34: Eyebrows
This is a photo of a man from Inner Mongolia, China. His name is Zheng Shusen.
He was 81 years old when this photo was taken in 2016. He has the same name as a surgeon who lives in Hangzhou and is a specialist in liver transplants, but this Zheng Shusen is notable in the English speaking world for one reason: he has the longest eyebrows in the world as recognized by the Guiness book of World Records, with his longest hair measuring at 19.1 cm when fully extended.
Eyebrows are a curious feature of the human body. As human beings evolved we stopped growing hair universally across our bodies, keeping them in various locations for reasons endlessly debated among evolutionary biologists. A common agreement is that eyebrows exist to keep sweat that accumulates on our forehead from dripping into our eyes. For those among us who have spent any appreciable amount of time in a hot space and had sweat still get into our eyes, this would seem like nonsense. I have it on good authority from my editor who had his eyebrow shaved off for eye surgery in Afghanistan that the sweat in one’s eyes is worse without eyebrows, but still, if eyebrows exist to keep sweat out of our eyes they do an imperfect job of it. An alternate theory is that eyebrows exist as a form of expressiveness. As there’s a good deal of contrast between our hair color and skin color typically, eyebrows allow our facial expressions to be read and understood from a distance.
Eyebrows are also interesting in that their care and grooming is a profoundly gendered experience. Men are expected to ignore their eyebrows. If a storyteller wishes to point out that a man is vain, they might have that man pointedly care about his clothes. If he’s meant to be extremely vain, he might care about his hair, as George Clooney’s Ulysses Everett McGill does in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Only a man who is meant to be ludicrously vain might be seen styling his eyebrows. In the meantime, women have always been expected to take extreme care of their eyebrows. Eyebrow maintenance is not only a function of basic feminine hygiene, it is also something that has had its own styles and fashions throughout the years. When filming the 1999 cult dark comedy Drop Dead Gorgeous, writer Lona Williams stressed the importance of casting women with “midwestern eyebrows” as the style in Los Angeles at the time was for women to have immaculately skinny eyebrows, which would have strayed from the film’s Minnesotan setting (a message that did not land when the film’s lead, Kirsten Dunst was cast, but did with its antagonist, Denise Richards).
In contrast with men, a woman who does not style her eyebrows is seen as someone who strikingly does not care about her appearance, potentially because she is profoundly lazy or potentially because she is a bright young thing above such petty concerns as physical appearance. The painter Frida Kahlo is potentially one of the most strikingly unique human beings to ever walk the earth, but when her appearance is commented on, her unibrow is almost always one of the first things mentioned
What is profoundly neglected as a signifier however in our society is the presence of styled or maintained eyebrows for purposes beyond vanity and attractiveness. Why would we style our eyebrows to be beautiful, when we can style our eyebrows to be sublime, as apparently the Hudsucker board member Addison does?
Addison begins his life in the film as the third person who speaks a line of dialogue. As Waring Hudsucker has climbed on the table and stretched his legs, the camera focuses on one of the old white men of the Hudsucker board who cranes his neck up and asks in confusion “Mr. Hudsucker?” The men of the Hudsucker board are largely nondescript and generic looking. They are old, they are white, they are dressed in suits, and they are frumpy. Addison could have easily been one of these men of no notable appearance but for the fact that his eyebrows curl up a solid inch away from his face and up towards his forehead. Addison’s eyebrows are magnificent, they look like a hawk in flight planted in the middle of a human man’s face. They do not make him beautiful, but they do make him sublime.
I.M. Hobson, the actor who plays Addison was a working New York City actor for his entire career. He had many parts on Broadway, being an original cast member in Amadeus, and performing on a national touring production of Pippin as Charlemagne. On the small screen he played an auctioneer opposite Oscar the Grouch on an episode of Sesame Street, and had a recurring role on the Bob Newhart sitcom Newhart. He also had a twelve year career in the movies, being bookended on one end by a part in the 1982 adaptation of the musical Annie! and on the other by his performance as Addison in Hudsucker among other noticeable yet small parts in films such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and Barton Fink (1991) where he plays a broadway producer named Derek who reads Barton’s glowing theatrical review.
