Released in 2001, The Man Who Wasn’t There was almost unanimously well received by film critics. Joel was awarded Best Director for a third time at the Cannes Film Festival, although this time top honours had to be shared with David Lynch for his surrealist noir Mulholland Drive (2001). Many reviewers rated The Man Who Wasn’t There among the very best the Coen brothers had so far produced. In the Guardian Peter Bradshaw called it ‘stunning’ and ‘mesmeric’, praising the Coens’ ‘originality and playful brilliance’ and hailing it as ‘quite simply the Coen brothers’ masterpiece’. Writing for Time Out, Geoff Andrew described it as ‘richly imaginative, resonant, rewarding, and of course, admirably weird’. Even Village Voice critic J. Hoberman, otherwise a detractor of the Coens’ films, found it to be a ‘sadder but wiser remake of the Coens’ rambunctious debut Blood Simple’. Like many reviewers, Jason Caro was particularly appreciative of the Coens’ imaginative remaking of classic film noir, not only because they dared to release a black and white film (today considered both a financial and aesthetic risk), but because they had succeeded admirably in recreating classic noir cinema, offering a contemporary film noir that plays like ‘a re-discovered noir gem from 1944’. In a film that takes doubt and uncertainty as its central thematic concerns, there can be no doubt that this project, in its consummate reproduction of 1940s film noir, serves the artistic ambitions of its makers, who return once again to their most favoured movie genre to put on full display their considerable knowledge and understanding of historical film noir.
Set in the southern Californian small town of Santa Rosa in the year 1949, The Man Who Wasn’t There is the story of Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), who in subjective narration recounts his and the crimes of others who struggle to achieve the American Dream of economic success and self-betterment. Ed works as a barber in a shop owned by his brother-in-law Frank Raffo (Michael Badalucco), where he mechanically performs his mundane labours with a deep sense of resignation. But he dreams of a way out of his burdensome life, to take flight from the dissatisfactions of a mindless job and escape his servitude to an unloving and unfaithful wife, Doris (Frances McDormand), who is having an affair with her boss, Big Dave Brewster (James Gandolfini), right under his nose, finally driving Ed to plot a sneaky revenge. The unexpected success of his scheme to extort $10,000 from Big Dave enables Ed to invest in a newly emerging branch of industry: dry cleaning. After his business partner, a shady character named Tolliver Creighton (John Polito), absconds with his investment, Ed faces another threat from Big Dave, who has discovered Ed’s secret identity as blackmailer. In an unforeseeable turn of events, Ed must kill Big Dave, only to learn afterward that Doris will be tried for the murder. Ed engages Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shalhoub), a fast-talking big-city lawyer, to defend Doris, but she cannot be saved. With no hope for acquittal, she takes her own life while awaiting trial. The story’s final twist of fate serves Ed poetic justice when he is convicted of murdering Creighton, whose real murderer was Big Dave, and sentenced to death. As the story comes to its conclusion and the barber sits on death row awaiting execution, he reveals that the tale he has just narrated is actually the text of an article he is writing for a ‘men’s magazine’. Recounting his story for publication has given Ed Crane a new perspective on his life and imminent death. In his laconic words, ‘seeing it whole gives you some peace’.
Homage to Cain
As they had in Blood Simple, the Coens again inhabit the mind of one of their most honoured literary predecessors, this time reconstructing Cain’s fictional universe with unusual sincerity. While Blood Simple re-examines the Cainian themes of sexual misadventure, greed and betrayal with darkly ironic inflection, The Man Who Wasn’t There takes a noticeably more sober approach, avoiding the genre-bending revisionism and black humour of their debut to reconstitute Cain’s pulp fiction as a gesture of genuine homage. Preserving the downbeat mood of Cain’s writing throughout, The Man Who Wasn’t There generally keeps faith with its source texts, only briefly verging on Blood Simple’s dark farce and intensifying, almost to the point of impersonation, the filmmakers’ identification with their literary precursor. Indeed, the extent to which they cede authorship to Cain can be measured by the Coens’ admission that basically ‘it’s [Cain’s] story’ (Robson 2007: 253), as if to say the film story owes its existence so completely to Cain that it no longer belongs to the screenwriters, who surrender authorial voice and artistic ownership to the revered ancestral writer. Like many of their postmodern contemporaries, the Coen brothers, with a few exceptions, as mentioned in the discussion of Barton Fink, seem unaffected by any Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’. Disinterested in competing with artistic predecessors in pursuit of originality, the Coens fully embrace the parasitic aesthetic of postmodernist citationality, authorising them to borrow (without debt) from Cain to reinvent his fiction in a way that it never was but could have been.
The basic elements of story and character constituting The Man Who Wasn’t There are undisguised borrowings from Cain, as is the focus on everyday people caught in a web of crime and betrayal. Ethan describes Ed Crane as an Everyman type who ‘inadvertently stumbles’ into a drama of mischance set in motion by the actions of others (ibid.), thus emulating Cain’s predilection for proletarian stories featuring ordinary people forced either by circumstance or greed to commit extraordinary crimes. ‘What intrigues us about Cain,’ say the Coens, ‘is that the heroes of his stories are nearly always schlubs – loser guys involved in dreary, banal existences. Cain was interested in people’s workaday lives, and he wrote about guys who worked as insurance salesmen or in banks, and we took that as a cue. Even though there’s a crime in this story, we were still interested in what this guy … does as a barber’ (Allen 2006: 180). The Man Who Wasn’t There also retains Cain’s focus on the loss of communitarian social values and the resulting pervasive sense of personal alienation and pessimistic despair that permeated Depression-era America. Like Cain’s doomed protagonists, Ed Crane is thrust into an existential predicament from which there is little hope for escape, teaching us that there is no exit from a world ruled by chance, where anything can, and ultimately does, go wrong.
