• 1 Gladys L. Knight, Pop Culture Places: An Encyclopedia of Places in American Popular Culture. Santa (...)

1As uncharismatic and irrelevant a character he may have seemed in films, the barber remains one of the most emblematic figures of North American cultural history and popular culture. The strong iconicity conveyed by the famous tricolor pole most certainly contributed to building such ubiquity, as it made the barbershop a fixture of streetscapes in American paintings, photographs, and films. Historically, like any other common workers, barbers came to America with the first colonists and took part in the colonization of the west with pioneers, soldiers, and cowboys. They brought their modest contribution to the construction of the Frontier myth, as their recurring presence in Westerns will attest later. In a fast-developing country, barbershops “expanded and prospered, becoming fixtures, like the town square and the village church, in almost every town and city.”1 They were there every step of the way to independence and witnessed the building of a strong national identity that their image contributed to mythologizing in the form of Americana culture as reified by their tricolor pole. Looking conveniently patriotic, it soon became another stereotypical cultural icon that epitomizes the American Way of Life, just like Coca-Cola, drive-ins, diners, apple pies, or bowling alleys. The barbershop and its pole have gone through history unchanged and still make part of American life. Likewise, they have crossed borders between arts and genres, positioning themselves as cultural signifiers particularly in Westerns and film noir, which explains why the Coen brothers chose a barber as the unconventional hero of their neo-noir, The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001).

• 2 Oil on canvas, private collection, 83.8 x 78.7 cm (33 x 31 inches). Painted for the cover of The Sa (...)

4In Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), the barber and his wife seem like a nice, harmless couple until their pernicious gossiping results in the lynching of an innocent man. The whole gossiping sequence at the barbershop could well be the model of one of Norman Rockwell’s paintings – incidentally, he will paint a very similar scene entitled Gossips in 1948,2 although a more inoffensive one, depicting this typical small-town-America activity with his traditional kind-heartedness. In Fury, crime, albeit by proxy, is associated with the character of the barber through the trust he inspires and the way the whole community chooses to believe the gossips that originate from his shop and spread through town. German-born director Fritz Lang, who had fled the rise of Nazism to start a career in Hollywood, delivered a hard comment on small-town America by exposing the potential danger behind apparently good country people. This early occurrence in the history of American cinema establishes a precedent that will later be amplified by the Coens to debunk the visual myth of Americana. The barber is also known as a regular secondary character in Westerns, typically meek, as in My Darling Clementine (Ford 1946). The film featured the conspicuous black-and-white striped pole that could already be interpreted as a signifier heralding a potential danger, in this case the upcoming gunfight. In Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, the submissive barber is simply banished from his shop, becoming, quite literally, a “man who isn’t there,” while Doc Holliday (Kirk Douglas) finishes his shave himself. The barber is thus depicted as a weak, almost emasculated character compared to the manly gunfighter. This type of situation will later develop in revisionist and spaghetti Westerns as the barber is simply deprived of his identity and often brutalized. In Il mio nome è Nessuno/My Name is Nobody (Tonino Valerii 1973), the barber and his son are both reduced to silence in the most humiliating way, their soap and brush being stuck in their mouths so that the killer can take advantage of the barber’s position above Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda) to try and slit his throat. Another similar example can be found in High Plains Drifter (Eastwood 1973), but this time it is the barber’s physical appearance that is mocked, and, once again, he is replaced by a killer who ends up dead.

• 3 The barber’s chair is another important element of the barber’s apparatus. It is sometimes used to (...)

5In Westerns, the barber is never a criminal, but criminals usurp his identity to commit crimes without arousing suspicions, taking advantage of the innate reliability of the character. He is seen as the ultimate benevolent figure in American culture, as opposed to the European barber-surgeon, diabolized in English folklore in the countless versions of the Sweeney Todd story (the most recent being Tim Burton’s musical, Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, 2007). This fluctuating image thus qualifies the barber as a vehicle for crossing generic borders. The Coen brothers might have exploited this discrepancy to create their own barber, who is so trust-worthy that nobody would believe that he can kill. Yet he crosses the border between good and evil, no longer a manipulated but a manipulative character, taking revenge on the lack of consideration generations of barbers have received in film history. The treatment of the barber in crime films is quite similar to what we observed in Westerns. He is a secondary character whose identity is usurped to do evil. In Scarface (Hawks 1932), for instance, he is easily manipulated into becoming Tony Camonte’s accomplice, warning him when the police arrive and hiding his gun in his laundry basket. Finally, he is an easily corrupted character who accepts any mission for money, but he never becomes the gangster’s equal. In Bretaigne Windust’s noir The Enforcer (1951), the barber is intimidated and manipulated by the gangster who takes his place to murder his enemy. Countless examples could be included here, but a significant evolution of this pattern occurs in Alan Parker’s crime drama Mississippi Burning (1988), in which the violent cop played by Gene Hackman swiftly replaces the barber during a shave in order to intimidate and molest a murderous deputy. A very intense sequence in which Hackman’s character tortures the man by performing too close a shave shows, as was seldom the case in past examples, the vulnerability of the customer sitting in the barber’s chair,3 and the power of the man who is holding the razor, completely reversing the benevolent image of this Americana icon partly shaped visually in painting and photographs.

