19: Joy In Repetition
Experimental composer John Cage once remarked “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” Cage is best known as an experimental composer, writing pieces such as Imaginary Landscape, a piece based on the I Ching that is to be composed of fragments of tracks from 42 randomly selected records; “Water Walk” which is written for a kettle, bathtub, blender, and rubber duckie among other instruments; and of course the famous 4’33”, a piece in which a musician sits at a piano for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds without striking a single key, the music being composed of whatever incidental sounds occur during that time period. Cage sought to redefine what music could be, but he primarily is known now more as an example of overwrought egghead nonsense art than for the merits of his actual compositions, despite the fact that many of his compositions are downright enjoyable in their own rights without experimental gimmicks*. His quote is meant to tell us that even if his notion of what is art seems challenging and potentially straight up unenjoyable at first, if one is willing to give it a chance and experience it on its own terms its own kind of aesthetics become apparent, even if the composition sounds nothing like Ode To Joy or whatever. Cage’s quote definitely applies to his own music, but he inadvertently also wrote a perfect descriptor to a certain kind of comedy, of which the Coens are kings and of which The Hudsucker Proxy has in spades.
The Coens’ peer, sometime roomate, and Hudsucker cowriter and second unit director Sam Raimi said of Ethan Coen “He’ll end up with a phrase flying around his head and it’ll reappear throughout the movie.” Most of the Coens’ films will end up with some kind of phrase that used across its runtime. Sometimes it’s there as a thematic element, as with Barton Fink and every time its titular character refers to “the life of the mind”, ultimately culminating in John Goodman’s Karl “Madman” Mundt running through a flaming hallway at Barton screaming “I’ll show you the life of the mind!” over and over at him. More often than not though when these phrases reappear throughout the movie, it’s for comedic effect. If something isn’t funny once, try it twice. If still unfunny try it four times, then eight, then sixteen. Eventually one finds it’s hilarious.
When the Coens repeat a phrase or term for comedic effect there is a continuum how they repeat it. Sometimes it hits over and over in the same scene, as in Hail, Caesar! (2016) when singing cowboy Hobie Doyle has been cast against type in the fictitious high society drama Merrily We Dance and cannot seem to adequately deliver the line “would that it were so simple”. Alden Ehrenreich’s Hobie Doyle and Ralph Fiennes’s Laurence Laurentz repeat the phrase back and forth beyond the point of semantic saturation, where “would that it were so simple” ceases being six english words and simply becomes a series of nonsense syllables.
On the opposite end is where it becomes a comic motif, where the simple use of a word becomes a running gag over the entire course of the film. In The Big Lebowski (1998), artist Maude Lebowski says of her work “My art has been commended as being strongly vaginal which bothers some men. The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Vagina. They don't like hearing it and find it difficult to say whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his dick or his rod or his Johnson.” Jeff Bridges as The Dude’s response is a mildly confused “Johnson?”, as though the word in reference is a quaint or unusual one**, and yet after that point every time a penis is referred to (most often The Dude’s) for the remaining run of the film it is always referred to as a Johnson. If calling a penis a Johnson in one scene isn’t funny, try it for two, then four, then eight. Eventually the audience will howl with laughter at the phrase “they’re gonna cut off my Johnson, man!”
While this is something they’ll use most often in their comedic films, it’s not simply that they’re running gags. Careful use of repetitive language is an effective rhetorical tool, and just as when Winston Churchill stresses his bravado with every “We shall” in his famous “We Shall Fight Them On The Beaches” speech, so too does Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men (2007) stress his terrible ruthlessness every time he says “call it” to a gas station attendant he is considering murdering in cold blood.
The Hudsucker Proxy loves to repeat itself for the sake of building humor and creating motifs and the Coens’ use of it exists across all these spectra. Some scenes are an excuse to repeat a line over and over, some things exist as long running gags and motifs across the entire run of the film. If a repetition gag doesn’t work in one scene, the Coens will try it in two. Eventually they’ll have an entire movie of one long running gag.
Just after Norville has been hired at Hudsucker industries, he is given the least helpful onboarding that has existed in the history of commerce and industry. The amount of bureaucratic mumbo jumbo that comes out of Norville’s new supervisor's mouth is simultaneously confusing and unhelpful and wouldn’t be out of place in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian bureaucratic christmastime nightmare Brazil (1985). The punishment for any improper following of the inscrutable procedure of the Hudsucker Industries mailroom is the only thing that a sane person could take away from the onboarding: they dock ya. As Norville walks down the hall ostensibly being trained but also being given pieces of actual work to do by other employees in the mailroom he in informed after being told about the nonsense non-logic of when the workday begins, that “punch in late, and they dock ya!” Subsequently after being told of Hudsucker mail’s voucher system he is told that “move any article without a voucher, and they dock ya!” Hudsucker’s ridiculous mail coding system (do they know there are numbers other than 37?) is ‘explained’ and he is informed “code it wrong, and they dock ya!” Lastly he is informed of what to do in case he feels his onboarding has not been sufficiently helpful: file a complaint with personnel, however “file a faulty complaint, and they dock ya!” By the time the last “and they dock ya!” is repeated the phrase is starting to unravel and lose its meaning. By repeating the same phrase in the same cadence over and over again in a short period of time we as the audience stop hearing it as words meaning “we will pay you less for your labor” but instead as a gruff and mean sounding way to end a paragraph.
A similar single scene use of repetition as humor happens as Norville presents the Hula Hoop to the Hudsucker board. Having delivered his initial speech the board begins to pepper Norville with questions and comments, here repeated verbatim as they appear in the film.
