or, Four Things I Noticed While Watching the Coen Brothers' Free Adaptation of Classic Noir:
1. Posture - Specifically Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton)'s posture during most of the movie. When he's not sitting in a particular pose (such as when he's at the dinner table with Doris [Frances McDormand], Anne [Katharine Borowitz] and Big Dave [James Gandolfini]), Ed is almost always seated as though he's sitting in an electric chair - apropos, considering the end of the film. When he isn't, it tends to have some bearing on the subtext of the scene- note in particular how Ed sits when he's listening to Birdy playing music - or is indicative of his attitude towards another character (the scenes with Ed and the Pansy [Jon Polito]). Admittedly, I picked some of this up from the commentary track with the Coens and Billy Bob Thornton, but unlike many of the other seemingly pointless information they share, this seems to have some bearing on the film.
2. UFO Imagery - There's a consistent theme of circular imagery in the Coen brothers films, but The Man Who Wasn't There pushes it well into another arena. During almost every scene one can find at least one, if not more, UFO shaped objects: ashtrays, light fixtures, perfume bottles, hubcaps, tables, shadows, or pillars of light. You can watch the movie looking for nothing other than specifically this and still find plenty to do. By the time (spoiler) the actual UFO appears, you should be well conditioned to the shape from its omnipresence in the film.
3. The Noir "Ideal" - After discussing the film, I feel strongly that the brothers Coen were trying less to pay homage to specific noir films (although there are many direct references to Double Indemnity, The Asphalt Jungle, and The Postman Always Rings Twice), and were instead stepping above that citation to make a film that embodies film noir as it was embraced ex post facto by the French Critical Circle of the 1950s. Most of their direct revisions seems to reflect ideas about film noir that aren't always consistent from film to film in what's considered the "canon" (let's say Double Indemnity to Kiss Me Deadly).
For example, most Film Noir uses some variation on Jazz as its musical accompaniment, along with a score that announces "DOOM!" for some character. In The Man Who Wasn't There, almost all of the music is by Beethoven, with some accompaniment by Carter Burwell. In this instance, rather than include music of the period, the Coens play to the critical concept in noir of always looking to the past, of which you don't get much further than classical music. The film is built around incorporating all of the "essential" elements of film noir (save for the obsession with water) into one film, which is why it feels less like any specific film and more like an encapsulation of the movement. Speaking of which...
4. Film Professors Like to Shoehorn Their Theories Into Just About Anything - Look, I don't mind that you have a pet theory that Ed Crane is a closeted homosexual and you can find plenty of circumstantial evidence in the film to support it. Certainly it's a well mined topic in films like Double Indemnity and Laura, so I get why you want to go there. However, there is a point at which when certain professors are simply unwilling to hear counter-arguments from other students (actually not the Cap'n in this case) based on comparably solid evidence in the film that you start to sound silly. Like when you imply that all "men's magazines" meant "something else back then..." I'm even on board with the fact that the entire story of The Man Who Wasn't There could have been something Ed Crane made up because a magazine paid him to, but it's really embarrassing to think that as a film scholar (or teacher of criticism), only your take - based on your particular obsessions in film history - is the only way to read a cinematic text. But that's how you presented the "Ed Crane is a homosexual" theory, and it will no doubt be a question on the final exam...
Things like that really make the Cap'n wonder if he's cut out for the world of Film Criticism.
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