And then this month's edition of Sight and Sound arrived, with a feature on double bills (Iain Sinclair talks about them as an interbreeding, the formation of a composite work), and I thought it might be a nice idea to watch one of the pairs of films that they mention: Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. And when Billy Bob Thornton's barber meets a coroner called Didriksen (the name of Barbara Stanwyck's temptress in Double Indemnity) about half way through the latter film, the light came on and the links between them started to flicker away.
The Coens are great pastiche-makers, of course, and their film is completely self-conscious in its pastiche - think of the final scene, in which we see Thornton transcribing his story for a "men's magazine" on the eve of his execution, not just an allusion to (and transformation of) Kind Hearts and Coronets, I thought, but also a tribute to the pulp fiction and cinema that the film mimics so well, and that surrounds Thornton on his desk.
But as we yoked the films together, as it became so obvious exactly what the Coens were pastiching, they pulled apart. And they pulled apart through their central metaphors. Double Indemnity is a film about the insurance system; the corruption of that system motivates all of its characters - the agents and customers of the insurance-game become complicit in its swindles, even as they seem to be pitched against one another. And Walter Neff's tragedy comes from the system itself: even as he imagines that he can play it from the inside, it drags him down, discovers him at the very end, at the moment when we realise that he too has been a passive instrument of an even greater swindle.
The Man Who Wasn't There, though, is a film about consumer culture. Everyone is a consumer, an investor; the film plants us in the affluent homes of the 1940s, post-war middle class, with their driveways and waste-disposal, their aspirations and their failures. Ed Crane is just a barber, but is he also more than a barber? That's the case that his lawyer makes at the end of the film, attempting to get him off the murder charge that he ends up facing. He's an allegory of modern man, says Riedenschneider, a simple little man caught up in a big system. And the film has existential ambitions - or at least Crane does, speaking about his alienation from the world, from the system that he has somehow stepped outside of. But has he? What's he hoping to gain from the $10,000 that he tries to extort? And hasn't his voice-over narrative distanced him from his world from the very beginning (unlike Walter Neff's, which is a way of reliving the squalid events that have landed him in his sorry predicament)?I enjoyed the Coen film; I think it's beautifully edited, and I think the photography is sumptuous. But I guess I found it just a little uneven in tone, a bit baggy at times. There's a handful of scenes about flying saucers that interrupt the seriousness of the flow of scenes, and just don't seem to belong there; as the Coens overload their movie with references to the paranoias and quirks of 1940s Americana, they distance it in tone from the taughter, meaner Double Indemnity.
Then we watched Pick Up on South Street. Halliwell calls it 'over rich', and I suppose that just about sums it up. A gripping first scene, if obvious (and gross): the picking of a woman's purse in the New York subway as sexual violation. But then you're left with 90 minutes of macho-men, gritting their teeth and spitting as they worry about Commies, just itching to slap a confession, or a hundred dollars or a microfilm, out of one another. This movie had nothing of the qualities of the other two films, but it was amusing to see the neuroses that Wilder may have understood and the Coens may have pastiched, laid bare like that.
