Speaking of borders, all the Republican presidential candidates supported building a fence along the border to keep Mexicans from crossing illegally. Mitt Romney advocated repatriating millions of Mexicans. Are those viable ideas?
The idea of a fence between El Paso and Brownsville bears all the credibility and seriousness of flying saucers from Mars or leprechauns. Or any manner of malicious, paranoid superstition. In other words, it’s bullshit.

But you hear the talk.
And the talk is worth headlines, the talk is worth attention, and that might lead to votes. It’s a predatory approach to democracy by those who would instill fear and then propose themselves as a solution. It’s very destructive. Very, very destructive. And it’s the perfectly wrong thing to do.

First of all, it won’t work. You can’t build a fence that I cannot get over, through, or under if I want to go to Mexico. In that [border] country, you cannot do it. It’s a complete folly. Ecologically, it’s a complete disaster, and sociologically, it’s a complete disaster. It’s an act of fascist madness.

And the people who are being appealed to, the voterships that are removed from that country, are being spoken to as if it’s time to fence their backyard so the stray dog doesn’t get in. “OK, let’s just build a fence.” That’s as far removed from reality as can be, and entirely cynical by those who would manipulate these people. It’s a sad day for the democratic process to see people manipulated through fear and insecurity.

In the film, the act of bringing Melquiades Estrada’s body home for his final burial is really an act of love.
It’s kind of metaphorical. It’s not a simple movie.

But the idea of sending Mexicans home by the millions is really an act of hate.
It is—and fear and prejudice and bigotry. You know, we’ve been treated this way by people in the North for a long time. I don’t think they’re going to change their minds and do anything different.

You’ve talked about the film as a story of redemption, and maybe that’s so for the border guard played by Barry Pepper who kills Melquiades. But I thought that it was not at all redemptive for your character, rancher Pete Perkins, who kidnaps and tortures that border guard.
If it appeals to you to track their spiritual journeys, then the film has succeeded. Whatever opinion you might have is right. They all cross borders, and that’s the subject matter of the film. We don’t moralize much.

You speak of films almost as if you were analyzing a text.
As if they’re narratives. Which would have been my specialty during my stay in Cambridge.

At Harvard, you were an English major, and wrote a thesis about Flannery O’Connor.
A cum laude thesis with my senior tutor, Bill Alfred, whom we miss dearly.
(The late William Alfred, a playwright and poet, was a Harvard professor from 1954 until 1991.)

What did you say about O'Connor?
She was Catholic.
Jones laughs once. “Ha!” Then, nothing.

She was Catholic, she was ill …
I didn’t write much about lupus. I wrote about the discovery of the tenets of Catholicism within the profane.

She and Cormac McCarthy, the author of No Country for Old Men, are relatives in a way, don’t you think?
They’re two of the best prose stylists we’ve had in the second half of the 20th century. I suppose that would make them relatives.

There’s darkness in both of them.
Oh, I see a lot of light in Cormac’s work. I’m not one of those people who would call his work apocalyptic. Hell, I was on the airplane today and I saw Rolling Stone and he’d showed up in Rolling Stone and they used the word “apocalyptic.” But, well, it’s OK with me—those people make money by trying to pigeonhole and stigmatize great talent. Let ’em have it. I don’t care.

In No Country for Old Men, innocents die, the villain gets away with murder, and the hero retires rather than pursue evil. Where’s the light in that?
To my mind, Cormac’s book and the movie are a contemplation of morality. We have an innovative perpetrator of evil, a seasoned defender of goodness, a poor, innocent, son-of-a-bitch common man caught in the middle. The forum for contemplation of morality emerges in the form of a detective story. (Laughs.) Which is pretty cool.

And what does this contemplation of morality give us?
Toward the end, [Jones’ character] Ed Tom Bell goes to see his uncle and says, “I’m being overwhelmed by evil. It’s new, it’s different. I can’t handle it. I’m overwhelmed.” And his uncle says, “That’s vanity.”

Evil is no different than it’s ever been.
That’s right. You don’t live at the center of the universe. This is not about you.

And then he relates the story of some bad guys riding up to another uncle’s house and killing him and riding off, in Hudspeth County [in west Texas] I think it is, desolate place, long ago. And it sounds like a recounting of a bad scene in a B-western. But somehow, as you listen to [actor] Barry Corbin relay the story, you think, “Damn, if I had been there on that day, it would have been real. That would have been real evil.”

It’s a rather healthy contemplation of morality. Which, it seems, remains constant. While evil changes face every minute.

I’ve seen the film twice, and both times the audience sat almost stunned at the end, when Ed Tom delivers a monologue about dreams of his father and the movie simply stops. It’s such a nontraditional ending.
(Smiling.)
Oh, it’s good, too.

How did you interpret that dream monologue?
So there’s a lot of different ways of thinking about morality, is what we were saying last, and the conventional way is not always the right way. Morality might be bigger than you are. And I think the human being needs—I don’t know if he deserves, but needs—frequent reminders that the world ain’t flat and he’s not living in the center of the universe. I think that’s an important part about the last few moments in the movie.

You’re asking me now about the last scene, which is essentially a speech by Ed Tom Bell recounting dreams about his father. And you have the feeling that Ed Tom is thinking about hope, about the future, and that no matter what evil might have transpired, or no matter what opportunities were lost for communication between father and son, or between brother and brother, sister and brother, that somewhere off ahead through the darkness and cold there’s a father who carried fire to create a warm place to welcome you. And that keeps you going, because you know he’ll be there.

And after describing that beautiful picture, Ed Tom says, “And then I woke up.” So, as always with Cormac, the question becomes more important than the answer. Was that dream an illusion or not?

It kind of reminded me of [Spanish novelist and philosopher] Miguel de Unamuno and his book, San Manuel Bueno, Mártir, about a priest who didn’t believe in God.

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