26: Lines
In 1791, as France’s constitutional monarchy was getting settled (completely unaware of the coming storm of the Republic and the terror around the corner), its leaders of thought were revising every bit of nonsensical outdated feudal nonsense embedded in the ancien régime. Among the legal and tax codes that were badly in need of change, the new government wished to create a new system of measurement that was based on rationality, and would use exclusively base 10 subdivisions, unlike, say, a completely nonsense system that defines its basic short unit of measurement as the length of one king of England’s forearm (which is in turn confusingly called a “foot”) and its basic long unit of measurement as being 5280 of those feet. The French Academy of Sciences thus developed what we now know as the Metric System, with its basic units of meters, grams, and liters for length, mass, and volume respectively. The Metric system has since been expanded to use these basic measurements to create measurements of of force, power, and energy like the Newton and Joule and Watt, and together with subsequent basic units of electrical current (the Ampere), temperature (the Kelvin) and intensity of light (the Candela) can measure more or less everything in the known universe, such as the Henry, a unit of magnetic inductance which is defined ultimately as one kilogram-square-meter per square-second-square-ampere*. Those French thinkers in the late 18th century needed to come up with something to base their new completely rational system of measurement on, and so they figured out that one ten-millionth the distance from the north pole to the equator was a little more than half the height of the average human, and was thus a good basis for a unit of measurement for distance, and was christened the “meter”**. The meter could then be multiplied into the long distance unit the kilometer, and theoretically further into the megameter and gigameter for extraordinary units of length***, and subdivided into the centimeter, millimeter, and micrometer for smaller units. One cubic centimeter of water at room temperature was used as the measure for mass and became the gram, and the volume taken up by one kilogram of water at room temperature defined the liter. Everything started though with a straight line.
The straight line is the object through which humans conceive of the natural world and measure it, and by measuring it understand it, predict it, and base models of how it should work based on it, which is frankly bizarre because profoundly little in the natural world is a straight line. An object dropped with negligible air resistance or lateral momentum will trace a straight line down to the ground. A thread pulled taught, like a segment of a spider’s web will describe a straight line. The formation of many types of crystals will describe various kinds of straight lined edges. Everything else in the world is full of curves and swerves. The straight line, with its cousins the square and the cube are attempts to impose order and measurement onto the natural world. From the enlightenment’s development of the scientific method to its realization in the industrial revolution, the more humans were able to calculate out how the world could work, and the more rectilinear and full of straight lines the built world became. One hundred and fifty years after the development of the metric system, this is what the once quiet forested island of Manhattan looked like.
Or, if you prefer, this is what it looked like.
There are plenty of big cities in the world, but Los Angeles, Delhi, Mexico City and London aren’t quite defined by their sharp, jutting skylines in the way that New York City is. New York is a city defined by its straight lines, and in The Hudsucker Proxy those same straight lines exist as a constant visual motif, one of imposed order, an attempt to fit into boxes and categories the wild and untamed. Straight lines are a sign of power.
As the film opens we move through the Manhattan skyline at roughly Hudsucker building height, showing off all those straight lined skyscrapers, ultimately focussing in on Norville Barnes outside the window of his office at Hudsucker HQ. We barely have a glimpse of a real flesh and blood human before Old Moses finishes his monologue and we cut away to the opening credits, but before we see a single name, we see a giant stylized capital H with its horizontal line jutting out from the two parallel vertical lines.
This is of course the Hudsucker Industries logo. The three lines are stylized into a kind of forced perspective set of triangular prisms. The fact that the horizontal line sticks out past the two vertical lines suggests that it is anchoring the vertical lines with additional structural integrity. This “H” is sturdy and powerful and strong. Just as Hudsucker Industries is the foundation upon which Hudsucker’s plot is based, this sharp rectilinear logo anchors the credits, just as the sturdiness of Hudsucker Industries anchors the plot of The Hudsucker Proxy.
Straight lines impose order onto the world, and the men who themselves impose order onto the world reflect this in their dress. The more powerful they are, the straighter the lines on their suits. As Norville gets off the bus, he wears an ill fitting jacket and a rumpled bow tie as he walks through the world as a powerless naif. Soon he even ditches the jacket, leaving him only with his rumpled shirt and Hudsucker Industries apron.
Before too long, he meets master of the universe, Sidney Mussburger, with his well fitting worsted wool suit with its sharp lapels, well squared off shoulders, and of course his omnipresent personal straight line, his cigar.
Soon though Norville is one of them, and as he slowly sells his soul to capital, his look gets sharper and sharper, becoming more and more rectilinear himself, by the time he’s laying off massive swaths of the Hudsucker workforce, his lapels are as sharp, his shoulders just as squared off, and even worse, he’s got pinstripes.
Pride cometh before a fall, and so before long all those sharp lines fall away, leaving Norville once more a rumpled mess.
The dichotomy of sharp-clothes-versus-rumpled-clothes-as-a-sign-of-power applies to pretty much every other bit of menswear that appears in the film. For example Smitty, despite his straight nose and square jaw, is dressed in a suit with semi-rounded lapels and a rounded collar, his shirt is rumpled, his hat is dented, and his tie is broad with a big round slope. His fellow Argus reporters, and even the Argus chief are similarly dressed.
