The Coen brothers’ fifth feature film, The Hudsucker Proxy, was released in 1994, but the screenplay, co-scripted with Sam Raimi, had already been written before the release of Blood Simple. Due to projected high production costs the project was put on hold until, a decade later, the Coens teamed with high-profile producer Joel Silver who arranged the financing for the movie at a cost of $25 million, considerably more than any of the Coens’ previous films. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the minimal appeal of its throw-back homage to Old Hollywood comedy, the movie was a box office bust, earning only $2.8 million in theatrical release. The film’s financial misfortune likely had much to do with its arcane generic form, for The Hudsucker Proxy is a clever reinvention of the classic ‘screwball’ comedy popular in the 1930s and 1940s as exemplified in the movies of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. Its fairy tale story revolves around Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins), a naïvely ambitious young man from Muncie, Indiana, who arrives in New York City hoping to launch a successful career in business. Although his first job at Hudsucker Industries as mail clerk puts him at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy, he soon makes a miraculous rise to the top when he is chosen for the role of ‘proxy’ to replace the recently deceased company president, Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning). Against all expectations, the seemingly simpleminded proxy enjoys immediate success by inventing a kid’s toy that becomes the craze of the nation – the Hula Hoop. Under the heady influence of sudden success and power, however, Norville quickly loses his small-town innocence and slips into a downward spiral of depression, ending in suicidal despair.
Set in New York City, 1958, Norville’s rise-and-fall narrative also reflects a trend in Hollywood movies of the 1950s such as The Sweet Smell of Success (1957), a noirish story written by Clifford Odets (a model for the Coens’ Barton Fink) about a ruthlessly ambitious newspaper man named J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) who climbs to the top but ends up, like Norville Barnes, contemplating a death leap from the top of a skyscraper. The similarity of the name Hunsecker with Hudsucker suggests a kinship, although the Odets-penned story was clearly intended as a sober critique of American big business, while the intentions of The Hudsucker Proxy are less transparent. Another movie of this era with similar concerns is Robert Wise’s drama Executive Suite (1954), a cynical tale that opens with the death of a top executive, which, as in The Hudsucker Proxy, initiates a battle for control of the company. One of contenders for corporate power schemes to profit from the old boss’s death by selling a large share of his stock to destabilise the company and lower stock values so that he can later buy back the stocks at a deflated rate, a scheme very similar to that of Sidney J. Mussberger (Paul Newman), who installs Norville as president of the Hudsucker Corporation hoping that the ‘proxy’ (whom Sid considers ‘a jerk we can really push around’) will shake the confidence of Wall Street and push down the price of company stock. In both Executive Suite and The Sweet Smell of Success the moral message is clear and meant to be taken seriously: Men who value career and material success above all else, even above personal relationships, are fated to live empty lives and ultimately to suffer despair.
Despite such affinities with movies that openly indict American big business, the Coens insist that their primary aim was not to critique capitalism but to create a ‘modern-day fairy tale’ set in the corporate culture of the 1950s. A far cry from the down-beat social dramas of the 1950s, The Hudsucker Proxy mimes the popular comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, and certainly, much of its fun derives from the enjoyment of the film’s complex and cleverly wrought pastiche, which offers a feast for the film-literate viewer, quoting heavily from the comedies of Capra and Sturges, as well as from Fritz Lang’s science-fiction masterpiece Metropolis (1927), Terry Gilliam’s dark satire Brazil (1984), and a rich array of additional cultural sources.
The movie’s initial reviews were mixed. Roger Ebert called it the ‘best-looking’ movie he had seen in a long time. Otherwise, he voiced the view, shared by many, that The Hudsucker Proxy was ‘all surface and no substance’. Todd McCarthy wrote that the Coens’ new movie was ‘one of the most inspired and technically stunning pastiches of Old Hollywood pictures ever to come out of New Hollywood’, but otherwise little more than sterile pastiche, lacking emotion and human warmth. Geoff Brown thought the Coens’ new film praiseworthy, ‘a brilliant film about archetypes and movie ghosts’, but was also forced to admit that ‘for something with heart and a cast of humans, you must go elsewhere’. Christopher Tookey condemned The Hudsucker Proxy as ‘one of the worst movies of this, or any, year’, faulting the Coens especially for their failure to critique capitalist big business and insisting that the movie should have created a more realistic image of big capitalism instead of the ‘fairy palace’ the Coens had built from the ruins of a dead genre. Considering the high production costs for such a movie, Tookey concludes that ‘a multi-million dollar budget has been wasted on film-school thinking’.
