The Seven Acts of the Epistle from The Man Who Wasn’t There

by Philip J. Hohle

This article was presented at the National Communication Association’s annual meeting in November of 2014 in Chicago, IL.

At one time or another, most people struggle with their identity and place in a community. When one feels their contributions are devalued or unnoticed, these moments can precipitate an existential crisis. This is the basic temperament of a lesser-known film from Joel and Ethan Coen titled The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). While the story is a tragedy in the sense that the protagonist Ed Crane (Billy Bob Thornton) loses everything, it is worth locating and examining the choices he makes along in his spiritless journey to find redemption and transcendence. Using Kenneth Burke’s dramatic pentad, the key acts and agencies of the protagonist will be isolated, analyzed, and evaluated for redemptive efficacy. This analysis includes a brief description of the plot and a summary of both popular and scholarly reviews on this film. This is followed by an examination of the key choices of the protagonist using the act/agency ratios from Burke’s pentad.

The film is important for several reasons; the first is simply that it is a part of the impressive oeuvre of the Coen brothers. Their works have been among the most discussed and analyzed films in their generation. Secondly, the film serves as a marker for the plight of modern humankind—a postmodern critique of advances that serve as much to inhibit as they enable. Finally, the film is a sharp commentary on the crisis in masculine identity. Typical of postmodern, independent or art cinema, there is no true hero in this story. The main character is a male protagonist, but the monomyth is broken; any potential heroic journey is stalled while our society sorts out the damage to the masculine psyche inflicted by modern pressures. 

Summary of the Film Plot

Critics almost universally classify this black and while film as noir, a genre featuring abject corruption, fatalistic themes, and dark tones (Schrader 213). The story portrays crime and punishment—two murders and three trials—but is hardly like the detective or mystery stories common for this classification. With the exception of the distinctive first person narrative and stark style, this is not a typical noir film. 

The setting is a post-WWII small town where Ed languishes as just a second-chair barber. He searches for his identity in the roles of barber, husband, mentor, entrepreneur, and criminal. The story is told from Ed’s point of view. The viewer is not privy to any information outside of Ed’s experiences, imagination, or projections. Stanley Orr wrote, “the Coens both understand the burden placed upon first-person narration and are fond of playfully destabilizing its smooth operation. Ed Crane represents the Coens’ most ambitious experiment in first-person narration” (n.p.).

David Bordwell in Narration in the Fiction Film differentiated between the filmmaker’s techniques used to create the narrative, the syuzhet, and the complete story constructed in the mind of the viewer, the fabula (49-53). While this definition is oversimplified, it is put to use here as a way to spotlight the conscious endeavors of the filmmaker in providing necessary information (e.g., plot elements) for the viewer, and how these cinematic moments are built in a way that may produce some desired understanding or impression. Conversely, the fabula is a product of the viewer’s own internal processes. The impressions of the fabula are proposed for the viewer through the syuzhet, but alternative fabula frameworks are likely constructed, as we will see below in the critic’s divergent perceptions taken from the same film. 

It follows that a deeper examination of the Coens’ syuzhet may produce a revised understanding of the experienced fabula of this film. The syuzhet is a deeply subjective story from a convicted killer framed as a death-row confession elicited by a men’s magazine. The story is a flashback, but Ed does not reveal his ultimate fate until the very end. It is within this hind-sighted resignation that the narration operates, weighed down by the drag of destiny. 

Ed’s passivity is the hallmark of his personality. Stanley Kauffmann compared Ed to Camus’ character Meursault in The Stranger, an anti-hero who “has the capacity to make choices: he just chooses not to choose” (30). While some might argue that Ed is post-modern in that he chooses not to act, this analysis will reveal this is not quite the case. 

Ed and Doris (Frances McDormand) have a sexless marriage. Doris is the bookkeeper for the local department store, and Ed reveals to us that he has become aware that she and her boss Big Dave (James Gandolfini) are having an affair. Ed decides to blackmail Big Dave in order to fund an investment in dry cleaning, a plan enacted impulsively with little apparent concern for vengeance, premeditation, or consequences.