These concerns along with Cain’s special interest in murder for profit and the inevitable failure of the ‘perfect plan’ are best illustrated in the two principle sources for The Man Who Wasn’t There: Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, both written as confessional narratives of working-class men marginalised by the economic crash of the Great Depression. As we saw in chapter one, The Postman Always Rings Twice’s Frank Chambers begins his story as a vagrant attracted to the freedom of the open road, but still searching for something to give his life meaning. He accepts a job working for Nick ‘the Greek’ Papadakis, a good-hearted restaurant owner, but quickly succumbs to a Cainian l’amour fou, lusting after Nick’s sexy younger wife, Cora, who rejects her older, unattractive immigrant husband for the more virile and adventurous Frank. At Cora’s urging, Frank plots to kill Nick and to acquire his roadside café so that he and Cora can make a new life together. After the failure of what they imagined would be a perfect murder, the adulterous lovers’ second attempt succeeds, killing Nick in an auto wreck staged as an accident. An aggressive district attorney quickly sees through their plot and charges Cora with the Greek’s murder. However, because Nick had life insurance with three different carriers, all of them seeking to avoid making payment on his death, the insurers’ private investigators are instructed to testify before the court that no crime was committed, forcing the district attorney to withdraw his charges and permitting Cora to go ‘free as a bird’. This legal trick is masterminded by the high-powered defence lawyer named Katz who, instead of representing his client’s best interests, cynically works the justice system for his own benefit. Later, the ‘postman’ of fate rings a second time, this time killing Cora in a car wreck with Frank at the wheel, repeating with terrible irony the fate of her deceased husband. Although Cora’s death is accidental, Frank is convicted of her murder and sentenced to death. In Frank’s trial, where no one would benefit from an acquittal, Katz takes Frank for everything he’s got, including Nick’s restaurant, but is unable to save Frank from the hangman. At the end, the narrative is revealed as Frank’s retrospective confession, written in his prison cell on death row, to be given to his priest for eventual posthumous publication.
Cain’s later novel Double Indemnity features Walter Huff, a young and aggressive insurance salesman, who falls for Phyllis Nirdlinger, the fatally attractive wife of a customer. As in The Postman Always Rings Twice, the illicit lovers plot murder for money, staging the murder of her unsuspecting husband as an accident. But it is not just Walter’s erotic obsession with Phyllis that motivates his criminal scheme. The insurance man knows his game and has been thinking for some time that he could ‘pull something off’, beat the insurance game, and cash in. Referring to the insurance business as ‘the biggest gambling wheel in the world’, Walter thinks of himself as a ‘croupier’ who knows all the tricks: ‘One night I think up a trick, and get to thinking I could crook the wheel myself if I could only put a plant out there to put down my bet. When I met Phyllis, I met my plant’ (1982: 382). Thus, Walter’s underlying motive is not so much his desire for Phyllis but his secret wish to beat the bosses of the insurance company by rigging the game to his advantage. Although Cain does not address explicitly the socio-political implications of his croupier metaphor, he nevertheless creates a provocative image of American capitalism as a game rigged to benefit the wealthy, thereby reflecting a widespread resentment among Americans in the 1930s who felt they were being excluded from the American Dream.
Cain’s protagonists may be losers in the end, but they are at least in the game. Ed Crane’s disillusionment has reduced him to a passive onlooker. He leads a life of quiet resignation, accepting a job he secretly loathes from his brother-in-law and acquiescing to the stronger will of Doris who, like her brother, treats Ed as a subordinate. Ed’s profound inner disaffection and disconnection from social reality is outwardly evident in his muted, nearly emotionless demeanour. Absent from his own life, he is in this sense truly ‘the man who wasn’t there’. After Doris’s suicide Ed’s spiritual malaise deepens: ‘I sat in the house, but there was nobody there. I was a ghost. I didn’t see anyone. No one saw me. I was the barber.’ So insubstantial is his presence that when Ed visits Tolliver to enquire about the dry cleaning venture, the con man doesn’t recognise him at first, mistaking him for a hotel porter and exclaiming, ‘I didn’t recognise you without the smock.’ In contrast to Frank Chambers, a man defined by an elemental vitality and naïve self-confidence, or compared with Walter Huff, whose distinguishing quality is his desire to take control of ‘the game’, Ed is defined by a profound apathy, illustrated by his stoic reaction to the realisation that Doris and Big Dave are two-timing him: ‘The signs were all there plain enough – not that I was gonna prance about it, mind you. It’s a free country.’
Ed does, however, share one important trait with his Cainian models: he is a working man who feels cheated and dreams of finding a way out of his spirit-numbing routine, searching for, in his words, a way to overcome ‘the instinct that kept me locked up in the barbershop, nose against the exit, afraid to try turning the knob’. Opportunity seems to knock when a scam artist appears in his barber chair, promising ‘the biggest business opportunity since Henry Ford’ to anyone willing to invest in his dry cleaning business. To raise the venture capital Ed blackmails Big Dave for $10,000, thereby also exacting a sneaky revenge on his romantic rival.
Generally, the narrative of The Man Who Wasn’t There takes its cue from the Cainian romantic triangle, but bends it to a different angle. Ed, the cuckolded husband, is not, as in Cain’s stories, targeted for murder by the adulterous lovers. Instead, he is cast in the role of blackmailer and accidental killer of Big Dave who, for his part, suffers the fatal misfortune typically assigned in Cain’s fiction to the unsuspecting husband. Ed’s criminal plotting does not include a plan to murder Big Dave, whose violent death is more the consequence of his inability to control his own rage than of any criminal calculation on Ed’s part. Furthermore, Cain’s adulterous couples typically scheme to eliminate the unwanted husband, but in the Coens’ variation the crime Doris and Big Dave plot is embezzlement rather than homicide. To comply with the anonymous blackmail demand Big Dave commits himself, and Doris, to the risky conspiracy of ‘cooking the books’ at Nirdlinger’s department store. To be sure, both Big Dave and Doris bear the moral guilt of marital infidelity and the legal guilt of embezzlement, but they do not plot murder. Unlike Cain’s femmes fatales, Cora and Phyllis, who both assist in the cold-blooded murder of their husbands, Doris is innocent but indicted nevertheless on circumstantial evidence for Big Dave’s murder, thus becoming the unintended victim of Ed’s extortion scam. This and subsequent outcomes mirror the fate of the adulterous lovers in The Postman Always Rings Twice where Frank is not charged with Nick’s murder but later condemned for what was actually Cora’s accidental death in a car crash. Ed suffers a similar fate. When the police find Creighton’s corpse, they falsely assume that Ed had a compelling motive for killing him. The partnership papers Ed had signed with Creighton are found in the dead man’s briefcase, proving that Ed had given him $10,000 – circumstantial evidence at best, but enough to send Ed to the chair.