• 4 Oil on canvas, Whitney Museum of American Art, 89.4 cm × 153 cm (35.2 in × 60 in).
• 5 1952, Oil on canvas, 47.6 cm × 45.1 cm (18.75 in × 17.75 in), Private collection, painted for the c (...)
• 6 Beth Venn, Adam D. Weinberg and Fraser Kennedy. Frames of Reference: Looking at American Art, 1900– (...)
• 7 Ibid.
• 8 It is particularly the case in Westerns and illustrates Turner’s myth of the Frontier – the border (...)
• 9 Knight, 80

6Although they delivered two strikingly divergent visions of their country, Norman Rockwell and Edward Hopper shared an interest in small-town America. It is not surprising, therefore, that the barber and his shop appear in several of their canvases. Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning,4 painted in 1930, and Rockwell’s Walking to Church,5 two decades later, represent two exterior scenes in front of a barbershop window. At first glance, the two paintings look very similar in terms of composition of frame and colors: red-brick walls and green-colored storefronts, punctuated with large shop windows compose the two backgrounds. Among the closed shops, the barbershop is easily recognizable by its tricolor pole and each canvas also includes a red fire hydrant, adding to the compositions’ symmetry. However, Hopper’s street is deserted while on Rockwell’s, a family of five is merrily going to church. Although no information concerning a possible connection between the two paintings could be found, Rockwell certainly knew about Hopper’s classic work, and consciously or not, might have attempted to transform a melancholy, spleenful, typically Hopperian scene into a more optimistic, idealized vision of America, his trademark. If the inclusion of a barbershop pole in both paintings does not appear to add any narrative value to the scene, it does refer to heartland America and Americana visual culture. Aesthetically, the tricolor object provides a touch of color that draws attention to the right-hand side of the canvases. More significantly, the pole can be seen as a reification of America itself and a way for the artists to embed their paintings in American cultural history. John Updike describes Hopper’s inclusion of the pole as follows: “the barber pole, whose slight tilt, in this intensely rectilinear canvas, has the odd effect of making the street seem to run downhill, left to right.”6 The pole creates a visual effect that attracts the viewers’ attention, especially because of the emptiness of the street. Updike then explains how surprising it had been for him to find out that the model used for the scene was New York’s 7^th Avenue as “the effect of small-town sleepiness was so strong.”7 Powerful signifiers, barbershops have this provincial aura that evokes heartland America regardless of their location. Central to the two canvases, they immediately play on the collective unconscious, suggesting a friendly place where men maintained a civilized,8 well-groomed appearance, socialized with other respectable men and initiated their boys to manhood by getting them a haircut or their first shave.9

• 10 The Saturday Evening Post on YouTube, “Rockwell video minute,” Shuffleton’s Barbershop, https://www (...)
• 11 Berkshire Museum, oil on canvas, 117.5 x 109 cm (46.25 x 43 inches). Painted for the cover of The S (...)
• 12 Neuberger Museum of Art (NY), oil on canvas 152,4 x 198,1 cm (60 x 78 ins).

7Such subjects were explored by Norman Rockwell who was keen on depicting scenes of joyful American everyday life. “The simple pleasures of small-town America”10 is what he tried to convey through Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950).11 Painted in a hyperrealist style, with great attention to details, Rockwell’s painting emphasizes the conviviality of the barbershop, as the place seems like a cocoon, softly lit and warm. This effect is conveyed using warm colors (browns, oranges, greys, and reds) and the subjective point of view – it assumes the position of a bystander looking through the shop window. The scene takes place after a workday; the barbers are playing music together in a merry atmosphere which recalls one of the painter’s earlier illustrations, Barbershop Quartet (The Saturday Evening Post, 26 Sept. 1936). The depth of field reinforces the impression of confidentiality; the spectator is witness to an intimate scene which, unlike the barber’s daily activities in front of the customers, is not supposed to be public. Moreover, the dim light and signs of time give a nostalgic turn to the whole painting, placing the barber at the center of American past and traditions. Instead of the usual tricolor pole, in this work, American identity is reified by the flag on the “Remember Pearl Harbor” poster pinned to the wall as a patriotic token. In a completely different style, the general atmosphere of Hopper’s Barber Shop (1931)12 is cold, almost clinical, due to the predominance of whites and light blues and the lack of contrast and perspective. The barber himself is seen from the back, he is standing on the extreme right edge of the canvas, so that his arms are off frame; the distinctive Hopperian ray of light crossing the canvas obliquely doesn’t enlighten the man entirely, leaving the top of his body in the shade. Although he is supposed to be the main subject of the painting, he is portrayed, like the Coen brothers’ barber, as “a man who isn’t there.” A second character, a woman, seen from the front, appears to be the real focus of the painting: like Doris (Frances McDormand, the barber’s wife in the film), she occupies the entire space and draws the viewers’ attention.