In self-defense, Ed kills Big Dave. Doris is pegged as the murderer, but she knows nothing of Ed’s actions. They hire Freddy Riedenschneider, a flashy defense attorney (Tony Shalhoub) who is not interested in arguing the truth, but rather in simply placing doubt in the minds of the jury. Ed confesses to his role in the killing, but Riedenschneider discards it as too implausible for Doris’ defense. Realizing the fool she has been, Doris hangs herself in her cell before facing trial. A sympathetic medical examiner tells Ed that Doris was pregnant, but Ed blankly confesses to him that he has not had sexual relations with Doris in years. Oddly now, Ed desperately wants to talk to Doris. He visits a spiritual medium but recognizes her as a fake. After only a brief reach into the unknown, he turns his back on the supernatural for what he believes to be the last time.

But Ed still finds hope. While the trial plays out, he invests his energy in a project—managing the budding career of Birdy (Scarlett Johannson), a teenage girl who shows some promise as a pianist. She is the daughter of the gently drunk Walter Abundas (Richard Jenkins), a friend who is hardly any less lonely. Yet even in this mentoring relationship, Ed’s dutiful support is thwarted by reality when the project crashes. Finally, with a smart dose of Coen irony, Ed is sentenced to die for a crime he did not commit—the murder of Tolliver, his partner in the dry-cleaning venture. The film narrative ends with Ed sorting out the events of his life, examining his fate to the best of his understanding.

As the story concludes, Ed is suddenly awakened one night in his cell on death row, a scene one might read as a dream. He goes out his open door to the prison courtyard where he witnesses a UFO hovering over the prison wall. It baptizes him with a bright light. The viewer sees the action, but Ed chooses not to narrate it. Untypically he does not now expend his cigarette smoke with his signature expression of resignation. Instead, he nods with understanding.

Indeed, Ed smokes cigarettes constantly in this film, one of a number of other key stylistic features of the Coen syuzhet. Ed drags on his smoke with a look of pained disgust that O.A. Scott reads as “baffled depression” (n.p.). Each exhale reflects the bitter bile of his meaningless, invisible existence. 

Hair also has meaning in this film. As a professional barber, Ed knows how to engineer all the styles popular in the day. He becomes emotionally caught up in its meaninglessness—something that grows without one’s control even after death. It is cut off and tossed in the dirt. Hair seems to trigger Ed’s existential crisis. In a soapy bathtub reading a popular magazine, Doris asks Ed to shave her legs. He obliges with professional efficiency without evidence of arousal. In a parallel scene while strapped to an electric chair in the last moments of his life, the prison guards shave Ed’s leg before attaching the electrical apparatus.

Through it all, pensive Beethoven piano melodies (including the Moonlight Sonata) give the film a despondent tone, reflective of Ed’s own inept search for transcendence. Michel Chion sensed that, “the technical precision of the rendering of the music … contributes to the general feeling of fatality” (176). Graham Fuller was chilled by the effect. “With its blankly becalmed hero and languid atmosphere, The Man Who Wasn’t There radically reworks noir’s clammy moral universe” (12). These are the metaphors for the existential yoke worn by Ed Crane throughout the film.

Review of the Literature

This film has received a respectable volume of consideration in the scholarly literature, but we will first examine some of the reviews in the popular press in order to establish some perspective. Roger Ebert wrote, “Joel and Ethan Coen are above all stylists. The look and feel of their films is more important to them than the plots” (n.p.). Scott agreed, “[The] Coens have used the noir idiom to fashion a haunting, beautifully made movie that refers to nothing outside itself and that disperses like a vapor as soon as it’s over” (n.p.). Two opposing ideological websites provided commentary on the spiritual undercurrent in the film. The Film Atheist site (Betrand XVI) declares a satisfying absence of a god and a lack of higher purpose in Ed’s life.

The film [leaves one] with the depressing but difficult to argue against message that life just sucks. While this doesn’t exactly make it an atheistic film . . . this does make the film’s message antithetical to the traditional omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent god concept currently the fashion in archconservative theistic circles. So, The Man Who Wasn’t There gets an extra half point on the Atheism scale due to blasphemy. (n.p.)

