How Cormac McCarthy Made Mainstream Movies So Subversively Cruel
News of the death of Cormac McCarthy earlier this week has been met with an expected wildfire of melancholy. McCarthy, at 89, was one of few living authors with a standing claim to the title of the Great American Novelist, both for how widely beloved his writing was and for how frequently he threw a spotlight, at once mythic and unflattering, on the essential character of the Southwest. His sudden absence leaves a crater of Grand Canyon proportions on the literary landscape.
One does have to wonder what McCarthy himself would say of such public lamentations, the very big deal the world is making of his passing. Death, after all, was a defining subject of his work. It cast a terrible shadow over his visions of the barbaric past and future—and over the movies, rarely as good as the books, made from them.
In his work, McCarthy was almost never sentimental about death. He acknowledged it as a constantly looming reality, indiscriminate in aim, often brutal in realization, inescapable. You could say his death on Tuesday fulfilled the promise and invisible dramatic arc of his bibliography: Like Emily Dickinson, another American writer of morbid preoccupations, he seemed to be preparing for it his whole career.