Brad Pitt’s Death Scene in ‘The Counselor’ Will Never Stop Haunting Me

There’s a lot of plot at work in Ridley Scott’s The Counselor. And, unsurprising given its original script by Cormac McCarthy, there’s a lot of thinking to be done about big concepts like greed and power and the West and such. I’m going to be honest when I say I don’t remember very much about the plot. Cameron Diaz plays a master criminal. There’s a drug deal gone wrong. Michael Fassbender, as the titular Counselor, bends his morals to the point of breaking in order to get his own piece of the pie. There is almost certainly a cheetah that Diaz’s character keeps as a pet. And, of course, there’s the scene where Diaz’s character has sex with Javier Bardem’s ferrari. (It is honestly a testament to just how miscalculated Diaz’s performance is that her character isn’t better remembered today, because it was all there on paper.)

But for as disappointing as The Counselor was, I can’t knock it too hard, because it did what 90% of movies can’t do: it showed me something that I have never been able to get out of my head since the day it opened, exactly five years ago today. Specifically, Brad Pitt’s death scene, which comes at the hands of a diabolical and terrifying little device known as a “bolito.” Don’t know what a bolito is? Neither did I. Allow Javier Bardem’s character from an earlier scene in the movie to explain.

Special bonus points for the fact that Bardem reads the line “Do you know what a bolito is?” in his exact Anton Chigurh voice from No Country for Old Men (Cormac McCarthy connection!). But also, points for setting that macabre idea in the audience’s mind early on in the movie, and allowing us to imagine the mechanics of such a device: a steel-wire collar connected by a small motor that, when activated, begins retracting the wire unstoppably. That wire will tighten and tighten until it’s cut through everything in its way. Just imagining it is horrifying. And then, just like any good student of Chekhov, Ridley Scott knows enough to bring it back by the end of the movie.

[WARNING: Uh … graphic. So graphic. So are the gifs that follow.]

I can’t remember why Cameron Diaz’s character wanted Brad Pitt’s character dead. Something valuable was surely in that briefcase. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the delicious combination of anger, fear, and frustration in Pitt’s voice when he realizes what’s been done to him. His hands frantically try to keep the wire away from his neck, but he knows he’s already lost. That “FUCK YOU!” out to the unknown jogger who just killed him is as much a “FUCK YOU” to the universe for leaving him without any options. This device, which Pitt probably heard about through the grapevine same as Bardem told Michael Fassbender, is unstoppable, and he’s got about a minute to be angry about it.

The moment the wire cuts through Pitt’s neck is super bloody and gross, but it’s also a bit of a relief, because at least it’s over. Strangely, what sticks with me more is the nonchalance with which the wire slices off the tips of Pitt’s fingers before its work is done.

This is a TERRIFYING way to die! To have that minute to know it’s coming and there’s nothing you can do? That wire is a more unstoppable killing machine that Freddy, Jason, or the virus in Contagion combined. You’re already dead. You’re just conscious enough to feel the panic for another minute.

Ever since seeing The Counselor, I semi-regularly check something out on Wikipedia. Just to make sure. Just to ease my mind.

And then I double check to make sure a particular word is still there.

And then I return to my life of never getting involved in million-dollar drug deals.