As the critics rightly emphasised, style does trump content in a film that recreates the look of old studio movies but playfully exaggerates and distorts that cinematic vision of reality with a style of monumental proportions. In terms of scale, the film’s overbuilt production design pushes the realist aesthetic far beyond conventional limits, its decorative excess serving to parody rather than replicate the naïve studio realism of its classic models. Production designer Dennis Gassner reports that he and the brothers ‘agreed that Citizen Kane had the scale and perspective we wanted, but we wanted to do it much better than they did it, to do it the Coen way, not the Welles way’ (Allen 2006: 68). To rival the visual monumentality of Citizen Kane, elaborate sets were constructed in super-sized sound stages large enough to house the enormous Hudsucker boardroom with its improbably long meeting table as well as Sid Mussberger’s palatial penthouse office atop the Hudsucker skyscraper (which Gassner compares to the office of fascist Italian dictator Mussolini). One of the most ambitious sets was the cavernous mailroom in the bottom floor of the Hudsucker Building which, in Gassner’s words, ‘looks as if it might have been designed by Albert Speer’, the Nazi architect Hitler commissioned to plan a new Berlin to be the greatest imperial city since ancient Rome (Robson 2007: 140). The design for the Hudsucker mailroom also takes a cue from Gilliam’s Brazil, where a horrific vision of totalitarian rule and its domination of the lower classes is conjured as a bureaucracy of absurd proportions, symbolised by a workplace which in its colossal dimensions overwhelms the oppressed workers, visually reducing them to ant-like images. Extravagant special effects sequences and spectacular action set-pieces such as Waring’s leap from the Hudsucker boardroom and Norville’s near-fatal plunge at the end also contribute to the movie’s overall sense of monumentality. Co-writer Sam Raimi directed the second unit needed for filming these and other technically complex sequences which, according to Joel, have a ‘cartoon element’ comparable to the animated Road Runner series where Wile E. Coyote can fall off a cliff and get up unharmed (Mottram 2000: 104). Combined with the film’s otherwise exaggerated production design, the cartoon-like action pieces lend the story world of The Hudsucker Proxy an air of faux-grandiosity, staged with such anti-realistic excess that ultimately its intended effect is alienating. In R. Barton Palmer’s view, ‘the selfconscious grandiosity of image in Hudsucker expresses the filmmakers’ detached view of the diegetic world they have conjured into existence’ (2004: 135). Style functions in The Hudsucker Proxy to distance audiences, as well as the filmmakers themselves, from the characters and the transparently ‘made-up’ world they inhabit.
A Capra Film Written by Sturges
Generally, the Coen brothers state their preference for rewriting literary sources (Cain and Hammett in their early films, Odets and West in Barton Fink), rather than doing remakes of antecedent films. This makes The Hudsucker Proxy, a film devoted entirely to recreating cinematic precursors, something of an oddity, and all the more interesting because it is one of the Coens’ earliest screenplays. As homage, The Hudsucker Proxy is proof of the brothers’ enduring affection for classic Hollywood genres, especially for the kind of comedies known as ‘screwball’. In its restoration of screwball comedy, The Hudsucker Proxy draws on a cluster of films from the 1930s and 1940s, in particular those by Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, sampling plots and characters from Capra films like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and infusing them with a darker, more cynical humour substantially derived from Sturges’ comedies of the 1940s. Like its historical models, The Hudsucker Proxy uses screwball antics to lighten its treatment of weightier themes, painting a picture of corrupt corporate capitalism with the brush strokes of a cartoon illustrator. In its reinvention of Capra-style screwball The Hudsucker Proxy pursues one of Capra’s most characteristic conceits: the hero’s failure and the temptation of suicide, typically prevented by the intervention of some last-minute deus ex machina. Probably the best-known version of this narrative occurs in It’s a Wonderful Life where one of Capra’s most memorable heroes, George Bailey (James Stewart), contemplates suicide to alleviate the humiliation and despair he has suffered in his failed struggle against Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore), a greedy, heartless capitalist who schemes to profit by purchasing and controlling all the local real estate. In his fight against Potter’s take-over, George makes great self-sacrifices for his community, staying home to manage the small-town savings and loan bank established by his father instead of following his dream of travelling and exploring the greater world. Only when a guardian angel sent from heaven intervenes to show him the error of his suicidal intent, does George relent, finally to be redeemed by his previous good deeds and saved from financial ruin by the generosity of friends and patrons, proving (Capra-style) the karmic principle that ‘what goes around, comes around’.
Another instance of the suicidal hero is found in Capra’s Meet John Doe (1941), the story of a down-and-out ballplayer named Long John Willoughby (Gary Cooper) who is hired by a local newspaper for a sensational hoax intended to boost circulation by running a fake story on ‘John Doe’ predicting that he will leap to his death from the top of City Hall on Christmas Eve. The hoax does indeed increase newspaper sales, but it also makes the John Doe proxy a populist hero. When the scam becomes public knowledge, the shame drives Long John to contemplate actual suicide. The suicide motif is also prominent in several of Sturges’ early screenplays, written in the 1930s, two of which concern financially successful men driven to commit suicide because their success leaves them with empty lives. In The Power and the Glory, scripted in 1934 for Warner Bros., the central character Tom Garner (Spencer Tracy) rises to the top as a ruthless railroad tycoon, but after a series of personal tragedies, shoots himself to death. In Diamond Jim (1935) the eponymous hero (Edward Arnold), rejected by the woman he loves, decides to eat himself to death. The Coens resurrect the suicidal tycoon in the character of Waring Hudsucker, whose leap from the top of the Hudsucker Building reenacts the suicides of Sturges’ tragic anti-heroes, but who returns in a Capraesque ending as Norville’s saving angel, confessing that he jumped to his death because, like Tom Garner and Diamond Jim, his professional success had ruined his personal life, causing the woman he loved to reject him and marry his Machiavellian business associate, Sidney Mussberger.
