40: Norville's Sultanate
When describing the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, the American orator Robert Ingersoll said “If you want to find out what a man is to the bottom, give him power. Any man can stand adversity — only a great man can stand prosperity.” Absent financial burdens and societal taboos, a rich and powerful person can pursue anything they so desire. The only limit is their imagination and the realities of the physical world. Take Chad Kroeger, for example, the principal songwriter and singer of the inexplicably mega-successful post-grunge band Creed. A quick Google search says that he is worth $80 million. Chad Kroeger therefore is largely financially unburdened in choosing, say, what he wants to eat and how he wants to entertain himself, and yet I know for a fact that Chad Kroeger is a man of simple tastes, as in an interview with Rolling Stone, the pop punk band 5SOS describes a meeting with Kroeger in the following way:
“He ordered 12 chicken strips and a Caesar salad,” says Irwin. “It was so funny, man.” Hood drops his voice an octave to imitate Kroeger: “He was like, ‘Fuck. I’m so unhealthy. I order this every day.'”
“At the end of the day, he was like, ‘Shit, I feel stressed,'” says Irwin. “He’s like, ‘You guys ever look up shit on the Internet?’ We’re like, ‘What type of shit?’ He’s like, ‘Girl stuff, like, hot girls dancing.’ So he goes on YouTube and writes ‘hot chicks dancing’ in the search. And we sat there watching hot chicks dancing. It was such a creepy dad-on-the-Internet move.”
Kroeger can spend his ample fortune in so many ways, and eat and be entertained in ways that I can only imagine, but when it comes down to it, what his heart desires is 12 chicken strips, a caesar salad, and a YouTube search of “hot chicks dancing”. That is who Chad Kroeger is down to the bottom.
We get a glimpse of how Norville Barnes is down to the bottom through his fortune-addled id in the third act of The Hudsucker Proxy. Having just gone through a bevvy of press conferences celebrating his successes, a scene takes place in Norville’s office where ostensibly he is there to do work, but he is instead drinking in all the excesses his heart can imagine. The scene opens with a tight shot on a string quartet playing Minuet from String quartet op. 11 no.5 in E (G275) by Luigi Boccherini.
This Minuet is one of dozens of pieces of chamber music by Boccherini, but has probably become his most iconic work stemming from its use in the dark comedy The Ladykillers (1955) in which a gang of hardened criminals led by Alec Guiness pretend to be aspiring chamber musicians in order to not be found out by the titular lady of the house. Guinness’s character pretends to be an upper crust Professor and during their criminal meetings, he puts on a phonograph of the Boccherini Minuet to both mask their plottings and also to maintain the fiction that they’re practicing their instruments. While Joel & Ethan Coen would doubtless know the piece from The Ladykillers given that they attempted to remake the film ten years later, the piece had also become shorthand in the intervening forty years for “this is fancy music for fancy people”. It had been used shorthand for “a fancy thing is happening right now” in The Muppet Show, Cosmos, This Is Spinal Tap, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off among others before appearing in Hudsucker. Norville Barnes has aspirations of being a fancy and refined person, but on the other hand his idea of what a fancy and refined person listens to with the string quartet he can afford to put in his office is not any of the works of, say Franz Joseph Haydn whose string quartets seem tailor made for listening while doing serious contemplation, but instead is a tune best known by this point as the thing that plays as powerful men eat steak au poivre in a white tablecloth restaurant.
As the camera continues to pan out from the string quartet, a pair of hands holding the newspaper’s funny pages comes into the frame. The blurry image of 50s strips “Barker Bill” and “Gordo” form a stark contrast against the apparent high class of the string quartet’s music, as arguably newspaper comics (especially of the 1950s) are among the most lowbrow forms of expression in popular imagination of the time. The comics are held by a rotund man wearing a black shirt, a polka dotted vest, flashy suspenders, and a black hat. While every aspect of his attire is individually appropriate for a businessman in the 1950s, together they create a strange and striking look. He is not wearing a jacket, and he’s wearing a hat indoors, both slight faux pas in the office of the president of a high powered corporation. Between this and his sharply contrasting suspenders worn outside his vest, and his tie untucked from that vest he gives off a slobbish impression despite his clothes being clean and fitting well. His slovenliness is compounded by the fact that the funny pages he’s reading are a separate section of the newspaper and in full color, typically reserved for the expanded Sunday paper. This man is present in the office on a workday having brought in comics that are at least a day old. Unlike the remainder of the people in the office, he serves no immediately apparent purpose. He is described in the script as follows “A GOON sits off to one side, hat insolently atop his head, reading the funny papers.” The Goon simply seems to exist to be a contrasting lowbrow point of Norville’s desires. He desires to be a fancy man, but at heart he’s still the hick from Muncie who reads Amazing Tales magazine, and the Goon is the avatar of that side of Norville’s personality.
