I had trouble drawing the connection between The Man Who Wasn't There and The Stranger, mostly because of the protagonists. While they seemed to think in similar ways and didn't find their meaning in common things like love, I saw the Ed in The Man Who Wasn't There as more of an ordinary man caught up in a murder, while I can't say I felt that way at all in The Stranger. The protagonists' characters defined the storyline, so when their characters are different, the stories must be different, as well.
Meursault's lack of a moral compass is what caused problems for him. Yes, his apathy is part of his personality, but this willingness to be on anyone's side makes him dangerous. He doesn't recognize value in life until he's confronted with losing his own. I didn't view Meursault as an ordinary man caught up in a murder at all; he didn't have to shoot. He wasn't defending himself. He had a gun in his hand and reacted by shooting. Because the sun was too hot. Perhaps you could argue he was caught up by his environment, but every morally questionable choice he made led to the murder.
Ed, on the other hand, just wanted to be a dry cleaner. Similar to Meursault, he didn't seem to have a sense of traditional moral values when he blackmailed Big Dave. But Ed didn't initiate the killing. Stabbing Big Dave was entirely self-defense. So he wasn't charged for that murder, but his wife was. What Ed did end up being incriminated for, he didn't even do. Ed seemed to be truly wrapped up by associating with Tolliver in the first place. He really didn't pick up on the sketchiness of the situation until later. While Ed was unobservant, Meursault recognized that others would see wrong in the situation and didn't care.
You're right that Ed's ambitions as a potential entrepreneur set him apart from Meursault (who has no ambition at all, according to his boss)--and these put him more in line with a quintessentially American narrative of progress and self-improvement. Perhaps this is one way the Coens "translate" the novel into an American setting. But as for his moral compass, he has no problem engaging in blackmail, and never seems all that remorseful about his own (self-defensive, again less ambiguous than in Camus) act of murder, or the fact that his wife takes the fall (although he does try to confess, though not in a setting where there are any authorities present).
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't want to push the comparisons too far, anyway. The film never declares itself an "adaptation" of Camus's novel, and it nowhere acknowledges Camus as a source. But it does seem like midcentury French fiction and philosophy is *among* the range of sources the Coens draw on, along with, of course, American film noir (which the French loved, and named, incidentally).
Another big difference I saw between the two of them was when Ed admitted that he was guilty of the murder rather than his wife. Nobody believed it because in society's eyes, Ed was a moral man who loved his wife deeply. They wouldn't beleive that someone like him would murder a man. On the other hand, the first thing about Meursault that everyone seems to notice is his quietness and the way he never showed emotion. He didn't seem to truly care for anyone in his life: not his mother, and not Marie either. Therefore, when he did kill the Arab, nobody had much trouble believing that it was actually Meursault who had done it.
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