Coen Noir
Reviewing The Man Who Wasn’t There.

By Thomas Hibbs, professor of philosophy at Boston College & author of Shows About Nothing.
November 22-25, 2001

t the end of American Beauty (1999 Oscar winner for best picture), Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) reflects back on his life and states that he feels nothing but "gratitude" for his "stupid little life." In The Man Who Wasn't There, the Coen brothers' latest offering, Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) reaches a similar conclusion about his life. As he was living it, he couldn't identify any "pattern," but looking back on the "whole" of his life, he sees its "shape" and finds "peace." Both Lester Burnham and Ed Crane are nowhere men, lacking depth and purpose, who make various attempts at becoming someone. But here the similarities end. In spite of its pseudo-profundity, American Beauty captivates the audience through Lester Burnham's quest to experience something more than the living death he has lapsed into in mid-life. By contrast, Ed Crane is never as alive, never as repulsive or as entertaining, as Burnham. Amid a series of astonishing events, Ed remains fundamentally unchanged, static, and disconnected from events and others.

The great attraction of The Man Who Wasn't There is visual. The film has all the stylistic trappings of noir: the late '40s setting, the black and white color scheme, enhanced to render the contrasts more pronounced, the persistent use of the voiceover technique, a central character who is a detached loner, a sullen, pensive men who seems a step behind everyone else but is actually able to see (or almost see) what others cannot. It also deploys standard structural features of noir: Its main character is trapped in a sort of labyrinth, a "maze" as Ed calls it, from which he cannot emerge and in which he struggles to find a sense of direction.

Classic noir, which emerged as a counter to the optimism of postwar America, often unveiled the dark consequences of desire in an increasingly consumerist America. The Man Who Wasn't There plays off of some of these same themes. Ed has a successful career as a barber, a bungalow with all the latest household conveniences, and an attractive wife, who works as an accountant. "You could say," Ed intones at the outset, "I had it all." (Again, one detects an echo of American Beauty.) But Ed wants, or at least seems to want, more. What he seems to want initially is more money, a piece of the burgeoning economy; what he really wants is an escape, but into what?

The film does not answer that question; not only is it unanswerable but even its significance is suspect. And this underscores a contrast between classic noir and Coen noir. The former is redolent with a sense of mystery, of depth, of the power of desire to lead to something more than the conventional conceptions of happiness or to unleash an utterly destructive chain of events. And classic noir often found ways of reaffirming the America ethos. The Man Who Wasn't There contains neither the explosive nor the redemptive possibilities of classic noir.

The Man Who Wasn't There is neither as dark nor as funny as Blood Simple, the Coens' first foray into noir. The funniest scenes in the current film play on chance misunderstandings, on the gap between what Ed knows or thinks he knows and what others know or think they know. When Ed's wife, Doris (Frances McDormand), is implicated in a crime that Ed committed, he confesses, only to be told by the high-priced lawyer that he will have to come up with something more credible than that. The last third of the film, much of which is played out in court, bears a slight resemblance to Kafka's The Trial. But, since Ed has only the appearance of an inner existence, Ed is not really a tragic figure. He moves with such equanimity, so placidly, through all of these twists of fate that the viewer feels little sense of horror.

The Coen brothers are obviously turning traditional noir motifs inside out. The most subversive departure concerns the absence of erotic desire in the main character. Ed and Doris are childless, and, as he admits in technically precise language, have not "performed the sexual act" in many years. Early in the film, Ed cuts the hair of a businessman, Creighton Tolliver (Jon Pollito), who plants in Ed's mind the possibility of a get rich scheme involving dry cleaning. Unable to shake the thought of this venture, Ed visits Tolliver in his hotel and offers to finance the business. When Ed detects that Tolliver, henceforth called the "pansy," is interested in something more than a financial partnership, Ed cuts him off, "You're way out of line." Later, Ed develops a seemingly Lolita-like fixation on a young girl, whose piano playing he admires. But the asexual Ed is aghast when she responds sexually. Indeed, Ed has no strong desires of any sort. Since all of his aspirations are prompted by the suggestions of others, the frustration of his designs hardly seems significant.

In a voiceover, Ed explains that he met Doris on a blind date, she got drunk and a few weeks later she suggested they get married. When he asks whether she doesn't feel the need to get to know him better, she laughs off the suggestion: "Why, does it get better?" Ed admits that there wasn't much more to know, that they knew each other as well in those first days as they do now. In fact, the film's message is "the more you look, the less there is to see…the less you really know." From the title to Ed's confession that he is a "ghost" in an "empty home," the film highlights Ed as a hollow man, superior to others only in his willingness to keep looking, in his fleeting glimpse of his own absence. Even the impressive visuals, which produce such clear distinctions between dark and light that individuals often appear as flat, dark surfaces with no depth, reinforce this point. In this respect and on its own terms, the film succeeds in matching form to content and in drawing the viewer to Ed, whose semblance of a life evokes no grand emotions, certainly not sorrow or horror, but only an evanescent chill.