Edgar's Life

Oh, I'm sure they were high school sweethearts: he was the high school jock, she was the cheerleader. It felt natural that they would marry. The wife (when new) was probably from an "aspirational" family, and possibly hoping to have a good life with just the husband. They got a farmhouse (maybe inherited), but got their fingers burned during the Savings and Loan affair/crisis, so things slowly went downhill after that. The rest is history.

Might also be possible that Edgar might have had latent feelings of homosexuality, which might explain why he's so bad to his wife. And maybe he was using his truck to drive to the gay bars at the edge of the city for chance meetings, which is why he liked his truck so much. And notice they had no children apparently.

They did really gloss over Edgar in a strange way. I read in an interview with Barry Sonnenfeld that Edgar was originally supposed to be an alien in disguise that had his suit stolen, but they changed Edgar to a human. Since he was human in the movie, it was strange how they glossed over his existence. The MIB didn't care at all that Edgar, a fellow human, had been killed in a particularly gruesome way. They were only concerned about The Bug.

I think it would have been opportune to have Agent K give one of his little speeches/ramblings revolving around the innocent and the more gruesome aspects of the job. In which case they could have segued into how horrible things can and will happen to totally normal, innocnet people and have given a little bit more background on Edgar. The short 30 seconds or so of his movie life is all we have to judge him by with a few hints strung along in the movie.

That being said, I can't quite make up my mind about him.
*He had friends he hunted with (or used to -- Hint given by Beatrice's picture).
This leads me to believe that he wasn't totally horrible; he had friends.

*He did act to protect Beatrice by going outside to investigate.
He could have just as easily not have gone outside, or if he was a big jerk, he would have sent Beatrice instead while he finished dinner.

*Everyone has a bad day from time to time where it feels like the world is just stacking all of its might and hate against you. He compares Beatrice to a dog that's been hit (or one that hasn't been hit enough). Questionable, but that still gives us no evidence that he physically abuses her. People, family and friends threaten each other all the time, but, collectively in comparison, we seldom take any violent actions against them.

*Beatrice did start crying while talking to the agents.

It would have been nice to have more solid background on Edgar, though. Besides living on a farm, I don't know what he would have done. He had cattle (that masterfully avoided being exploded -- I hope the alien was aware of cow pies when flopping Edgar's skin every which way in the dirt). The farm did look like a family farm... And who knows where he picked Beatrice up; they probably knew each other from High School or something.

I do feel that Barry tried very hard to make us prejudiced toward Edgar so we wouldn't feel bad for his demise. However, when I thought about everything, my conscience wouldn't let me write off Edgar as a horrible person; let alone a horrible person that deserved to die in such a fashion.