The apparent death of Birdy Abundas (Scarlett Johansson) in an auto accident with Ed in the driver’s seat clearly alludes to Cora’s unfortunate death with her lover at the wheel. Unlike Cain’s Cora, however, Birdy survives the crash relatively unharmed, and unlike Cora, a primary character of the story, Birdy is a secondary player who enters the story after Doris (Cora’s true counterpart) has committed suicide. Instead, Birdy plays a role similar to Madge Allen in The Postman Always Rings Twice, a minor character with whom Frank Chambers has a brief fling while Cora is out of town. Like Madge, who tames wild jungle cats, Birdy likes animals and professes a desire to be a veterinarian. Birdy’s name also recalls Nick’s pet name for Cora, whom he calls ‘my little white bird’. As a younger, more innocent stand-in for Doris, Birdy also bears comparison with Phyllis Nirdlinger’s step-daughter Lola in Double Indemnity, in whom Walter Huff sees an innocent purity lacking in her devious step-mother. Like Ed Crane, Walter feels compassion for Lola and wants to help her start a new life. Likewise, Birdy Abundas, whose surname suggests the abundant plenitude of youthful promise, represents a chance for Ed to escape and ‘find some peace’, and perhaps also a chance to make restitution for his own wasted life. Ed wants to be Birdy’s manager and handle her business affairs, but his concern for her professional well-being has a compensatory aspect. As he explains: ‘You’re young. A kid really, your whole life ahead of you. But it’s not too soon to start thinking … to start making opportunities for yourself. Before it all washes away. I can’t stand by and watch any more things go down the drain.’
Katz, the conniving lawyer in The Postman Always Rings Twice, finds his counterpart in Freddy Riedenschneider. But while Katz is a minor character in Cain’s novel, Riedenschneider’s role and significance in The Man Who Wasn’t There is expanded and caricatured, exaggerating the smug self-importance and cynical greed of his Cainian model. In Cain’s novel Katz initially works pro bono in Cora’s case because his victory over the rival district attorney is sufficient reward. But later, when Frank Chambers is put on trial, Katz’s steep legal fees cost his client everything he owns, including Nick’s roadside burger joint, just as Riedenschneider’s billings eventually consume Crane’s entire financial holdings, including brother-in-law Frank’s barber shop, put up as collateral for a loan to subsidise Riedenschneider’s fees and extravagant expenses such as staying in the best hotel in town and ordering expensive meals at upscale restaurants. Eventually, Ed must sign over his house to Riedenschneider, whose tricky legal defence cannot prevent the barber’s conviction and death sentence.
As ever, the Coens indulge in citational name-play. Those familiar with Cain’s writings will recognise the store name Nirdlinger as Phyllis’s married name in Double Indemnity. In Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Double Indemnity, Nirdlinger was changed to Dietrichson. A similar name – Diedrickson – is given to the medical examiner who informs Ed that Doris not only killed herself in prison but her unborn child as well. Notably, the name-play gives prominence to the Cain-texts, while names borrowed from film adaptations like Wilder’s are relegated to minor characters. The one exception is Freddy Riedenschneider who takes his name from John Houston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), a classic film noir in which Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe) is the criminal mastermind who plans the logistics of a complicated armored car heist. The irony of this reference should be obvious: Riedenschneider only thinks he is a mastermind; his faux-philosophical legal discourses are in fact ‘gibberish’ (a word the filmmakers use to describe Riedenschneider’s diatribes). Other character names develop the motif of aviary flight, most prominently with ‘Birdy’, whose piano playing offers a way to ‘fly’ from a soul-deadening existence for Ed ‘Crane’, who shares his name with Marion Crane of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), another character hoping to ‘fly away’ and start a new life with stolen money.
Homage to Classic Film Noir
Undoubtedly, The Man Who Wasn’t There gives pride of place to Cain’s writings, but at the same time the Coens, somewhat uncharacteristically, pay double homage to the cinematic tradition of film noir, exploring the genre as historical form and imitating its signature techniques while reexamining its most basic themes and worldview. Challenging Paul Schrader’s claim that film noir is historically determined, ‘a specific period of film history, like German Expressionism or French New Wave’ (1990: 81) which cannot be reduplicated out of historical context, the Coens dare to render a remarkably convincing recreation of classic film noir – a movie that looks, sounds and feels like ‘the real McCoy’. From the outset, The Man Who Wasn’t There announces its generic identity with recognisable noir techniques, beginning with Ed’s voiceover narration. Used in classic film noir to signify the self-enclosing subjectivity of the narrator (particularly in adaptations of Cain’s stories where it functions to replicate the protagonist’s firstperson confessional mode), the Coens insert a continuous voiceover to underscore Ed’s alienated detachment while creating the impression that he is telling his story as an extended flashback, thus replicating the retrospective narrative structure of classic film noirs. At the end of the movie, Ed reveals that he is writing down the story he has just told us for a men’s magazine and that he is being paid by the word, which accounts for his talkativeness as a narrator, in contradiction to his on-screen character who ‘doesn’t talk much’ and who finds ‘gabbers’ like his chatty brother-in-law and the loudmouth Riedenschneider tiresome.
