Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #88 The Man Who Wasn't There (1983)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like two kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah, and I’ve just begun a project on the movies of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie.

You kind folks have chosen a fascinatingly random and diverse collection of movies for me to watch and then write about, films that aren’t necessarily culturally important but that stick out in your mind enough that you decide it is worth paying some weirdo to see them and share his observations with the world.

Movies do not get much more random or ferociously inessential than The Man Who Wasn’t There. No, not the Coen Brothers’ melancholy noir masterpiece, the 1983 3-D Steve Guttenberg invisibility action-comedy soft-core romp. 

This 101 minute insult to the public’s intelligence and judgment stuck out in the patron’s mind for a pair of appropriately random reasons. First, because it was included in a Keith Haring retrospective because the legendary artist and graffiti guru drew in chalk on the black paper next to it in the subway, and when opportunistic art dealers went underground in search of fortune they preserved the poster for the abysmal-looking Steve Guttenberg romp along with Haring’s timeless art. 

That is pretty fucking random. Through a weird twist of fate, this astonishingly dumb, shockingly racist T&A parade will forever occupy a minor but unmistakable place in the legacy of one of the most beloved American artists of the past fifty years. 

The second reason this stupid, stupid movie stood out is because the patron bought it for fifty cents at a video store but it degraded too much to be watchable. 

Having just wasted possibly 101 of the final minutes of my life on this film, I can assure the patron that he did not miss anything in not being able to see The Man Who Wasn’t There and also that he seriously over-paid for the tape. 

The Man Who Wasn’t There was part of the tacky wave of opportunistic genre exploitation movies that rode the 3-D wave of the early 1980s, schlock-zests like Comin’ at Ya!, Jaws 3-D, Amityville 3-D, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Friday the 13th Part III (which shared a producer with The Man Who Wasn't There in Frank Mancuso Jr.), Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn, Starchaser: The Legend of Orin and Parasite that inspired “Weird Al” Yankovic to write “Nature Trail to Hell” about a fictional 3-D bloodbath that outdoes all of the aforementioned b-movies in gore and gratuitous 3-D effects. 

It might seem perverse to make a 3-D movie about lead characters no one can see but The Man Who Wasn’t There allowed uniformly underwhelmed and apoplectic audiences to see nothing in a whole new dimension. 

A clearly bored Guttenberg sleepwalks lazily through the thankless lead role of Sam Cooper, a wacky low-level diplomat cursed with having to have to work with representatives from the kind of places our president has derided as “shit-hole countries”, as opposed to the classy, glamorous, overwhelmingly caucasian nations that produce world-class bikini teams and Trump’s wives. 

We know that these countries and ambassadors are pathetic losers to be laughed at and pitied because of their dark skin, cartoonish accents (the primary racist stereotype our hero interacts with sounds like The Simpsons’ Nick Riviera being strangled softly), non-Western garb and inability to comport themselves in an adult fashion. 

Also, we know these brown and black skinned foreigners are pathetic because at their loser soiree of shame the entertainment is provided by a garishly dressed man playing the accordion instead of an elegantly dressed string quartet. 

Who could possibly respect an accordionist in loud garb? No one, that’s who.

On the day Sam Cooper is supposed to be getting married he instead finds himself baby-sitting a bunch of racist caricatures whose inability to master the basics of behaving like adults leads first to a food fight and then into an epic melee that, needless to say, does not reflect well on Cooper and keeps him from making it to his own nuptials in a timely fashion. 

It might seem super-racist to depict every non-white foreigner a slacker diplomat deals with as a clownish child unable to control their emotions but as Guttenberg’s zany protagonist explains to his bosses, the functionaries he deals with don’t just behave like the 3 Stooges because their skin is darker than Americans: they’re emotionally stunted buffoons because their countries are poor as well. 

Bill Murray and Harold Ramis might have been able to pull off the idea of a a zany underdog diplomat working with zany underdog, oddball countries, or at least rendered such a tricky and problematic premise palatable. 

But The Man Who Wasn’t There is a terrible vehicle for Guttenberg’s third-rate Bill Murray wisenheimer shtick. At his best, Guttenberg can be glibly charming; here he’s just glib, broadcasting his complete disengagement from the material at every turn. Why wouldn’t he? This is beneath the dignity of even Steve fucking Guttenberg. 

