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- [00:11]
A
Hello, and welcome to the Hudsucker Proxy episode of Slate. Money Goes to the Movies. I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Emily Peck.
- [00:24]
B
Hello.
- [00:25]
A
And we have the one and only Katherine Bell with us. Katherine, welcome.
- [00:29]
C
Thank you. It's great to be here.
- [00:31]
A
Introduce yourself. Who are you?
- [00:33]
C
I am the editor in chief of Quartz.
- [00:35]
A
Quartz is a fabulous publication that was originally started by the Atlantic and then became Japanese for a hot minute. And now you are independent?
- [00:45]
C
Yes. We did a management buyout last fall.
- [00:48]
A
So, braving the wilds of new media, I need to ask you, before we get into the Hudsucker Proxy, how many spac approaches have you had in 2021?
- [00:59]
C
That is confidential information.
- [01:01]
A
We were going to break news, okay? This episode, we are not going to learn about spacs. We are going to learn about a much earlier form of capitalism with elevators and vacuum tubes and straight lines and hula hoops and nostalgia and wise cracking, fast talking reporters and magical black men and all manner of things which may or may not be problematic. All tied up by the Cohn brothers in a fanciful concoction that is known as the Hudsucker Proxy. We will be taking it apart and giving it grades coming up on Slate. Money Goes to the Movies. So, Katherine, do you remember, where were you when you first saw the Hudsucker Proxy?
- [01:49]
C
I was in my living room. I just saw it for the first time.
- [01:51]
A
Oh, wow. Okay. So this is this. You were new to the Hudsucker Proxy. Are you a Coen Brothers fan, but you just missed this one, or are you not really a Coen Brothers person?
- [02:01]
C
I'm not really a Coen Brothers person.
- [02:04]
A
Okay. I was curious, but you're Coen Brothers curious. And this one is definitely. It doesn't have the macabre sort of bloodiness of some of the other ones. So that's maybe a good entry. It's definitely very stylish.
- [02:22]
C
It is very stylish, which I knew going in, which is one of the reasons I wanted to.
- [02:26]
A
I mean, can you even think of a movie with better fonts?
- [02:33]
B
It was all style and no substance. It looks good, but it's Emily bad.
- [02:40]
A
Oh. Oh. Emily comes out swinging. Oh, no. Catherine, would. Would you agree with Emily's harsh verdict here? I really enjoyed it.
- [02:54]
C
I think it's kind of true, but I think it's the point. So I agree in terms of the characters, they were missing a lot of depth. But I think that the lack of depth in the rest of it was on purpose, in a way that I ended up thinking was really interesting.
- [03:10]
B
Huh. Well, before we get in, should we talk about what the movie's about?
- [03:14]
A
A little. Let's talk about. There is a very slender thread of plot, I suppose that.
- [03:21]
B
Yeah, for sure.
- [03:22]
A
Yeah. Which kind of perhaps matters. I mean, for me, the movie is all about, I don't know, circles and lines, but really, it's. I guess the ostensible excuse for the movie is this kind of La Capra esque fairy tale. Yeah. Emily, how do you characterize the plot? I guess you can be rude about that, too.
- [03:42]
B
No, I'll be unrude.
- [03:45]
A
It is.
- [03:45]
B
It takes place in 1958, and it involves a very super corporate 1958ish atmosphere at the top of a building that kind of looks like the Empire State Building. And the guy who runs the company, the CEO, Mr. Hudsucker, he jumps out the window, the 44th floor, not counting the mezzanine, and sets off the chain of events that makes the movie entertaining. He apparently. And we can get into this, like the stock, his stock is going to revert back to the public and. And Paul Newman, who heads up the board of directors, I think, decides he's going to make the stock price fall really far so that they can scoop up all the stock and control the company. So they're going to bring in a stooge to run the whole thing. The stooge is Tim Robbins, who only plays stooges from the 90s through the early aughts, I think, and maybe is one of the issues I have with this film. So he comes in as the stooge and he has a great invention which is a circle on a piece of paper, which we can talk about. And Jennifer Jason Leigh is involved because she's like the sassy screwball journalist who, you know is going to take him down, but then somehow, for some reason I don't understand, falls in love with Tim Robbins. And that's kind of the plot. Right.
- [05:05]
A
And then it has a ridiculous day of, you know, like, weird, like, cosmic ending as well, just to make it even more unreal and fanciful.
- [05:15]
B
Yes.
