15: Nonstandard Scenes of Hudsucker Pt. 2: Bromo
An oft repeated rule of filmmaking is “show, don’t tell.” The earliest examples of film after all were silent movies, where every line of dialogue needed to be represented by a title card, breaking up the action with every utterance, so in order to keep the action going one needed to minimize dialogue. Even in the era of talkies, describing action rather than showing it is a cheap trick. Certainly a title card intro is sometimes needed to establish an unfamiliar universe, as was evident in their ubiquity in the openings of trashy 70s Sci-Fi like Logan’s Run (1976), A Boy And His Dog (1975), and Star Wars (1977), but we wouldn’t want an entire film to be explanations of things happening, we want them to simply be the things happening. Similarly so, voiceover can be a way for a screenwriter or director to tell rather than show, with the same possibility of detriment. The oft-derided original theatrical release of Blade Runner (1982) had copious amounts of voice over of Harrison Ford’s Deckard overlayed onto scenes explaining the action due to test audiences not fully understanding the action. The effect though is that the delicious ambiguity of Ridley Scott’s creation gets lost in the over-explanation. “God help you if you use voiceover” says Brian Cox portraying real life screenwriting guru Robert McKee in Adaptation (2002), "it's flaccid, sloppy writing."
So then how does the Hudsucker scene in the diner where Norville meets Amy work so well? In the fairytale that is The Hudsucker Proxy, the scene where the prince meets the princess needs to hit hard, and it does, but it does so without the audience hearing a single line of dialogue between the two of them. The only characters who speak in the scene are an unnamed waitress who speaks one line, and two cabbies named Lou and Bennie who narrate the entirety of the action, primarily from offscreen as a kind of voiceover.
The specific character of the patter calls to mind the classic vaudeville doubles act, in which two comedians play off each other for jokes. While Lou & Bennie’s timbre and rhythm are roughly identical to a vaudeville doubles act (albeit one that moves slower than most), the nature of the text is strikingly different. In a standard doubles act one person asks a question or makes a statement that the second person can then use as a launching point to make a joke, as in this Burns & Allen bit:
the straight man tees the joke up, and the comedian launches it into the audience. This however is not how Lou & Bennie interact. In a classic vaudeville doubles act there is an established rhythm in which there is a setup person and a punchline person. In the Burns & Allen bit above George Burns is the setup man and Gracie Allen delivers the joke. With Lou & Bennie, there’s not exactly jokes in the same big broad context as in a Vaudeville show. There’s certainly funny moments, as with the exchange:
Benny: Adenoids
Lou: No, Benny
Lou & Amy in unison: Lumbego
Benny: Aww that gag’s got whiskers on it!
It’s a subtle humor, designed to both move the narrative along and also insert a bit of snark and commentary rather than announcing a big broad joke such as:
“I went to a high class nudist colony, butlers and everything”
“Well how did you know they were butlers if they weren’t wearing butler clothes?”
“Well they certainly weren’t maids!”*
The patter between Lou & Bennie recreates the form but not the substance of a Vaudeville act. The disconnect between the form and the substance in turn creating a novel kind of experience, like hearing a rock & roll band’s instrumentation playing a fife and fiddle folk tune.
Lou and Bennie’s substance is that of a kind of a Greek Chorus, a common enough phenomenon in narrative art of all kinds which is a reference to the ancient Greek plays of authors like Euripides and Sophocles, in whose plays the action and dialogue was broken up by a group of dancers who narrated both offstage action and reactions to the action itself. The best kinds of choruses are ones that would seek to react to the action in the way that the audience itself is, putting our own feelings as viewers into words before we ourselves can. In the Sophocles play Oedipus The King, after having saved Thebes from disaster and ascended to its throne, the seer Teiresias announces that the man who killed Thebes’s previous king is now in the city, its citizens thinking him a harmless stranger. The chorus then begins to hypothesize: the only stranger who has come to town recently is Oedipus himself, but he has saved Thebes, why would he have killed the previous king? Has the full truth of Oedipus’s identity not been revealed**? The chorus synthesizes the information Teiresias has just given us and works through the thought process slowly enough that we think of what the chorus is thinking as they vocalize it.
