“Whatcha got ain’t nothin new. This country’s hard on people, you can’t stop what’s coming, it ain’t all waiting on you. That’s vanity.”

This addition to the growing and already gratuitous body of secondary literature surrounding the film “No Country for Old Men,” directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, will no doubt disappoint readers looking for a review. I will not tell you whether this film was “good” or not. Everything I say henceforth is based on the initial and essential presupposition that “No Country” is an almost unparalleled cinematic achievement. Which it is.

That said, I would also like to use this opportunity to say hello to all of you readers. We’ll hopefully be seeing each other relatively often from now onward. I invite you all to keep me humble and write me nasty e-mails about how wrong I am. I write like such a self-righteous clown that I think I deserve it.

Back to “No Country.” What should we make of this film? The first time I saw it, I left borderline baffled beyond any hope of recognition. Convinced that I was just too stupid to appreciate what I felt was surely greatness, I went and sat through the film another four times in the theater.

The first facet of the film that struck me was the violence. Interspersed with placid scenes of dialogue were cuts of gunshots, spattering blood, and car crashes. This is importantly distinct from those classic westerns to which “No Country” is often compared. Anton Chigurh isn’t Old Shatterhand and Llewellyn Moss isn’t Dirty Harry. Bad guys aren’t punched across rooms and a bullet from a magnum doesn’t carry that magical momentum that it does in those old movies, that velocity of fantasy that can throw the worst through a window.

No, everything in “No Country” carries that distinct metallic aftertaste of the super-real. At times, cinematographer Roger Deakins (acclaimed for his work on, among other films, the oft underappreciated “1984,” “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” “Fargo,” and “Jarhead,” about which one of the only good things was that series of heart-wrenching shots of flaming oil fountains) seems to relish the sight of an open wound. Extended cuts in which the camera pans up and down skin flayed by shotgun buckshot show the audience an experience that can not be so easily classified. Is it gratuitous? Is it disturbing?

Is it beautiful? It is. The cinematographer’s use of his tool is nothing short of majestic. The sight of a nude Anton Chigurh picking shotgun pellets out of his open wounds evokes an archetypal image of those impossibly perfect Renaissance sculptures, those Greek Gods. The characters’ injuries and subsequent sequences of reflective wound-licking seem so real as to force the audience to ask itself: am I disgusted or obsessed?

Perhaps it is a mixture of both. It takes a tough stomach to watch some of the things depicted in “No Country” without cringing. But what are we left with after having sat through the movie? Not a queasy feeling of disgust. Instead we find, after having seen and felt the painful gravity of Anton Chigurh’s violence, a deeper and richer appreciation of what is arguably the film’s central topic: chance and randomness. The film upsets our comfortably deceptive notions of stability and a universe that is at its most basic level calm and measured by setting Chigurh’s killing spree in an idealized, “typical American” setting. Every time a good ole’ boy or a southern belle is senselessly murdered, our baseless faith in the inherent sensibility of the world is chipped away, bit by bit.

We can see now why the Coen brothers included painfully, entrancingly long cuts of wounds and injuries, pieces of film that are odes to humanity and animality alike. It is not so we sit and marvel at how good a Boy Scout Llewellyn or Anton would be, even though that’s exactly what I did. It is so that, when the directors finally reveal their message in a startling, viciously ironic happenstance, the audience internalizes it until they brim with its gravity. The virtues of the film as medium are readily apparent: what a philosophical text cannot convey is captured in “No Country” by the camera lens. Words cannot evoke the primal and instinctual reactions that an exceptionally graphic image can.

So, in conclusion, watch movies. Love the good films and hate the bad, but kind of love the bad too, because at least they tried. Read my column, write your own responses, and we’ll have a conversation that is sure to be more interesting than the four hour long screening of “The Seven Samurai” you have to go to for your film class. Hey, with the addition of a Film and Media Studies major on the horizon, this might just be the next cool thing to do.