TedG: Noir, No Country...

McCarthy's writing style comes after the Clancy/Ludlum model where things are diced into parallel episodes but unified in a grand arc driven by the cosmic principle that good triumphs and the bad guys get punished. This has become the cinematic norm, so whenever we pass through a scene-story, we know how it fits in a universe powered by a machine of justice.....

The other cinematic notion that McCarthy uses is noir, and I am certain that it is what attracted the Coens. They've spent their entire careers surrounding this notion, probing it from all directions. In absolute terms, what defines noir is the notion that the machinery of the universe is arbitrary and linked to the act of viewing. That "viewing" piece has stickiness, because it involves us in what happens to the characters in the world we witness. McCarthy makes us explicitly complicit in the unraveling of ordinary, even expected justice.