Guttenberg’s horny hero does not get married but he does stumble upon an invisibility formula being pursued by both American and Russian agents as well as a mystery invisible man (who turns out to be a woman) and a Village People-style crew of henchman that includes a Native American whose ethnicity is constantly referenced, an old British man and William Forsythe, in his screen debut as a very out of touch Hollywood conception of a punk/new waver.

The state department employee takes the serum and turns invisible, something that allows him to cat-call teenaged girls more effectively AND sneak into the showers at an all girl’s school so that he, can indulge in his great love of looking at naked women without naked women being aware of his presence. 

In the 1980s, the whole goddamn point of a movie like The Man Who Wasn’t There was the obligatory scene where the hero uses his special powers to look at naked boobs. Now that kind of behavior is incredibly off-putting, problematic at best and a crime at worst. 

Hell, the film’s tagline—“Being invisible gets you into spy rings, diplomatic circles and the lady’s locker room—waggishly promises this sequence, just as its poster guarantees a zany good time by revealing that its otherwise naked gun-toting hero is partial to boxer shorts with cartoon hearts on them. 

In abysmal light comedies like these, boxer shorts with hearts on them is shorthand for zany. Or rather ZANY! Life right now feels like an ongoing tragedy but if I were wearing boxers with hearts that would automatically render it a wild and wacky comedy. 

If I were to learn, for example, that Philip Seymour Hoffman’s characters in Synecdoche, New York and Before the Devil Knows Your wore boxers with hearts on them I would immediately have to assume that they were lovable goofballs who love to laugh. 

Scott teams up with his would-be-wife’s bombshell maid of honor Cindy Worth (Lisa Langlois), who takes the invisibility forum herself because it gives the movie the green light for gratuitous nudity. 

After all, there’s no point being invisible if people can see your clothes floating in mid-air so both Guttenberg and Langlois are constantly taking off their clothes and re-appearing while still naked. 

In the film’s most shameless and disappointing sequence, a group of creepy old perverts who have formed a club dedicated to their mutual love of voyeurism and perversion conveniently decide to peer into the open window of a room where our invisible male lead just so happens to be having sex with our naked female lead, something that shocks and arouses these men to the point that the monocle of one shatters in surprise. 

I have been making jokes about the monocles of pompous boobs shattering in shock for a solid two decades now and I don’t know that I’ve ever actually seen that cliche in action. Well, I have now, and it saddens me to report that not only is it not anywhere near as hilarious and awesome as I always imagined it would be.

The Man Who Wasn’t There certainly has the capacity to be so bad it’s good but mostly it just fucking sucks in a way that’s also shockingly boring and takes the fun out of both gratuitous nudity and shit flying at the screen in a manner designed to show off the film’s abysmal 3-D and woeful special effects. 

Langlois’ sometimes invisible, frequently nude love interest finds Guttenberg charming and irresistible but I don’t know what she sees in him. I just don’t see Guttenberg’s appeal, in general but particularly in this stinkeroo.

Nothing in this joyless, laugh-free action-comedy amused me half as much as tragicomic IMDB trivia entries like, “According to Lisa Langlois, she was tricked by the producers as the film was originally intended to be a PG rated action family film, and then just completely added a lot of nudity to it (mainly her scenes) to spice it up.”, “Jeffery Tambor only did the film just to continue working in Hollywood”,  “Lisa Langlois absolutely hated her hairdo that she had throughout the film” and “There was some turmoil on the set involving drug use which involved the Director of Photography throwing a temper tantrum after doing cocaine.” 

This leads me to believe that a documentary on the making of The Man Who Wasn’t There would be roughly ten times as entertaining as the film itself but that’s setting the bar awfully low. 

I’m glad I chose to watch The Man Who Wasn’t There because I needed the distraction of a movie that wasn’t just bad but appalling during these bleak and uncertain times. 

I’m also glad I was able to satiate a reader’s curiosity about this idiotic ephemera. Fate inextricably connected this nonsense to a great American artist; accidentally sharing gallery space with a Keith Haring original is the closest this movie will get to art, or even entertainment, for that matter. 

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