• 13 Evangelos Kourdis and Pirjo Kukkonen, "Semiotics of Translation, Translation in Semiotics", Punctum(...)
• 14 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, Bloomington : Indiana University Press 1979.

8The two types of barbers are depicted side by side in the Coen brothers’ film: Frank (Michael Badalucco) embodies the traditional Rockwellian barber, and Ed (Billy Bob Thornton) is the mute, motionless, almost absent Hopperian barber. The presence of these two models, reinforced by the traditional filmic image of the barber as described earlier, denotes an intericonic process13 of “resemiotisation”14 which can be explained as the transfer of two occurrences of an icon from painting to film and the redefinition of what this icon means or evokes in popular culture. The opening credits and sequence focus on the barber’s profession and environment as typically American and related to small-town culture. The pole, placed above the entrance, is the main focus of the credits. Shot in a low angle, revolving on its axis, it animates the distinctive stripes to advertise the shop. The pole is what the brothers single out from the beginning, which places the striped motif at the center of the film’s aesthetics. Then the camera tilts down and Ed’s voice is heard as a customer is coming in: “Yes, I worked in a barbershop, but I never considered myself a barber.” Ed positions himself as an outsider in an Americana cliché. An old man comes in and the melancholy music of the opening credits continues, along with Ed’s presentation of the context, as the camera slowly moves towards Frank, “the principal barber,” cutting a boy’s hair while talking continuously. He embodies the Rockwellian barber, disserting on Rockwellian themes, trappers and pelts in this case. The whole sequence looks like a snapshot of the 1940s or a time capsule magnifying the nostalgic atmosphere by use of a subtle, quite poetic, slow-motion effect. But then, the main characteristics of the two barbers seem to be exaggerated in the film; the mute Hopperian barber becomes boring, and the traditional Rockwellian barber becomes annoyingly talkative. These opposite portraits of an Americana icon unnaturally coexist, as if two strikingly divergent paintings had been forced into one single filmic reality, defying the borders between the arts and the genres, comedy and tragedy, and ultimately redefining the icon’s meaning.

• 15 Stanley Orr, “Razing Cain: Excess Signification in Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn’t There,” Post (...)
• 16 The Phillips collection (Washington), oil on canvas, 73.66 x 86.36 cm (29 x 34 ins)

9Frank’s Italian origins are also caricatured in a sequence showing a family reunion at the countryside that seems to satirize the supposed vulgarity of the Italian American culture, or is it just heartland American culture? Frank shamelessly takes part in a blueberry-pie-eating contest with a bunch of kids, his hands tied behind his back, covering his whole face with jam; he also rides the family pig, proudly drinking from the distinctive Italian wine bottle in a straw basket, the fiasco. His Italian origins participate in making him a burlesque version of the traditional small-town barber. His sister Doris (Frances McDormand), on the contrary, is a self-loathing Italian, who rejects tradition and aspires to a more sophisticated urban life. Ed is in the middle, he just “stumbled into his profession,” as he admits, unlike Frank who inherited the barbershop and all the traditions attached to it from his father, Guzzy, who gave his name to the business. Ed is the counterpart of the discrete barber portrayed by Hopper, a mute, expressionless man – recalling a lot of Hopper’s similar figures, like the man sweeping the floor in Pennsylvania Coal Town (1947)15 or the one sitting on the wooden floor in front of his shop in Sunday (1926),16 his arms crossed, staring at the floor, a cigar between his lips. He goes through life like a ghost, following his attention-seeking, adulterous wife wherever she drags him to. He is the man no one remembers, not even the salesman, Creighton Tolliver (Jon Polito), who proposed him a partnership in the dry-cleaning business and had forgotten him the day after. As the lawyer, Freddy Riedenschneider (Tony Shalhoub), says after Doris is wrongly accused of murdering her boss and Ed is also suspected, basing his all-defense argument on this simple elementary fact: “He’s just a barber,” so insignificant that he could not have committed a crime. The Coens play on the usual insignificance of the barber character in films to redefine a convention of the film noir. For that, they need to create a contrast between the two barbers, the Hopperian and the Rockwellian, who seems to have shaped this stock characters in films. They somehow came to question the visual myth of Americana, that is, the visual representation of the American Way of Life that this iconic character stands for.

