Coen Bros: The Man Who Wasn’t There

So: Minnesota, self-effacement, inner pride. Where does this combination come from? It must be something in the water of those 10,000 lakes. But there’s a little bit more. Schulz was taught, from an early age, that the worst thing a man can do is call attention to himself — not out of propriety, but out of self-preservation. He was taught by his father the “Tallest Poppy” philosophy of political rule, wherein the tallest poppies of a community get their blooms cut off by the powers that be. To borrow a WWI image, the man who sticks his head out of the trench is the man who gets his head blown off. Knowledge of this philosophy is useful in politics, notes Schulz’s biographer, but it is equally useful in barbering.

Schulz’s father, and Charlie Brown’s, as every schoolchild knows, was a barber.

Schulz haunts The Man Who Wasn’t There. The movie is set in Santa Rosa, CA, where Schulz eventually made his permanent home, and set in the late 1940s, when Schulz was developing his comic strip, and was made in 2000, right after Schulz’s death. It takes place in a context of postwar anomie and uncertainty, a mine-ridden landscape of paranoia, depression and sublimated, frustrated desire, just as Peanuts does. Schulz, like Ed Crane (the movie’s protagonist), harbors a bleak, pessimistic grudge against the bulk of humanity, one he keeps well hidden. Like Peanuts, the movie occasionally bursts the bounds of its form and becomes weird, philosophical and unapologetically poetic. It also features, of all things, a young pianist who plays Beethoven. Maybe this is all coincidence, maybe not, maybe it’s, as I say, something in the water of Minnesota, but if there were a character in The Man Who Wasn’t There who owns a beagle I would probably jump out of my skin.

If Ed Crane, “the barber,” is Charles Schulz’s father, that would make his wife’s unborn child Schulz himself, a child never given a chance to live in a world too filled with sadness to give him love. Thing is, Schulz would probably recognize that judgment as a sober assessment of his life.

(It might also make the unborn child “the man who wasn’t there,” since he was not allowed to live.)

In any case, enough of that.

THE LITTLE MAN: In this, the least-ironic of all Coen movies (until recently, that is), Ed Crane is a barber who wants to become a dry cleaner. He’s not a three-time loser after a bag of money, or a brilliant young man with a vision, or a desperate man one step ahead of the law. He’s an ordinary man with a perfectly drab ambition. Yet even this tiny little hope for a better life ends up destroying his world, ruining the lives of everyone he knows.

Why does Ed Crane want to become a dry cleaner? As in most Coen movies, it is shown that the ordinary working man is little more than a sheep whose life is spent being prepared for slaughter by the greater forces of capital. “I’m the barber,” says Ed, in a tone of voice that implies that “the barber” is synonymous with “nobody” (Freddie Riedenschneider echoes this sentiment at another point in the movie).

In the Coen world, there simply is no such thing as an honest living. Anyone with money is a fraud, a criminal or insane. Big Dave Brewster seems to be rich, but he’s not, he’s living on his wife’s money. Freddie Riedenschneider has money, but he’s a lawyer, and a fraud on top of it. And they all bow down the The Bank, the institution that patiently stands by, a pillar of the community, waiting for misfortune to strike its citizens so it can accept the assets handed over to it in times of crisis.

So Ed wants to become a dry cleaner because, in his mind, it’s a way to get his head above the rat race. The man he’s investing with, Creighton Tolliver, even assures him that he won’t have to do any work to make money off the business — the perfect American dream, having just enough capital to start a business that someone else will run, while you sit idly by, collecting money from the suckers. He wants to get his head up above the rat race, but, as we see, those who stick their heads up, the tallest poppies, get their heads blown off. That’s how harsh the worldview of The Man Who Wasn’t There is: even a barber who wishes only to become a dry-cleaner is guilty of hubris, and must be destroyed by the powers-that-be.

Where is there hope in The Man Who Wasn’t There? Ed seeks value in Art, the intangible something that seems to suggest that beauty and balance and the sublime are possible — and he is told, forcefully, to seek value elsewhere. Walter Abundas, Ed’s lawyer friend, seeks solace in the study of genealogy — he finds comfort in roots, in people long dead. And that’s about all Man offers in terms of hope. Big Dave eats and smokes and brags and embezzles, Doris drinks and smokes and reads magazines, her brother Frank doesn’t seem to have brain in his head, Freddie Riedenschneider lies and eats, and Creighton Tolliver wants only to start a business. (It turns out, against all odds, that Tolliver is not a fraud — he’s just one more guy who stuck his head up and got it shot off.)

(It’s also worth noting that classical music, which symbolizes “Art” for this movie, is also used as a force of crass capitalism, as Freddie Riedenschneider is seen preparing for his court appearance in the “Turandot Suite” of his hotel and stuffing his face at a restaurant called Da Vinci’s — so much for art supplying life with beauty and meaning.)

