The Man Who Wasn't There
"We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were we could reach some
conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously."
-Jean-Baptiste Clamence, The Fall (1956)
While Modernism seems like an exhausted resource sometimes in an age where deconstruction still has much to offer, it was a bold move by the Cohen brothers to make a movie so devoted to the theories of modernism in literature as well as the aesthetic of modernism in art. But they did a brilliant job, making what proves to be one of their best if not most enjoyable movies to date in "The Man Who Wasn't There." I was blown away by the efficiency and depth this movies offers in the main character (it is difficult to call him a protagonist, as it is difficult to call Alfred Prufrock a protagonist) that is rarely seen in movies. Rather than making a movie with a charismatic, human figure at the center, they paint a picture of cultural dualities in the full swing of murder plot. Rather than being suspensful, the murders unravel awkwardly and sadly, and the most suspended action of the movie is the main character, played by Billy Bob Thorton, shedding light on plot structures that work in all of our lives as he moves directly toward the end of the film.
This movie is also a bit of a tribute to Dashiel Hammett. Also interesting to note is that nearly every actor wore hairpieces throughout this film.
I should begin this series of notes upon some of the themes and structural aspects of this movie by noting some of the major dualities that come into play.
Alive/Without spirit
Organic/Mechanical
Faith/Pessimism
As I said, the crux of this movie is dedicated to the lines in between the dualistic concepts above, to name a few. We could think of them as straight hairs that are teased, combed several different ways, and ultimately cut.
1.Public Morality
The protagonist, Ed Crane, is a barber who, in his detachment, exemplifies an existential anti-hero whose life is cut away because it is unacceptable
to his society, even though he is a part of that society. "It's a part of us" he reflects to his friend about hair, "but we cut it off." Ed Crane is the
part of the social psyche we cut off, not for its crimes, but for his inability to to conform to an image of faith and optimism. This is much like his unwillingness to display emotion, because he seems to have grown away from the body of humanity in his detachment. He does not grow angry or sad, but is very matter of fact, There is something terrible about his silence and utter lack of outrage over anything, and that silence both literal and implicit in what he leaves out of his story. He does not give in to passions spiritual or venial, but exists as a sort of grey area which is indeterminate, and likewise strange for it leaves little to relate to. It is for this reason he is executed eventually, not because of the danger he poses to society, but because his frightening strangeness, like the hair that grows too long, does not appeal to our collective sense of vanity. His strangeness was not the crime he was found guilty of in court, but was a transgression all the same.
He is asked several times in the movie "what kind of a man are you," a question he cannot answer. Why can he not answer this question. Rather than a glib recontre, or a dusty phrase, he seems to chew the question about in his mouth, unsure but working his mind toward some answer. This question also begs for a gender interpretation of the movie, which would be really interesting.
2. "I'm going to mix my hair with common dirt"
Some commentary on L'estrangier by Camus is relevant here:
"[The protagonist] is the archetype of a middle-class man. He works
as a clerk, rents an apartment, and draws no attention to himself.
He is, if anything, ordinary. Meursault might even be boring. He lacks
deep convictions and passion. If he is estranged from any aspect of
French society, it is religion -- he does not believe in the symbols
and rituals of faith.
"Is the main character estranged? "Cela m'est égal" Meursault views life
as one might a movie. No matter what occurs, "It's all the same to me."
He is not a stranger, but rather an observer without an emotional
connection to the world."
Here it is not the church which serves to alienate the main character, but faith in the symbols and rituals of modern life. Ed sees himself in relation
to what society seems to want him to be, his opposite. Big Dave, dishonest but charismatic banker, who in many ways plays Ed's inverted ego is murdered by Ed halfway through the movie with a knife. While Ed acted in self-defense, he defended himself in a situation he created. The resulting murder both leaves Ed free in his own mind of guilt and exposes thefalsityy of the Banker. Another major repercussion is that Ed has killed his wife's lover, a fact that haunts him later as he is accused of cold-blooded murder. While Ed is detached, this detachment leads him to be truthful without fail. Again, Camus:
"His only redeeming quality is his honesty, no matter how absurd. In
existential terms, he is "authentic" to himself. Meursault does not
believe in G-d, but he cannot lie because he is true to himself. This
inability to falsify empathy condemns him to death."
The detachment leads to a sort of authority, similar to the sort of authority exercised upon a film by the audience. Ed's point of view lends him the authority of a barber. This story is essentially the tale of a barber, which is why the barber pole, itself a type of illusion, is the first significant image in the film. The Cohens are great symbolists. While Ed cannot be an authority of music (like the piano teacher), or business (the gay man is that), or knowledge (the lawyer is that: "You're a barber, I'm a lawyer, you don't know anything), or morality (the judge is that), Ed can only tell his own tale as a barber, a convict and a writer for Sci-Fi magazines. How an author comes into authority, and if any genuine authority is possible, is one thread of consideration that runs through this movie. Even when telling his own story we find it difficult to believe the truth of what Ed is telling us. Did Birdie, the sixteen year old daughter of a friend, really try to seduce him, or was he only leaving out his own complicitness? Did he really kill his wife's lover in self defense? At the end of the film, it is difficult to believe Ed's story, which is why the flying saucers are both a beautiful visitation and wildly improbably turn of events.
The incident of the flying saucer extends the bathos of previous incidents. It flaunts in the viewer's face the proposition that we cannot know the truthfulness of Ed's story any more than Ed can know any limitless truth. The greatness of this moment brings up the central binary of faith/pessimism. As viewer I both felt deeply suspicious of Ed's motives, while I also acknowledged that I can only know what is cast upon the screen, and that is, in a sense, the truth of Ed's story.
