25 Years Ago, The Coen Brothers Delivered a Hard-Boiled Noir With a Sci-Fi Twist
The Man Who Wasn't There finds the uncanny in a gritty crime story.
Even before any mention of strange phenomena, things seems slightly off-kilter in the noir-inspired world of the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There. Set in 1949 and shot in luminous black and white by cinematographer Roger Deakins, The Man Who Wasn’t There clearly evokes the classic era of film noir. Its plot about an ordinary man whose criminal plans spiral out of control is straight out of the noir playbook, and star Billy Bob Thornton delivers near-constant deadpan narration.
Yet The Man Who Wasn’t There, which was released 25 years ago this week, could fit in just as easily as part of The Twilight Zone, presenting a stark morality play with elements of the uncanny. The sleepy town of Santa Rosa, California, is far removed from hubs of scientific advancement, but word about the Soviet development of atomic bombs still reaches the barber shop where Thornton’s Ed Crane works with his garrulous brother-in-law Frank Raffo (Michael Badalucco). The impending atomic age provides the backdrop for Ed’s ill-fated scheme, launched when he meets sweaty entrepreneur Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito).
Tolliver touts the revolutionary new technology of dry cleaning, something that’s as inscrutable to Ed as nuclear energy, and just as enthralling. “It’s all done with chemicals, friend,” Tolliver tells him, like he’s a mad scientist explaining the mutation process in one of the monster movies that were on the verge of overtaking movie theaters. That’s enough for Ed to commit to investing $10,000 that he doesn’t have, for reasons that are never quite clear, either to the audience or to Ed himself.
To procure the money, Ed decides to blackmail Big Dave Brewster (James Gandolfini), the boss and lover of Ed’s wife Doris (Frances McDormand). It’s another compulsion that he neither explains nor seems to understand, even though he knows that it will ruin Big Dave’s life and possibly lead to wider repercussions. It’s just something he has to do, like a Twilight Zone character pulled along by forces outside his control.
Ed decides to blackmail the boss and lover of his wife Doris.
Santa Rosa itself resembles one of Rod Serling’s hermetically sealed worlds, and Ed sees himself as the only one who can break out of its confines. After he’s forced to take drastic action against Big Dave, he looks out at the crowd of everyday people on the streets and sees himself as having transcended the limitations of their lives: “Like I had made it to the outside somehow and they were still struggling way down below.” At times, he seems like some sort of robot or alien attempting to comprehend and mimic human behavior, even as he’s unable to resist his darkest human impulses.
Then there are the UFOs. After an hour of the movie’s otherworldly mood-building, Ed gets a late-night visit from Big Dave’s wife Ann (Katherine Borowitz), dressed in black and veiled like an apparition. She tells a story about Big Dave being abducted by aliens while on a camping trip in Oregon, and assures Ed that she blames a government conspiracy for the bad things that have happened to Big Dave. “Sometimes knowledge is a curse, Ed,” she tells him, in a line that could be lifted from any 1950s sci-fi movie.
Is it daylight filtering in, or the light from a UFO?
Ed maintains his customary poker face while Ann tells him this fantastical story, but he can’t escape the looming possibility of extraterrestrial presence on Earth. Later, after all his plans have completely fallen apart, he comes across a Life magazine article titled “Dry Cleaning: The Wave of the Future,” right next to an article about the supposed UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico. A light shines down from above in the stark room where Ed meets with attorney Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shalhoub), as if the aliens have come to retrieve him. When Ed gets in a car accident, the car’s hubcap looks like a UFO as it flies across the screen, as does the doctor’s head mirror when Ed wakes up in the hospital.
Near the end of the movie, at the moment when he’s accepted the grim fate of so many noir characters, Ed experiences a vision of the UFO itself. The Coens abandon all semblance of reality as they send Ed off to his final reckoning, and the stark black-and-white imagery looks more like the inside of an alien vessel than anything that has ever appeared in a noir film. Ed has broken out of his small-town existence, just as he wanted, and he’s ended up in a dimension far beyond anything a hard-boiled would-be criminal could imagine.
