If you watched the Oscars on Sunday night you might have noticed a few quick cuts to a gray-haired man and a young boy in the audience during one of the acceptance speeches for No Country for Old Men.

The man was Cormac McCarthy, the author of the book by the same name that birthed the Academy Award-winning film; the boy was his son, part of the inspiration behind McCarthy’s latest book, The Road, which is currently in production with John Hillcoat (director of The Proposition), starring Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron.

credits: Time

McCarthy and the Coen Brothers

It was surprising to see McCarthy at the Kodak Theater. He rarely speaks in public and has given about two interviews in the past 15 years. It was appropriate, however, that the literary community have a representative present. Aside from No Country, two of the other films nominated for Best Picture were adaptations of lauded books: There Will Be Blood and Atonement.

While not nearly the first time a well-written book has been turned into an amazing film, the instances of failure are greater than success, fewer still are the occasions when the author responsible, reclusive in the vein of Delillo and Pynchon, shows up at a Hollywood award ceremony. It calls for some celebration.

Even if you’ve never read one of McCarthy’s novels, his outlook on literature alone seems to suggest his words would translate into gripping cinema. He doesn’t consider writers to be “good” unless they “deal with issues of life and death.” Of Proust, Henry James and Joyce McCarthy says, “I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature.”

credits: Richard Foreman

Can't stop what's comin

But Llewelyn tries.

Such a statement is one filmmakers might warm to when you consider whether you’d rather watch another adaptation of Ulysses or No Country for Old Men. Violence does not cheapen the latter: brutal comeuppance in the novel and film exists as part of a didactic landscape–the “country”–that instructs and demolishes.

The violence in No Country works as a placeholder for truth, existing until the truth gets there, at which point the violence destroys it, and we’re left with bleakness, open territory where trying to make sense of the horrors you’ve seen will age you faster than war.

McCarthy’s presence at the Oscars helps dissuade the claim that great literature must be difficult to understand. In the words of David Lynch, “Bullshit. Total fucking bullshit.” Here is one of the world’s greatest living writers sharing camera time with Jack Nicholson and Colin Farrell. And not some absurd Brooklyn author who writes about his pointless Jewish upbringing–a man who writes stories where something besides a reputation or marriage hangs in the balance.

credits: Miramax

That we might see a sign

Taking the money case on a trip to the dark side in No Country.

Those stories become literary cinema. You can call No Country a “thriller” or a “crime drama” and it is both of those things. But after the final cut-to-black you realize you’ve been tricked: somewhere between the dark hotels, silenced shotguns and transponders a message snuck in, something about mankind’s self-deception, our fervent belief that we can control how life happens to us, heads or tails out on a ledge…

But No Country doesn’t have to be any one way. And that’s why it succeeds. You can take what you will from it and still have a gripping story about human beings doing hard living in the real world. Which is what we want to see: stories that confirm our fear that the world is real.