- [05:16]
C
With another fall from the 44th floor.
- [05:18]
A
With another fall from the 44th floor.
- [05:20]
B
Not counting the mezzanine.
- [05:22]
A
No, don't never forget the mezzanine. But when you start it, you think, oh, right, this is the producers. Right. The idea is that what we want to do is create a complete bomb and then someone comes along and inadvertently winds up with a hit.
- [05:38]
B
Yes.
- [05:40]
C
Right. Which, you know, is what's going to Happen from the very beginning.
- [05:42]
B
Because the circle is a hula hoop.
- [05:44]
A
The circle. Well, the circle is a hula hoop. Although, like, it's other things, right? It's also like, if you look at it a different way, it's also like the cross section of a bendy drinking straw. And later it becomes a Frisbee. Like, circles are everything that is good and pure in this movie. And straight lines are everything that is straight, laced, and corporate. And the whole movie is about the tension between circles and lines. Whoa.
- [06:11]
C
Well, and the circle is even the halo. Remember that? The halo moves in exactly the way that a hula hoop.
- [06:17]
A
He actually says. He's like.
- [06:18]
C
He's talking. I was so distracted.
- [06:20]
A
We're all wearing these. These cool little hula hoop halos now. Says the ghost of Mr. Hudsucker. Yeah, I like that thing.
- [06:27]
B
They're all wearing them upstairs.
- [06:29]
A
It's a fad.
- [06:30]
B
Anyway, I totally miss that. I think by that point in the movie, towards the end, I was like, I hate this movie. I just hated. Has that Coen Brothers issue of, like, it's clever and funny, but it has no heart. And I feel like they didn't figure out the heart part until a few years later. This movie was 1994, and then Big Lebowski and Fargo come out. Fargo's 96, and Lebowski is 98. And I think those movies kind of figured out, like, the heart. But these characters, like, I just couldn't key into them, and I need that. I can't only have the circles, Felix. I need more. I need a sphere.
- [07:07]
A
So this movie came out the same year as Forrest Gump, and Forrest Gump is another one of those naifs who is improbably successful. And Forrest Gump, the movie was vastly more successful than the Hudsucker Proxy, which just kind of sank more or less without a trace. Although people with hindsight are beginning to be nicer about it. Are you saying that the reason is that Forrest Gump managed to do a better job of more overtly tugging on heartstrings and making you care about characters 100%?
- [07:42]
B
Tom Hanks is greater than Tim Robbins. Like, you care about Tom Hanks character in Forrest Gump. He's, like, lovable and likable, and I just. Tim Robbins, his character in this movie, when Jennifer Jason Leigh's character. What is her name? Amy Archer.
- [07:58]
C
Amy Archer.
- [07:59]
B
Norville Barnes, when she falls in love with him. I'm. Honestly, I was so perplexed. Like, why? I don't. Maybe you guys can tell Me.
- [08:10]
C
Well, that was the writing, though. I mean, I'm not defending Tim Robbins, but.
- [08:15]
A
Oh, my God, you guys.
- [08:17]
C
The writing was like that. For every character, they would just have these. I mean, they were all extremes. It was just like a cartoon. And they would switch from one extreme to another. So when Norville becomes the president, he switches immediately into being this, you know, bad guy who's lying around, being massaged and taking things for granted. And it's such a sudden complete change that you don't really believe it and. Right. And Amy falling in love with him. I didn't believe it the entire time.
- [08:50]
B
Yeah. And we should also talk about, because we are journalists and this whole idea that she's like, undercover. I know the plot doesn't matter, Felix, but, like, the whole idea that a journalist would, like, go undercover and lie about who she is to get inside a company, that is far fetched. Like, Even in the 1950s, no one was doing that. Right. Just to get back in the 1950s.
- [09:12]
A
And there was no such thing as journalistic ethics in the 1950s, you know.
- [09:15]
B
Okay, well, it would be easier to get the story, but yeah, I guess that is the writing. We don't have to blame the acting. Like, they just didn't give any depth to any characters.
- [09:26]
A
In terms of the character arc, it reminded me quite a lot of Trading Places. And in fact, the scene where Norville is being chased through the streets by a bunch of irate people who blame him for. I can't even remember what they were blaming him for, but reminded me very much of the scenes with Dan Aykroyd in Trading Places when he was, you know, down at the low point of that movie. And meanwhile, the overnight embrace of luxury is exactly the trajectory of the Eddie Murphy character. Right. So, like, these tropes are not unique to this movie. And in fact, I don't think the movie makes any claims at originality. I think it's just this very sort of nostalgic attempt to. To paint a picture of how we dream that American business. Like the stereotype of American business in the 1950s and how it worked and how we can sort of put a lovely sort of fast leaned lens on the whole thing.
