20: Old Moses

The Hudsucker Proxy is commonly compared to the films of Frank Capra, such as It’s A Wonderful Life (1946) or Mr Deeds Goes To Town (1936), and while its set pieces, broad plot strokes and overall aesthetic may owe much to Capra’s work, it lacks an essential Capra quality: the impeccably good protagonist.  Hudsucker has evil in droves; its antagonist Sidney Mussburger is greed incarnate; the Manhattan Argus Chief has little in the way of scruples or guiding vision, and of course Aloysius seems to be a straight up demon.  In addition its protagonists and supporting cast are full of moral ambiguity.  Norville gives into the temptations of his success all too easily; Amy’s zeal for the truth leads her into duplicity; even poor, wronged Buzz the elevator operator isn’t above starting an angry mob when it suits him.  Hudsucker has but one character who is purely righteous and virtuous.  He is also however an example of a harmful stereotype stretching back over a hundred years. He’s also an emblematic part of the kind of late studio system film that Hudsucker seeks to emulate, and is a necessary part of the story, but his place in that studio system movie is emblematic of a problematic aspect of history, and his place in the story is to prop up its weakest point. 

We need to talk about Old Moses. 

Old Moses is played by Bill Cobbs, and like most of the supporting cast of the film, Cobbs is a character actor known for a type.  Cobbs’s type in most mainstream white films is as an older, aloof and/or cranky Black man.  His long face and deep booming voice projects a kind of detached weariness with the rest of the world, like he’s the only person in the room with a dang lick of sense, but he knows no one will listen to him so why bother sharing that sense with the rest of the world? In a guest stint on 90s magical realism dramedy Northern Exposure he played Angelo the barber, a prim and proper well dressed man who correctly identifies a meningeal cyst on Dr. Joel Fleischman’s head (which the overly proud Dr. Fleischman refuses to accept is what it is because he refuses to accept that a barber would know anything about anything medical).  He had a recurring role in the twilight of The Drew Carey Show as Tony the busdriver, a kind of grouchy sounding board for Carey as he asked him life advice questions while riding the bus, and receiving only snark and condescension in return, and in That Thing You Do (1996) he plays Del Paxton, a fictitious jazz legend who makes Oneders drummer Guy Patterson’s day when they record a jazz song composed by Patterson called “Sparticus” during an impromptu recording session. 

Old Moses however isn’t grouchy or aloof exactly. He definitely realizes that the worries and cares of the Hudsucker Executives in the rooms next to his clock tower are foreign to his own, and so he views and talks about them with a kind of detachment, but he still takes an interest. He apparently knows everything there is to know about Hudsucker Industries and will happily discuss whatever he knows with whoever will ask him, it’s just that no one ever asks him.

Moses’ voice appears in four scenes in Hudsucker, but his body only appears in two.  To call him an omniscient narrator would be a stretch, as his voiceover is only present at the opening and closing of the film, not enough to really call him a narrator of the entire film.  He establishes the setting in the opening and narrates the denouement; his voice acting as a bookend to the film, just as in the opening the camera slowly tracks in on the Hudsucker clock tower and at its close the camera slowly tracks out from the same. Moses, as the keeper of the clocktower makes sense as a voice laid over the clock, but we never hear his voice narrating any other scene or setting up any action as with, say Alec Baldwin’s disembodied voice in The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).  However while it wouldn’t be fair to necessarily call him the narrator of the film, omniscience isn’t too far off. 

The two scenes in which Old Moses’ body appears demonstrates that he has knowledge and power that transcends that of most humans.  First the obvious.  At the film’s climax the man stops time. Clearly Moses has some kind of supernatural power at the very least.  A case could almost be made that it’s not Moses that can stop time, but in fact the Hudsucker building’s clock itself controls time.  Stop the clock, stop time, but this falls apart as soon as one realizes that Old Moses himself can continue to interact with the clock and its gears (and Aloysius and his jaw) while time is stopped. 

Moses is clearly more powerful than he lets on.  Less obvious is his depth of knowledge revealed in the dialogue he shares with Amy Archer as she attempts to snoop on Sidney Mussburger via the utility access catwalk. During the course of their brief conversation Moses reveals that he is privy to the following pieces of information:

1. He is speaking to Amy Archer, the newspaper reporter who does not publish or circulate her photo. 

2. The Hudsucker board is attempting to purposefully depreciate the company’s stock to secure a majority share by hiring a seemingly idiotic president. 

3. That Norville’s “you know, for kids!” drawing of a circle is indeed a worthwhile idea / that Norville is secretly a genius. 