So too during the diner scene Lou and Bennie react to Norville and Amy meeting for the first time in a way that suggests that they’re watching the same movie we are and delivering commentary on it. Further than that, they’re reacting to the meet cute in a cynical way. They’ve seen this movie before and they can’t believe it’s being shown again. The action of the scene is simple enough. Amy, in an attempt to get close to Norville, is pretending she is a destitute and out of luck waif so that Norville will take pity on her and bring her into his life (which will in turn allow for her to prove that Norville is indeed a bunko captain of industry), and Lou and Bennie see right through it. “That gag’s got whiskers on it!” they repeat at each repeated cliché. Of course, it is an old move, not merely because of Hudsucker’s existence as a pastiche of dozens of old hollywood studio system pictures, but also in the reality of the 1950s world of The Hudsucker Proxy. In Frank Capra’s Mr Deeds Goes To Town (1936) Jean Arthur’s character Babe Bennet embarks on a similar waif-in-distress move to get a similar inside scoop on Gary Cooper’s character, the titular Longfellow Deeds. Much as with Amy Archer (here pretending to be the distressed Muncian Amy Smith) she goes so far as to pretend to faint from hunger to completely sell how helpless she is as a pair of onlookers (in Babe Bennet’s case a pair of photographers) look on and remark on her performance. Similarly so in Preston Sturges’ The Lady Eve (1941), Barbara Stanwick’s character Jean Harrington observes a group of women attempting to curry favor from and extract money from wealthy bachelor Charles Pike, and offers similar commentary to Lou and Bennie. Harrington’s “Holy smoke! The dropped kerchief? That one hasn’t been used since Lily Langrty!” has its echo in Lou and Bennie’s line delivered in jaded unison “...enter the light lunch.” It’s not that the gag is old for 2020 as this essay is being written. It’s not that the gag is old for 1994 when the film was released. It’s that the gag is old for 1958 when the film is set.
The reality of the scene also relies on a certain level of the believability of Amy’s con job. She is clearly and transparently performing her waif routine to win Norville’s sympathy, but we as the audience have to be in on the joke that it’s a con. This introduces a fine line to walk: how believable can her performance be that Norville believes it but the cabbies (and the audience) do not? Instead of trying to walk that fine line, the Coens sidestep it entirely by giving us the performance secondhand through Lou & Bennie’s commentary. Any kind of art that portrays a kind of creativity always has a tough row to hoe. If, for example, a movie is made about a fictitious musician, there’s no shorthand for creating music for that musician to perform in the film. If the fictitious musician is supposed to be a hitmaker then the song being performed onscreen needs to credibly sound like a hit. Sometimes this works (see the 1976 and 2018 versions of A Star Is Born) and sometimes it doesn’t quite so much work (does anyone believe that the song “You All Everybody” as performed by fictitious band Driveshaft from the television show Lost could have been performed successfully to an audience larger than one would find in a basement? I contend it could not). Likewise if someone is being portrayed as a compelling author or poet, any onscreen recitation of their work needs to actually be compelling or their perception as being a good author will be less believable. Possibly the toughest of these is when a character in film, television, or theater is portraying a credible and believable actor. We know already as the audience that the character is being portrayed by an actor, that these sets of movements and speeches are to some level unnatural for this person but that their skill in acting will make them seem natural and compelling, but if they themselves are portraying an actor who must then perform some act of meta-acting on screen, that meta-acting must be removed enough from the character’s portrayal that we see that the character is now the one doing the acting, but that second layer of removal from the actual actor doing the acting can very easily make the meta-acting hammy or stilted. In the instance of Jennifer Jason Leigh playing Amy Archer who is pretending to be Amy Smith from Muncie, we crucially have the remove of seeing the meta-acting but not hearing it. We can see how maybe Amy Archer plays Amy Smith a little bigger and a little broader than Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Amy Archer, but because we’re observing it through the eyes of the cabbies without hearing any unnaturally stilted dialogue our imaginations can fill in the blanks of exactly where “believable enough for Norville but not believable enough for the jaded NYC taxi driver” line sits.