- [10:36]
B
Yeah. And I felt like I kept asking myself, like, is this a satire of business? Or like you said, Felix, it's just more like this is what we think business was like in the 1950s. And I think it's.
- [10:48]
A
Is it a satire in the way that, like, Brazil is a satire with, you know, the vacuum tubes and the bureaucracy? Like, it started off that way, right?
- [10:56]
B
Yeah.
- [10:57]
C
It felt like the whole thing was a critique of capitalism and that it was obsessed with that the entire time. But I read one thing in a review where it said that the Coen brothers were reading about people talking about the big ideas of capitalism in it. And they said that they were just completely uninterested in that entire. So I think for them it was more about the movies. They were interested in being derivative of those earlier movies, in a way. And those earlier movies had been obsessed with capitalism.
- [11:30]
B
Like the. His Girl Friday and Howard Hawke kind of screwball comedies of the 30s, kind of fast talking dames, that kind of thing.
- [11:39]
C
I think so, yeah. And then the architecture, too, of some of those movies, Metropolis and things like that.
- [11:45]
B
There were parts of the film at the beginning. I really did like the beginning. After he jumps out the window and palms.
- [11:52]
A
The opening titles were glorious.
- [11:56]
B
And then when they announced the death of the president of the company over the loudspeaker.
- [12:01]
D
Attention, Hudsucker employees. Attention, Hudsucker employees. We regretfully announced that at 30 seconds after the hour of noon, Hudsucker time wearing Hudsucker founder, president and chairman of the board of Hudsucker Industries merged with the Infinite.
- [12:18]
B
And then they do a moment of silence. And then they announce that you won't be paid for the moment of silence.
- [12:23]
D
Thank you for your kind attention. This moment has been duly noted on your time cards and will be deducted from your pain. That is all.
- [12:32]
B
That was wonderful. Like, I loved all of that. I just. I don't feel like they sustained that kind of magical humor throughout and it wasn't enough to carry a movie, you know.
- [12:42]
A
But tell me. Actually, I mean, I'm interested since you, you know, have spent a bunch of time looking at business. Like there is this Hollywood caricature of business where it's like the Ford production line, but kind of taken to the nth degree. And you see it everywhere from, as I say, from Brazil to Willy Wonka to Metropolis. Maybe even something like the Fifth Element or Blade Runner, where everything is this kind of dystopian. Humans become cogs in this heartless big machine. And you can really see the machine. This is like a visible machine. And it's got big skyscrapers with lots of lines in them. And I keep on going back to the vacuum tubes. And everyone knows exactly where their place is. And there are hierarchies and there are lots of rubber stamps and there's lots of middle management. And virtually everyone seems to be in middle management. And it's gray suits. And Hollywood loves to present, or certainly loved to present business in that kind of light. And I want to know, was that reaction, was that, like, them reflecting reality? Was there a time that business was like that?
- [13:54]
C
Well, one thing I was thinking about a lot while I was watching it is just how physical everything was, which was weird because the physical spaces were really abstract in one way. And it sort of looked like theater sets some of the time, not even movie sets, because it was so kind of abstracted. But every aspect of business in it was incredibly physical in this very 20th century way. And I was thinking about how it came out in 1994, right when things were starting to go digital. And this was sort of looking back to a time where the mailroom was incredibly busy and everything about the mailroom was physical. The stock ticker, they keep going back to the stock ticker and picking it up and looking at it, you know, and, you know, even just like, when they get mad at each other, they slap each other every time. It's a lot of slapping. And the newspaper, I mean, you know, the newspaper office, everything is real and touchable. And I think there was a sense in which that changed the way things work. I think, like, when that stopped, when something. So much of what we do became digital. I mean, I'm sure I'm thinking about this even more intensely now, where we've been in this year plus of not even seeing each other at all, and everything's become completely digital. And in the world of business, that isn't about manufacturing. That was something I kept thinking about the whole time.
- [15:21]
A
But was it real? Like, I mean, I feel like it wasn't real in 1994. I have this idea that perhaps, I don't know, General Electric in 1958 might have been organized along those kind of lines or some big company, but I don't know, maybe it wasn't. Were there ever companies like that?