On a review site with a Christian perspective, Carole McDonnell provides paltry hope for Ed, arguing his condition is in total due to his own shortcomings. “He has arrived at his station (pun intended) in life by not making any real decisions . . . . It is a downer, emotionally and spiritually” (n.p.). McDonnell also argues that Doris deserved more sympathy. “And although it’s not an excuse, we know that a sullen curmudgeonly husband such as this is going to end up with a bored wife . . . who needs excitement, or at least someone she can talk to” (n.p.). 

Finally, Peter Travers of the Rolling Stone found Ed’s psychological crisis humorous, “What does Ed do? He smokes, stares and says nothing . . . . For all its lapses, Man is steadily engrossing and devilishly funny” (n.p.). Certainly among popular critics, there is little recognition of transcendence in this film.

In the scholarly literature, a number of critics have found an appreciation for Man on a deeper level. David Buchanan compares it favorably to other great noir films but left the generic comparisons behind to look deeper into Crane’s character. In the film, Walter Abundas spends his free time searching for records of his family’s roots in libraries and courthouses. Buchanan recognizes that both Walter and Ed are exploring their origins and (by default) their destination. “[It is a] search for truth, for certainty, for an understanding of one’s place in the world, and the impossibility of achieving it based upon hard facts alone” (147). Ed’s search for transcendence demands more than a modern man’s scientific positivism can provide. “The real and the unreal are combined in a striving for the ideal, for a completion that goes beyond the mere addition of worldly parts” (145). When put on trial for murder, Riedenschneider describes Ed’s plight in existentialist terms. Buchanan summarized, “He talks about how [Ed] had lost his place in the universe, tells the jury to look closer, that the closer they look the less sense it would make, that Ed ‘is modern man,’ and that to convict him would be to condemn themselves” (150). Buchanan clearly recognizes a longing for redemption and transcendence was present in the film. He explored the two beam-of-light experiences in the story, “Much like Riedenschneider did, [Ed] seems to understand something. [He said,] ‘It’s hard to explain … But seeing it whole gives you some peace’” (151).

On the other hand, not all scholarly critics cared much for Ed’s search for transcendence. Judith Franco sees “the impassive Ed Crane [as] the quintessential castrated and domesticated male” (35). For characters like Ed, any search for transcendence is simply a thinly disguised attempt at “redeeming white masculinity” (29). She generalizes that such characters do not demonstrate feminine values like “compassion, generosity, and altruism” (42) while at the same time she calls Ed “naïve” for mentoring Birdy (37). She considers protagonists like Ed afraid (39), narcissistic (45), and in desperate search for control (44). Male heroic agency is “troublesome” (41) and “demanding” (45), and she wrote of “pathological masculinity” (45) as if it were a disease. Franco anticipates this paper’s central thesis and argues against it:

[Sometimes, filmmakers work] hard to idealize the victim-hero through religious metaphors . . . [they resort to] a resurrection narrative in order to redeem the male protagonist . . . In these art cinema versions of masculinity in crisis, the male protagonist does not undergo a transformation or conversion. His crisis is permanent and culminates in (self) destruction and martyrdom. (33, 35)

Franco did confirm Ed’s search is a journey toward transcendence, but argues that he finds it only upon his death in his “return to Doris, the Mother” (37). 

Bordwell considers the arbitrariness of a character’s actions and the ambiguity of the fabula a mark of art cinema (209-10), a stark contrast to the efficacy and purpose of the modern man. Orr recognizes Ed’s search as a struggle, navigating the “arbitrariness of the distinction between meaning and meaninglessness” (n.p.). Deviating from art cinema somewhat, it is significant that Ed seems to find connection and meaning to his life in the dénouement. The trouble with the Coens’ film is that this ambiguous resolution remains somewhat inaccessible for many casual viewers and critics. Brian Snee argues that viewers watch Coens’ noir protagonists with a “detached interest, curious but not concerned or connected” (220). Though Orr recognizes the “existentialist epiphany of the death-cell sequence” (n.p.), he proposed that Ed might simply be insane.

