1. It would take a brave man to marry Mattie. And she wouldn’t seize and marry a weakling just to dominate him— she wouldn’t feel the need. Thus she became an old maid.

2. It’s easy to see why only the horse’s death bothers Mattie: only the horse is innocent. Only modern sissies are bothered by bad guys getting killed. To be sure, she perhaps doesn’t show Christian restraint in her desire for vengeance on her father’s killer, but that’s a tough temptation, especially for someone who like her would have a strong belief for justice in general. And what should the Christian attitude be, actually? Should a good Christian allow his father’s killer to go unpunished?

By the way, just an aside, we live in Fort Smith, Arkansas. If you guys ever find yourselves in our region, get in touch. We’ll give you a tour of Judge Parker’s old court house, and the gallows.

I wonder about the meaning of the state of nature for the 3 corpses, particularly the first. It would seem that this corpse was particularly and deliberately dishonoured by the people who put it there. Certainly this is not an appropriate, customary, humane or civilized condition for a corpse, but it does not seem exactly natural in the way that the other two are.

Particularly the second corpse; the young man was concerned precisely with the prospect of his corpse being left in a state of nature (the wolves). It is nature that ostensibly gets in the way of Cogburn burying him, (the earth is hard in the winter) and he is even removed from the cabin and set outside on the ground in nature.

I was thinking about the significance of the corpses of the three criminals, and it occurred to me that we never really see Chaney’s corpse at all, if I am not mistaken. He is shot, and he falls off the cliff, but for all we know he may have died on the way down. Given how many other corpses Mattie sees in the movie, it seems significant that she never really does get to see the one corpse she was looking for the entire time, so to speak.

I really like Carl’s observation that the movie is about redemption through burial rather than justice. If justice was really the main theme, the final scene would be even stranger; ending a movie decades after the resolution of the conflict not for a reunion of the main characters, but for the burial of one by the other.

Has anyone said anything about the loss of Mattie’s arm? I am not sure what it might mean, but it is certainly striking seeing the one-armed older Mattie in the final scenes.

Back to my comment about the tragedy of what Mattie became. She doesn’t just say she never married, she says in a very tight way that she never had time for such nonsense. (That isn’t a quote, but it is the gist.) That sat me up in my chair. She seemed quite Scrooge like, all law and no equity, if you will.

Her quest to see Rooster, who she doesn’t know has died, is presented (I thought) as a major departure from what she would normally do in life. I think she says she didn’t usually travel. It is a life seemingly without joy or “frivolity.”

Peter: I am not sure he became a father figure since she apparently had a good relationship with her real father based on the flashback. She never saw Rooster other than during that one week, albeit an earth shattering week, and this is 25 years later. They also apparently didn’t correspond. He never wrote back to accept or reject her offer of the second $50 she owed him. He then wrote her out of the blue saying he would be nearby with the Wild West Show. (An old marshal appearing with two notorious non fictional outlaws, Frank James and Cole Younger–who actually did do that–reinforces the theme that the good guys and bad guys were not altogether different.)

Perhaps, she saw moving his body to her home plot as payment of a duly owed debt. That would be in character, or perhaps–and this appeals to me– that would be her rationalization to herself allowing her to do something purely out of emotion and love.

Interlude: the coffin-room. Here Mattie arranges for her father’s corpse (A) to be sent back to her home. She is annoyed that the mortician has embalmed, thus upping the expense, and she refuses his invitation to kiss the corpse (for “closure”). The Masonic cloak is mentioned, and Mattie arranges to sleep there for the night b/c she doesn’t yet have money, but we never see her father’s corpse in these scenes. We don’t see any…well…I think that we do see, in the second coffin-room scene, a stiff hand sticking out from one of the coffins, but we don’t really view the three corpses of the hung criminals that are put there. Poetically, we can say that Mattie has to sleep among the dead. A bit cold that she is willing to do so and that the town of Ft. Smith can’t find anything better for this vulnerable wayfarer.

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Corpse #1: The corpse hanging very high in the tree, left to the birds. “Why did they hang him so high,” asks Mattie. “I do not know,” says Rooster. Do we know? Is there any reason why a man (presumably an outlaw) should be hung so high? The only one I can figure would be to make his body harder to take down, so as to increase the possibility of its undergoing dishonor. We never learn the story behind this. Through Rooster’s giving the corpse to a lone Indian, and he in turn selling it to the bear-man, this corpse literally follows Mattie and Rooster for a time, and its becoming a dismember-able and circulating object of trade is underlined. In sum: a dishonored corpse, in the state of nature, remarkably ABOVE where it ought to be.

Corpse #2: That of the young man Brendan was speaking of, and it is joined by several others after the night gunfight. The dying young man gave information specifically so his corpse would be properly buried, but it isn’t, and the dialogue underlines this fact. We see it along with others “sitting” outside the cabin as Mattie and co. leave. In sum: dishonored corpse(s), in the state of nature, AT GROUND LEVEL.

Corpse #3: That found in the pit, containing snakes. Another anonymous one. One could argue that by this point, Mattie has become used to corpses, and she readily pulls it toward her given the knife on it which might save her. In sum: dishonored corpse, in the state of nature, WAY BELOW GROUND LEVEL.

Mattie cannot get away from corpses, and they are accompanying her downward. Into a pit. Poisoning her.

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Final Scene: We do not see corpses, but we finally see an instance of their being where they are supposed to be–out of sight just below the ground, in a plot with tombstones. These are the only tombstones we see in the film…somewhat odd for a Western. Mattie’s redemption, to the extent it occurs, is caught up in the fact that we thus see her fully carry out the funereal duty of her original Ft. Smith journey, a duty overshadowed then by her quest for justice for the dead. Those 3 oddly-positioned state-of-nature corpses reveal that the whole film is more a quest for BURIAL, connected in some way to a need for redemption, than it is a quest for justice. And in this final scene that quest is realized, outside the state of nature, to be sure, but away from the bustle of town and commerce.

This half-hidden theme of funereal dignity, we might hope, may have wound up speaking to the Coen brothers themselves, who at times have evinced a peculiar interest in the cinematic meat-grinding of human bodies.