There is also a tender, convincing love story at the center of The Man Who Wasn’t There. Ed is married to Doris, although he can’t really think of a good reason why, and decides to exploit his marriage for capital gain. The results of his attempt are disastrous, but as the movie goes on, we see Ed, in his own quiet way, finally fall in love with his wife. There is no love scene more sweet and honestly felt in the Coen cannon than the one where Ed confesses the murder of Big Dave to Freddie Riedenschneider and the two of them trade sad, loving glances across the table, as though Doris is finally seeing Ed for the first time and liking what she sees. If Doris could speak in that scene, I think she would say something like “Ed, I never knew — if you had told me you were capable of blackmail and murder, I think I could have loved you.”

Because the one thing that Ed and Doris share is their contempt for humanity. Doris is capable of expressing hers, Ed is not. Doris can get drunk and curse out her family, or tell a pesky salesman to fuck off, or laugh in the face of a murder accusation. Ed is capable of little besides a tiny nod of his head, but his dread and hatred of people is palpable.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: The police in The Man Who Wasn’t There are interesting. They are not thugs, brutes or clowns, as they are in other Coen movies. What they are are, to a man, self-loathing. They gripe about pulling shit detail, they get depressed about having to break bad news, they mope and drink and sigh and curse.

If the noirs of Chandler and Cain took place against the backdrop of World War II, with the detectives representing stand-ins for American soldiers, the noir of Man has a specifically postwar bent, with those same soldiers feeling guilty and ashamed of the actions they were required to take against the enemy. The Japanese theater of the war is explicitly invoked several times in Man, as well as Nagasaki. To a large extent, the euphoria of America’s victory in WWII gave way quickly to a sense of guilt and dishonor, since we knew that, on some level, we had cheated to win and, in the process, had ushered into the world a horror a thousand times worse than a sneak attack on a military base in Hawaii.

(Strangely, Barton Fink takes place at the time of Pearl Harbor, in Los Angeles no less, but alludes only to the Germans and Italians — conversely, Man talks only about the war against Japan and does not mention Germany or Italy at all [unless you count the Italians Doris is related to].)

(And, for the record, Charles Schulz fought in WWII, but in Europe, not the Pacific.)

The anxiety the US felt about the atom age became expressed in tales of UFO sightings, a fact Man expresses with great comic skill and no small amount of poetry. In a way, you could say that Man is about 1949 — it’s almost as though the Coens decided on a date, then looked at an almanac of “things prevalent in 1949,” then wrote a plot based on that list. Postwar anxiety — check, dry-cleaning — check, UFO fever — check, the rise of men’s magazines — check, the postwar boom in classical music — check.

HAIR: Ed worries a lot about hair. What is it, where does it come from, why does it grow, how does it relate to the possibility of a soul? In a brilliant move of philosophical jiu-jitsu, Ed reasons that, if hair keeps growing after the body dies, “the soul” is the thing that keeps it growing, and when the soul dies, then the hair stops. Otherwise, why would it keep growing? Of course, he answers his own question, in another scene, while thinking about dry-cleaning: “chemicals,” he intones, and the single word wraps up the totality of mid-20th-century discomfort — where are we going, what have we done, what does anything mean any more?

(As a side note, let me mention that Ed shaves Doris’s leg as he plans the scheme that will end in her death — likewise, his leg is shaved by a prison employee as he goes to the electric chair.)

THE MELTING POT: Race is always important in a Coen movie, yet in Man the issue becomes cloudy. Ed seems pretty WASPy, that seems clear enough, but he’s married to Doris, who is played by Frances McDormand, who is not Italian, yet she is the sister of Frank, who is played by Michael Badalucco, who very much is Italian, and Doris even goes out of her way to insult her family as “wops.” Is she supposed to be Italian, or adopted, or what? Likewise, Big Dave is played by the manifestly Italian James Gandofini, yet his name is Dave Brewster, which indicates that perhaps he has changed it, as many Italians did in the US, the better to improve their circumstances, to get their heads out of the rat race. In contrast, “Guzzi,” the long-dead originator of the barber shop where Ed and Frank work, is an example of the Italian immigrant who didn’t change his name, and thus was “the barber,” relegated to a lifetime of anonymous irrelevance. Likewise, Creighton Tolliver is played by the unabashedly Italian Jon Polito, another example of an immigrant seeking a higher station in life through a change of names. Likewise, the “Frenchman” who teaches piano in San Francisco is played by Adam Alexi-Malle, who is Spanish, Italian and Sienese — but not French. Freddie Riedenschneider, for his part, is a typical Coenesque Jew, and is played by Lebanese actor (and fellow Midwesterner) Tony Shaloub.

FAVORITE MOMENT: Freddie Riedenschneider cannot be sure of the name of the man who devised the Uncertainty Principle. He also totally misrepresents it — which is fine, since his interpretation matches most laypersons understanding of the concept.

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The Man Who Wasn’t There is one of the Coens’ most straightforward, honest and heartfelt movies — no wonder it bombed. They stuck their heads up and got them blown off.

What they’ve done, in a way, is expose the subtext of noir — if noir was about wartime stress and postwar anxiety dressed up in the language of lies and betrayals, then Man states those themes explicitly. Freddie Riedenschneider points to Ed and calls him “Modern Man,” and I honestly think the Coens, with that speech, indulge in a rare moment of hand-tipping. I think they really mean for Ed to be a symbol of Modern Man, and they are very serious about his quiet search for beauty and meaning in a hollow world of talkers.