by: Cameron MacKenzie
The recent wild market fluctuations suggest that we've entered an interesting period where we can't decide what, exactly, money is, or even what it does. There's something about the nature of money that's unsettling for people. It's strange, occult, even a little mystical, because money requires something close to alchemy for it to work.
There’s a great scene in the movie No Country For Old Men, when the assassin Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, stops by a gas station to fill up his stolen car and buy a pack of peanuts, and the coins he hauls out of his pocket for this simple transaction can tell us a lot about the mysterious nature of money.
Here’s the clip:
The attendant's attempt at small talk actually puts his life in danger, especially once Chigurh realizes the old man will remember his car. Chigurh begins to ask a series of very simple questions, and as the attendant becomes frightened and confused by the direction of the conversation, he says he has to close the store.
“What time do you close?” Chigurh asks him.
“Now. We close now.”
“Now is not a time. What time do you close?”
“Dark. We close at dark.”
And of course it’s the middle of the day.
Curious now, Chigurh begins to ask the attendant about the details of his life, finally learning that he works at the gas station because it used to belong to his wife’s father.
“You married into it,” Chigurh says.
“If that’s how you want to put it.”
“There’s no way to put it. That’s the way it is.”
Chigurh lives in a world of definitive answers, in which everything is always one way only and not another. Following those rules, Chigurh should now kill the attendant so there will be no witnesses to his having stopped for gas. Instead, Chigurh does something else, something he does often in the film. He takes out a coin. He flips it in the air, covers it on the counter, and he tells the man to call it.
“We need to know what we’re calling it for,” the attendant says.
“You need to call it. I can’t call it for you. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“I didn’t put nothing up.”
“Yes, you did. You’ve been putting it up your whole life, you just didn’t know it.”
By this point the old man can sense that something he doesn't understand is coming to a head.
“I need to know what I stand to win,” he says.
“Everything.”
“Alright. Heads then.”
Chigurh lifts his hand, sees the George Washington, almost smiles, and says “Well done.” Then he puts the other coins on the counter to pay for the peanuts.
In the beginning of the scene, this is a simple exchange. Gas and nuts for coins. Very easy.
But then Chigurh changes the commodity in question without changing the medium of exchange. Money can do this of course because it’s very flexible--or rather, our minds are very flexible about commodities and value, but we anchor our understanding to money because it’s a seemingly simple thing. So suddenly a coin isn’t mediating an exchange about gas and nuts. It’s mediating an exchange about, simply, “everything.” Everything is now being asked of this two-sided coin, and the answer is either life or death. Once again, thanks to the coin, it's very clear, and very simple.
But why doesn’t Chigurh just kill the man? Why flip a coin? Chigurh doesn’t think he should make that decision himself. He says it “wouldn’t be fair.” And in Chigurh's refusal to make a decision, the nature of the coin changes again. Now it represents something like fate. Fate is speaking through the coin. It has been “travelling 22 years to get here,” Chigurh says. The coin is now the old man’s destiny. Has today always been the day the attendant was going to die? Shot to death in his wife’s father’s store? Is this the end of his story, foretold by the side of a coin?
This film in total is about a robbery, about a bag of money that everybody wants. That’s what a lot of movies are about. And just like a lot of movies, a lot of people die over that bag of money. So many people die, in fact, that it starts to become obvious that all this killing isn’t about the money at all, and that these people have nothing in common other than the money that they all want. The money is, in a sense, the pure wanting. The wanting more than the other guy. The wanting of what the other guy has. Take the money out of the equation and the whole story falls to the ground. All the relationships between people dissolve. Money organizes people in these situations, holds people together, even if they can’t decide on what it means. There’s a bag of money in the front seat of a car, but what does it mean? There’s a coin on the counter, but what does it mean?
Here, it’s heads, so the old man gets to live.
Once the old man has won his coin toss, Chigurh leaves him the coin, which the man quickly moves to put in his pocket. But Chigurh turns and stops him. “Don’t put it in your pocket,” he tells the attendant. “It’s your lucky quarter.”
In an instant, the coin has taken on a new and even stranger property. Now the coin is lucky. And now the lucky coin belongs to the man. With this belonging, its cycle of representation comes to a close. The coin has been circulating around the economy for 22 years, acting as the medium of exchange for untold transactions. It’s been a constant traveller, meaning a thousand different things to a thousand different people but now, the coin belongs to the old man in a way it has never belonged to anyone before. It is his lucky coin.
Who hasn’t ever had a lucky coin? Who hasn’t kept their first dollar? Who’s got a check that’s never been cashed? Something special has happened to the old man, and it happened because of the coin. The special thing has passed through the coin. And that passing has imbued the coin with the specialness of the event. In fact, the coin is the only physical proof that the special event ever occurred. The coin, after everything, is now sacred.
And while this is interesting and not, I think, completely incorrect, Chigurh would twist the knife one more time. He urges the old man not to put the quarter in his pocket because, if he does, “It’ll get mixed in with all the others and become just a coin...which it is.”
The mysterious nature of the coin--if it represents commodities, fate, even if it represents luck--is powered by little more than just simple, unsubstantiated belief. The coin may in fact be the representation of belief. It is precisely what we believe it to be, what we agree it is. Without that agreement, without that shared belief, a coin--and of course money itself--ceases to be anything at all, and everything it props up just falls to the ground. All it takes, in other words, is for you to call it.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.