- [15:43]
C
Well, you did have the Taylor system, right, where they were figuring out how to make employees kind of work like an assembly line and trying to figure out how to apply those kinds of systems to people's time as well as to the machines themselves.
- [15:59]
B
Wait, what's the tailor saying?
- [16:01]
A
Oh, that's men following each other around with clipboards, right? Trying to sort of work out how many minutes it takes to do every part of your job, right?
- [16:10]
C
And then adjusting it to make it really efficient. So I do think that that was an aspect of how things ran, and more people had jobs that were really concrete and repetitive than people do. In white. Color work now.
- [16:26]
B
Yeah. 1994, that is when I think Windows, Microsoft Windows was released. The one that sort of changed everything because I was in college or finishing UP College in 1994. Like, we didn't do anything on computers back then. It was all physical. I had a word processor still. And I think the portrayal of the office 1994 was maybe the last year where the Hudsucker proxy's portrayal of office life was relatable to a modern person, even though it's wildly unrelatable.
- [17:01]
C
I mean, it was also way more extreme but closer to reality than now, even in terms of like the hierarchy. The way the hierarchy was matched by the level of floors in the office building. So the enormous, enormous, crazy executive suites and the kinds of luxuries they had with, you know, massages in the boardroom and cigars everywhere. Now, in a lot of executive suites, they're not separate. Even people work in open plan offices, even if they're the CEO.
- [17:33]
A
In a lot of cases, it's Mike Bloomberg putting himself in the middle of the bullpen.
- [17:37]
C
Right, right, exactly. So that hierarchy has changed drastically. And then another. Another thing was all the sexual harassment. There was a lot of sexual harassment.
- [17:47]
B
In that movie and only one woman being sexually harassed basically over and over. And that the tired old plot line of like, she's a career woman and she's too hard and it's all a shell and really she's soft inside and just wants to get married. That. That bothered me.
- [18:03]
C
She just looks married, but she doesn't.
- [18:08]
B
The other thing I thought about was just like the whole product that they were making and how this could never be in 2021. There's not a big conglomerate all focused on making one individual product in that way. That's not a tech product. Like today. It would be like a guy who thought of the Hula Hoop and then would outsource it to China and sell it on Amazon and it would be a fad for like a month and then it would go away, and then it would be sold, you know, on every street in Manhattan for like 75 cents or something. Like the fidget spinners. Fidget spinners, exactly. Like the whole company would not be saved by the stock of a company, would not be saved by a fidget spinner. Now.
- [18:49]
A
Well, I feel like the Hudsucker Corporation was already like far too big for Hula Hoop to be able to drive its stock to record highs. That was maybe, maybe lacking in complete verisimilitude. What?
- [19:05]
B
Well, you don't need anything to drive your stock to record highs in 2021? You just need it in 20.
- [19:09]
A
Yeah. In 2021. To tweet about you. Yeah.
- [19:15]
B
Maybe a circle picture. If Elon tweeted a circle, what would that do for Tesla's stock price?
- [19:20]
C
Who knows what would happen to the moon?
- [19:22]
A
And, like, you know, it's the opposite of the cybertruck with all of its hard angles.
- [19:27]
B
Speaking of the portrayal of women in this movie, I was a little uncomfortable and weirded out by, like, the magical black man who ran the clock. That was a little uncomfortable. I didn't quite know what to do with that in 2021. Did you have thoughts about that, either of you?
- [19:44]
C
As soon as he showed up, I was like, they're going to make him God.
- [19:48]
A
Just.
- [19:49]
B
Yeah. I don't know. This was also the same year Shawshank Redemption came out. I don't know. I was like, why isn't Morgan Freeman playing this character? But he was too busy in the Shawshank Redemption.
- [20:01]
A
So, yeah, I guess they decided they needed an actual character to play God. So they found, like, some avuncular black guy to be in charge of the clocks, which is the very. But I mean, the clock is the symbol of, you know, the working day of life, of the way in which humans have to sort of insert themselves into the machine that is the workspace. Right. And that's the big sort of metaphor that really drives the whole movie for all the. We live in very different workspaces now. We interact very differently to workspaces. It doesn't feel as impersonal in the same way, you don't feel like you're just a cog in the machine necessarily in the way that perhaps people did back in the. In the 50s or even in the 90s. That whole question of trying to understand the relationship between yourself and your employer and resolving those tensions, that never goes away. Right. Because I feel like employers are now just saying, like, oh, yeah, no, we're super friendly people who. You should like to work for us and then just give us your entire lives, because that's what you want.
