This paper focuses on Joel and Ethan Coen'sNo Country for Old Men (2007), relating the film to the concerns of frontier mythology and connecting it to the sociopolitical issues affecting the 21^st century USA. The paper addresses the role of myth in history and its impact on the Western genre and draws specifically on the historian Harold Rosenberg's 1959 essay, "The Resurrected Romans." Rosenberg takes a cultural approach to history through a detailed analysis of Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)."The question of myth in history," asserts Rosenberg, "is the question of the hero. And the question of the hero is the question of resurrection" (1959, p. 141). However, just as myth seeks to eradicate the historicity of things, as Roland Barthes would suggest, so too does the historical element become lost on the hero, whose awareness is only of `eternal forms' (p. 142). In applying these issues to No Country for Old Men, we find the hero, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) facing a quandary: Is his approach to current problems of law enforcement defined through these `eternal forms'? Or, can he learn from the past to become an agent in history rather than merely an effect of it?

This paper seeks to relate Joel and Ethan Coen's cinematic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (2005) to a wider concern: the articulation of frontier mythology in contemporary American society, culture, and history. The latter of these issues, though by no means distinct, provides the primary focus—addressing the role of myth in history and its impact on the Western genre as a whole. In this, the paper draws specifically on historian Harold Rosenberg's 1959 essay, "The Resurrected Romans" (Rosenberg, 1959, pp. 140-158).

Rosenberg's approach to history comes through a detailed analysis of Karl Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). He identifies two continuities in what he describes as `the plot of history' (Rosenberg, 1959, p. 141). The first concerns the various "circumstances in which historical acts take place," and thus "constitute an external continuity," and the second constitutes an "inner continuity between the men who are to act historically in the present and other actors who once trod the stage…men who in a situation sufficiently resembling the present one played their part with greatness" (Rosenberg, p. 141). This sets up a distinction between macro- and micro-political scenarios, between the general flow of historical movement itself and those individual `actors' who move within it, drawing from the past their inspiration for both the present and the future. In Marx's terminology, it is these individual actors who suffer from history's ironic reversal, as noble intentions grind into their very opposite, whilst the teleological flow of history continues inexorably."The question of myth in history," asserts Rosenberg, "is the question of the hero. And the question of the hero is the question of resurrection" (Rosenberg, p. 141). So it is that this dead hero is resurrected, disinterred as it were from the grave, his role assumed by the individuals acting in the present as they "anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes" (Rosenberg, p. 141).

American Literature Journal, Sociopolitical Issues, Historical Acts, Micro-Political Scenarios, Teleological Flow, Generic Tradition, Mythological Tropes, Traditional Generic Output, Contemporary Sociopolitical Concerns, Ideological Contradictions, Deconstructive Tendencies, Socio-Historical Trends.