In Man, the Coens create the narration in the absolutely subjective voice of Ed. In spite of the fact that one is privy to all of Ed’s thoughts in constructing a fabula, viewers like Franco or McDonnell were unable or unwilling to identify with Ed’s search. Kauffmann concludes that the Coens had no higher intentions for Ed. “They have contrived a hybrid, a protagonist who could make choices but who, for the most part, casts himself as a victim . . . . Ed’s actions then negate any suggestion of hidden depths” (30). Fuller sees only an “absence” and asks, “So what does Ed want, if not money, success, a prime piece of jailbait or even to be a small town barber?” (14). In using the narrative syuzhet, the filmmaker may locate the viewer on any point along this journey, but Bordwell argues the viewer fills the gaps left by the syuzhet when constructing the fabula (54-55). The problem in reading Ed is that his character seems to languish in his progress, which can tax the construction of a meaningful fabula. Like Bertrand XVI argues, one may only feel that it sucks to be inside Ed Crane’s mind for 116 minutes.

Methodology

Transcendence is an escape from a profane and mundane existence, an approach to the holy and sacred (Elaide 13ff). This process or movement toward transcendence is akin to Kenneth Burk’s cycle of redemption; it starts with order that becomes polluted. It is then corrected with acts of purification, which brings redemption and rebirth to a protagonist (Rhetoric of Religion 172ff).  If a character rejects or fails to recognize any of these steps along his or her journey, only a false sense of transcendence may be possible, or at worse, a parody of transcendence may be constructed out of frustration for this failure. What follows is an analysis of Ed’s choices in his journey to see how they helped or hindered his journey toward true transcendence.

Burke’s dramatistic pentad (Grammar of Motives xv) is a five-way lens that can be used to isolate the dominant ratios (or interactions) in a work’s syuzhet. Any given work can be summarized in a series of five questions: Who (agent), does what (act), with what means (agent), under what exigence (scene), and with what intent (purpose)? A ratio is a description of the interaction observed between any two answers. The discipline required to form ratios can help the critic construct a stable fabula from a film’s syuzhet elements. For this study, we will examine this film using the pentad, but will focus only upon several competing alternatives to the key act/agency ratio. 

Analysis

The Man Who Wasn’t There is a definitive story of modern mankind’s search for higher meaning in life. While the story takes place in the boom of post WWII expansion and optimism, the scene is more a postmodern frame in that the precision and efficiencies of modern times themselves are put on trial as meaningless constraints. The agent is the passive Ed Crane, which may seem counterintuitive. Of course, Man is hardly a complete heroic quest like that mapped in Joseph Campbell’s monomyth (30), yet Ed finds himself in the belly of the whale (90) or an inner cave where he faces an ordeal (Vogler 143, 155). Indeed like the traditional hero, Ed finds himself struggling to find a way out and back to wholeness.

Consider this the universal truth for protagonists grasping for transcendence: Without a creator in a broken cycle of redemption, the creature finds no sense of longing; without a longing, acts of redemption are meaningless. Without redemption, communion and transcendence are impossible. The agent must experience communion with a higher Other and realize redemption from without in order to discover transcendence. 

The proposed act/agency ratios analyzed in this film portray Ed’s clumsy grasp toward this this fixed purpose. What follows is a test of several acts/agency pairs to evaluate their efficacy in achieving this end. The standard question arises—will Ed survive the ordeal in his inner cave and return with a redemptive boon to share with his community and the viewer? (Campbell 181).

The Acts of the Epistle

Writing from prison and facing death, Ed Crane’s letter to a men’s magazine is his confession. Ed’s passivity makes his few decisive acts stand out in stark contrast to his inaction. What is meant here by acts are not unconscious reflexes such as lighting another cigarette or the conscious acts of his routine. The acts here examined are those conscious decisions he makes, plans that are clearly efforts to dislodge himself from the psychological and spiritual rut limiting his journey. We will evaluate each act and what is proposed as the concomitant agency (act/agency)  in order to evaluate their efficacy in helping Ed reach transcendence (purpose).

1. Ed Cuts the Hair/Duty
2. Ed Visits Tolliver/Technology
3. Ed Shaves Doris’ Legs/Servanthood
4. Ed Writes Extortion Note/Power
5. Ed Stabs Big Dave/Will
6. Ed Sets Up Birdy’s Audition/Vicarage 
7. Ed Falls Silent/Mystery

Act one: Ed Cuts the Hair/Duty

The modern condition lays a role expectation upon the citizen, and fully expects a devotion to the role enough for spiritual fulfillment. It is a duty to contribute to the stabilization if not the betterment of the community, whether anyone notices or not. Ed searches for transcendence through fulfilling his the duty to his world. Ed is technically competent and knowledgeable, but realizes the meaningless in hair and the endless cycle or growing and cutting that provides no drama, rebirth, or redemption. In Ed’s existential crisis, he readily sees that merely fulfilling a material role is not enough.

