27: Circles
Circles are everywhere in nature. In a still pool of water, if you drop something into it, circular waves will emanate from it. Drop a little oil into that same water, and the oil will form a circle on the surface. The tendency for energy and resistance to project itself equally in all directions from a single point gives us the creation of a pearl, the rings of an onion, cross sections of bamboo, citrus fruit, and the planet where we all live. From the tiniest atomic orbit to the cosmic microwave radiation, circles are everywhere. This is maddening of course, because circles are inscrutable and unknowable. Circles don’t tessellate, so it’s impossible to measure area in terms of how many circles it would take to fill that area, unlike with squares (or for that matter triangles or hexagons), but it is literally impossible to know how much space a circle takes up because we cannot measure its equivalent in a tessellating shape. The ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter —expressed by the greek letter π— is the secret to how to measure the area of a circle, but not only can it not be expressed in base 10 numerical systems, it cannot be expressed in any numerical system, or expression of a ratio between any integers, nor can it be expressed in terms of comprehensible numbers in terms of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, or any exponent or root, giving it the distinction of being both an irrational number and a transcendental number. Yet, behold the circle, in all its simplicity, it is the most comprehensible shape imaginable, it defies logic in that it seems like it should be knowable, and yet it cannot be known.
Straight lines and circles do not mix. The very definition of folly among mathematicians of antiquity was to be a “circle squarer.” A person who attempted to solve the riddle of how to measure the area of a circle in squares was the ancient world’s version of the crank attempting to invent a perpetual motion machine with magnets in their basement. The circle is the defiant shape which refuses to be measured. Just as the straight line is a representation of comprehensibility, and thus of predictability and thus of plans and schemes, the circle is the representation of those plans being foiled. If lines represent plans, circles represent God laughing at those plans. Such as it is in life, and such as it is in The Hudsucker Proxy
Near the beginning of the film, Norville seems set on a path of despondence. He has no connections, he has little enough money that a penny tip on his dime cup of coffee seems extravagant, and most of all he has no experience that would land him a job as a Cat’s Meat Man or Reform Cantor or Sandhog or whatever. His natural linear path would appear to be one towards the gutter. The lucky accident that takes him off his straight path to despair is a want ad —a surprisingly big want ad considering that newspaper classifieds are paid by the letter— that Norville misses the first time he peruses these very ads. The thing that finally leads him to apply for a job at the Hudsucker Industries mailroom is a circular stain made by his coffee cup that somehow follows him up the block.
If not for that particular circle, Norville never would have gotten that particular job, walking into Hudsucker HQ immediately as Waring Hudsucker left it 44 floors above him. Had he not been the newbie fall guy not smart enough to hide from the Blue Letter, he would never have had his audience with Sidney Mussburger, and he would be no Hudsucker Proxy for The Hudsucker Proxy. The circular coffee stain leading Norville to an entry level position in the Hudsucker mail room is not Norville’s plan, nor is his unexpected success Sidney’s plan. The pathway of the film is inherently unpredictable, and it all starts with this circle.
Throughout the film, while its main visual anchors continue to be the hard straight lines of its sharp suits and art deco skyscrapers, the Coens pop in just enough circular imagery to break it up. Inside both the Hudsucker boardroom and Sidney Mussburger’s office is a stock ticker machine. Under its glass dome is a spool of paper in a circular shape, itself representing the uncertain future of the company in the wake of Waring Hudsucker’s death.
Also in Sidney’s office is a Newton’s Cradle, an office toy consisting of a line of steel ball bearings suspended by strings, where the pendular motion of a bearing on the end transfers all its energy to the bearing on the opposite side. The bearings are themselves spherical, but are arranged in a straight line and operate on very predictable physical features of kinetic energy transfer and pendular motion. It is their very predictability that makes the two points when the office toy is in focus so striking. First when Sidney demands of Norville “wait a minute” and apparently the very laws of physics respond as the balls stop clacking and stop moving, and second when Moses likewise freezes time near the end of the film, and the way we as the audience know that it’s the case is the shot of the Newton’s Cradle is suspended mid-swing (aside from Norville’s sudden stop of course).
In each case the spherical bearings are a representation that even the unbreakable laws of physics seem to be a little more pliable in this film.
Even the film’s preferred metaphors are circular. Zebulon Cardoza informs Norville that he needs to “circle [the] wagons'' of the Hudsucker stockholders, whatever that might mean in this context. Moments later, nursing a shiner, Norville muses upon how he and Amy may have met in a previous life as he considers “what [Amy’s] beatnik friends call Karma, the great circle of life, death, and rebirth”. We have a completely unnecessary and frankly inaccurate diversion of a german scientist explaining “Ze dingus [the hula hoop] is kvite zimple, really. It operates on ze same principle zat keeps ze earth spinning 'round ze sun, and zat keeps you from flying off ze earth into ze coldest reaches of outer space vere you vood die like a miserable shvine.” Gravity keeps people on the earth and the earth spinning around the sun, while simple directed momentum operates the Hula Hoop, but it is interesting in that it connects the hoop with the motion of celestial bodies, of the notion of days and years and thus how we measure time. After all, when Moses describes his job, he doesn’t say “I keep the clock running”, but “I keep the old circle turning”.
