its central character. Joel sighs. 'I know. There are parallels.' He shakes his head. 'These things really should seem obvious to us.'" In addition, Ethan Coen states that "we're not conscious of it, [and] to the extent that we are, we try to avoid it. The similarity to Fargo did occur to us, not that it was a good or a bad thing. That's the only thing that comes to mind as being reminiscent of our own movies, [and] it is by accident." Richard Corliss of Time magazine adds that "there's also Tommy Lee Jones playing a cop as righteous as Marge in Fargo", while Paul Arendt of the BBC stated that the film transplants the "despairing nihilism and tar-black humour of Fargo to the arid plains of Blood Simple." Some critics have also identified similarities between No Country for Old Men and the Coens' previous film Raising Arizona, namely the commonalities shared by Anton Chigurh and the fellow bounty hunter Leonard Smalls. Genre Although Paul Arendt of the BBC finds that "No Country ... can be enjoyed as a straightforward genre thriller" with "suspense sequences ... that rival the best of Hitchcock", in other respects the film can be described as a western, and the question remains unsettled. For Richard Gillmore, it "is, and is not, a western. It takes place in the West and its main protagonists are what you might call westerners. On the other hand, the plot revolves around a drug deal that has gone bad; it involves four-wheel-drive vehicles, semiautomatic weapons, and executives in high-rise buildings, none of which would seem to belong in a western." William J. Devlin finesses the point, calling the film a "neo-western", distinguishing it from the classic western by the way it "demonstrates a decline, or decay, of the traditional western ideal ... The moral framework of the West ... that contained ... innocent and wholesome heroes who fought for what is right, is fading. The villains, or the criminals, act in such a way that the traditional hero cannot make sense of their criminal behavior." Deborah Biancott sees a "western gothic ..., a struggle for and with God, an examination of a humanity haunted by its past and condemned to the horrors of its future. ... [I]t's a tale of unrepentant evil, the frightening but compelling bad guy who lives by a moral code that is unrecognizable and alien.