The opening sequence of The Hudsucker Proxy finds Norville Barnes on the brink of repeating Waring Hudsucker’s fatal leap from the top of the Hudsucker skyscraper. Off-screen, the omniscient narrator, Moses (Bill Cobbs), poses the story’s central question: ‘How’d he get so high, and why’s he feelin’ so low?’ In the end, like George Bailey, Norville is saved by Waring Hudsucker’s angelic intervention and given a second chance, but for very different reasons. Bailey’s near-demise is, ironically, the consequence of his moral virtue. By helping his fellow working-class citizens resist the domination of big capital, Bailey represents the populist ideal mythologised in Capra’s vision of American democracy. Norville, on the other hand, can hardly be held up as a hero of the working class. Instead of using his power to help the workers of Hudsucker Industries, his miraculous and unearned ascension to power goes to his head and as chief executive he soon shows himself to be little better than his antagonist, Sid Mussberger. As president of Hudsucker Industries, Norville leads a princely life of luxury in his penthouse office, while below he has decreed big layoffs from the workforce to boost profits. When Amy (Jennifer Jason Leigh) confronts him with this, Norville replies matter-of-factly, ‘Well yes, we’re pruning away some of the dead wood’, whereupon she scolds him angrily, accusing him of ‘sitting up here like a sultan not doing a lick of work’.
Norville Barnes also recalls Jefferson Smith (James Stewart), the hero of Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), who, like Norville, journeys from backwater to the big city where he is chosen by corrupt powers to serve as a kind of proxy, selected by devious politicians to fill the term of a deceased senator because they think he can be easily manipulated. In the ethical conflict that ensues, Jefferson Smith emerges as a symbol of moral integrity in a corrupt world, a mythic incarnation of patriotic virtue and the American belief in the power of a strong democracy to counter political graft. Norville’s journey to the big city is a somewhat different story, with a very different outcome. Like Mr. Smith, Norville triumphs over the powers of greed and corruption, but not for the sake of the utopian ideals of populist democracy and moral virtue. The only ideal Norville pursues is success in business, which he achieves more as the result of dumb luck than of moral strength. Norville never questions the capitalist ideology implicit in the corporate culture of big business and happily carries out his duties in service to the American Dream of material success.
The most extensively quoted film in The Hudsucker Proxy’s Capra pastiche is Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, from which the filmmakers recruit another of Capra’s populist heroes whose story develops the familiar theme of provincial ‘little man’ fighting big-city corruption. Longfellow Deeds (Gary Cooper) is a small-town rube who unexpectedly inherits a large fortune which, of course, powerful big-city businessmen and lawyers scheme to take from him. With the help of Babe Bennett (Jean Arthur), an ambitious newspaper reporter who at first tries to expose the protagonist as a ‘Cinderella Man’ but then joins his noble cause, Deeds is able to outsmart his scheming antagonists, retain his inherited millions and become the heroic benefactor of the working class, freely redistributing his windfall fortune to bankrupt farmers during the Great Depression. In addition to the obvious borrowings in narrative structure and characterisations from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, The Hudsucker Proxy references numerous scenes directly, notably the scene in which muck-raking reporter Amy Archer stages a con designed to deceive and expose Norville as an ‘imbecile’. The scene’s referent in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, a ‘lady-in-distress’ scenario, stages a similar deception. Hoping to get the inside scoop on the overnight millionaire, Babe Bennett schemes to meet Deeds on a rainy night outside his urban mansion, posing as an unemployed and homeless waif. Accompanying Babe on her mission to swindle Deeds are two snide photographers from the newspaper who observe from a parked taxi as Babe works her magic on the unsuspecting mark. To gain his sympathy and assistance she feigns poverty and finally pretends to faint from hunger, forcing Deeds to take her to a nearby restaurant for sustenance.
‘Enter the dame.’
This comedic routine is replayed by Amy and Norville in a scene entitled ‘Enter the Dame’, but with a fundamental revision. In Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, the role of the observing photographers is minor, their sarcastic commentary on Babe’s deception intermittent and mostly insignificant. In the Coens’ parodic reinvention, two veteran cab drivers, Benny (John Seitz) and Lou (Joe Grifasi), replace the tag-along photographers in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town as witnesses to Amy’s swindle, narrating and commenting on her scam in the style of a Greek chorus (if the chorus was composed of veteran New York cabbies). The entire scene is shot in one long take from the cabbies’ point of view. Thus, instead of dialogue between Amy and Norville, we hear only the cabbies’ cynical off-screen narration, as they knowingly anticipate Amy’s every move, mocking the well-worn clichés she uses to deceive a gullible Norville. As Amy seats herself next to Norville, the veterans begin their commentary:
Lou: Enter the dame.
Benny: There’s one in every story.
Lou: She’s looking for her mark…
Benny: She finds him.
Lou: She sits down.
Norville, meanwhile, is not noticing her presence, prompting Lou to speculate…
Lou: Maybe he’s wise.
Benny: He don’t look wise.
To get Norville’s attention, Amy resorts to Plan 2, pretending to cry.
Lou: Here come the water works.
Lou: Old Faithful.
Benny: Hello Niagara.
Having finally been noticed, Amy proceeds to lament her predicament. She has family problems, her mother needs an operation. Benny speculates: ‘adenoids’. Lou corrects: ‘lumbago’ – then exclaims: ‘That gag’s got whiskers on it.’ Just as the cabbies begin to think her act is failing to reach Norville, she pretends to pass out from hunger. The cabbies look on in disbelief. Lou can only say: ‘She’s good, Benny.’ Benny agrees: ‘She’s damn good, Lou.’ As if to emphasise the nauseating transparency of Amy’s con artisty, the narrators conclude their commentary by ordering a ‘bromo’. For the most part, the sob story Amy feeds Norville is cribbed directly from the Babe Bennett routine. Presenting the scene exclusively from the cabbies’ perspective, however, not only highlights its referential status as movie cliché, but also has the effect of distancing the viewer, whose experience of the scene is mediated entirely by the cab drivers’ sarcastic voiceover.
Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is not the only movie this scene references. Benny and Lou’s commentary also brings to mind a scene in Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941) in which the con artist Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck) observes from afar a group of women trying to impress the wealthy eligible bachelor Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), whom she herself has targeted as a mark. ‘Holy smoke,’ she exclaims at one point, ‘the dropped kerchief! That hasn’t been used since Lily Langtry,’ echoed in the cabbie’s remark: ‘That gag’s got whiskers on it.’ Although the content of this scene is straight out of Capra, the ironic framing of the cabbies’ off-screen commentary lends it a distinctly Sturgean point of view, subverting Capra’s sentimentality with Sturges’ cynical irony. Thus, the Coens playfully resurrect an antiquated subgenre, but at the same time render what is arguably a more authentic version of screwball, as exemplified by the movies of Sturges. Not surprisingly then, the Coens cite Sturges as the bigger influence on The Hudsucker Proxy: ‘There is Capra in the film,’ says Joel, ‘but there’s more Sturges’; the difference, as he explains, is that ‘Sturges had a more satirical undertow [and] his relationship to business and society is much more sympathetic to our view than Capra’s’ (Robson 2007: 133). No doubt, there are crucial differences between these two filmmakers that shape their worldview and their conception of characters. Capra’s heroes are truly heroic; they fight for justice, and though they generally fail, they are redeemed for their virtuous actions. Sturges prefers the comic fool whose redemption is granted not for his altruistic motives but in spite of his character weaknesses. Sturges also takes a rather different view of morality. Contra Capra, Sturges’ comedies commonly portray self-interest and monetary gain as more important than traditional ethical values. Accordingly, the material qualities of personal success and external beauty are rewarded.
Norville Barnes is not a sympathetic populist hero in the mold of Capra. The only ideal he seems to embrace is the American Dream of getting rich quick, a feat Norville achieves not on the strength of his moral virtue or work ethic, but as the result of accidental good fortune bestowed on him simply because he is a gullible fool. In this way, Norville is closer to the naïvely vacuous figures typical of Preston Sturges’ movies such as Christmas in July (1940), where the protagonist, Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell), is tricked into thinking he has won a national advertising contest. His false success so impresses his boss that he is awarded an unearned promotion to advertising executive. When the truth comes out, Jimmy is allowed to keep the promotion and given a chance to prove himself. If Christmas in July mocks the American mythology of success and wealth for all, Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), Sturges’ satire on patriotism during World War II, travesties the myth of the warrior-hero in its farcical tale of a returning war veteran mistakenly celebrated for heroic deeds he did not perform. As his name indicates, Norville Barnes is a direct descendent of Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken), the hero of The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944), Sturges’ satire on smalltown morality in 1940s America. Like many of Sturges’ characters, Norval is an accidental hero. A nerdy weakling unfit for military duty, Norval is miscast in the role of the archetypal all-American boy in love with the girl-next-door, mischievously named Trudy Kochenlocher. As Trudy’s surname suggests, she too does not conform to the conventional notion of the chaste and virtuous all-American girl. Going against type, she is portrayed instead as a ‘loose’ young woman whose idea of patriotism is partying with the soldiers going off to war. When one of her soldier friends gets her pregnant before shipping out, Norval steps in to offer assistance to the ‘lady in distress’. While at first Trudy cannot take Norval seriously, eventually his genuine love and devotion win Trudy’s heart and the story concludes with their marriage and with Trudy giving birth to not one baby but sextuplets. The news that he is suddenly the father of six causes the surrogate father to pass out and the movie ends with an ironic title card:
But Norval recovered and became increasingly happy for, as Shakespeare said: ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.’
His belated ‘greatness’ thrust upon him, Norval once again proves that the heroism of Sturges’ protagonists is illusory, in this case, as much the outcome of the hero’s weakness as of his strength. Lacking a clear moral message, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek does more to undermine than uphold a conventional code of ethics and propriety thought to be the provenance of small-town Americans.
The Coens borrow much from Sturges to fashion their reinvention of screwball comedy, but nothing so much as his style of writing dialogue. In its time, Sturges’ highly stylised dialogue established, as film critic Andrew Dickos describes it, ‘the standard of eloquence’ for Hollywood screenwriting in its poetic rendering of ‘a cacophony of Euro-American vernacularisms and utterances, peculiarly – and appropriately – spoken with scandalous indifference’ (1985: 56). The fast-paced wit of Sturges’ dialogue is most effectively imitated in The Hudsucker Proxy by the speeches of Amy Archer, whose character appears to be shaped primarily in the mold of Babe Bennett, the fast-talking, ruthless journalist bent on exposing the incompetence of Longfellow Deeds. Most viewers identify Amy’s cinematic model as Katherine Hepburn, famous for her roles in such films as Howard Hawks’ Bringing up Baby (1938) and George Cukor’s comedies, The Philadelphia Story (1940) and Adam’s Rib (1949). But, as actor Jennifer Jason Leigh told the Los Angeles Times, ‘It’s not just Hepburn. Amy is very reminiscent of all those 1930s and 1940s heroines in the screwball Capra and Preston Sturges movies, Howard Hawks, Cukor.’ ‘Actually,’ says Leigh, ‘I’m doing everybody’ (Anderson 1994). Thus, while Leigh’s performance is a studied impersonation of Jean Arthur’s Babe Bennett, it also recalls Rosalind Russell’s performance as Hildy Johnson in Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday (1941) and Barbara Stanwyck’s memorable rendering of the con-lady Jean Harrington in Sturges’ The Lady Eve. A composite pastiche of acting styles, Leigh’s delivery reflects and amplifies The Hudsucker Proxy’s multi-voiced dialogue with classic Hollywood comedies.