Act Two: Ed Visits Tolliver/Technology

Ed has not yet given up on modernity, even though the innovations of hairstyles and household gadgets have not deserved more than a passing comment in his narrative. Entrepreneurial risk and independence are really the liberating agencies, but it is the technology that intrigues him the most. Dry cleaning without water is magic, a miracle of science. The idea provides Ed with renewed hope. Much to his disappointment, Ed misses his opportunity and the miracle remains beyond his grasp. Later when reading an article on dry cleaning, he must resign himself to the idea that technological transcendence is without spirit and any boon is reserved for others more worthy or lucky.

Act Three: Ed Shaves Doris’ Legs/Servanthood

Ed is dreaming of technology when Doris’ makes this request of her barber husband. Actually, his act seems to be another passive response, but the attitude of servanthood is a conscious choice. He chooses his own masculine mortification as an agency to find spiritual communion with Doris. This sacrificial act proves that Ed really loves Doris. Franco disagreed, seeing his servant motif “construed as a victim of social pressure who gives his family and friends what they want because he is afraid to disappoint them” (39). But the real servant expects nothing in return, and even though Franco is right in that this platonic relationship is hardly balanced, healthy, or whole, yet Ed seeks communion in the faithful servant role. The act of gently shaving the legs is not self-gratifying, as clearly Ed is not sexually aroused. Instead, he willingly submits to his wife—reminiscent of the image of Jesus washing his disciple’s feet as recorded in the Bible (NIV, John 13:3-5)—a spiritual act of humility that leads to transcendence. Sadly, there is no spiritual balance for Ed in this communion as Doris is too distracted by Big Dave to understand or appreciate Ed’s act. She cannot give of herself completely to be served, thereby thwarting Ed’s act.

Act Four: Ed Types and Delivers an Extortion Note/Power

Ed’s use of power (knowledge) is a rare experience for him. Unaccustomed to this agency of coercion, Ed can only manifest it in a criminal act and he quickly loses control over his agency. While the blackmail produces the cash, it does precipitate unwanted consequences: Doris loses her power and freedom. In gaining some power over Dave, Ed actually takes it from Doris and ultimately from himself.

Act Five: Ed Stabs Big Dave/Will

Of all the conscious acts of Ed, this is perhaps the one most difficult to see as a willful act. Yet it confirms that Ed is not yet dead. Under duress he produces a will to survive. This is evident in the prolonged physical struggle between the two that reaches a critical point before Ed stabs Dave in self-defense. While one could argue that Ed only acts reflexively, one could also make the case that Ed chose not to allow Dave to choke him to death. It is precisely this will to survive that produces all the following acts. A glimmer of hope, it is a key moment in the film easily overlooked. Still, the agency of will is not enough. After his near-death encounter, Ed is left without a spiritual release. He is alive, but must live with the consequences of his act of self-redemption that only produced more guilt.

Act Six: Ed Sets Up Birdy’s Audition/Vicarage

At a party, Ed stumbles upon the teenaged Birdy Abundas playing a meditative Beethoven sonata on a piano. Franco considers Birdy a “seductive daughter figure” (30). Kristi Brown confirmed that most reviewers focus on the repressed sexual nature of Ed’s encounter and relationship with Birdy. “When they mention the music at all, it is usually as a pleasant accessory to the girl’s charm . . . . What initially draws him into that room is the music [emphasis original], not the girl” (146). Indeed, Ed hears something miraculous in the music and, “he immediately wonders . . . [if] a miracle might be possible for him too” (Brown 150-151). With Birdy and Beethoven, Ed discovers beauty, peace, and purification—but soon finds he cannot appreciate it by itself as a source of transcendence. With his modern conditioning, he finds a utilitarian (materialist) motive to pursue: the development of Birdy’s career. The piano instructor informs Ed that Birdy is soulless in her technique. While Ed’s transcendence is dissipated, he “seems to understand the ‘soul’ thing more than he lets on” (Brown 151). Moments later when Birdy finally demonstrates her lack of purity, Ed’s vicarious act of redemption is negated as well.