Filmed entirely in rich black and white, the visual style of The Man Who Wasn’t There identifies it unmistakably as a period film noir. This is a movie that strives to achieve what few contemporary filmmakers have attempted: a nearly exact replica of classic film noir visual style. When asked about influences, director of photography Roger Deakins cites several key classic noirs as visual models, including This Gun for Hire (Frank Tuttle, 1942), Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955) and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). Ultimately, however, Deakins and the Coens decided against the so-called ‘hard lighting’ used in classic noir, opting for more diffusion to soften the high contrast effects (Robson 2007: 257–258). Somewhat flippantly, the Coen brothers also say that the look of the movie is based more on science-fiction movies and cheap documentaries of the 1950s. ‘For some reason,’ says Ethan, ‘it’s an object of interest among critics, what our influences are, and you tell them important stuff because that’s what they want to hear, but it’s really like high school hygiene movies’ (Robson 2007: 258). As R. Barton Palmer has noted, the visual style of The Man Who Wasn’t There departs markedly from the excesses of the classic noir look, featuring ‘few striking chiaroscuro effects or deglamorized low-key lighting set-ups, no unbalanced compositions marked by slaked angles, no disorienting disruptions of continuity editing, and no un-motivated camera movements designed to unsettle’ (2004: 65). Although I differ somewhat on the frequency of chiaroscuro effects, which are, in fact, pervasive in The Man Who Wasn’t There and at times quite dramatic, it is generally true that the visual style does not draw attention to itself with the excesses of previous Coen brothers films. The cinematographic effects are not designed to convey the urban paranoia of classic film noir, instead utilising a balanced spectrum of light and dark to achieve a less strident visual tonality as a cinematic correlate to Ed’s monotonous provincial life.
Ed contemplates blackmail.
One of the more dramatic uses of chiaroscuro lighting occurs in an early scene as Ed contemplates Tolliver’s risky proposition, wondering if the mysterious entrepreneur is a ‘huckster’ or ‘the real McCoy’. In the first of a series of shots, Ed stands motionless in a doorframe, his profile facing right, half in light and half in shadow. A quick cut shows his figure again framed in a doorway. This time his profile, now facing left in full shadow, creates a dark silhouette against a brightly-lit background, enhancing the notion that Ed is a negative presence, a ‘ghost’. Here the filmmakers also employ a subtle editing trick to disrupt the continuity of transition from one shot to the next creating the impression that in both shots we are seeing Ed in the same doorframe only from different angles. A closer look at the background of each shot, however, tells us that from one shot to the next, Ed has moved from the doorway of the dining room to the doorway of the bathroom. Because his pose is essentially the same in both shots, his movement from one space to another does not register immediately, evoking in the viewer a vaguely unsettling sense of temporal and spatial disorientation. As he ponders the question of the Tolliver’s authenticity, Ed is drawn over the threshold by Doris’s request for assistance shaving her legs. Contemplating his own capacity for duplicitous deception, he enters the bathroom, where his inner thoughts assume visual form as his image is doubled in the reflection of a mirror. Shadows and mirrors – stock signifiers of duality in classic film noir – are here employed to good effect, foreshadowing Ed’s subsequent shady dealings.
Another striking use of noir visual technique occurs in a scene that takes place in the prison meeting room. As Riedenschneider stands silently in the middle of the confined space about to commence his interview of the defendant, a shaft of sunlight enters from a high window, casting brilliant illumination across the attorney’s solitary figure against a background of deep black. The shaft of light cuts a diagonal line across Riedenschneider’s face, leaving his eyes and forehead in darkness while brightly illuminating his mouth and beneath it, the lower portions of the lawyer’s finely-clad figure. Freddy has assumed the posture of one in deep thought, but he stares upward as if in communication with some higher power. The joke of course is that, represented in this way – eyes covered with a thick veil of darkness, mouth and lower body exposed to harsh light – Freddy is rendered blind, perhaps blinded by his own ego, his image visually signifying a lack of enlightenment commensurate with his total miscomprehension of ‘what happened’ in the case of Big Dave’s murder. The lawyer’s mouth, however, is fully visible and fully functional, ready to litigate vigorously as well as consume large amounts of food to satisfy his rapacious bodily needs. Here the lighting set-up vividly recalls a scene from the classic film noir Phantom Lady (1944), directed by the German-Jewish émigré Robert Siodmak, an important, if unacknowledged, influence on The Man Who Wasn’t There. The corresponding scene in Siodmak’s movie stages a prison meeting of the story’s protagonist, Scott Henderson (Alan Curtis), wrongly accused of murder, and his devoted secretary, Kansas (Ella Raines), who gives her despairing boss hope by promising to find the titular ‘phantom lady’, the missing witness who can prove the innocence of the accused. Exploiting chiaroscuro stylisation for maximum symbolic effect, the inmate and his visitor are illuminated by a strong back-light made to look like a single shaft of sunlight streaming through a high barred window. As in Reidenschneider’s jailhouse scene, brilliant light from above cuts through the darkness of the jail cell’s gloom, transforming the actors into shadowy, one-dimensional silhouettes, phantom figures in search of a phantom lady.
The Uncertainty Principle.
Further evidence of Siodmak’s influence emerges in comparisons of the Coens’ movie with Criss Cross, featuring Burt Lancaster as Steve Thompson, an obsessive romantic caught in a vortex of deceit and betrayal. The ‘double cross’, a common theme in classic noir, is given visual expression in Siodmak’s movie by a set design featuring a variety of crisscross patterns, particularly evident in the lattice-work decor of the Rondo, a dingy barroom where Steve and his lover Anna (Yvonne De Carlo) often meet. A similar iconic symbolism is evident in the carefully arranged mise-enscène of Nirdlinger’s department store where, during a company party, Big Dave draws Ed aside for a private chat, confesses to an extra-marital affair and confides to Ed that he is being blackmailed for $10,000. As they speak in hushed tones, shadowy images in the background decor form crisscrossing patterns, ironically signifying Ed’s secret double-cross – the very cause of Big Dave’s suffering. The signifying function of noir mise-en-scène is further developed in The Man Who Wasn’t There by incorporating circular imagery throughout (mirrors, ashtrays, light fixtures, hubcaps), subliminally insinuating the constant unsettling presence of alien flying saucers.