Critics complained that such denaturalised acting, which forces the actors to speak their lines in a peculiar, stilted way, reduces the characters to a set of stylised mannerisms. For this reason Jeff Shannon of the Seattle Times called The Hudsucker Proxy a ‘sleek machine that just doesn’t work’, because ‘not one minute of it registers even the slightest hint of emotional involvement’. As R. Barton Palmer points out, however, the Coens’ approach to the film may be better understood in relation to the theory of drama advanced by German playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose so-called ‘epic theatre’ utilises a variety of ‘alienation effects’ to suspend spectator empathy and promote critical thinking and ideological engagement. As a practical function of his theory of estrangement, Brecht instructed his actors to speak as if they were quoting their lines. Thus, the arch anti-realism of The Hudsucker Proxy is in accord with Brecht’s aim to discourage identification with characters in order to create the critical distance required for the audience to reflect intellectually on ideological themes. Other practices of Brechtian dramaturgy designed to deconstruct the illusion of reality are on display in the film as well. The breaking of the ‘fourth wall’ separating on-stage reality from audience is invoked, for instance, when Moses, searching for a way to save Norville from his fatal leap from the 44th floor, addresses the viewer directly, saying ‘I’m really never supposed to do this, but do you have a better idea?’
The general use of comedic farce to counteract elements of melodrama lends the entire film story a sense of cool detachment that disturbed both audiences and reviewers. Viewed from this perspective, The Hudsucker Proxy offers itself as a Capra story as it might have been written by Sturges (under the influence of Brechtian aesthetics). Indeed, one of the central creative concerns in the movie is the filmmakers’ attempt to orchestrate a contentious duet between Capra and Sturges, juxtaposing the differing styles and themes of these two filmmakers to commemorate their works but also to examine the values their movies convey. Simply put, the major difference that emerges in such a comparison is ideological. Capra has an unclouded moral vision; the division between good and evil in his fictional universe is clear and unequivocal. Sturges, in contrast, is wary of closed belief systems and his attitude toward inherited cultural values is typically ambivalent and critically distanced. Capra was a sentimentalist dreaming nostalgically of the return of an America based on cultural myths that likely never existed. By filtering Capra’s ‘corny’ mythology of America through the lens of Sturges’ more cynical comedies, The Hudsucker Proxy works to subvert Capra’s sentimentality with an ironic, ‘alienated’ sensibility consistent with the self-reflexive artificiality characteristic of postmodernist art, rather than with Capra’s antiquated notions of sincerity and earnest altruism.
Circular Thinking
According to Joel Coen, The Hudsucker Proxy is, ‘in a weird kind of way, almost an exception to the other movies we’ve made. It was almost calculated to prove what people thought about our previous movies but actually I don’t think was ever the case’ (Mottram 2000: 93) – namely, that their previous films were ‘all style and no substance’. Describing the film’s narrative as ‘a very simple story with a rather banal moral’, Ethan admits that, in his words, the movie is ‘anally constructed’ according to strict principles of design (Woods 2000: 134). As the Coens go on to explain, the geometric figure of the circle is the movie’s most basic design element and every aspect of the film is coordinated with it. The image of the circle is of course prominently displayed as the design for Norville’s inventions, the Hula Hoop and the Frisbee, but circular imagery infuses the film’s mise-en-scène from beginning to end. In the opening sequence the camera tracks through the New York cityscape on New Year’s Eve, 1958. Gliding among the skyscrapers, the camera registers their high-rise vertical linearity, which, geometrically, stands in sharp contrast to the circularity of the huge clock atop the Hudsucker Building where the camera eye finally comes to rest. In voiceover, Moses speaks of the celestial order that keeps the planets in circular orbit around their solar fulcrum: ‘Daddy Earth fixin’ to make one mo’ trip around the sun.’ Thus commences a retrospective narrative that begins at its end point and circles around to tell in flashback the story from its beginning as Norville arrives in New York City. Eager but inexperienced, he seeks employment in the ‘help wanted’ ads at the Nidus Employment Agency, only to find that he is unqualified for any of the jobs available due to his inexperience. Discouraged, Norville enters the ‘Epicure Diner’, where the camera focuses on the counter, panning casually from a circular ashtray to the circular saucer under Norville’s coffee mug. As he leaves the diner, we see (but Norville does not) that the coffee cup has left a circular stain on his abandoned newspaper, inscribing a perfect brown ring around an ad for a job in Hudsucker Industries’ mailroom. Blown by the wind of some inexplicable fate, the newspaper follows Norville out the door and down the street until it finally plasters to his leg and he sees the coffee-stain circle announcing the beginning of Norville’s quest for business success. As Norville enters the Hudsucker Building to apply, he walks, appropriately, through a circulating revolving door – at the very moment when Waring Hudsucker leaps to his death.