Act Seven: Ed fall Silent/Mystery

The Bible promises, “The Truth shall set you free” (NIV, John 8:32), and Ed spills it all in a last attempt at self-redemption. The confession is a symbolic mortification of the efficacy of modern man, and while it provides some catharsis, it alone cannot provide transcendence. Riedenschneider cannot hear Ed’s confession, and so he fails to save Doris. Nor does telling the truth set him free. After all is said, the confession gives way to silence, which allows Ed to contemplate the mystery of order and obedience (Burke, Rhetoric of Religion 307). It is difficult to evaluate this agency in the dénouement, as the Coens’ leave veiled for the viewer that which is revealed to Ed. We can only join Ed and experience the mystery.

Failure to Launch

Ed’s journey is a failure. Ed never manages to climb out of the belly of the whale, and so one could classify this story a tragedy and leave it at that. As a consequence of his failed acts, Ed concludes the story in a position worse than when he began. As a result of these bungled attempts, people may only see Man as a cautionary tale at best. Spiritually, he is paralyzed, but as Brown asserts, “Inertia is clearly not the same thing as tranquility” (150). 

A deeper examination of Man may yet reveal that Ed does indeed approach transcendence, but not as a result of his own acts or agencies. Like the flood in O Brother Where Art Thou? this Coen film requires divine intervention to satisfy the longing for redemption. Ed is in need of an outside Other to bring him into communion, where redemption can be performed, where no act can divide the wholeness that is the mark of transcendence.

In one scene early in the film we see a low angle view of a statue of Jesus Christ on the cross. Ed narrates that he and Doris go to church once a week but as the shot tilts down to reveal a priest, we quickly realize that he is presiding over a game of bingo. For Doris, the church provides pseudo-transcendence only when it satisfies her longing for entertainment and competition. Meanwhile, Ed only finds peace in the place. This syuzhet element suggests that the organized church is no longer the source of transcendence for modern man. Yet modernity’s hierarchy of ideals is no better. Ed’s role is that of a barber, which is a metonym for uselessness—a source of guilt and the place of his fall. Recognizing the pollution that begins the redemptive cycle, we see that Ed’s hands are clean on the outside, but the constant cigarette smoke is symbolic of the death inside. Polluted and unredeemed, humans find sacred acts impossible to perform. 

Kauffmann observed, “[Ed] performs some acts in the film, two of them illicit, but he is such a puppet figure—a given, meant to be accepted as presented—that these acts are incomprehensible in him” (30). However as we have illustrated, one of Ed’s conscious acts is an act of servanthood. Parallel to his own servant act of shaving/washing of Doris’ feet, the prison guards do the same for him in preparation for his own rebirth in the afterlife. It is as if Jesus himself were inviting Ed to come die and live with him transformed, leaving behind the hierarchical guilt that plagues all of humankind.

Modern thinkers drive the idea that human efficacy can produce transcendence. Foucault argued, “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning” (9). On the other hand, G. K. Chesterton asked: what does it mean that man is unable to save himself? 

I remember amusing myself by writing my own answers to the questions; but I soon found that they were very broken and agnostic answers. To the question, “What are you?” I could only answer, “God knows.” And to the question, “What is meant by the Fall?” I could answer with complete sincerity, “That whatever I am, I am not myself.” (165) 

When Big Dave confronts Ed about the blackmail, he asks Ed, “What kind of man are you?” Later Frankie repeats this same interrogation. Ed of course has no answer. His entire search for transcendence is a search for identity, but the answer to this question stays just beyond his grasp.

Three events in the film provide moments where an Other, through a mediator, attempts to intercede on Ed’s behalf. The first event is when the eerie Ann Nirdlinger appears on his doorstep at night. Wide-eyed, she insists that aliens are behind all their troubles. At the time, Ed finds her tale unbelievable to his modern ears and he cannot grasp the metaphor. As prophet, Ann is misunderstood and rejected.

