When watching The Man Who Wasn't There, I saw instant similarities to The Stranger. The most obvious charactorial similarity is in Ed Crane/Mersault. Both the movie and the book are narrated in first person by the main character, who ironically, has few words to say in their story. At the beginning of the stories, both characters usually just sit back and observe what is going on, likely with a cigarette hanging from their lip. Eventually, both characters have a violent outbreak that kills someone and both, as far as we know, die as a consequence of their actions.
There are, however, some differences in Ed and Meursault's actions and the reason for them. Ed Crane's motivation for killing who he does seems much more justified than Meursault's. Crane's wife is cheating on him with his wife's boss. Crane blackmails his wife's boss into giving him $10,000 and gets a late night call and is told to come visit the boss's office. The boss ensues to choke Crane almost to death before Crane stabs and kills the boss out of desperation.
However, from a rational point of view, Meursault doesn't seem very threatened or in imminent danger when he kills the Arab. Meursault is complaining about the hot weather, as well as the glint that the Arab's knife blade makes in his eyes, but doesn't seem to be in any danger of death.
Furthermore, there are some comparisons in plot that make the movie a bit different than the book. The movie has many extra side plots that create a more complicated plot, but the side plots all tie back to the main idea of both the book and the movie. First, there is the business venture involving Crane and Tolliver, in which Tolliver asks Crane for money to start a dry cleaning business. There is also the side plot of Crane's initial infatuation with Birdy, his friends teenage daughter. Crane greatly enjoys her piano playing, as it seems to relieve some of the stress in his life, especially when his wife is in jail and after she dies. Finally, there is the whole deal with Crane's wife getting convicted instead of him, and how Crane sort of tries to admit to the crime but nobody takes him seriously. These all tie together and complete the plot however. Birdy tries to get frisky with Crane while he's driving, he crashes, he wakes up in the hospital and is arrested for the killing of Tolliver, a crime that he didn't commit, and in the end, Crane is put in the electric chair for this crime.
Finally, there are some differences in the general nature of the two main characters, Crane and Meursault. At first, before the pivotal murder, Meursault seems generally content with life, observing, relaxing. Crane, however, seems always tense and mad at life. He always just seems mad at everything and that he doesn't really care. The other major difference is after both characters have murdered people. Meursault struggles to find his happiness, but eventually does, and it seems that Meursault find himself content and more sane after his conviction. Crane, on the other hand, just gets weird. Although there isn't much time between when he is convicted and when he is executed, the only two major details we get is his extremely bizarre dream about walking out of jail, seeing a UFO, and nonchalantly going back into the jail. He also tells us about his magazine article telling his story. Here, Crane also seems relatively content with himself. I just wonder what he would've felt if he was never convicted for the killing of Tolliver, and he had to live with himself knowing he was ultimately the cause of his wife's suicide.
Besides the obvious parallels to The Stranger, when I watched The Man Who Wasn't There I also noticed some things that reminded me of Kafka a lot. Just the plot in general is so absurd and Kafkaesque -- Crane kills a man out of self defense, watches as his wife is fighting to not get convicted for the crime, then he actually confesses to the crime and the lawyer calls it b.s. Later he is accused of killing Tolliver, which never happened, but he is still convicted, and given the electric chair. No to mention the random UFO and aliens just popping in and out of the story. It's bizarre and absurd.
ReplyDeleteIt's a matter of interpretation, of course, to see Crane as "mad" or angry, and what we're interpreting is largely a reflection of Thornton's performance. I personally don't see that same anger (compared to what we see in Big Dave, for example--no one *seethes* quite like Gandolfini!), more a general bemusement, a hands-off "go ahead and talk if you want, but I couldn't care less" attitude. Ed just goes with the current--he doesn't *want* to be a barber, he's just sort of stumbled into it. He doesn't especially *want* to marry his wife, he just passively agrees when she suggests it. Even his jealousy--what's usually the psychological motive in a noir plot like this--is understated ("I suppose that stung a bit, too" he says, at one point). He's more motivated by the desire to invest in a dry-cleaning operation than to avenge his wife's infidelity.
ReplyDeleteMaybe because his life is more entangled than Meursault's, he seems a bit less carefree, a bit more trapped by circumstance. And maybe Billy Bob's glare has an angry side to it--he certainly exploits this in other of his films. But I see Ed as much closer to Meursault's brand of chillness, filtered through an American lens.