Another distinctive intertext in the Coen brothers’ dialogue with classic film noir is supplied by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 noir thriller Shadow of a Doubt, which the Coens acknowledge as a major influence on The Man Who Wasn’t There (Allen 2006: 179). Like the Coens’ movie, Shadow of a Doubt transfers its story and characters from the characteristic big-city setting of classic film noir (typically Los Angeles) to the quiet little town of Santa Rosa, where Hitchcock spins a dark tale of a man with a double life, by day law-abiding citizen, by night sinister serial killer. In Hitchcock’s Freud-influenced rendering of the doppelgänger, the shadow self is never exposed and the killer goes to his grave a respected man, his secret self vanishing as if it had never been there. Something similar happens to Ed Crane, whose crimes go unnoticed (even when he confesses them to Riedenschneider), but must later pay for a crime actually committed by the man he has murdered.
When Ed speaks of his detachment from fellow Santa Rosans, he seems to cherish his secret identity, for it provides him with what he perceives as a higher knowledge. While watching pedestrians on the sidewalk through the window of a moving car, Ed remarks: ‘There they were. All going about their business. It seemed like I knew a secret – a bigger one even than what had really happened to Big Dave, something none of them knew.’ The staging of this scene seems to acknowledge Hitchcock, who is said to have instructed his cinematographer for Shadow of a Doubt, Joseph Valentine, to include in his filming shots of ‘everyday people in motion’ which the director thought would create ‘an atmosphere of actuality that couldn’t be captured in any other way’ (Spicer 2002: 57). Shot from Ed’s point of view as he drives slowly down the main street observing his fellow citizens, this brief scene seems to heed Hitchcock’s advice but also to modify and distort the ‘actuality’ of Santa Rosa by employing a speed aperture change in the camera, thereby slowing down the image of Ed while accelerating the images around him. This effect produces an uncanny visual sense of Ed’s disconnection, reinforcing the sense that he had ‘made it to the outside’ while his neighbours were ‘all still struggling way down below’. The omission of ordinary street noise in this scene, replaced on the soundtrack with languid strains of Beethoven, also enhances the viewer’s sense of Ed’s separation from the ordinary world, the disjunction of sound and image intensifying the otherworldly atmosphere.
In Shadow of a Doubt the provincial American town of Santa Rosa feels threatened by sinister ‘alien’ forces. A similar mood of creeping dread pervades The Man Who Wasn’t There, articulated visually in the pervasive use of shadow imagery. Departing from film noir’s generic preoccupation with the mean streets of the big city, both films choose a small-town setting. Thus, the shadow imagery in both movies is shaped not by the sharp geometrical angles of an urban cityscape, but instead by the flowing contours of a more natural landscape, exemplified in The Man Who Wasn’t There by the delicate shadows of a waving tree branch that flicker over Ann Nirdlinger’s face when she emerges from the night at Ed’s door to share with him her paranoid fears of ‘alien’ extraterrestrials and government conspiracies. The effect of such nature-chiaroscuro is an evocation of silent dread, not the hysterical paranoia of urban noir, but rather a whispering undercurrent of existential angst spooking America’s quiet suburbs.
Masculine identity – what it means to be a man – is a recurring concern in the Coen brothers’ body of work, evident in one way or another in all their movies, especially in their noir-inflected works. The crisis of gender identity is a basic element of film noir, a common trait of the noir male protagonist who is often depicted as psychologically conflicted, damaged or otherwise emotionally victimised, and thus emasculated. The passive male victim of classic film noir has an important source in the writings of Cain, but variations on this theme are also found in classic noirs like Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd. (1950), where Joe Gillis (William Holden), a down-and-out screenwriter, becomes a gigolo for wealthy silent film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), who treats him like property and eventually kills him.
Film scholars have linked the male victim-type of film noir with the fear of passive homosexuality, which is thought to have been pervasive among post-war American men (Buchsbaum 1992). It may well have been on the minds of American males at that historical juncture, but any treatment of homosexuality in movies was strongly suppressed by the censorship of the Production Code. As if observing the delicate protocols of the 1940s censors, The Man Who Wasn’t There makes only cursory overt allusions to male homosexuality, but the film’s numerous indirect and disguised references constitute a continuous subtext. Thus the Coens choose not to approach the issue of Ed’s sexual orientation directly, instead dramatising it by introducing the ambiguous partnership between Crane and the fancy stranger with a proposition. Hints are dropped early and often. At the beginning of his story we see Ed wearing an apron; at the end, preceding his execution, he is shown having his legs shaved (as he had once done for Doris). During the course of the story, Ed is repeatedly feminised, as when one of Doris’s co-workers asks him, ‘You in ladies’ wear?’ Or when Freddy Riedenschneider refers to the cigar trimmer Ed uses to kill Big Dave as a ‘dame’s weapon’. No wonder then that ‘the pansy’ (as Big Dave refers to Creighton Tolliver) mistakes Ed for a gay man. Consider the scenario when they meet to consummate their partnership in a cheap hotel room. Tolliver is lying in bed, his toupée a bit ruffled. He gives Ed a heavy-lidded stare, a faint smile on his lips. As Ed returns the stare, the con-man loosens his tie and shoots his new partner an almost imperceptible wink. ‘Was that a pass?’ asks Ed. ‘Maybe,’ says Tolliver. Ed’s response – ‘You’re out of line, mister’ – seems too subdued, even for Ed, suggesting that his stern but gentle rejection of Tolliver’s advances betrays the barber’s uncertainty about his real inclinations.
Thus, the question, ‘What kind of man are you?’ is asked of Ed twice, first by Big Dave after he has discovered that Ed is his blackmailer. Big Dave’s query has moral implications: What kind of man would extort $10,000 from another man for sleeping with his wife? The irony of Big Dave’s outrage of course is that his own boasts of manliness are a sham based on comic-book fabrications about his he-man exploits in the war. The second time Ed hears the question it comes from his brother-in-law, who after hearing the district attorney’s accusations, loses control and attacks Ed, whom he now believes to be guilty not only of Tolliver’s murder but of his sister’s death as well. This is a secret side of Ed that takes Frank completely by surprise. But this twicerepeated interrogative has larger implications for the problem of male identity permeating The Man Who Wasn’t There, an issue introduced visually in the opening minutes of the movie as Ed discourses on the entrepreneurial success of Frank’s father August Raffo, founding owner of Guzzi’s barbershop. After lingering momentarily on Ed at his barber’s station, the camera tracks in toward an old photograph of ‘old Guzzi’ taped to the mirror. Beside it hangs an advertisement from a men’s magazine promising to ‘make you a new man’ in just fifteen minutes a day. Indeed, nearly everything about Ed Crane suggests the need for self-improvement, but the necessity of defining his masculinity, of answering the question, ‘What kind of man are you?’ seems at times to trump all others. In this context Ed’s willing partnership with an effete, dandyish stranger whose business deal offers ‘a way out’, a way to become a ‘new man’, assumes added connotations.