- [21:12]
C
Well, the amount that you can control your own time, or at least the illusion of being able to control your own time, is definitely something that's changed a lot for some of us. But if we were working in an Amazon warehouse, that same kind of control over every single minute of your time would absolutely still be there.
- [21:31]
A
Or even. Yeah. Working as an Amazon driver, they really. I mean, that's the modern Taylorism right there.
- [21:36]
B
Right, right. We used to all be in it together in terms of clock watching and the time aspect of work. And now it's more bifurcated. And this movie predates that probably a little bit.
- [21:50]
C
Except at the very top, where he's just playing golf and getting massages.
- [21:54]
B
I love all the work stuff in here. The Christmas Party, the title on the invitation was like, fancy Christmas Party and the Wives.
- [22:04]
A
Yes, well, the wife, like, so that was. That was why he wound up killing himself. Right? Was because he was in love with one of those wives who'd wound up marrying a Paul Newman instead.
- [22:13]
C
But she was the secretary, too, so it was the same story.
- [22:17]
B
Yeah. I feel like the Coen brothers thought they were being really ahead of their time and progressive with bringing stuff like that up or having the black man play the timekeeper, but it just doesn't come off. Now, looking at it, it's just like, ugh. No, like, Mad Men did a better.
- [22:33]
C
Job at those times. I mean, it almost felt like they were enjoying the ability to be able to use those tropes because they were doing it in this nostalgic way because they were setting it in the past, they were still getting to do it. You know, there wasn't that much satire to those pieces.
- [22:55]
A
No, no, it was definitely more nostalgic than it was satirical.
- [23:00]
B
Yeah. Why would anyone be nostalgic for this? I'm not sure. For the outfits.
- [23:06]
A
Just for the architecture, if nothing else. You know, that amazing 1930s architecture. I mean, the production design of this movie. I mean, I know you didn't like the movie, Emily, but you have to admit the production design was amazing.
- [23:19]
C
Yeah, the furniture was amazing. It looked great. Furniture was great. The outfits were good.
- [23:25]
B
Really good outfit.
- [23:26]
A
I mean, never, never in any movie before or since has a stock ticker looked so good.
- [23:31]
B
That's true. Can you one of you enlighten me? Like, what do they see on the ticker? What does it actually look like? Is it just stock symbols and prices and that's it?
- [23:40]
A
Well, I mean, that's. That's a bespoke stock ticker for just the Hudsucker Corporation, right?
- [23:45]
B
No.
- [23:45]
A
So it's like every time there's a trade in Hudsucker Corp, it will print out that trade and it will just tell you what the price was and how shares were traded.
- [23:53]
B
Oh, my God. Okay. I didn't understand what is happening until right now.
- [23:58]
A
Can you imagine that for amc?
- [24:02]
B
It would be impossible.
- [24:03]
C
I was curious about how that machine actually worked.
- [24:06]
B
Are there any stock tickers today that we can go see?
- [24:09]
A
Felix, just turn on cnbc, man.
- [24:11]
C
It runs along with the paper.
- [24:14]
A
Oh, wait, well, so the. Yeah, that's true. I used to work down on lower Broadway where they have ticker tape parades, right? And nowadays there's literally no ticker tape anymore. No one prints out stock tickers on ticker tape. So whenever there's a ticker tape parade, there's some, like, random part of the New York City government, which goes around all of the office buildings on Broadway and hands over pieces of shredded paper that you then throw out the windows because all the ticker tape that people used to use just doesn't exist anymore.
- [24:45]
B
I feel like no one thinks about the office and work the way this movie is showing it to us. Like, it's totally. It's so different now. I like the. The trope that work is this, like, cold, heartless place has been obscured. It's still a cold, heartless place, but now it's obscured in all this, like, happy talk and snacks and, like, slack channels where you talk about, like, what your favorite movie is or whatever. Like, okay, but the point is, at the bottom of it all, it's still a cold, heartless place. Did we already talk about this?
- [25:17]
A
So, no. So here's the question. Here's the question, right? It's like, was it, weirdly, just much more honest back then? Yes, that is what I'm saying. When cold, heartless managers were like, I'm gonna be cold and heartless and Paul Newman and I'm gonna crush little guys. Rather than now, when cold, heartless managers are saying snacks. Yes.