“What if you tire before it’s done?”
“Does it have rules?”
“Can more than one play?”
“What makes you think it’s a game?”
“Is it a game?”
“Will it break?”
“It had better break eventually”
“Is there an object?”
“What if you tire before it’s done?”
“Does it come with batteries?”
“Could we charge extra for them?
“Is it safe for toddlers?”
“How do you know you’ve finished?”
“How do you make it stop?”
“Is that a boy’s model?”
“Can a parent assemble it?”
“What if you tire before it’s done?”
“Is there a larger model for the obese?”
“What the hell is it?”
The first question “What if you tire before it’s done?” is repeated three times and just gets funnier each time. The first time as the silence breaking question it simply establishes that the Hudsucker board has no idea what it is they’re witnessing, both that they simply do not understand the toy nor do they realize what a huge hit it will be. The second time after we’ve been given a moment to breathe, the question makes us as the audience say “you silly old man, when you tire, it is done” and we have a hearty chuckle at his expense. By the third time however the full absurdity of the question hits. What if being tired and being done hula hooping do not occur at the same moment? Can I be compelled to hoop? Am I being compelled to continue hooping despite my discomfort from without or within? If I am in control of both my own hooping and managing my own fatigue, who then would introduce this conflict of tiring before it’s done? The question becomes a kind of zen koan, a question to ponder that is on its face so absurd that the act of pondering it causes the ponderer to lose sense of self. If the question doesn’t strike you as absurd on a profound level when asked once, try asking it twice, then thrice, very soon you will see the depths of its ridiculousness.
Sometimes the repetition can create a kind of pavlovian tic in the viewer, especially when done as a kind of call and response. If repeated enough the call immediately elicits the response. In the scene immediately following Waring Hudsucker’s demise the height of the building he jumped off of is called into question several times. First, Sidney Mussburger states that Waring had fallen forty-four floors, at which point a man listed in the shooting script as “Precise Executive” corrects him with “forty-five!”, capped by a character named “Elderly Executive” stating “counting the mezzanine”. This of course is then repeated in the inverse as a different executive named Addison states that Waring had just fallen forty-five floors and the same two chime in with “forty-four”, “not counting the mezzanine”. Our elderly and precise duo have their final moment in the scene when it is decided that they need to purchase 50% of the company, at which Precice Executive chimes in with “Fifty-one!” and Elderly with “counting the mezzanine”. The comedic timing of these three beats hit so hard that any time I even ponder the existence of a forty-four floor building my brain cannot help but include “forty-five, counting the mezzanine”. This bit is even called back at the conclusion of the film as Moses narrates “that's the story of how Norville Barnes climbed away up to the forty-fourth floor of the Hudsucker building and then fell all the way down, but didn't quite squish hisself. Ya know, they say there was a man who jumped from the forty-fifth floor... but that's another story.” If the joke isn’t funny forty-four times, try it for forty-five and count the mezzanine.
Of course however the greatest repeated line in The Hudsucker Proxy is the one for which this project takes its name: Norville Barnes’s non-exclamation for his drawing of a circle, “you know, for kids!” When Norville first shows his diagram to his coworker in the Hudsucker mail room, his reaction (and potentially the audience’s) is quiet befuddlement. What is this lamebrain thinking? In what way is an unadorned circle “for kids”?
The second time, in Mussburger’s office, the exact same thoughts are compounded with “this could very well be the jerk we can push around! Our very own Hudsucker Proxy!”
By the third time, we know what’s coming. As Amy Archer sees the professionally drafted circle it’s already practically a catchphrase. She has long suspected that maybe Norville wasn’t the “idea man” he was being touted as, and as the slack jawed Muncian points at a picture of a circle saying "you know, for kids!" her suspicions seem to be confirmed.
Even if there was a good explanation for how a drawing of a circle could save the company, the phrase “you know, for kids!” isn’t that explanation. Once we have three points the connection is confirmed between the phrase and the drawing, so when we hear Norville offscreen say the phrase “you know, for kids” that a drawing of a circle can’t be far away, but this time we see that Norville’s nonsense drawing had obscured a genius idea as the camera cuts to Norville showing the Hudsucker Board the thing the circle signified: the hula hoop, one of the most popular toys of the 1950s.
Similarly when Moses says “Norville’s got some tricks up his sleeves, ‘you know, for kids!’” we realize that Moses has the deepest sense of what’s going on in the Hudsucker organization, more so than Sidney, the Board, or anyone else at the company. Each time “you know, for kids!” is used as a phrase, it recalls its prior uses and the associated meanings standing behind them, but also each time it builds on it based on each new context the phrase is used in. In this way from the beginning of the film where “you know, for kids!” is used as a shorthand for “Norville is an idiot”, by the time the context has built on itself enough by the end of the film as he introduces the frisbee to the Hudsucker board, “you know, for kids!” has become a shorthand for “Norville is a genius”. In other words, if Norville seems dumb the first time he says “you know, for kids!”, see how you feel about him the second time he says it, then the third, then the fourth. Eventually one discovers that Norville is not dumb at all.
*I have done a decent amount of writing including these very essays to Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes, roughly an hour’s worth of music for piano that is both fascinating and pretty, and not just because some of the pieces are performed with screws in the piano sitting between strings.
** Those of us old enough to remember the 90s would ask “how is Johnson a quaint or unusual word for a penis in Lebowski? Wasn’t that the heyday of Big Johnson shirts?” On one hand, yes, Big Johnson shirts were just past their zenith in 1998 when the film was released, but were still a regional novelty item in 1991 when Lebowski was set.