What happened to men? Recently I saw two movies about the absence of a man. In the first the man is mentally absent, in the second he just disappears physically. Both were highlights of this year's cinematographic output.

The Man Who Wasn't There is the latest work of the most European of all American film directors, the Coen Brothers. It is a film noir darker than any of the films in the 30s/40s which gave the name to this genre. Ed the chain-smoking barber does not talk much. When he speaks it is mainly about the miracle of growing hair and his fear that the hair could stop growing which would make him jobless. He lives an average American life in a small town. He is married and when he finds out that his wife betrays him everything takes its unstoppable course. I won't say much more about the story only that it does not finish as Hollywood films would end. Everything happens to Ed. He only reacts. The question of culpability is irrelevant. Ed could be a character out of Kafka's short stories. Especially Der Prozess (The trial) comes to mind. Or Camus L'Etranger (The stranger). Everything is fate. Ed is an anti-person. A loser whose care for the career of a young piano-playing girl is interpreted by her only as interest in sex (I actually thought the same). Who is so naive to invest money in an obviously fishy plot. Tragically it won't be only the cash that he loses there. The Coen brothers are in American film what Beck (esp. with Odelay) is in American rock music. Geniuses of eclecticism. They have absorbed all the history of Western arts and culture to create something refreshingly new. They transform Heisenberg's uncertainty principle which states that you cannot measure speed and location of an electron at the same time into the phrase "The closer you look the less you see" which the lawyer says in before the trial. There is also some very black humour at one point where I had to laugh till I cried when suddenly the laughter stuck in my throat. It is the scene when the brother of Ed's wife asks if there are no alarm clocks in prison as she does not turn up in time for her trial. There I really felt cheated by the Coens. I forgive them the slapstick scenes but in the trial scene they really manipulated the spectator. Anyways a great movie and one of their best together with Fargo. It is a quarter to twelve and the other film review will have to wait until tomorrow...