Norville’s invention: ‘You know, for kids!’
Although circularity is featured prominently in the film’s visual design, most of the design elements are in fact angular – the skyscraper cityscape dominated by the modernist architectural styles of Manhattan and Chicago, the interior spaces of the Hudsucker Building (where most of the story takes place) featuring improbably high ceilings braced by enormous columns, windows rising up from floor to ceiling, and oversized wooden doors large enough to accommodate a giant astride another giant. Appropriately, angularity is the dominant design element in the construction and décor of Sidney Mussberger’s extravagant office, which brings to mind the control centre of Joh Frederson, mastermind of a fully mechanised super city of the future in Fritz Lang’s science fiction classic Metropolis. Reminiscent of the austere executive suite from which Frederson rules over his city, the offices and boardroom atop the Hudsucker skyscraper are extravagantly spacious, with high ceilings, oversized doors and a minimalist décor that emphasises the enormity of the set’s spatial dimensions. In both films, the monumental mise-en-scène serves the same purpose, aggrandising and accentuating the power and control of those who sit atop the economic pyramid.
In opposition to the ‘square’ aesthetic of capitalism conveyed by the grand urban monoliths of corporate power, the circular iconography articulates a different philosophy of life, symbolised in the figure of Norville Barnes, for whom the circle becomes a constant visual motif. In every scene he is associated with and surrounded by circular objects and shapes. Circular lamp shades appear whenever he is in the shot; in the coffee shop he is surrounded by circular coffee cups and plates; he is seen wearing a scarf featuring white circles set against a dark field, creating the impression of tiny luminous globes. His executive desk has an oval shape and the décor of his office space is generally more organic, its edges rounded and softened. Even when Norville is not present but being discussed by others, for instance by the chief editor of the Manhattan Argus, the motif is continued in the circular desk lamps, ashtrays and furniture decorating the editor’s office. The thematic relevance of the circular design is on full display at the Hudsucker Christmas gala where, in a Capraesque romantic scene, Norville and Amy share an intimate moment on an outdoor terrace high above New York City. As Norville nurses a black eye inflicted by an incensed stockholder, applying a circular ice pack to his injury, he waxes philosophical, invoking the Hindu concept of karma. Looking down from the skyscraper balcony, Amy comments that the people below look like ants. ‘Well,’ Norville replies, ‘the Hindus say – and the beatniks also – that in the next life some of us will come back as ants. Some will be butterflies. Others will be elephants or creatures of the sea.’ Norville imagines Amy in a previous life as a gazelle and himself as an antelope (or an ibex) and goes on to explain that ‘the whole thing is what your beatnik friends call “karma” – the great circle of life, death, and rebirth’. Amy puts it in more common terms: ‘What goes around, comes around.’ With the circular bulbs of a Christmas tree shining in the background, Norville exclaims, ‘That’s it! A great wheel that gives us each what we deserve.’ What Norville alludes to here is the Hindu belief in the cycle of reincarnation called samsara, based on the cause-andeffect morality of karma. For Hindus, the ultimate goal of human existence is liberation from the circle of samsara and the merger of the individual soul with the great cosmic spirit, Brahman. In Hindu religious thought, the mandala (Sanskrit for ‘circle’) is a sacred symbol representing cosmic order and unity. Norville’s comment, seemingly innocent, invites a reading of the film as religious allegory in which the circle serves as a universal symbol for unity and infinity – the unbroken line with no beginning and no end. When Norville succumbs to the temptations of materialism, the karmic wheel spins him into despair. The realisation that he has, in Amy’s words, ‘outrun his soul chasing after money and ease’, drives Norville to the brink of self-annihilation, but at the last moment he is saved – Capra-style – by an angelic Waring Hudsucker, who returns from heaven wearing a glowing round halo to give Norville a second chance, or, one might say, a reincarnation.
To supplement allusions to Hindu beliefs, the Coens also sneak in a reference to the Jewish Cabala, a book of mysticism based on the idea that divine truths are encoded in religious scripture. The biblical Moses (probable namesake of Moses, the story’s narrator and Norville’s secret guardian) is said to have initiated the tradition of cabalistic interpretation which, like Hinduism, teaches that those who understand the mysterious codes of sacred scripture can break free from the ‘enchanted circle of life’ that traps the unenlightened. Appropriately, a cryptic reference to the Cabala is suggested when Amy says to office mate Smitty, ‘There’s a real story here, some kind of plot, a set-up, a cabal, a – oh.’ Using a fancy word (Amy’s standard way of showing off her verbal finesse), she ponders the possibility of a ‘cabal’ or secret intrigue within the power structure of Hudsucker Industries, but ends her thought with an added ‘a’, thus casually rendering the quite different, though oddly related term: ‘cabal-a’ – which gives her cause (‘oh’) to ponder another mystery. Combining Eastern religious mythologies of spiritual enlightenment with the Western quest myth, the Coens create a fairy tale narrative à la Capra populated by archetypal figures: the good king who dies at the beginning (Waring Hudsucker), the evil regent (Sidney Mussberger) and the callow youth (Norville Barnes) who replaces the dying king. By transporting this mythic material to 1950s corporate America, The Hudsucker Proxy implies that the noble quest of ancient legend has degenerated into an ignoble conquest of the material world, reflected in the empty-minded materialism of a consumer society for which the Hula Hoop is emblematic and precisely the opposite of the wisdom of Eastern religious thought which stipulates detachment from worldly desires as the path to true enlightenment and escape from the circle of samsara, the great circle of life, death and rebirth.