While the doomed Waring Hudsucker, himself rotund in build is framed with a perfectly folded pocket square and pinstripes, similarly so with the remainder of the board.
The most imposing set of straight lines though in the film is the Hudsucker Industries building. The fictitious Hudsucker building is clearly meant to evoke the art deco skyscrapers built in the 1930s, such as 30 Rockefeller Plaza, The Chrysler Building, and the most famous art deco skyscraper of all, The Empire State Building. Not only does it (as with most all tall buildings) have impressive straight vertical lines along its terminal dimensions, but it also has exterior visual touches to accentuate its straightness and imposing height. The windows of the Hudsucker building are recessed, so that the space between windows acts as a kind of pinstriping, and the concrete columns around the entrance themselves have grooves in them to create more straight lines and vertical stripe effects upon viewing it.
Further, its interior design is all about these same vertical stripes and tall straight lines, creating a sense of how imposing the building is from within just as well as from without. Hudsucker’s lobby is a giant space, effectively two stories tall (counting the mezzanine) and all around its tall window-door combination full of tall straight panes of glass are support columns, each of them painted to have vertical stripes, making an already large space feel even taller.
45 floors up in Norville’s office there are similar vertical line accentuation marks in the support columns surrounding his door, once again making the impressively tall space feel even taller.
Just across the clock face in Sidney Mussburger’s office, his own cavernous space has its height accentuated by twenty foot windows just behind his desk.
Set designer Dennis Gassner was told that Mussburger’s office should feel like the one Benito Mussolini used as his tenure as dictator of Italy, itself a giant cavern.
Sidney himself is of course the most powerful figure in the film, clearly the de facto power running Hudsucker Industries despite being Vice President to Norville’s President. His giant and sterile office reflects this, and while he might outwardly bristle at being compared to Il Duce, he’d probably inwardly reflect on how he was a man who could really get things done. The Hudsucker building is a towering monument to the company’s influence and power, and thus the stakes of who runs it.
The most striking bit of rectilinearity inside the building though is the absurdity that is the Hudsucker boardroom table. A central piece of several scenes where the Hudsucker Board schemes their schemes, it comfortably fits 8 men on each side with room to spare. It’s easily 30 feet long, raising the question of how it was even put into the boardroom given that it needed to come up 44 floors on an elevator. Not only is it itself a long straight thing, it has a forced perspective depiction of the Hudsucker building depicted as it would be seen from below via six additional lines on the surface of the table.
The boardroom is the center of all the power that Hudsucker wields. It is the room in which the stock swindle is originally formulated. It is where Norville’s first photograph as Hudsucker President is taken. It is where he presents the hoop to the board, and it is where the board subsequently plots his downfall. The giant table is the seat of power inside the giant Hudsucker tower that seeks to control as much of the world as possible through its market share in… whatever Hudsucker does. Dingus manufacture, I guess.
Strangely enough, the idea that straight lines represent power and imposed order can be applied to a way in which Waring Hudsucker himself appears to defy the laws of physics. At the beginning of the film when he jumps out of the window, physics demands that his lateral trajectory —that is the speed at which he was running at the moment he made the jump— would continue as he fell. He should fall in a parabola, accelerating downward faster than he traveled laterally, but still traveling laterally. The 200s block of Madison Avenue where the Hudsucker building is located according to the shooting script consists of 4 lanes of traffic and 2 sidewalks, about 60 feet wide building to building. As Hudsucker himself jumps out the window, he has a good long running start to get to a good sprinting velocity as he crosses the ridiculously long table in the boardroom. The average human sprinting speed is 20 mph, but it’s safe to say that between his age and his rotundity that Waring Hudsucker sprints at a below average speed, and further that his speed would be slowed by the fact that he crashed through the window. Even still, the meager velocity of 5 mph, that of a power walk (which can be expressed as about 7.3 feet per second) would cause Hudsucker to travel 220 feet laterally over the course of his 30 second fall. He should hit the building opposite Hudsucker HQ, but he does not. He flies out over the pavement, and his lateral motion stops, almost as if he willed it so that he would make the biggest impression by landing dead in the middle of the street. Waring Hudsucker is apparently the only thing in nature that carries lateral momentum but falls in a straight line.
In The Hudsucker Proxy as in life, straight lines are a way to impose order on chaos. Straight lines are the basis for mathematical equations that describe the physical world. Straight lines allow for measurement and thus for predictions and plans. Straight lines allow for schemes, but schemes may be foiled.
Next week’s essay is about circles.
* I understand how electro-magnetic circuits work mostly and I don’t get it either. Units are weird.
** They of course did it wrong unfortunately. The average circumference of the earth in meters as originally defined is 40,075,000 m, not 40,000,000 m. The question then became “do we make the meter slightly longer or redefine what the meter is”. In an effort to not confuse things, the Academy of Sciences subsequently has redefined the meter as the distance that light travels in 1 / 299792458th of a second in a vacuum.
*** for an understanding of these measures, one gigameter is slightly more than the distance between Earth and Jupiter when they are furthest from each other in their orbits. One megameter is approximately the distance between Manhattan and Muncie, Indiana
editorial note:
"Just across the clock face in Sidney Mussburger’s office, his own cavernous space has its height accentuated by twenty food* windows just behind his desk."
*foot (?)