Viewed within the larger history of classic film noir, Tolliver ‘the pansy’ constitutes a belated reimagining of the homme fatal – the fatal male, gender-opposite of the femme fatale. As such, Tolliver’s representation of the noir homosexual offers a less menacing, more openly gay version, compared at least with hommes fatal like Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, or Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) in Laura (1944), or with Peter Lorre’s memorable characterisation of Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon. Although such characters were allowed to appear in classic Hollywood noir, their sexual identity was suppressed by censors like Joseph Breen whose policies explicitly prohibited any overt depictions of homosexuality in motion pictures. Proof of such censorship is presented in a Breen Office report on The Maltese Falcon sent to Jack Warner, specifying that the Joel Cairo character should not be openly portrayed as ‘the pansy type’ (quoted in Naremore 1998: 98). By including the character of Creighton Tolliver, the depiction of male homosexuality, largely absent in classic film noir, repressed by censorship and prevailing social attitudes, is restored to importance as part of a larger culture of repression in 1940s America. Perhaps one could say that The Man Who Wasn’t There is an attempt to mediate (to paraphrase Ed’s final words) ‘all those things they didn’t have words for’ in the era of film noir’s emergence, disclosing a hidden truth embedded in historical film noir that can only now be spoken.
Ultimately, the question of Ed’s masculine identity remains unanswered, just another uncertainty in a world under the shadow of doubt. At the end of his story, Ed Crane begins to imagine a world where doubts about identity (gender or otherwise) become irrelevant, where he might be freed from earthly constraints. Such freedom is connected, weirdly, with improbable science fiction images. Perhaps extraterrestrials in flying saucers can open a path to a world beyond, where the things he doesn’t understand on the terrestrial plane will become clearer.
The Uncertainty Principle
In his jailhouse discourse on the legal ramifications of doubt and uncertainty the hotshot lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider thinks he has come up with an ingenious defence for Doris. Invoking Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle as a method of deconstructing the judicial concept of ‘reasonable doubt’, the legal mastermind explains:
They got this guy in Germany. Fritz something-or-other. Maybe it’s Werner. Anyway, he’s got this theory, you test something, you know, scientifically – how the planets go round the sun, what sunspots are made of, why the water comes out of the tap – well, you gotta look at it. But sometimes, you look at it, your looking changes it. You can’t know the reality of what happened, or what would’ve happened if you hadn’t stuck in your own goddamn schnozz. So there is no ‘what happened’. Looking at something changes it. They call it the ‘Uncertainty Principle’.
According to physicist Werner Heisenberg, the objects of scientific observation are inevitably altered by the human observer, casting doubt on the reliability of outcomes in scientific investigations. Specifically, Heisenberg postulated the impossibility of accurately measuring variables at the subatomic level, arguing that the act of measuring alters what is being measured and concluding that the presence of the observer changes the reality of what is being measured. His theory had far-reaching implications for quantum physics, suggesting that even the nature of light (thought to be a constant) might be indeterminate. Of course, Riedenschneider’s gloss is mostly comic gibberish, but he does identify the philosophical crux of Heisenberg’s theory: human subjectivity is a source of uncertainty for all forms of investigation.
The lawyer’s strategy is to correlate this scientific principle with the legal concept of reasonable doubt. Contrary to the lawyer’s idiosyncratic interpretation, however, the Heisenberg Principle (never named as such) was in fact an attempt by the physicist to specify a provisional form of certainty for the calculation of probabilities in tracking the position and momentum of subatomic particles. In the lawyer’s reductive misreading of Heisenberg, since nothing in Doris’s case can be known with absolute certainty, since there were no witnesses to Big Dave’s murder, there can be no ‘what happened’, and thus it follows that Doris must be acquitted on the grounds of reasonable doubt. In Riedenschneider’s simplistic logic, ‘looking at something changes it’ and therefore ‘the more you look, the less you really know’. His outlandish claim that uncertainty is ‘the only fact there is’ establishes uncertainty as a universal principle. ‘Even Einstein says the guy’s on to something,’ says Riedenschneider approvingly. ‘This heinie even wrote it out in numbers.’
If nothing else, Riedenschneider’s excursus on the Uncertainty Principle gives ludic expression to the very serious crisis of doubt afflicting Ed Crane, whom the lawyer in his defence describes as ‘a man who has lost his place in the universe’. He calls Ed an example of ‘modern man’, suggesting that his predicament is an allegory of man’s growing uncertainty about his place and meaning in the universe. Ushering in this age of uncertainty, the emergence of quantum physics, and with it the threat of global nuclear destruction, gave profound proof of the contingency of human life. Describing their sense of the dominant cultural mood of the late 1940s, the Coen brothers say they envisioned ‘laymen going around saying “Einstein says light is curved” and wondering what it means, where they fit in, feeling like they’re cast adrift’ (Robson 2007: 274). As film scholars recognised early on, the meaninglessness of human existence is an essential theme in classic film noir, which in its day served as a major point of entry for the new European intellectual import called existentialism. Paul Schrader stresses the significance for film noir of the influx of Germanic filmmakers whose stylistic mannerisms gave shape to a noir universe where, in Schrader’s words, ‘style is all that separates one from meaninglessness’ (1990: 86). No doubt, the rise of existentialist thinking and its entry into the cultural mainstream, not just through motion pictures but via a variety of artistic media, constitutes an important socio-historical context to which The Man Who Wasn’t There speaks. Thus, in addition to film noir and the writings of Cain, the Coen brothers address the premiere existentialist writers of that period, in particular Albert Camus, who was inspired by Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice to write his novel The Stranger. Although the presence of existentialist ideas is not as prominent in The Man Who Wasn’t There as Cain’s influence, it cannot be said (despite what the Coen brothers might say) that their movie is just a ‘Cain story’. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a Cain story as it might have been rewritten by Camus.