Further elements in The Hudsucker Proxy’s production design point to the influence of Lang’s Metropolis. Noted for its monumental architectural visualisation of the urban future, Lang’s film provided a rich conceptual model for the Coens’ fairy-tale vision of New York City. Lang had in fact visited New York before making Metropolis and reported that its impressive modern skyscrapers had inspired his grandiose vision of a technologised future world. Instead of a utopian vision, however, Lang challenged the modernist faith in technological progress, presenting a dystopian view of a fullytechnologised mega-city. In this respect, Metropolis is a forerunner for the critique of techno-bureaucracy and its relationship with capitalism depicted in futuristic films like Brazil and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). Using elaborately crafted models and advanced visual effects techniques, Lang envisioned the urban future as a dense cluster of towering high-rise structures, the scale and complexity of which are reconstructed in The Hudsucker Proxy with a set of miniature models based on various well-known New York structures such as the Chrysler Building, the Chanin Building and the Bank of New York, as well as famous Chicago buildings like the Merchandise Mart. Due to its division of society into an elite ruling class and an underclass of exploited workers, Lang’s Metropolis has often been read as a Marxist allegory. In this regard, Palmer’s comments on the implied politics of The Hudsucker Proxy are of particular interest:
Dominating both its narrative and visual design is the monolithic Hudsucker Corporation, an organization identified with its impressive New York edifice, where most of the narrative unfolds. True to the American myth of the ‘robber baron,’ its founder has built this company through the ruthless pursuit of profit. […] Those at the top exploit underlings with the unconcern of the factory owners in Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s horrifying vision of end-stage capitalism, which seems to have provided the Coens with a model both architectural and ideological. Seldom has the gulf between management and labor loomed wider than in the depiction of modern economic relations featured in The Hudsucker Proxy. (2004: 138)
This reading of The Hudsucker Proxy as political allegory is affirmed by others, like Erica Rowell, who asserts that the movie presents ‘a sweeping indictment of power and greed’ (2007: 154). Similarly, Paul Coughlin argues that an important part of the film’s agenda is its parodic engagement with ancestral cinematic forms as a way of reexamining interrelated socio-historical issues: New Deal politics, the myth of small-town America and contemporary corporate practices (2009: 209). To say, however, that political satire is the essential tenor of the movie contradicts the filmmakers who insist that in making The Hudsucker Proxy their primary aim was not to critique capitalism, but simply to create a ‘modern-day fairy tale’ (Romney 1994). After all, at the end of Norville’s rainbow there is a pot of capitalist gold and a permanent position at the top of the economic pyramid. In his epilogue the narrator Moses tells us that Norville ‘went on and ruled with wisdom and compassion’, seemingly reaffirming Capra’s myth of American democracy with an optimistically ‘Capra-corny’ note. ‘Wisdom and compassion’ are characteristic for Capra’s humanist heroes, but Sturges’ characters are seldom heroic in such a simplistic way, and they are even less often wise or compassionate. Neither are the Coen brothers’ protagonists typically heroic and a Coenpenned story does not typically have a happy ending. Norville Barnes may be the only Coen character to approach the stature of a hero, and only then because he stars in a fairy tale. Furthermore, saying that Norville went on to ‘rule’ Hudsucker Industries is a telling choice of words. Indeed, we are left at the end to imagine that under Norville’s benevolent reign Hudsucker Industries continues to manufacture and mass-market trendy but frivolous leisure products to the unquestioning ‘Silent Generation’ of 1950s America, whose increasing demand for vacuous entertainment fueled the beginnings of the consumer society that emerged fully in subsequent decades. As with everything else in The Hudsucker Proxy, the happy ending of Norville’s triumph over Sidney and the continued success of his inventions seems artificial, not just a clichéd Hollywood ending or the customary positive resolution of conflict at the conclusion of a fairy tale, but also a refusal to draw conclusions about potentially relevant social issues raised in the narrative. If anything, The Hudsucker Proxy seems to reinforce the conservative values of capitalist society in a way not unlike Capra’s movies like It’s a Wonderful Life, where the message is not that the system of capitalism is evil because it spawns villains like Potter, but rather that the power of democracy and the perseverance of people like George Bailey are sufficient to counterbalance and correct the faults of capitalism, without any need for structural reform.
