MOVIE REVIEW: The Man Who Wasn't There (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2001)

The Man Who Wasn't There on IMDb

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I'll be lazy and quote the Barber Paradox from Wikipedia: 

"The barber is a man in town who shaves all those, and only those, men in town who do not shave themselves."
From this, asking the question "Who shaves the barber?" results in a paradox because according to the statement above, he can either shave himself, or go to the barber (which happens to be himself). However, neither of these possibilities are valid: they both result in the barber shaving himself, but he cannot do this because he only shaves those men "who do not shave themselves".
 
Now, Bertrand Russell devised this paradox for more technical reasons, but I believe that in this movie it is alluded to in order to express the chronic, almost logical not-belonging of the main character, who is a barber. Of course, he begins the narration by stating that he never considered himself a barber, he just "worked there"...
 
So much about normality. As soon as Ed Crane, Billy Bob Thornton's main character, starts talking about his daily life, we find out that he and his wife go once a week in a strange establishment called "church", presided by a man in priestly attire, but where people play Bingo and exclaim "Jesus, Bingo!" when the right random combination of signs and squares is met. There we go, already neck-deep in Coenland.
 
So the business is grooming - an external, neutral, harmless affair which is nevertheless called at some point "the most important part in business". But we're still not in, we're on the outskirts of life, tending to it as it pulses and whirls by itself, only paying us regular monthly visits.
 
And this we find out from the forever lovely John Polito, as he explains, with his immensely expressive face, the wonders of dry-cleaning. Tending to life, again. With him, the narrative fabric begins to take shape. We get the motive - as usually in the noir-ish universe, the motive is a way out, in our case a way out of the flat predicament of Ed the barber. Then we get the means - blackmail, crime paying off further crime, again typically noir. Then the story turns briefly into a roller-coaster - life plans crumbled, torture, revelations, murder, wrong imprisonment, the cold gods of the noir in full swing.
 

Then we are introduced to Tony Shalhoub's lawyer, Freddy Riedenschneider, whom the camera films in Citizen Kane-ish angles and shadows, and the narrative comes to a halt, the alien laws behind it gradually exposed. First off, Ed has to keep his mouth shut, because he is the barber, he doesn't know anything. After which his detachment becomes even more apparent - he's looking at the people on the streets and perceives them as belonging to a different universe, "like he'd made it to the outside and somehow they were still struggling way down below". Outside of what? Outside the social matrix probably, when you are caught between the threads of inter-human relationship, desires fears and purpose. But he isn't the weaver either, he is simply an observer, temporarily immune to causality and impulse. He is us. He is looking at his own world as if through a fourth wall. Ironically, Ed got his "way out", except it was much farther out than he would have imagined. In the end we find out one other source for the inner fourth wall feeling - Ed's voice throughout the story hadn't been just an inner monologue, it was him telling his own story, which automatically placed him behind a fourth wall, an inner fourth wall, between the narrating voice and his own life.
 
That Freddy has this effect on Ed's existential status is not so bizarre - he is a lawyer, one of the ultimate builders of reasons and weavers of stories. And he starts talking about a quantum-mechanical angle on scientific observation, the Uncertainty Principle, where the observer changes the system while measuring it. Your looking changes it, which is why you can't know the reality of what happened. Looks like this is the case for very small particles and human stories - by looking at them you change them. And indeed, in most Coens movies the characters have little idea of what is happening, what shakes the shape of their world. Except for the Barber - he knows everything, he's outside Freddy's principle, because he's out of it all. But, of course, nobody listens to him. 

Now, sure that Freddy's speeches were mostly bullshit to confuse the jury and anyone who listened, and give him a free hand in switching opinions his way, in fact he admits that his purpose is not to deliver facts but to raise doubts in everyone. After all, he's the one who mentions the "barber's dilemma", which is the paradox I mentioned in the beginning of this comment, but he's not thinking about Russell's story. That's a hint from the Coens themselves. But just like the dilemma, some of Freddy's words have meanings beyond his own understanding, coming from his creators and delivered without his explicit awareness through the walls of his narrative aquarium. Man he'd be surprised to see us all staring at him.
 
Ed, on the other hand, would just throw us a flat stare and turn around back to his prison cell, like he did to those aliens. After all, he's not even really in his own story...
 
I liked this movie so much I actually watched it again now for the review. And I kind of want to end the commentary with Billy Bob Thornton singing Earl Scruggs's Ring of Fire, because I've been listening to it a lot these days, and it's just soothing to hear Billy's calm voice after talking so much about his crazy flick.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITjrAUI_NYQ