• 17 Trudy Bolter, « Le mythe visuel de l’Americana, » in Melvyn Stokes, Reynold Humphries, and Gilles M (...)

10Trudy Bolter identified at least three major periods of skepticism about Americana: the 1920s, 1930s, and 1970s.17 All three correspond to events that raised a doubt about the American model. The laissez-faire policy and debauched lifestyle of the 1920s resulted in the 1929 Wall Street crash followed by the Great Depression throughout the 1930s. American decision-makers had to rethink the American system completely, hence the New Deal coalition that transformed American society durably. The 1970s turmoil was the result of a particularly difficult shift in American society between pre-1960 “old” society, what Kennedy defined as “the safe mediocrity of the past” as opposed to his “New Frontier” program and its “fresh air of progress” (see JFK’s Acceptance speech, 1960). In the 1920s, essayist H. L. Mencken had already pointed at the mediocrity JFK referred to, targeting the American “booboisie,” a contraction of “boob” and “bourgeois,” echoing Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922), who denounced the conformism of the small-town middle class, or in Kennedy’s words “the stale, dank atmosphere of ‘normalcy.’” This “booboisie,” these small-town bourgeois people are shown by the Coens in The Man … after Doris is put to jail for the murder of her boss, Big Dan (James Gandolfini). Ed, as the film’s voiceover, refers to them as “they,” these soulless people prone to judge hastily (exemplified by Rockwell’s Gossips). They are first filmed in slow motion, walking in the street in a lateral tracking shot as Ed is driving his car, observing them; and a second time as Ed is still driving, commenting on the private detective’s alleged investigation, as we see the man, still in a slow motion lateral tracking shot, walking under the rain in the opposite direction to the crowd, under Ed’s suspicious eye; and a third time as the camera is still slowly tracking laterally, following Ed walking against the stream, explaining how people started avoiding him after Doris committed suicide. “It was like I was a ghost walking down the street.” Each of these symmetrical sequences is illustrated by a Beethoven piece (Moonlight Sonata) and uses the same aesthetics and composition of frame, each time opposing a stream of smartly dressed, so-called “good people” to the barber driving along or walking against the stream and symbolically rejecting the norm. This series of shots emphasizes the main interest of the film: how an ordinary, docile barber crosses the border between normalcy and criminality. It also exemplifies a recurring process in the Coen brothers’ films, the dialogue between the arts, another form of border-crossing that generates implicit meaning and complexifies their reception. The dialogue established between painting and film through the representation of the barber is now enriched by classical music, Beethoven’s, which is also a strong signifier as one of the subplots is focused on Ed’s sudden and incongruous interest for this music when he hears Birdy (Scarlett Johansson), the judge’s daughter, play. Another border is crossed, the one between low and high culture, between small-town America’s ignorance (embodied by Ed) and higher-class education (embodied by Birdy). However, it is interesting to notice that both ultimately remain mere embodiments of small-town America and its limitations, as indeed Birdy, whom Ed takes for a music genius, is rejected by a revered instructor from the city.

• 20 The concept of Americana originally emerged after the Civil War and referred to American antique ob (...)

13Thus, the term “Americana” used for satirical purposes seems to have emerged in the 1920s and may have resulted in a visual criticism of the American model, or a crisis of visual representation.20 As the artist Charles Burchfield commented in 1930, discussing Hopper’s representation of America:

• 22 Further information on www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/brunel/A885062 (Accessed July 2019).
• 23 Incidentally, the figure of the barber was also popular during the revolutionary period in France, (...)
• 24 Walker Evans worked with the Farm Security Administration program launched during the New Deal era (...)
• 25 MOMA, 23.6 × 17.7 cm (9 5/16 × 6 15/16 ins).
• 26 Michel Pastoureau, Rayures, une histoire des rayures et des tissus rayés, Paris: Seuil, 1995, 5.
• 27 Ibid. (My translation)
• 28 Ibid., 6.
• 29 Ibid., 5.