As Ethan Coen once said, disingenuously, all of their movies are ‘frameworks on which we can hang cheap jokes’ (Woods 2000: 127). Comments of this kind excusing the Coen brothers from social responsibility and serious content are familiar, but not all of the jokes in The Hudsucker Proxy are ‘cheap’. Beyond the slapstick pratfalls, sight gags and witty banter one expects in a screwball comedy, there are, as critics have noted, signs of engagement with socio-political themes, especially with the corrupting power of material success and the social inequities caused by capitalist economics. Indeed, certain citations, buried in the film’s abundantly citational pastiche, begin to accumulate and form a polemical undercurrent. There are, for instance, repeated references to Communist Russia, notably in the film’s musical score, which borrows heavily from the works of Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian, noted for his musical celebrations of the Soviet laborer. A loyal Communist ideologue, Khachaturian was devoted to making art relevant to the common worker. Elements of Carter Burwell’s score are taken from the Khachaturian ballet Spartacus and Phrygia, which depicts a slave uprising in ancient Rome. Erica Rowell suggests that like Spartacus, Norville opposes and eventually triumphs over the tyrannical rule of corporate greed represented by Sidney Mussberger (2007: 151). Khachaturian’s ‘Saber Dance’ accompanies the lengthy Hula Hoop montage depicting the toy’s highly efficient industrial development from design stage to manufacture and distribution, finally ending up on the hips of an All-American youngster who magically discovers the joys of Hula Hooping and ignites a craze that swept the US in the 1950s. The juxtaposition of Khachaturian’s Marxist aesthetics and the capitalist mass-production of the Hula Hoop insinuates ideological commentary, equating corporate business with totalitarian communism, suggesting that both socio-economic systems operate in similar ways and ultimately result in the same constellation of power – top-down control of the masses. Further references reinforce the juxtaposition of opposing ideologies. Outside the ‘Creative Bullpen’ where the ‘Hudsucker Brainstormers’ search for a name to call Norville’s ‘dingus’, we see a secretary reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina, novels that champion the worker. Much of the interior décor of the Hudsucker Building reflects Communist values and icons, such as the struggle of the working class depicted in a base relief decorating the wall of the Hudsucker boardroom. As a whole, the filmic text is presented in a Brechtian style, alienating the viewer with its ostentatious visuals, its archly mannerist style of acting and its anachronistic confusion of period styles in clothing and setting (1930s story and acting set in the late 1950s) in order to stimulate critical thinking. Taken in aggregate, these minor, seemingly insignificant elements begin to suggest that The Hudsucker Proxy might be, in Palmer’s words, an ‘engaged reinvention’ of the past (2004: 158), an excavation of historical forms as commentary on contemporary life.
Assuming the Coens were (at some uncertain level of consciousness) aware of the inherent ideological implications of the capitalist tropes they summon to create their story world, such awareness does not force the conclusion that social commentary is the film’s primary thematic agenda. It is just as reasonable to assume that the characters and corporate setting are simply tropes borrowed from Capra, whose stories typically pit an Everyman underdog against big business or big government. Perhaps the agenda of The Hudsucker Proxy is not thematic at all, but rather to showcase the filmmakers’ superbly crafted orchestration of an intricate pastiche in which every element can be read as a quotation. As a complex pastiche, The Hudsucker Proxy bears further comparison with Lang’s Metropolis, which provided the Coens with an aesthetic as well as architectural-visual model. Conceived as a mixture of cinematic spectacle and popular kitch, Metropolis is a movie, as one commentator writes, ‘jammed almost to the point of incoherence with ideas, references, allusions, and visualizations’ (Rutsky 2005: 180). The screenplay, written by Lang’s wife Thea von Harbou, based on her popular novel, was clearly intended as the script for a profitable blockbuster that would, with its multitude of references to popular culture, be assured of widespread appeal. The German movie studio UFA invested heavily in the production of Metropolis, hoping it would compete on the international market with big-budget Hollywood movies of the time, but its relatively weak box-office performance helped drive the studio into bankruptcy. A similar, though less drastic production history attends The Hudsucker Proxy. Executive producer Joel Silver’s confidence in the movie’s potential for success as a mainstream movie product was not rewarded at the box office, where his $25 million investment returned a mere $2.8 million in US distribution. Despite its initial financial failure, Lang’s Metropolis has over the years retained its aesthetic appeal. According to R. L. Rutsky, contemporary viewers ‘enjoy the film less as a serious parable about modern life than as an amusing, often campy pastiche that mixes striking scenes with naïve ideas, cinematic virtuosity with comically over-the-top acting’ (2005: 194), which is not a bad description of The Hudsucker Proxy. Perhaps, like Metropolis, the enduring worth of the film resides in the appeal of its pastiche aesthetic – the very element for which it was initially condemned.
With The Hudsucker Proxy the Coens had attempted the impossible: reinventing a dead style that cannot be brought back, even as sincere homage. Screwball, unlike other classic film genres, has long been moribund. Perhaps its style and ethos are too antiquated, its historical moment too far removed from contemporary concerns. Unlike the western, which, despite a waning popularity in recent years, still continues to be reinvented, screwball is now relegated to the museum of cultural artifacts, with few, if any, legitimate ‘neo-screwball’ equivalents (although the Coens’ Intolerable Cruelty [2003] can be considered precisely that). As R. Barton Palmer puts it, screwball is ‘an outmoded regime of representation that can only be displayed, not reinvented’ (2004: 137). The awareness of this impossibility shapes the Coens’ ironic approach to the generic material. No doubt, The Hudsucker Proxy reflects the filmmakers’ affection for the classic period of film history and their appreciation of the exemplars of classic screwball comedy, Capra and Sturges. Perhaps the only certain purpose of the film is to offer the pleasure of experiencing a dead genre, returned briefly to life in a gaudy flourish of pastiche. Indeed, in keeping with the circle motif, the film demonstrates that in art as in life, ‘what goes around, comes around’, stressing the intertextual processes of recycling in which all texts are generated by repetition in an endless discursive continuum with no certain point of origin.