The actor:	Tommy Lee Jones
The character:	Ed Tom Bell
The film:	No Country for Old Men
The line:	“But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard.”

Theoden, at the end of his rope and the innermost chambers of Helm’s Deep, allows himself a rhetorical question, one which bleeds his despondency. “What can men do against such reckless hate?” Aragorn, who is not really a guy who deals in rhetorical questions, replies, “Ride out with me. Ride out and meet them.” Ed Tom Bell is a good guy, but he’s not Aragorn. There’s no “Ride out and meet them” in his system, not at this age, not at this moment in history. In the years of Middle-earth, enormous battles are met across a continent. In the late 20th Century in rural Texas, good and evil are such atomized entities that never meet one another.

We’ve all heard “too smart for his own good.” Ed Tom Bell is better described as “too wise for the job he has.” He understands, with an intimacy that very few people around him can empathize with, that there are people who are beyond reason or decency. Wendell doesn’t understand, even if he’s a willing deputy who brings a retriever’s enthusiasm to the chase.

Arguably the most chilling killer in the movie is not Chigurh but the unnamed murderer from the film’s opening monologue. “Told me that he’d planned to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember,” Ed Tom says. “Said that if they turned him out he’d do it again…I don’t know what to make of that. I sure don’t.” We can let ourselves pretend that Chigurh does what he does for money; we can rationalize his actions even if we can’t moralize them. That guy who goes to electric chair and knows he’s going to Hell is not someone we can understand. Maybe we can’t even allow him to live in a society with the rest of us; it’s not a pretty thought, and the ramifications of what it would mean for us to tolerate him are shuddering.

At the end of his career (and not to rely excessively on the title of the movie, but), Ed Tom is essentially on that “one last job” that has fired up so many movies about cops. The choice he’s shying away from in this line is a choice he’s making for the rest of his life, for the after-sheriff period, however long that may last. He’s two or three steps behind Chigurh and Moss, though by the end of the movie it feels much more like one or two steps. Ed Tom gets close enough to witness catastrophic levels of damage, but he never does have to put his soul at hazard. He witnesses without engaging.