- [25:38]
C
Well, part of what I think is more honest in a way, or at least interpreting a similar thing in the opposite way, is that there. There was nothing in between the mailroom or operating the elevator or being the person who has to change the names on the door and etch off the paint when somebody's being replaced and being on the board or running the company except for two or three secretaries, there's nothing in between that. And now we pretend that everybody's in between that.
- [26:11]
A
One of the movies we covered in the first season was Working Girl. And Working Girl starts with that same idea that you just have the secretaries who are no. 1, and then you have these master of the universe dealmakers who have all of the power and all of the money, and there's nothing in between. And then you have that sort of triumphant ending where Melanie Griffiths gets promoted and gets the job offer, and she's like, she's no longer a secretary, she's now someone. And then the Very final shot of Working Girl is from the outside of her office window, pulling back further and further to reveal that she's just like one office window among 10,000 office windows. And she is now deeply entrenched as junior middle management. And this is her new cubicle that she's never gonna be able to escape, which only comes at the very, very end. It's that last little sort of Mike Nichols knife twist at the end of that MO. But I think, yeah, in general, the movies are very good at the way in which low level employment robs you of any kind of agency. And they're very good at the sort of heartlessness of the bosses. But the weird limbo zone in the middle is something that no one ever makes movies about.
- [27:31]
B
Yeah. You made me think of how there was a time in corporate America where you could get a job in the mailroom or as a janitor even, and work your way up to the C suite or the executive or management level.
- [27:43]
A
Well, wasn't that like Ursula Burns? Didn't she do that?
- [27:46]
B
Exactly. That's the Ursula Burns story. And I think there was, like, a great New York Times piece a few years ago about how this is an avenue completely cut off now because in the modern workplace, we outsource all those low level jobs now, and there's no way ever, ever someone from the mail room would make it across. But, like, that was a real possibility back then. So in a way, like, though it seems like a much more hierarchical workforce that actually, for men anyway, white men, it wasn't.
- [28:13]
A
Or even for Ursula Burns.
- [28:15]
B
Or for Ursula Burns, it's neither white.
- [28:17]
A
Nor a man, but, yeah, correct. It can be done.
- [28:19]
B
Yeah, it can be done. It could be.
- [28:20]
C
So the idea that you'd be somewhere for a really long time, which everybody in that movie seemed to have been there forever.
- [28:27]
B
The guy in the mailroom who's like, yeah, about 40 years. I might get a promotion soon.
- [28:32]
A
How long you been here?
- [28:34]
C
48 years.
- [28:36]
A
Next year. They move me up to parcels. I'm lucky. But is there something about the hypocrisies of the modern corporation that make it just, like, much less cinematic? I feel like we watched the Social Network as part of the last season and none of us really loved that movie, especially with hindsight. And part of the problem, again, there is it's hard to show the sort of dystopia that is Facebook in a movie because it's people who are sitting on soft furnishings, like, hanging out with their laptops. Like, how bad is that?
- [29:16]
B
We have talked about not on the Slate Goes to the Movies podcast. But on the Slate Succession podcast, they managed to pull off a very stylized look for the workplace. The modern. Yeah. And Vaulter. So it can be done, you know, it doesn't have to be like, some schlub in his sweatpants staring at the Zoom or whatever. Not that I'm wearing sweatpants right now. They're joggers.
- [29:36]
C
But what happens now when everyone's remote? You can't have the Office interactions with each other if everyone's doing that on Slack.
- [29:43]
B
Yeah, I don't know how you make a workplace movie right now. Maybe you make it in the Amazon warehouse.
- [29:48]
C
The Office was great because they were all forced to be in one room together all the time.
- [29:53]
A
Okay, so, Emily, I'm gonna start with you because we need to just get the haters out of the way first. What grade would you give the Hudsucker proxy?
- [30:06]
B
I really want to talk in Amy Archer's ridiculous accent, but I won't. Yeah, I'll give it a four out of five. No, I'll give it not a four out of five. Take that out.
- [30:16]
C
I would.
- [30:17]
B
Yeah, I give it a C. I mean, it looked good, and the beginning was really funny, but it had no heart. And ultimately, I have to give it a thumbs down, as did most critics at the time who were wrong.
