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A contribution to: Scrutinizing Beauty

Edited by Eleanor Dobson and Daisy Gudmunsen

MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 12

Modern Humanities Research Association

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Abstract.  In his 1872 book The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche argues that beauty emerges from the combination of the ‘Apollonian’, which derives from the Greek god of wisdom, and the ‘Dionysian’, a force personified by the Greek god of chaos and religious ecstasy. This article explores an allegorical interpretation of Nietzsche’s dichotomy in two 2007 Westerns and literary adaptations, No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood. Drawing on political readings of these films and on the history of Apollonian and Dionysian allegory, I postulate that these animi frame the ideological conflicts of post-9/11 America, supplanting the exultation of Nietzsche’s original ideal of beauty with dysphoria. The article first considers Douglas Kellner’s analysis, which champions both pictures for their allegorical and philosophical properties. It then delineates Nietzsche’s understanding of the Apollonian and Dionysian. It subsequently applies these phenomena to No Country for Old Men and its representation of an America plagued by sectarian violence and denuded of authority. I follow the evocation of this declinist subtext with an analysis of There Will be Blood, where I argue that the Apollonian and Dionysian serve to satirize the Bush administration’s state of imperial overstretch and fracturing electoral coalition.

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