic technique--since despite the film's reiterated conviction, the desire for understanding either oneself or another cannot be inferred from events as they occur, or even actions as they are performed.

VI. Conclusion

The Counselor daringly undermines twin notions of character and morality held dear by viewers: that we can make active choices about the life we want to live; and that we can more generally choose the kind of person we hope to be. Perhaps this helps explain the film's failure to engage a larger audience. After all, viewers resist a challenge to their cultural belief in self-command, especially in a work combining aspects of popular genres: the crime film, the Western, the neo-noir thriller. Repeatedly, we are led to believe--by what occurs to characters as well as by what they express--that nothing can alter events once set in motion. As well, the very form of the film is self-reflexive, commenting through its violence as well as its camera angles and cinematic sequencing on the viewer's own love of violence. If enough has already been said about the first point, it may nonetheless be worth addressing those moments where we are made aware of our own lack of agency, as if the lesson the Counselor failed to learn from Jefe was one we as viewers had yet to accept for ourselves. After Reiner explains the bolito's operation, the Counselor asks why no one actually sees the garroter escape after dropping the device over a victim's head: "Oh. Well, given a choice between watching someone walk away down the street and watching someone being slowly decapitated by a device apparently engineered and patented in the halls of hell you are going to watch the latter. That's just the way it is. You may think you should avert your gaze. But you wont." That assurance describes not only the behavior of actual witnesses but our own investment as "witnesses" of a film that has already made the lesson obvious, which may explain why the dialogue was dropped (once again) as unnecessary.

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Moreover, the description intimates that the coherence we desire in our lives is an illusion, whether on-screen for characters or sitting as we do in the audience. The dissociative aspect of the film's events undoes any more integrated or progressive plot we might hope to imagine for characters. And the lesson seems to be that much the same is true for our own fragmented lives, lived according to possible plots that in the event keep breaking down. Given how actions in the film abide by a course of their own, with intentions stymied by circumstances, it makes sense for us to be more circumspect about our behavior. Yet in fact, the lesson itself is nugatory, since caution (like regret, or sorrow) has little sway in the world represented on screen. Nor can one point to Malkina's survival, possibly even her success at the end, as a defiance of such logic, since no guarantees attach to her more than anyone else. She distinguishes herself purely by avoiding sentimental bromides about herself, without buying into the comforting notion that she can be protected in a world where events so easily undo themselves at any moment. The film ends as it began, refusing to be accommodated within neat genre conventions, or more broadly within self-confirming conceptions of personal identity. All we come to realize is that the confusion we feel at characters whose behavior seems disconnected, who suffer consequences wholly unintended, is embodied in the cinematography and fragmented sequence of the film itself. The triumph of The Counselor is, among other things, to have translated Cormac McCarthy's long-standing dour philosophy into a Ridley Scott cinematic vision at once restrained and extreme, forming a narrative as brutally unforgiving as it is a burnished performance.