(Hobson acting opposite a Muppet in a trash can)
While Hobson’s impressively bushy eyebrows were universally present in his stage and screen work, it is only the Coens who took advantage of not just their thickness but their length. Eyebrows do not naturally come away from the face for any reason. Look at Zheng Shusen at the beginning of this essay again, while his one hair he is stretching out for effect is profoundly striking, the mass of his eyebrows are not as visibly long. Eyebrows do not naturally grow outwards, they curl in. When someone is discussed who has a preponderance of eyebrow hair, it is rarely said that their eyebrows are long, but rather that their eyebrows are bushy. I.M. Hobson’s eyebrows are no exception, as can be seen in his work outside of The Hudsucker Proxy, where they are notably bushy but not long. It is specifically as Addison the executive where Hobson’s eyebrows pull away from his head into their glorious upward curve. For some potentially inscrutable reason Joel Coen requested of makeup artist Jean Ann Black that Addison’s eyebrows be styled and curled outward so that they could become this majestic screen presence.
Addison as a character has a good deal more depth than most anyone else on the Hudsucker board. The only other members with names are company VP Sidney Mussburger (who is of course the main antagonist of the film) and the man giving the fiscal report in the first post-credits scene, Stilson. Every other character is referred to in the shooting script as either generically “Executive” or occasionally with an epithet such as “Elderly Executive” or “Precise Executive”. Addison himself is given a name in the script, but not in the credits, where he is simply listed as “Board Member” along with seven other actors. Addison however is the only one of these powerful men who appears to be capable of expressing emotion. Conceivably the board met regularly and many of the members had sat on the board for some time. It’s certainly implied that Sidney Mussburger had been a faithful lieutenant of Waring Hudsucker for years. These men worked together regularly, they probably thought of each other in friendly ways, if not as out and out friends. Yet after his death, Addison is the only man who mourns Waring Hudsucker’s loss. Sidney Mussburger, cruel and callous as ever, tells the man expressing his very real grief to “quit showboating”. As the board devises their scheme to artificially devalue the company’s stock he is too lost in grief to join in the chant of “Long live the Hud”.
His subsequent scene that he brilliantly steals happens later in the film. As he wept through Sidney Mussburger’s pitch to commit securities fraud, he also weeps further down the line in a subsequent scene of the board meeting. He weeps as Sidney gets a deep tissue massage as it has become apparent that the plan has failed in light of the unlikely success of the Hula Hoop. First Addison weeps as his compatriots scheme over wealth rather than mourn their employer’s death, and subsequently he weeps over his own lost wealth from sales of the hoop. Addison then takes what is now a familiar step up upon the table to take a sprint down it, ostensibly to join Waring Hudsucker in the great beyond. Unlike the first time this happens in the film where the Hudsucker board gazes upon Waring Hudsucker with quiet befuddlement, two of the board members protest and get him to stop, with the remainder — now realizing what is about to happen — are slack-jawed in shock, but for one man, Sidney Mussburger, who sits stone faced as as his masseur finishes his massage. Of course he, alone knows what the remainder of the board does not: that Addison’s attempt at self harm will not end in a crash as with Waring Hudsucker, but with a splat as his body presses against the newly installed Plexiglas™ window.
While Addison is seen in a couple of later scenes in the Hudsucker boardroom, he delivers no further lines in the film.
Addison’s styled eyebrows are a conscious choice. I.M. Hobson’s eyebrows are naturally bushy, but it took the eye of a skilled filmmaker and the skills of a talented hair and makeup department to make them swoop out and up into the majestic specimens that appear in the film. The meaning of his long swooping eyebrows could be as simple as “it looks weird, and the Coens love weird striking visuals, so that’s what they went for”, but it also could be a coded statement about his character. The upward and outward swoosh of his eyebrows are slightly reminiscent of the swoosh one might see on an eyelash that has been styled with mascara. Addison is no beauty queen, but his eyebrows may represent a masculine form of the same beauty style. Mascara is one of many methods one might accentuate one's eyes in a feminine way to project beauty. Addison’s styled eyebrows make his appearance striking. He is a man in a position of power, but he is also alone among his colleagues in that he lets his feelings get the best of him. Perhaps then Addison’s styled eyebrows may be his own masculine version of mascara, a way to accentuate his eyes to project power and authority. Perhaps he does this because he knows himself to be a sensitive soul and thus he needs all the help he can get to stay in a position of power.
Probably not, they’re probably just there to look silly, and boy howdy do they do the job.