The Hudsucker Proxy · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Norville Barnes goes over the ledge of the Hudsucker tower, forty-some floors of Art Deco dropping away beneath him, and then he stops. He hangs in the air. Down in the lobby an old man has jammed a broom into the gears of the great clock, and time simply quits. A body falls, and the falling is put on hold. Everything the film cares about is in that suspended second, so start there.

The building runs on a clock. So does the plot. The year turns at midnight, the stock scheme is timed to a funeral, and the hero's death is undone because the second hand refuses to move. Deleuze has a name for an image like this: the chronosign, time shown directly instead of as the measure of somebody's movement. In an ordinary movie the clock tells you how long the hero has to defuse the bomb — time serves action. Here it's the reverse. Carter Burwell's score ticks, the pneumatic mail-tubes hiss, the timepiece whirs and clanks, and the whole cosmos is organized around a mechanism that governs the story rather than obeying it. Bill Cobbs plays the clock-keeper AND narrates the fable, which means the man who stops time is the same man telling us the tale. Time isn't the setting. It's the author.

Now notice the world this clock sits inside. There is no location work, no real Manhattan. Dennis Gassner's interiors were built on soundstages from miniatures, matte paintings, and forced perspective — a New York assembled entirely out of the iconography of 1930s and '40s studio pictures. Circles everywhere: clock faces, the hula hoop, Norville's doodled 'O.' Deleuze calls a sealed image like this a crystal, and its purest form — his word is the saturated crystal — is a world with no outside, mirror-faced, complete in itself. Hudsucker is exactly that. It has no exterior because it is made of other films. And here's why the lens earns its keep: the standard complaint about this movie — that it's airless pastiche, a diorama under glass — is not a flaw the concept excuses. It's the concept, named. The Coens built a crystal on purpose, and the airlessness is the achievement, not the accident.

What happens to truth in a world like that? It goes soft, deliberately. Cobbs's narration arranges the ending; an angel descends to reverse a suicide; the fable both believes its happy resolution and winks at the machinery cranking it out. Sincere and tongue-in-cheek at once, as Burwell's borrowed Khachaturian Adagio is sincere and ironic in the same swell. Deleuze would call this the powers of the false — not lying, but making true-and-false undecidable as a way of creating. You cannot ask whether the movie means its Capra uplift, because it means it and mocks it on the same beat, and the falsifying narration holds both. The contrivance stops being a weakness the film tries to hide. It becomes the subject.

And nobody in it acts, exactly. They quote. Jennifer Jason Leigh doesn't play a fast-talking reporter; she performs the cadence of Rosalind Russell and the bray of Katharine Hepburn, a figure of those women. Robbins is a figure of the Capra naïf. Every gesture is transposed into spectacle — what Deleuze calls the reflection-image, action lifted out of the sensory-motor world and staged as a Figure of some earlier picture. That's why the film can feel like a museum that talks.

Its debts are precise, and the film wears them openly. The vertical Deco boardroom, the sets scaled to shrink the human figure, come straight out of Lang's Metropolis. The naïf-from-the-sticks dropped into a power structure he can't read is Mr. Deeds; the manufactured public hero and the literal high-ledge crisis that fate must reverse is Meet John Doe, Capra's suicidal fall rebuilt as Norville's rooftop plunge. The machine-gun con and ironic framing are Sturges's Lady Eve; the overlapping newsroom velocity is Hawks's His Girl Friday; the cynical publicity engine is Nothing Sacred. What Hudsucker adds is the sealing. Capra's fables opened onto a country, a people, a Depression outside the frame. The Coens weld the doors shut and keep only the mechanism.

That's the significance, and it's a real one even if the film flopped. Hudsucker takes the most humane genre Hollywood ever made and rebuilds it as a closed clockwork object — a demonstration that you can construct an entire emotional machine, run it flawlessly, and let the audience feel both the feeling and the gears at once. The commercial failure pushed the Coens back toward the lived, breathing world of Fargo, which is its own kind of proof: they went as far into the crystal as anyone could, and came back.

So rewatch it, but watch the clock instead of the plot. The movie isn't really about a fool who invents the hula hoop. It's about a machine that, for one held second, decides to be kind — and lets you see the decision being made.