4. He knows the exact words Amy threw in Norville’s face in the fight they just had. 

5. That Amy hides her own deep seated unhappiness behind a veneer of professionalism. 

One could almost understand how Moses knows the board’s scheme and what Amy said to Norville in a fight they just had given that the boardroom and Norville’s office are directly adjacent to the clock.  It’s unlikely that he would overhear these things being in different rooms and above all the noise that the clock itself makes, but who knows? Maybe his hearing is superb. The other facts though are much more difficult to square how Moses knows them.  Norville is incredibly bad at expressing what his drawing of a circle actually describes, so the idea that Moses would have faith in it is surprising to say the least, especially when Moses would have no good reason to have ever experienced Norville’s “you know, for kids!” pitch.  One certainly doesn’t typically invite the clocktower keeper to your corporate R&D brainstorming sessions. That he knows that Amy is in fact Amy Archer is bonkers unless he moonlights at the Argus building when not tending to the Hudsucker gears. Lastly of course the idea that he appears to know all about Amy’s personal mental state suggests that it’s not so much that he’s particularly knowledgeable about Hudsucker, but is in fact particularly knowledgeable about everything. 

It’s not unreasonable then to think of Moses as a kind of divine presence.  Enlightenment thinkers described their conception of God as a being that set the universe in motion but did not meddle in day to day affairs. A common refrain was the idea of God as a clockmaker, the idea being that a clock continues to operate of its own volition due to a great deal of thought and care in its design without any direct input from its creator, so the connection between God and clocks is one that already exists in the occidental mindset.  Moses however takes this idea and puts it on its head.  “I keeps the old circle turning. This old clock needs plenty care” he tells Amy. No clock simply runs forever, and the bigger and more complex the clock, the more intervention is needed to keep it running. It’s also worth noting that Moses refers to the clock colorfully as “the old circle”, especially given that in the introduction of the film Moses says in his intro “old daddy earth is fixin’ to make one more trip around the sun”, pointing out that the human conception of time is circular.  When Moses says he keeps the old circle running, is he talking about the clock, or time itself? If he is a God or representation of God he is a benevolent one. Moses recognizes that Sidney Mussburger’s plot is ultimately amoral, and thus he intervenes to stop it, first by helping Amy with her reporting, and then by throwing the laws of physics out the window to keep Norville from “squishing himself”. 

That being said, Moses is a bit of an inscrutable figure, we know nothing of his wants or needs or inner life, only his relationship to his employer and its executives. This can get into murky territory when we consider that Moses is the only Black character in the film. If the Coens have a weak spot, it’s their relationship to their nonwhite characters (and the lack thereof in many of their films).  In the middle of the 20th century New York City’s Black population was around 14%. If this were distributed across Hudsucker’s 78 credited cast members, about ten or eleven of them would be Black.  Admittedly, one didn’t find many Black board members on high powered corporations of the 1950s, but there were certainly Black cabbies, news reporters, diner patrons, mail room clerks, and new years revellers. The New York of Hudsucker though is not the actual New York of 1958, it is a pastiche of screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, and attempts in many ways to emulate the rhythm, feel, pacing, and character types of those movies.  This of course includes the only roles regularly available to Black actors in these times: very often peripheral characters who are affable, uneducated helpers to the richer and more privileged white main characters without needs or wants of their own. The two most egregious examples of these types of characters being James Baskett’s portrayal of Uncle Remus in the notorious Disney feature Song of the South (1946) and Hattie McDaniel’s portrayal of Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939), for which she became the first Black woman to win an academy award. Moses isn’t Remus or Mammy, but this is much more due to Cobbs’s performance than the way the character is written.  A different reading of the same lines could very well have made Moses into the same kind of servile character that the Coens are referencing with his existence, but thankfully Bill Cobbs’s performance gives Moses some aloof dignity.  His take to the camera as he stops time has a marvelous bit of “can you believe I had to stop time to save this stupid white boy?” energy to it. Moses at least helps because he wants to, not because he needs to. 

The most perfect Moses moment in the film isn’t however when he stops time or as he narrates the beginning or end of the film.  It’s a marvelous little moment that’s easily missed.  As Amy Archer has been freshly caught snooping by Moses, she asks “Say, you won’t tell anyone about me will you?” as she holds up her pack of cigarettes as both a friendly offering and a minor bribe. As Moses responds he pulls a previously unseen cigarette out from behind his ear. “I don’t tell no one nothin’, less’n they ask, that just ain’t Old Moses’ way.” In the one line and the one action, he both rejects Amy’s bribe but accepts her friendly offer to have a smoke as they chat, and assures her that he will neither hide information from her nor will he volunteer her identity. Moses is kind and affable and wants to help, but he always lets you know that he knows more than you and he’s already got anything you could offer him. No wonder he’s always smiling.