The narration of Lou and Bennie lets us as the audience pull away from experiencing the scene as we normally might and thus hone in on some of the more subtle ridiculous things happening in the scene. First and foremost is the score. The same theme and motif that composer Carter Burwell has given us from the opening credits as a full orchestral score is here played on a lone violin playing with tons of vibrato in the instrument’s upper register. Its over-the-top melancholy timbre gives us as the audience a wink and a nod of “this is supposed to be sad, but you and I are in on the joke that it’s secretly ridiculous.” It is in many ways Amy Smith’s tiniest violin in the world playing her sad, sad song. In addition to this the way that the scene is narrated rather than presented through dialogue lets us as the audience focus on the absurdly over the top slapstick physical comedy of the scene. After she orders her “light lunch” which appears to be an order of cottage cheese from her lips and her muted dialog, Amy proceeds to attempt to get Norville’s attention by practically dumping the contents of her purse onto his lunch plate to prove she has no money, and as she does so Norville is so profoundly oblivious to her due to what appears to be a bite of gristle in his Chicken A La King, a bite of gristle that he removes from his mouth, observes with some trepidation, and then gives the old Muncie College of Business Administration try of attempting to eat it a second time. After this fails to get Norville’s attention, she makes herself cry, and once the tears are good and flowing gives Norville an incredibly unsubtle elbow to the ribs causing him to finally pay attention to her. All the while Norville seems more or less unconcerned by the situation, reacting primarily with a bit of confusion, perfectly enunciated by the cabbies as “Maybe he’s wise?” “He don’t look wise”***. The scene is ultimately capped by Amy’s feign of a faint, when Norville finally fulfils his duties as the chivalrous rube that he is and runs to catch her before she hits the floor, delivering a spectacular “you don’t need to worry, everything is fine here” smile to the rest of the diner that is so insincere that it perfectly communicates Norville’s inner panic.
While the majority of the scene is devoted to Norville & Amy’s meet-cute, the scene’s bookends are a perfect kind of Coens absurdist touch. The top of the scene and the end are the only times we see our narrators and see them speak, as they appear profoundly unhappy due to the state of their indigestion. Sitting behind their empty lunch dishes which appears to be an empty bowl of some kind of soup or stew or chili, Lou announces “I’ve got gas, Benny”, to which Benny responds “tell me about it”. We now know through the minute and a half that they narrate the action of Norville and Amy meeting that they’re suffering from gastric distress, an entirely unnecessary detail, but what are the Coens without unnecessary details? It also provides an easy exit to the scene without us needing to see how exactly Norville manages to extract an unconscious Amy out of the diner. A waitress obscures their view of the new couple and asks if they need anything else. While we’ve heard Lou and Benny throughout the scene, the camera cuts to a view of them for the second time, the last time we’ll see them in the film****, as they order an indigestion medication, something that was effective in causing its adherents to forget about their indigestion for a spell due to its sedative effects, but also something that wasn’t very good for their long term health owing to the toxicity of its active ingredient, sodium bromide, causing it to be removed from the market in the mid 1970s. Of course we know that Lou and Bennie have gas from the beginning, but one has to wonder, is their final request of the waitress due to the fact that they were unable to digest their lunch, or the clichéd story they just witnessed?
“Bromo” Bennie croaks, his expression unchanging.
“Bromo” Lou pleads, his eyes yearning for relief.
*This exchange is from podcaster Nate DiMeo’s The Memory Palace in an episode about his grandfather’s club, in which some written schtick straight from the 30s is recreated for the listener: https://thememorypalace.us/2013/06/origin-stories/
**The answer of course is very very much yes there is more to be found out about Oedipus
*** “Maybe he’s wise?” “He don’t look wise” is probably the best summation of Norville Barnes as a character in his entirety.
**** While this is the last time we see them in the actual cut of the film, the shooting script has Lou & Bennie return as narrators when Norville returns to beatnik bar Anne’s 440 after surviving his fall from the top of the Hudsucker Building. While I understand why the scene was trimmed and thus Lou & Bennie’s return was cut for pacing, it still works as a standalone scene, and so I will attempt to recreate what never was using stills.
Lou: What the heck’s he doin’ Benny?
Benny: What the he’s she doin’ Lou?
Lou: What the heck they don?
Benny: You know what they’re doin’ now Lou.
Lou: This I know Benny
Benny: This you’re familiar with.
Lou & Benny: Geez
Lou: You alright Benny?
Benny (in a quavering voice): Yeah, I’m… just… It’s beautiful Lou!
Lou (also choked up): It is beautiful Benny.
Lou & Benny: It’s the most beautiful thing I ever saw.
Bartender: You cats coming in from a party?
Lou: Cabbie’s affair
Benny: Hacks’ new years gala
Bartender: Crazy. You need anything else? Carrot juice? Herbal tea?
Benny: Bromo.
Lou: Bromo.