Indeed, important elements that could only derive from Camus’ The Stranger find their way into the story of Ed Crane. To be sure, The Postman Always Rings Twice provides the basic narrative frame for The Man Who Wasn’t There; but in certain ways the same could be said of Camus’ The Stranger where, as in Cain’s novel, the story and its protagonist come to an end on death row. Other elements, however, such as character traits not traceable back to Cain, are shared by Ed Crane and Meursault, the titular ‘stranger’ of Camus’ novel. Most notably, both share a profound aversion to the spoken word. Meursault’s distinguishing trait is his taciturnity. Like the silent barber, he is a man who doesn’t waste words on idle conversation. When asked during his murder trial, for instance, if he has anything to say in his defence, Meursault tells the judge, ‘I rarely have anything much to say. So, naturally I keep my mouth shut’ (1958: 82). Ed Crane is just as loath to verbalise his experience, as he wearily announces at the beginning of his narrative: ‘Me, I don’t talk much … I just cut hair.’ Most times the only response Ed can manage is his characteristic gesture, the slightest of nods.
The self-estrangement from verbal intercourse that marks these characters has its emotional equivalent in the lack of meaningful interpersonal relationships in both their lives. Meursault gives little credence to notions of love or emotional attachment. He is indifferent to his girlfriend’s affections and appears to feel no grief after his mother’s death. When asked how he felt after his mother’s funeral, Meursault answers that in recent years he had ‘lost the habit of noting [his] feelings’ (1958: 80). Ed’s emotional disconnectedness is reflected in his loveless marriage to Doris, who, only a few weeks after they met asked him to marry her because ‘she liked it that I didn’t talk much’. Thus the amatory passion of The Postman Always Rings Twice’s Frank and Cora, essential to Cain’s lovers as the central determinant of their fate, is drained entirely from the relationships of Meursault and Ed Crane. Ed’s aloof silence is the outward sign of his refusal to participate in the routine conventions of everyday life and, at a deeper level, of his suppressed spiritual unease. Ed’s silence makes him a social outsider. His almost total disinterest in small talk frequently creates awkward silences. Because Ed does not observe the usual conventions of social decorum his behaviour makes an unsettling impression. In this way he is ‘alien’. His silence makes him inscrutable, urging others to ask, ‘What kind of a man are you?’ A similar question of identity haunts Meursault. His murder trial, like Ed’s, is in many ways an attempt to establish what kind of man he is.
The hero of Cain’s novel is a drifter, a self-professed ‘gypsy’ and thus a social outsider, but he is far from silent. Moreover, Frank Chambers exudes a primitive vitality and connectedness with physical reality that differentiates him fundamentally from the detached indifference of Crane or Meursault. Accordingly, Frank is at home in the world of things. He hungers for the physical and seems unburdened by metaphysical longings. Frank is never granted that ‘leap of consciousness’ into the lucid awareness of the absurd that in The Stranger happens suddenly, almost involuntarily, at the moment Meursault shoots his Arab antagonist. Meursault’s violence seems to lack any clear motive; he kills a stranger on impulse and later tells the judge that he could think of no particular reason for his action. The crucial difference between these two outsiders resides in Meursault’s transformation from detached, unreflective passivity to active reflection and self-awareness. Even though he appears to kill without reason, his act finds purpose in its consequences as it initiates Meursault’s evolution from common man to existential man. Whatever else Camus may have borrowed from Cain, this transition, Meursault’s leap of consciousness, constitutes a significant philosophical renovation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, restoring to Cain that oft-noted absence of a philosophical framework and giving back to Cain’s characters what their author had denied them: an awareness of their absurd condition. Ed’s feeling of the absurd begins when he is forced to murder Big Dave in self-defence. From that point on Ed feels a growing awareness, the sense that he knows some big secret that the others do not.
Allusions to Sartre and his 1938 novel Nausea are also incorporated into the Coens’ existentialist pastiche. The bouts of nausea suffered by Sartre’s protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, caused by the stifling awareness of life’s meaninglessness and absurdity, find their equivalent in the distaste with which Ed Crane confronts his reality. Roquentin’s disgust is triggered by the overwhelming presence of a physical reality unmediated by human thought and indifferent to human subjectivity. The unintelligibility of the real that causes Roquentin’s nausea is, as Sartre explains in an essay on Camus’ The Stranger, the consequence of an ‘inability to think, with our words and concepts, what happens in the world’ (1957: 33). Without the mediating illusions of language and conceptual thought, external reality begins to lose its comfortable familiarity. The real becomes viscous, thick with the density of a world now crowded with a mass of ‘things divorced from their names’. Of these nameless things Roquentin says: ‘They are there, grotesque, headstrong, gigantic, and it seems ridiculous … to say anything at all about them: I am in the midst of things, nameless things’ (2013: 125). This crisis of language forces him to confront a reality stripped of causality and revealed as absurd. Ed Crane’s Sartrean disgust manifests itself in his shared aversion to the viscous density of the real. Presumably, it is Ed’s hope for deliverance from the messy entanglements of material reality that motivates the barber’s interest in the new method of laundering called ‘dry’ cleaning. As Ed enters the bathroom to shave Doris’s legs, a task he no doubt regards as an unpleasant reminder of his barber’s duties, he thinks of dry cleaning, describing its attraction in terms that emphasise its sterile purity: ‘Clean. No water. Chemicals.’ The promise of quick riches in dry cleaning offers him a ‘way out’ not only from the economic enslavement of being a lowly barber but from the nauseating materiality of the real, which Ed, the barber, confronts ceaselessly in the tangles of human hair he cuts off that go ‘down the drain’ but that won’t stop growing. His friendship with ‘Birdy’ promises another clean getaway. Listening to the ethereal strains of Beethoven she rehearses gives Ed a sense of transcendent peace, momentarily enabling him, as Birdy’s name reminds us, to ‘fly away.’