The second event is Freddy Riedenschneider’s look inside the beam of light. As he strategizes Doris’ defense, this unlikely philosopher stumbles upon a revelation as he stands in the jail cell looking up into the light streaming from a window. As Freddy says to Doris and Ed, “the more you look at it, the less you know.” The scene recalls the essay by C. S. Lewis, who discovered the difference between looking at something—for example, a beam of light inside a darkened toolshed—and looking along with something, that is, looking inside and through the light itself and toward its source. 

We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. One must look both along and at everything.” (Lewis 215) 

In an apparent dream state, Ed finally steps into his own beam of light at the very last hours of his life in the third event. In wrapping up his epistle, Ed admits to finally seeing things differently, being able to sort things out. But the Coens’ syuzhet seems to leave a gap. Just what is it that suddenly brings Ed to this new communion with the truth? (Joel—space aliens? Are you serious, Ethan?) Tiffany Joseph adds skepticism when she noted that Coen “characters [often] misread their own lives, confuse what is true, what is false, what is real, and what is imagined” (¶ 5). Franco is kind enough to see Ed’s impending death as “a liberating experience (‘seeing a hole gives you some peace’) . . . . Ed in the electric chair bathed in white light suggests Ed’s redemption and his return to Doris, the Mother” (37). It is perhaps relevant that Franco misquotes Ed, who actually says, “seeing it whole gives you some peace.”  She sees a hole where others inside the beam might see a whole. Brown also looks at it, but cannot see inside it: “Ed experiences separateness as transcendence: a mysterious, secret knowledge, which he has attained through an elevated perspective” (155). These analyses fail to fully explain the transcendence Ed experiences inside the beam.

While Ed never says anything about it, he sees the space ship with his own eyes in his dream walk (significantly, a shape he saw while unconscious and presumably near death after his car accident). The clue is found not by looking at the light, but with the light. The viewer can construct the fabula with this possible meaning: that modern man does not have all the answers within, that knowledge of a Numinous Other will rearrange our order and upset the hierarchy. The viewer must also step inside the beam to experience the mysterium; that redemption comes from outside our cells. As Ed finally figures out, communion with an Other is possible. Transcendence is conceivable, even if not earned by any acts or agencies of our own doing. This brings about a creaturely humility. Rudolf Otto wrote, “Conceptually mysterium denotes merely that which is hidden and esoteric, that which is beyond conceptions or understanding, extraordinary and unfamiliar” (13). As such, one cannot cause another person to experience the Numinous. It must be experienced for oneself; it can only be “awakened from the spirit” (60). The transcendence is found in communion without words and Ed rightly remains silent on what he experiences; the Coen brothers properly leave it to the viewer to wrestle with mystery inside their own fabula.

Conclusion

Joseph observed that Coen characters often end the film physically alive but spiritually dead” (¶ 32). In this exception, Ed loses his life, but not before he gains a glimmer of hope in a revelation—that there is meaning in life, and that even the most empty, passive, or even stupid humans are worthy of redemption and transcendence. Passively, as his leg is shaved and perhaps with some trembling, Ed is redeemed. He finds communion and transcendence—but he cannot express it. As he says, “I’m not much of a talker.”

The story of Ed Crane is not a typical journey toward transcendence. Nevertheless, models of transcendence and redemptive cycles help a critic track and analyze the acts that agents perform, as well as the fit of their agencies to the milieu of veiled journeys toward transcendence. Additional scholarship is needed to better read those narratives that produce false transcendence (or appear to fail) in order to help evaluate the choice of acts and agencies. 

Works Cited

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Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film.  Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 1985. Print.

Brown, Kristi A.
“Pathetique Nair: Beethoven and The Man Who Wasn’t There.” Beethoven Forum 10.2 (2003): 139-161.  Web.

Buchanan, David. “The Man Who Wasn’t There: An Intertextual Investigation of Modern Identity.” Studies in the Humanities 38.1-2 (2011): 138-154. Web.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1969. Print.

—. Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1970. Print

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949. Print.

Chesterton, Gilbert K. Orthodoxy. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1908. Print.

Chion, Michel. “The Man Who Was Indeed There (Carter Burwell And The Coen Brothers’ Films).” Soundtrack 1.3 (2008): 175-181. Web.

Ebert, Roger. “The Man Who Wasn’t There.” rogerebert.com Movie Reviews. Chicago Sun-Times, 2 Nov. 2001. Web.

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