- [30:30]
A
I'm gonna come out and say that, like, there's something gloriously simple and beautiful about this movie, and it can be enjoyed as just an opera of symbols and ideas and sheer cornball corniness and put together in a very sort of elegant way. I mean, that beautiful scene in the middle, right in the middle of the movie with the hula hoop rolling down the street, the red hula hoop. Like, when suddenly all of the sepias and the browns, like, you get that beautiful red hula hoop, and there's the boy hula ing, and it's hilarious. And how can you not watch that scene and just smile? It's impossible. You have to enjoy it.
- [31:17]
B
I loved all the kids storming out of school and running into the streets. That was amazing. You never see that today. And then just dumbfounded by the boy who was doing the hula hooping. That was.
- [31:27]
A
Yeah, now they'll just be slouching out of school on their phones.
- [31:31]
C
Yeah. The pleasure in the hula hoops was amazing. Both a part where they were actually made. That scene where you're watching them be extruded out of the machine was just incredible. And then the way everyone talks about the sand and how the sand in Them gives it extra pleasure.
- [31:46]
A
It's fun, it's healthy, it's good exercise. The kids will just love it. And we put a little sand inside to make the experience more pleasant, which it does.
- [31:54]
C
Yeah, it does. It's true. And there's something so pure about it. And I loved the way everybody learned to do hula hooping naturally, perfectly, immediately. It's hard to do.
- [32:08]
B
He was doing it, like, around his ankle and his neck. Like, I could never.
- [32:11]
A
I mean, Tim Robbins is a great hula Hooper. I am reminded of one of the most impressive feats of hula hooping that I've ever seen. It was Grace Jones on the steps of Buckingham palace doing a concert when she was, like, in her 70s and just hula hooping the entire time because she's Grace Jones.
- [32:30]
C
Oh, I'm gonna be on YouTube the second we end this podcast.
- [32:33]
B
Amazing.
- [32:34]
C
That's amazing.
- [32:34]
A
So, yeah, the sheer joy of hula hoops alone is to give this movie, for me, I would say, an A minus.
- [32:41]
B
I did also love. Now you're making me think more about this. The scene where they come up with the name for the hula hoop.
- [32:47]
A
We'll call it the Flying Donut. The Dancing Dingus, the Belly Go Round, the Swingerino, the Wacky Circumference, Uncle Midriff.
- [32:57]
B
And there's the two guys, all serious in the Brainstorming room, I think it's called. And you see their shadows through the window. And the secretary is sitting out front reading War and Peace.
- [33:08]
C
And then Anna Karenina, and she's making.
- [33:10]
A
Her way through Tolstoy, and they just.
- [33:13]
B
Come up with Hula Hoop. But I feel like there is a brilliant.
- [33:16]
A
It's great. Isn't that wonderful? But the seriousness with which the vast resources of the corporation are marshaled in the service of this circle. It's this wonderful, wonderful part of the movie. And, you know, where they're like, exploding people to see whether it can withstand an explosion. It's great. You see, you do like it after all.
- [33:40]
B
You're giving me a little bit more appreciation for this film. I think part of it also. And we have to get to Katherine's rating. But part of it also is just watching a movie at home. I get distracted much more easily. And if it hasn't captured my heart, I'm gonna be like, what's on Twitter, though? And then put away Twitter and try to. It's just harder for me to watch a film at home sometimes, especially if it doesn't happen.
- [34:02]
A
And this is definitely a movie to see. In the cinema as well, because it's.
- [34:07]
C
I would love to see that on.
- [34:08]
A
The big screen, especially the opening title sequence where, you know, the clock strikes 12 and everything goes white and. Yeah, I mean, and it's all perfectly timed up with music. And they care. They're artists of the Coen brothers and they make, they make it look just beautiful. There's basically not a single frame of this movie that isn't beautiful.
- [34:29]
B
Yes. And now I'm thinking more about how much effort corporations put into the smallest things. That shouldn't take a lot of time. Like, I recently heard about someone saying former journalists write tweets for executives. Like, that's a job that they're hired to do. That takes a really long time to write a tweet for an executive. Like, it's just amazing the things that companies spend money on, those little things.
- [34:52]
C
Because of that stock ticker. It could affect it.
