On of my most favorite lines from the movie, The Man Who Wasn’t There would probably be the barber shop scene where Ed Crane(I think?) says to his brother-in-law(don’t remember the guy’s name) if he knows about hair. It keeps growing and we just cut it off and throw it away. But it never leaves us, and keeps coming back. I thought that this was one of the strangest things in the movie. Of course, the movie was full of strange things ranging from the court cases to the UFOs (I really don’t know what they were about). What was stranger (ah get it!) was when he continued saying that he was gonna take the hair and mingle it with dirt, common house dirt. Something along those lines. Even if we look at this scene, for a moment avoiding the rest, we can still get a pretty good idea that there are a few loose screws on this guy. This can be seen again and again, with him from the office to Walter’s house. There is certainly something that is not right. And this leads into the fact that the world isn’t the right place for Ed, it is not made for a guy like Ed. On top of that, his actions only make the situation worse. We can, as an example, take the dry cleaning incident. Ed at first is interested in it, but cannot get his mind around whether it would be a good thing or is it a hoax. When he finally does invest his money, all it does is come and bite him back in the end. He is punished for a crime which he didn’t really commit at all: the death of that entrepreneur. Similarly, Mersault is punished for a crime he didn’t really commit: not having any emotions when his mother died and his place in society, specifically, how he does not fit in. This would probably be one of the biggest differences between the book and the movie, and we should expect differences, as this movie never took any copyright permissions to make a movie of The Stranger. But I feel, that although he could have protected himself, like Mersault, he was too tired of life, the society in which he resides (not even resides, maybe a better word would be stuck), and how he has nobody or nothing to look forward to in life.
Do Ed's lines about how the hair keeps growing ("Lucky for us!" says his brother-in-law) and "mingling them with common dirt" evoke Sisyphus for you at all? I don't see this as Ed "having a screw loose" at all--in light of Camus, it seems like the moment where consciousness is dawning, his awareness of the absurdity of our "daily grinds." Haircutting is a pretty Sisyphusian profession--if Sisyphus were in the *business* of rolling boulders uphill, and he commented that they just roll back again, his business partner might similarly reply, "Lucky for us!" But it wouldn't make the human condition any less absurd.
ReplyDelete