Big Dave's wife, who speaks to Ed about UFOs near the middle of the movie, is a figure bearing parallels to Ed; parallels which the UFO sighting serves to point attention to. Both are created by their society but are simultaneously rejected by them. Does this truthfulness mean that he is objective? No, as his lawyer points out, just by witnessing we engage in action. That there is no truth is the Truth. In his quest to seek objective reality in his life, Ed finds that the only objective certainty is death, and he reaches toward that goal with the ceaselessness of a hair winding out from one's head.
3. The Shears of Modern
While Romanticism, which Modernity formed as a reaction against, values an intrinsic organic "triad ofcorrespondencee between (i) the subject, (ii) the object (the perceived world), and (iii) the medium of expression" (-Albert Gelpi), which was replaced by the "dyad of modernism: (i) the subject (intellectual imagination) and (ii) the object/medium language. The medium of expression becomes itself, the object." (ibid). The doubt which the film casts upon the truthfulness of anyexplanationn or narrative is achieved through its techniques of discrediting itself through scrutiny. From the elements of 1950's Americana, unnatural as it seems, Ed's role is that of inventor via narrative's dislocation of objects. Wallace Stevens stated that "a blessed range for order was the motivating force of the modernist artist." In this sense Ed's role as barber is analogous to that of the narrator, whose artistic role is both to hide and reveal, to style.
4. "The barber shop is a rock"
The barber shop is a place associated with small-town values and a verbal community. Ed's associate in the barber shop, Frank, expresses the naive values of small town life; an tendency to organize himself around familial ties; a faith in hard work as a key to success; also a belief in the basic sameness and goodness of all people, typified in his small speech about how similar bankers are to barbers (they put their pants on just like us). Frank encounters his own naievete when Ed is arrested for the murder his wife was previously charged with, a painful moment for the character. It is a brilliant unilateral performance done by Michael Badalucco that incorporalizes a certain sense of Americana.
The shifting paradigm of small-town values and modern industry is displayed in the discourse between barbershop and court system. When two policemen deliver to Ed the message that his wife has been arrested for murder, it becomes a display of bureaucratic coldness as they shrug and mention "they sent us to tell you." After arriving in court for his wife's trial, Frank is dismayed at the impersonality of the court system because the Judge is late. It does not acknowledge that others got there on time. In fact, since courts are set up to work despite personal vendettas and cultural biases, in a sense it does not acknowledge others at all. The idea of deference which operates in the court system is strange to Frank because in Frank's world people take responsibility for what needs to be done themselves, rather than defering authority to another body. In this contrast we can see how the blade cuts both ways; Frank's sense of self-entitlement, which it is tempting to call "folksy," one can derive the attitude of either Woody Guthrie or a clansman,
5. Piano Music
Modernity's spirit of invention is echoed in technological culture by machines, as we can see in cubism, movies like Lang's Metropolis, poetry like EE Cummings, which was made as "typewriter music" or William Carlos Williams who said that "poems are small machines". The UFO flying saucer phenomena is another aspect of modern consciousness; it is the modern mythical other. While Native Americans and many other cultures have had tales involving outer-space, aliens and travel, it is particular to modern myth that they appear not as beings, but as or with machines. Ed is a machine, in that he comprises of working parts but does not contain a soul. The movie uses several methods of making this point. We can look to Ed's interest in Birdie to begin. Ed is soothed by (potently named) Birdie's music. Birdie's music, which as the music teacher (who speaks of the soul being the mark of good music) says, is that of a "typist," someone who works artlessly with machines. So Ed's interests reflect his personality, which is only capable of dealing with mechanical objects. The music teacher states "spirit is the engine of great art," and describes the processes involved in one's self-expressions as being mechanical but rooted in the divine. The teacher suggests a modernist ideal of the soul's will to power being inventive. Birdie's fingers move as a typist's do, moment to moment without a unified intent. Her way of playing music reflects the composition of Ed's narration which is similarly "moment to moment," as Ed puts it near the end of the film.
While it is entirely suspect that Ed is indeed an "enthusiast", as Birdie wryly puts it, another text is possible; that he sees Birdie as a pure soul and is emotionally devastated by her inappropriate sexual intent toward him. Perhaps Ed created an illusion of purity that he can hold onto, a sort of "escape," as he says himself, whereby Birdie is like her name, an innocent and natural creature. His escape involves the illusion of her as the one dimensional "good girl" her fathers says she is. Ed may be incapable of dealing with the psychological dualities she presents, both good girl/promiscuous woman, and sees things non-dualistically, in terms of appearances.
It is interesting that inappropriate or passionate behavior, which is what Ed's narrative seems to leave out, is described as being "wild hairs" or "letting our hair down." The Italian wedding is an example of life being enjoyed, hair down; the man riding the pig as central symbol. Music is a part of this celebration of spirit, which in this scene is spirited and rustic. If spirit is the engine of great art, as the piano teacher put it, then
it is interesting that they chose to name the pig the man was riding Garibaldi. The aloofness of the Cranes from this feast is significant, for it is the
feast of life.
6. Two interesting quotes, displaced.
"There they were. All going about their business. It seemed like I knew a
secretÂ…something none of them knew, like I had made it to the outside somehow
and they were all down struggling below"
-Ed Crane
The source of perfection lay in the self's capacity to think beyond itself,
to be in the presence of the other.
-Joe Riddell, Continuing Fictions
posted by Nick Gardner at 1:09 AM
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