- [34:54]
A
Well, my friend Ryan McManus wrote this piece about, you know, those little numbers on the side of truck doors. There's like 1, 2, and then 3, 4, and then it goes up to like 9, 0. And it's a little code you can use to get into the truck. This piece of, I guess like 1980s technology, which seemed really cool in the 1980s, has survived onto the F150 Lightning, you know, the most high tech truck in the history of automobiles. And when people saw that, they were like, why is this 40 year old piece of push a code of buttons to get into the truck? Like, why is that still on this super high tech electric vehicle? There are lots and lots of really good reasons. It's one of the most thought through and carefully designed pieces of technology in cars. And cars have a lot of like, very small details, like how do the, you know, the sticks work for putting on the blinkers or turning on the windscreen wipers or whatever. Cars are very small and carefully designed. But that one item which allows you to do things which were otherwise entirely impossible, like for instance, separate permissions for who can drive the truck and who can get into the truck. You can give someone like the code to the truck to allow them to get into it, to be able to, you know, fetch the beers or whatever. But just because you have the code doesn't mean you can drive it. You still need the key to be able to drive it, that kind of thing anyway. And you can open it with gloves really easily because you're pushing. You don't need to like fiddle with your phone. It's thought through and it's one of those things. Ford is a good example. Right. Of one of those corporate. It's the, er, example of the production line of the big company that makes decisions in a very distributed way across lots of memos with triplicate and rubber stamps and pneumatic tubes and stuff. And Ford, for all of its weaknesses, like, it makes cars that people love. It makes the best selling car, bestselling vehicle in the history of America. Like the number one bestselling vehicle in America for what, like 25 years straight? Has been the F1.35 years.
- [37:01]
B
It was going to be my number for the past three weeks, but I forget. I forget every time.
- [37:05]
A
Anyway, we're digressing wildly here. Katherine, what is your grade for this here movie?
- [37:11]
C
So I'll give it a B. I'm close to you. I love Felix that you compared it to an opera. Because I think I approached it in sort of that way where I was willing to throw myself into it, even though it was really on the surface in terms of the plot, but everything else about it made up for it and was so dramatic and pleasurable and made me think about things, you know, even if it wasn't intentional. The Coen brothers may not have cared about the history of capitalism in the 20th century, but I do. And it was interesting. You know, their motifs and the way they constructed that piece of art made me think about things in a way that I really enjoyed. So I would have liked it better if it had real characters. And, you know, I was particularly disappointed, I guess, in the Amy Archer and the newspaper. I wanted to love her and I just didn't. So if it had had characters with heart and complexity on top of everything else, it would have been amazing.
- [38:12]
A
I believe that Hudsucker Proxy does make the incredibly long Joanne Letman list of movies where a female reporter sleeps with her sources.
- [38:21]
B
She sent us such a long list. It was really remarkable. All over the map. So many movies. We will talk about some of them this season.
- [38:28]
A
She's coming on the show.
- [38:30]
C
Amazing.
- [38:30]
A
And we're gonna. Yeah, I mean, it is one of the most tired Hollywood tropes. Was it already a tired Hollywood trope in 1994? I guess it must have been. Right, because that was. That was like what they were making fun of in a way.
- [38:43]
B
Yeah. I mean, I think there's a movie, His Girl Friday that, you know, has the fast talking female journalists and it's all about her relationship with, I believe, a male reporter. We might need to cut this out. I think it's loosely the character in his Girl Friday is like, what, you want Amy Archer to be in this movie, you know, or just like any.
- [39:04]
A
Any female character in, like, a Billy Wilder film, basically. Just, like, wisecracking and.
- [39:08]
B
Yeah, yeah. There's, like, something else there, you know? Yeah.
- [39:12]
A
Oh, sure. Like. Or classic, like, Katherine Hepburn role. Something like that.
- [39:17]
B
Yes. For some reason. I mean, again, it's the writing, just like you said. Or maybe it should have been Frances McDormand or something.
- [39:23]
A
It should have been Frances McDormand. If in doubt, cast Frances McDormand. This is a rule that the Coen brothers did eventually come round to. They figured it out. They wound up. At least one of them even wound up marrying her, which is always a good move. So, yeah, maybe this would have been a great a film if only it had the presence of Frances McDormand. That was. Maybe that. That's the. That's the verdict, the final verdict that we can agree on. Emily, thank you for bringing your skepticism to this show, even though you're wrong.
- [39:59]
B
You're welcome.
- [40:00]
A
And, Katherine, it's been so great having you. We'll get you on a normal slate, a regular slate soon as well.
- [40:07]
C
It's been so fun. I would love that.
- [40:09]
A
And we'll be back next Tuesday with even more. More sleep. Money goes to the movies.