16The origin of the striped barbershop pole can be traced back to eleventh-century France, when two corporations of surgeons co-existed: those from the academy of medicine and the barber surgeons. The latter would practice bleedings or use leeches to purify infected blood in their barbershops. After each intervention, the barber would usually hang the bloody bandages outside the shop, as a form of advertising. The bandages were placed on a pike, creating a red-and-white oblique stripe which was the color of the first poles; a metal bowl, in which the leeches were collected, was placed underneath it. Through the decades, the pike became the tricolor pole: the blue stripe representing the veins, the white one, the bandages, and the red one, the blood. As for the metal bowl, it later became a sphere placed on top of the pole.22 Although the tradition later died in France, the tricolor pole crossed the Channel to England, and the Atlantic to America, where its popularity increased during the revolutionary era as it recalled the new American flag.23 Not only painters, but also photographers like Walker Evans,24 used the emblematic barbershop as a model for Shop Front, taken in New Orleans in 1935.25 This rather awkward picture creates a visual shock due to the overwhelming striped pattern covering the shop front, the lamp, the woman’s pullover, and the unmissable pole in the foreground. This proliferation of stripes contradicts the initial appeal of the candy-like tricolor pole, and makes the shop look more grotesque than traditional. But what really strikes the eye is the connotation of the black-and-white stripes that are quite different from the colored ones because they lose their patriotic quality. As explained by historian of colors Michel Pastoureau, the black-and-white stripe is, essentially, a negative sign – unlike the revolutionary stripes of the sans culottes, for example.26 He provides a list of various negative instances, recalling the way in which certain categories of people are historically stigmatized by the striped pattern. Examples such as the buffoon, the Jew (i.e., the vertical stripes of the uniforms in concentration camps), the heretic, the juggler, the leper, the executioner, and the prostitute are part of a long list of ostracized characters, all of whom “disturb or violate the good order; […] [and] are linked with the Devil in one way or another.”27 Pastoureau further argues that the bad reputation of the striped pattern might result from an ambiguous statement in the Old Testament (more precisely, the book of Deuteronomy): “Thou shalt not wear garments of different sorts, as of woollen and linen together,” which, he believes, may have been wrongly translated and confused with “two different colors,”28 thus sealing the fate of the striped pattern for centuries. But it might just as well be a purely visual problem, the stripes making it difficult for someone to distinguish between the figure and the background so that “the structure becomes the figure”29; a feature which is particularly striking in Evans’ photograph.

• 30 The Coens had to accept to make a color version (that is available on DVD) to get the film funded.
• 31 Ronald Bergan. The Coen Brothers. London: Orion Media, 2000, 25–26.
• 32 Strangely enough, the barber has now become a fashion icon due to the rise of the hipster trend tha (...)

19The Man Who Wasn’t There is meant to be a classic film noir, featuring most of its generic codes, but the femme fatale is not so fatale and the killer acts in self-defense. Repeatedly referring to classic noir, the film’s renewal of the genre relies on the influence of a referential cultural network surrounding the figure of the barber and constructed by American folklore, painting, movies, and stories, thus crossing the borders between these arts. The choice of a barber as the main character and omniscient narrator is unusual, and so was the black-and-white treatment of the film when it came out.30 Using high contrast, the directors push the noir aesthetics to an extreme, foregrounding the eerily overwhelming striped patterns, deconstructing the codes of the genre in the process. This strategy is reinforced by a series of quirky, typically Coenian elements including the barber’s Nabokovian relationship with young Birdy and his sudden passion for Beethoven; an interaction with Dan’s crazy widow who believes her husband was abducted by aliens; an accident involving a flying hubcap which recalls what we later identify as a flying saucer; or a bold homosexual toupee-wearing salesman asking for a haircut and looking for a partner with whom to start a dry-cleaning business. An element that is common to the entire oeuvre of the Coen brothers is the use of dark, offbeat humor, which is usually not in keeping with the admittedly darkly pessimistic and glamorous noir genre. Their peculiar sense of humor is usually expressed through the debunking of Americana icons: wrestlers in Barton Fink, bowling in The Big Lebowski, the Paul Bunyan fakelore in Fargo, the cowboy in No Country for Old Men, folk music in O’Brother, trailer parks in Raising Arizona or Hula Hoop in The Hudsucker Proxy. As a result, “the fashionable label of ‘postmodernism’ is often conveniently attached to the Coen brothers.”31 It is true that the Coen brothers have become masters at manipulating codes and conventions to deceive the audience and at using intertextuality and intericonicity to transcend the borders of arts and genres. In The Man Who Wasn’t There, they pay tribute to film noir, deconstruct its codes, and thus contribute to its renewal by rehabilitating an eternal secondary character whose ambivalence is magnified by the multiple cultural references with which he is associated.32