Coen Brothers Final Day Three: The Man Who Wasn't There

(note: this might be a reprint, but since he borrowed my paper topic for the final, I'm re-posting it with the question I'm not allowed to answer again...)

3. Discuss The Man Who Wasn't There as the Coens' attempt to recreate or recapture the experience of classic, historical film noir. In what ways do they achieve this recreation? In what ways do they elaborate the genre of film noir, by adding a new element or recognizing a neglected aspect and amplifying it?

More than Noir:

The Man Who Wasn’t There and Critical Approaches to Film Noir

Film noir has a rather unique place in film history, and a role we may consider to be trans-genre(ic). In his exploration of noir More Than Night, James Naremore lays out the particular problem of conceptualizing this amorphous term:

There is in fact no completely satisfactory way to organize the category; and despite scores of books and essays that have been written about it, nobody is sure whether the films in question constitute a period, a genre, a cycle, a style, or simply a ‘phenomenon’. (9)

For Naremore, “film noir is an unusually baggy concept, elaborated largely after the fact of the films themselves” (5). There is a unifying theory of film noir, based largely on a set of “markers”: black and white photography, a flashback structure, existential themes, urban settings, an affinity for water, the “femme fatale”, high contrast lighting, location shooting, chiaroscuro, voice-over narration, and stories borrowed from hard-boiled detective fiction. However, few films that can be characterized as “film noir” have all of these characteristics. In fact, several of them – Laura, for example – have very few of the “accepted” descriptors.

In the introduction to More Than Night, Naremore proposes we set these contradictory elements aside, suggesting that “no matter what modifier we attach to a category, we can never establish clear boundaries and uniform traits. Nor can we have a ‘right’ definition – only a series of more or less interesting uses” (6). Joel and Ethan Coen, however, have other plans with their homage to film noir, The Man Who Wasn’t There.

The film is both an encapsulation of and a commentary on noir, not merely as a style, but as a concept. By sidestepping specific references (although there are many direct references to Double Indemnity, The Asphalt Jungle, and The Postman Always Rings Twice), the Coen brothers instead make The Man Who Wasn’t There embody film noir as it was embraced – and arguably invented - ex post facto by the French critical circle of the 1950s.

The Man Who Wasn’t There is an anomaly for 2001 (when it was made): the black and white film relies heavily on narration from Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton), a character who otherwise says almost nothing to anyone else. Speaking directly to the audience, Crane makes the viewer aware of a James M. Cain (author of Double Indemnity)-esque crime involving adultery, blackmail, murder… and dry cleaning. Almost immediately, the Coen brothers begin to alternately recreate “period” film noir and to deconstruct it.

For example, most Film Noir uses some variation on Jazz as its musical accompaniment, along with a score that emphasizes the impending doom of its protagonist for effect. In The Man Who Wasn't There, virtually all musical cues are attributed to Beethoven, with some accompaniment by Carter Burwell. Rather than include music of the period, the Coen brothers revise film noir based on the existential dread of the future. If the characters are consistently looking to the past and away from the future, it stands to reason that conceptual film noir would do the same with its music. Accordingly, all traces of contemporaneous music (i.e. Jazz) would – and should – be removed in favor for the ultimate reminder of the past: Classical compositions.

Elsewhere, The Man Who Wasn’t There includes incongruous references to UFO imagery, part of a late move in neo-noir that includes films like Blade Runner and Dark City. While this iconography appears to have no place – and no referent – in “classic” film noir, it is nevertheless a component of Naremore’s More Than Night and, accordingly, would fit into the Coen brothers’ abstract recreation of the genre. This deconstruction leaves viewers with a sense of both “authentic” and “revisionist” noir simultaneously.

The Coen brothers set out to replicate film noir in an all-encompassing fashion, including as many possible elements from the “baggy concept” into one film. Simultaneously, The Man Who Wasn’t There is both “film noir” embodied in one movie and a commentary on the way the term was constructed. This hybrid status affords Joel and Ethan Coen the ability to do more than freely adapt film noir; they are also allowed to comment on its critical development intertextually and discursively. The revisionist elements seem to reflect shifts and contradictions within the critical community to “noir” as a concept, making The Man Who Wasn’t There both noir and “more than noir” at the same time.