The full extent of the Coens’ existentialist rendering of Cain becomes evident in a comparative reading of the endings of The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Stranger and The Man Who Wasn’t There, where in all three stories the condemned protagonist re-examines his life from a cell on death row. Facing the certainty of death, Frank Chambers’ final thoughts give shape to a longing for ‘another life after this one’. Uncertain whether Cora, before dying, understood that he didn’t kill her intentionally in the car crash, Frank hopes for an afterlife so that he can convince her of his innocence: ‘I didn’t do it, I know that. That’s what I’m going to tell her, if I ever see her again.’ Frank quells his fear of death with memories of himself and Cora united, floating on the gentle swells of the ocean where they had once experienced a fleeting glimpse of transcendent harmony: ‘Whenever I can make it, I’m out there with Cora, with the sky above us, and the water around us, talking about how happy we’re going to be, and how it’s going to last forever.’ When Frank is with Cora in this remembered moment he has hope for a life beyond: ‘Out there with Cora, that’s when it seems real, about another life’ (Cain 1982: 101). But Frank’s notion of transcendence as ‘out there’ lacks conviction. His vision of a world beyond, where he will be reconciled with Cora seems little more than a doomed man’s desperate fantasy. If anything, Frank’s imagined reunion with Cora recalls the Freudian concept of ‘oceanic feeling’, a sense of self-dissolution associated with regressions to the maternal origin of the womb.
By contrast, Meursault’s story ends without hope for an afterlife. Asked by the prison priest how he imagines the afterlife, Meursault shouts at the clergyman that he has very little time left and he is not going ‘to waste it on God’ (Camus 1958: 150). His leap of consciousness has washed him clean and emptied him of hope. Gazing up at the darkened sky, ‘spangled with its signs and stars’, Camus’ existential anti-hero is now able to ‘open his heart to the benign indifference of the universe’ (1958: 154).
Like Meursault, Frank Chambers is also visited by a priest promising the afterlife, but Frank remains skeptical of the priest’s vision of Kingdom Come. Only when he thinks of being ‘out there’ with Cora does it seem possible: ‘That’s when it all seems real, about another life, not with all this stuff how Father McConnell has got it figured out. When I’m with her I believe it. When I start to figure, it all goes blooey’ (Cain 1982: 101). In other words, when Frank applies human reason to ‘figure’ or calculate the universe’s unintelligible mysteries, he fails. In his final speech Ed Crane likewise expresses a hope for a reunion with Doris in another world:
I don’t know where I’m being taken. I don’t know what waits for me, beyond the earth and sky. But I’m not afraid to go. Maybe the things I don’t understand will be clearer there, like when the fog blows away. Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her … all those things … they don’t have words for here.
In their proximity to those of Frank Chambers, Ed’s final words might seem merely a re-inscription of the ending of Cain’s novel. Frank’s dream of being ‘out there’ with Cora and his desire for reconciliation are reiterated in Ed’s departing monologue. But, whereas Frank has naturalised the idea of transcendence as ‘out there’ in the ocean, reducing the transcendent to the elemental, Ed cannot give material shape or location to the afterlife. It’s just somewhere ‘beyond the earth and sky’. Throughout his story, Ed has given no indication of religious beliefs. Apparently, Ed no more believes in an eternal afterlife than Doris, who believes, according to Ed, ‘that our reward is on this earth and bingo is probably the extent of it’. Ed shares neither Frank’s naive agnosticism nor Meursault’s unapologetically atheistic repudiation of the eternal hereafter. What distinguishes Ed’s parting words most notably from those of his literary models is his hope for communion with Doris somewhere beyond words, where they are freed from the prison-house of language. Ed has followed Meursault in taking the leap into the absurd, but he has also accepted the linguistic consequences of his leap: the world ‘beyond’ must be beyond language. It must make possible what Camus calls the ‘odd state of soul in which the void become eloquent,’ creating space for the raw experience of ‘lucid’ awareness that results from the existentialist’s heightened consciousness of the absurd (1958: 12).
In his final hours on death row, Frank Chambers reveals he has been writing down his story and that his priest has promised to find for it a publisher. Likewise, Ed Crane confesses that he is writing the story he has just told for a ‘men’s magazine’. In revealing that he has been writing for a cheesy pulp magazine (and being paid by the word), Ed casts suspicion on the reliability of his story. Perhaps, like Frank’s dream of Cora ‘out there’, Ed’s story is an elaborate fantasy fabricated to escape the terrible reality of his impending death. Perhaps, in Riedenschneider phrase, there is no ‘what happened’ in Ed’s story. Perhaps the tale Ed has just told us is a fiction, no more credible than Big Dave’s war stories or Creighton Tolliver’s promise of a fortune to be made in dry cleaning. This uncertainty makes Ed an unreliable narrator, and his story merely an illustration that the world of imagination, like the ‘real’ world itself, is always a subjective construct, its meaning subject to doubt and the vagaries of human interpretation. Nevertheless, by putting his life story into words, Ed has been able to get some distance and now he can see his life as a whole and realise that ‘all those twists and turns are the shape of your life’.
When he ‘pulls away from the maze’ and perceives the larger pattern of his life, Ed finds a ‘way out’ in the act of storytelling. In doing so, Ed finds salvation in the human imagination, which makes possible an escape into alternate dimensions of consciousness, where anything is possible, even UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. Thus, on the eve of his execution Ed is inexplicably free to wander from his prison cell (despite being on ‘death watch’) and mysteriously drawn to the prison yard where a flying saucer hovers, perhaps communicating with Ed, who nods ambiguously. What are we to make of this alien visitation? Significantly, Ed’s UFO encounter takes place just after the disclosure that he is writing his story for a men’s magazine like those littering Ed’s prison cell with titles like ‘Muscle Power’, ‘Stalwart’ or ‘The Unheard-Of’, which features an article entitled ‘I Was Abducted by Aliens’. Like Frank’s imaginary voyages ‘out there’ with Cora, perhaps Ed’s encounter with an unidentified flying object is nothing more than the fantasy of a narrator who wasn’t really ever there.