The Hudsucker Building’s clock is simultaneously nearly the only thing about it that isn’t made of hard straight lines and also its most prominent feature. Everything about the design of the building draws the eyes towards the gigantic clock face, framed on its sides with the offices of the President and Vice President, on top with the company’s name, and on the bottom in the notably curvy Gillies Gothic typeface its company slogan, “The Future is Now”. The clock strikes 12, its simultaneous beginning and terminal point at two of the most important moments of the film: when Waring Hudsucker starts his descent at the beginning of the film, and when Norville Barnes starts his descent at its climactic finish. Both events disrupt business as usual at the company, first of course with Waring Hudsucker’s death causing chaos, and next with Waring Hudsucker delivering his message from beyond the grave (sporting a circular halo! But of course we know “it’s a fad”)
Norville Barnes as a corporate president should not have happened, or at the very least, Norville Barnes as Hudsucker President at the age of 25 or so should not have happened. Business as usual would have Norville Barnes fighting his way up the corporate ladder to eventually settle in as a department Vice President around the age of 45 or so and continuing his corporate tenure until he retired with a gold watch, certainly not running a company the size of AT&T before he could legally run for the US Senate. The clock is run by Old Moses, a man who at the very least has some kind of supernatural powers and acts as a kind of guardian angel for Norville for no apparent reason. Norville seems nice enough, but he’s also demonstrated as corruptible as he seemingly unnecessarily lays off a sizable portion of Hudsucker’s workforce, but still the apparently omniscient Moses does say in the denouement of the film that Norville “went on and ruled with kindness and compassion.” Moses knows this, and therefore he with his circular power of time intervenes to let Norville live, perhaps for compassion, and perhaps simply for the sake of him getting enough time at the company to also invent the frisbee.
The most prominent disruptor of order and plans is of course not Norville himself, but his invention the Hula Hoop. As Ethan Coen noted, the reason for the Hula Hoop being the MacGuffin of the film is ostensibly because “We had to come up with something that this guy was going to invent that on the face of it was ridiculous. Something that would seem, by any sort of rational measure to be doomed to failure, but something on the other hand the audience already knew was going to be a phenomenal success.” The real artistry behind that statement though is that Norville never presents his idea of an extruded circular piece of plastic meant to be swung around the hips rhythmically. He presents his idea of a circle, with no more explanation than “you know, for kids!”
No human can own the idea of a circle, much less present it as an invention. The circle —as noted above— is a profoundly natural phenomenon. The circle is also one of two foundational objects for Euclidean geometry along with the straight line. Before the father of mathematics allows for the existence of triangles, squares, cubes, or even numbers, he allows for the mathematician to create the circle. Yet Norville persists several times in his complete non-explanation of his toy, as though he can see a future no one else can where the success of the hoop is so self-evident that trying to explain “this thing you swivel around your hips will become a global phenomenon” seems as reductive as explaining “in order to continue surviving you need to breathe air, drink water, and eat food.” The hoop of course also is profoundly disruptive, to borrow a phrase from modern techies. Its existence upends everything the seemingly experienced members of the Hudsucker board know about business, and of course it throws their stock swindle completely off course. Even Norville however isn’t immune for being thrown for a loop by a drawing of a circle. The thing that ends up being the pretext for knocking him from his pedestal is when Buzz the elevator operator (with his circular cap!) comes into his office uninvited and presents his idea for the bendy straw, aka the “Buzzsucker”.
The corrupted Norville fires him on the spot, but that encounter gives Sidney Mussburger the leeway to fabricate tales of IP theft by Norville (along with exploiting his mopiness to declare him criminally insane). While the bendy straw may be better described in a diagram by a straight line contrasted with a “ 𝚪 ”shape, the only shape in Buzz’s diagram is a circle, clearly intended as another obtuse circular diagram connected with a clearly successful product for us audience members here in the future. In both cases, the powerful and successful men of the Hudsucker Corporation are capable of being undone by goofuses with drawings of circles.
The premise of this very essay is that the circle is inherently unknowable, which in the deepest sense of mathematics is so. We cannot know the exact length of the circumference of a circle in the same way that we can know that there are exactly 5 solid shapes whose faces are identical shapes for example. In the real world however we do get by. Using the commonly used 3.14159 approximation of π for example will give us less than 0.000084% error in calculation. If we built a circular fence around a 100 meter radius using that approximation of how much fencing material to acquire, we would be off by less than half a millimeter, approximately the diameter of a coffee ground. We cannot know the circle but if given the tools we can approximate it and likewise bend its properties to our wills in the same way that humans have done with the straight line. If we know how to use the circle rather than letting it disrupt, we can adapt to its bends and curves and see where it will take us gleefully, and thus the same person whose life was turned upside down with a hula hoop can turn around and embrace the chaos that the circle provides, and ultimately give us the frisbee.