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THE CHARIOT: Cormac McCarthy, Guy Ritchie
Among the Major Arcana, The Chariot represents the peculiar single-minded character of military strength. It is the conquering warrior, the disciplined regiment, and the raging berserker. It is the vanguard of nationalism and narcissism, where man takes his animal nature and releases it from its bondage, but channels its energy through tactics, into methodical, orchestrated dominance and self-assertion.
Cormac McCarthy is the modern author of this kind of domineering masculine character. He is related to the Emperor, perhaps being one of his appendages, but he represents a fundamentally different, more naive spirit. McCarthy uses the tropes of the Western, and more recently the post-apocalyptic survival saga, to enmesh his characters in irresolvable conflict: not simply with other powerful men, but with whole worlds and ways of life, which they must overcome, both for their material prosperity and for their very survival.

On one hand, this is how the world often works. On the other hand, as my friend Evan once said, McCarthy seems dangerously close to inventing depraved monsters (Anton Chigurh, Judge Holden), and then giving them his gruff approval.
If the poets of violence were cast as circus clowns, Guy Ritchie would be the auguste to Cormac McCarthy's whiteface.
Guy Ritchie is a mirror image of McCarthy: instead of discipline and austerity, he is an irrepressible conductor of revelry and mayhem. I said, above, that there's a certain troubling naivety in McCarthy's violence... Guy Ritchie's films are just as naive, but their artificiality is a vaudeville flourish, rather than a ritualistic pretense of seriousness. Thus, though Guy Ritche paints the screen with more blood spatter and murders more meaningless extras, his violence is also less troubling, having less of a sentimental claim on the viewer.

In these two directors -- in particular, in the space between them, the tension that their contrast defines -- we find the Chariot, the engine of conquest, in its discipline and release, its catharsis and its brutal innocence. They are an odd couple, but like every Major Arcana, they belong together in their unbridgeable difference.
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