The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)

Billy Bob Thornton: Ed Crane

Photos 

Quotes 

• [last lines] 

  Ed Crane : I don't know where I'm being taken. I don't know what I'll find, beyond the earth and sky. But I'm not afraid to go. Maybe the things I don't understand will be clearer there, like when a fog blows away. Maybe Doris will be there. And maybe there I can tell her all those things they don't have words for here.

• Ed Crane : He told them to look not at the facts, but at the meaning of the facts. Then he said the facts had no meaning.

• Ed Crane : Life has dealt me some bum cards. Or maybe I just haven't played 'em right, I don't know.

• Ed Crane : [after reminiscing about their first date]  It was only a couple weeks later she suggested getting married. I said, "Don't you want to get to know me more?" She said, "Why? Does it get better?" She looked at me like I was a dope, which I never really minded from her. And she had a point, I guess. We knew each other as well then as now. Anyway, well enough.

• Ed Crane : Me, I don't talk much... I just cut the hair.

• Ed Crane : Time slows down right before an accident, and I had time to think about things. I thought about what an undertaker had told me once - that your hair keeps growing, for a while anyway, after you die, and then it stops. I thought, "What keeps it growing? Is it like a plant in soil? What goes out of the soil? The soul? And when does the hair realize that it's gone?"

• Ed Crane : I was a ghost. I didn't see anyone. No one saw me. I was the barber.

• Ed Crane : It's like pulling away from the maze. While you're in the maze, you go through willy nilly, turning where you think you have to turn; banging into the dead ends. One thing after another. But you get some distance on it, and all those twists and turns, why, they're the shape of your life. It's hard to explain. But seeing it whole gives you some peace.

• Ed : Frank.

  Frank : Huh?

  Ed : This hair.

  Frank : Yeah.

  Ed : You ever wonder about it?

  Frank : Whuddya mean?

  Ed : I don't know... How it keeps on coming. It just keeps growing.

  Frank : Yeah, lucky for us, huh pal?

  Ed : No, I mean it's growing, it's part of us. And we cut it off. And we throw it away.

  Frank : Come on, Eddie, you're gonna scare the kid.

  Ed : I'm gonna take his hair and throw it out in the dirt.

  Frank : What the...

  Ed : I'm gonna mingle it with common house dirt.

  Frank : What the hell are you talking about?

  Ed : I don't know. Skip it.

• Ed Crane : [narrating]  There they were. All going about their business. It seemed like I knew a secret, a bigger one even than what had really happened to Big Dave. Something none of them knew. Like I had made it to the outside somehow, and they were all still struggling way down below.

• Ed Crane : My wife and I have not performed the sex act in many years.

• Ed Crane : Heavens to Betsy, Birdy!

• [first lines] 

  Ed Crane : Yeah, I worked in a barbershop, but I never considered myself a barber. I stumbled into it. Or married into it, more precisely.

• Reidenschneider : Ladies and gentlemen, members of the jury, citizens of Santa Rosa, we've just heard from the district attorney a rather lurid description of a truly despicable man.

  Ed Crane : [voice-over]  I had to hand it to him. He tossed a lot of sand in their eyes. He talked about how I'd lost my place in the universe. How I was too ordinary to be the criminal mastermind the D.A. made me out to be, how there was some greater scheme at work that the state had yet to unravel. And he threw in some of the old truth stuff he hadn't had the chance to trot out for Doris.

  Reidenschneider : One may at first look at these lines and see only the chaos of a work of modern art.

  Ed Crane : He told them to look at me, look at me close. That the closer they looked, the less sense it would all make.

  Reidenschneider : Look closely at him. This human, this barber.

  Ed Crane : That I wasn't the kind of guy to kill a guy, that I was the barber, for Christ's sake. I was just like them, an ordinary man. Guilty of living in a world that had no place for me, yeah. Guilty of wanting to be a dry cleaner, sure. But not of murder.

  Reidenschneider : But most specifically, this is a barber's dilemma. For he is modern man.

  Ed Crane : He said I was modern man.

  Reidenschneider : He is your reflection.

  Ed Crane : And if they voted to convict me, they'd be practically cinching the noose around their own necks. He told them to look not at the facts, but at the meaning of the facts. And then he said the facts had no meaning. It was a pretty good speech. Even had me going, until Frankie interrupted it.

• Ed Crane : Sooner or later everyone needs a haircut.

• [Tolliver loosens his tie suggestively] 

  Ed Crane : Was that a pass?

  Creighton Tolliver : Maybe.

  Ed Crane : Well you're out of line, mister... way out of line.

• Ed Crane : I was the principal barber now. I hired a new man for the second chair. I'd hired the guy who did the least gabbing when he came in for an interview, but I guess the new man had only kept quiet because he was nervous. Once he had the job he talked from the minute I opened the shop in the morning until I locked up at night. For all I know, he talked to himself on the way home.

• Ed Crane : I went to see a woman who was supposed to have powers of communicating with those who had "passed across" as she called it. She said that people who had passed across were picky about who they communicated with, not like most people you run into on this side. So you needed a guide, someone with a gift for talking to souls.

• Ed Crane : Frank Raffo, my brother-in-law, was the principle barber, and man could he talk. Now maybe if you're 11 or 12 years old, Frank's got an interesting point of view. But sometimes he got on my nerves.

• Ed Crane : And through it all, we cut the hair.

• Ed Crane : She was just another gabbler.

• Jacques Carcanogues : The girl? She seems like a very nice girl. She plays, monsieur, like a very nice girl. Stinks. Very nice girl. However, stinks.

  Ed Crane : I don't understand.

  Jacques Carcanogues : It is not so hard to understand. Her playing, very polite.

  Ed Crane : Did she make mistakes?

  Jacques Carcanogues : Mistake, no, it says E-flat, she plays E-flat. Ping-ping. Hit the right note, always. Very proper.

  Ed Crane : I don't understand, no mistakes? She's just a kid. I thought you taught the, uh, the...

  Jacques Carcanogues : Ah, but that is just what I cannot teach. I cannot teach her to have the *soul*. Look, monsieur, playing the piano, is not about the fingers. Done with the fingers, yes. But the music, she is inside. Inside, monsieur. The music starts here, then comes out through here, then maybe, she can go up there.

• Ed Crane : Doris and I went to church once a week. Usually Tuesday night.

  Bingo Caller : B-9. I-29.

• Ed Crane : I was turning into Ann Nirdlinger, Big Dave's wife. I had to turn my back on the old lady, on the veils, on the ghosts, on the dead. Before they all sucked me in.

• Ed Crane : Of course there was one person who could confirm Doris' story, or plenty of it: the dry cleaning pansy. But he'd left the hotel, skipped out on his bill. He'd also disappeared from the residence he gave me, owing two months rent. How could I have been so stupid? Handing over 10000 dollars for a piece of paper. And the man gone, like a ghost, disappeared into thin air, vaporized like the nips at Nagasaki, gone now. All gone. The money gone. Big Dave gone. Doris going. How could I have been so stupid?

• Ed Crane : I called in Freddy Reidenschneider. I signed the house over to him. He said he didn't normally work that cheap.

• Ed Crane : The men's magazine also asked about remorse. Yeah I guess I'm sorry about the pain I caused other people, but I don't regret anything. Not a thing. I used to. I used to regret being the barber.