The camera then cuts to a man wearing a smock, beret, and beard holding a hammer and chisel over the beginnings of a sculpture of a man’s face, presumably Norville’s. Between his beret and beard, the sculptor’s appearance is likely meant to evoke the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin (the script refers to him as a “French sculptor”, despite the fact that he does not speak and thus reveal his frenchness). The sculpture is huge. The head is easily as tall as the sculptor’s torso. The average sculpture of a bust of a person is life sized (as is the bronze bust of Norville that appears later in the film), while the statue being created in Norville’s office is practically an Easter Island Moai by comparison. One gets the sense the only reason it’s not any larger is down to it being the largest piece of rock that could be brought into Norville’s office on the 44th floor. Norville has always thought he was destined for great things. In the mailroom he informed his neighbor that he “won’t be working in the mailroom long”, convinced that he was one demonstration of his circular drawing away from being whisked away to an executive suite even without a cockamamie scheme to commit securities fraud. There’s no such thing as a humble corporate executive, but had Norville been the humble nitwit that Sidney Mussburger thought he was, he might modestly accept that his visage might need to be preserved for posterity, but he would not necessarily commission a statue of his head the size of a wardrobe. Norville initially has the good midwestern horse sense of presenting a humble facade, but his success and weeks of being fêted by the press has torn this away. He’s no longer a cornfed moron, he’s the great idea man! Of course he needs a giant statue of his head carved from rock.
The ultimate show of how Norville has decided to spend the capital of his presumed greatness comes as the camera cuts from the sculptor to him. His suit and pocket square are snazzier and sharper than in his previous appearances as Hudsucker’s president, having sharper creases (in part no doubt held due to a lack of physical activity on his part), bright pinstripes and french cuffs on his shirt. He is smoking a cigar which he also is pantomiming as a baton to “conduct” the string quartet. Never mind that the string quartet is not looking at him, and thus his “conducting” is doing nothing (all for the better as he waves his cigar somewhat off-beat for much of the scene). His feet are on his desk in a lazy, reclined position, and flanking his torso are two women in identical gray smocks buttoned to the neck. One is bathing his fingertips in a yellow liquid, no doubt to soften his cuticles for a manicure, as we see a cuticle cutter on her towel later in the scene. The other is massaging his temples with a pair of devices strapped to her hands. The significance of the manicurist is obvious. Since the days of Beau Brummel, men who have outwardly displayed that they care about their appearance have been mocked as vain. This was certainly still true in the 1990s when the film was made and was very true in the 1950s when the film was set. A man is not supposed to care about how he looks aside from owning a well tailored but understated suit. He should not care about such frivolous things as his hair or skin, and certainly not about his fingernails. Norville therefore getting a manicure in the middle of the business day is clearly intended as a sign that his vanity has taken full hold of him. The woman massaging his temples however has layers of significance. The devices strapped to her hands are a marvelous bit of mid-century ephemera: the Oster Stim-U-Lax Junior Massage Instrument. While vibrating massaging instruments are nearly as old as household electricity (the oldest vibrating massage device with any surviving history is the Polar Cub Electric Vibrator, with advertisements for the device coming as early as 1891) the 1950s saw a brief boom in massagers designed to be strapped to the hands with springs. The Oster Stim-U-Lax appears to be the king of these devices (and is still sold new today by the Oster Corporation, you can order one here), though other devices such as the Handy Hannah Vitalator and the Gilbert No. 8 Hand Massager were also introduced around the same time. While these, as with any other electric gizmo that vibrates, can be used in any way the user finds pleasurable (60’s feminist sex-guru Betty Dobson credited a Stim-U-Lax with her own sexual awakening in the documentary Passion and Power), their stated use was as a barbershop amenity. After giving their client a short-back-and-sides with their Oster brand clippers, a barber could then add to the experience by massaging their client’s scalp with a different buzzing handheld device. Norville however is not having his scalp massaged at the barbershop. He is having his temples massaged by a stern looking woman. While the experience is no doubt soothing and relaxing, that’s clearly not what the primary purpose is. A few lines that were cut from the script in this scene makes it all the clearer. As the quartet plays, the goon reads the funnies, the sculptor carves Norville’s visage, and the two women care for his hands and temples, before Amy comes in he sits bolt upright in his chair and announces “Hold it! Nobody move, nobody breathe. An idea... is coming…” In the silence, as the “idea” is coming, a pin literally drops on the floor from a tailor working on Norville’s pants cuffs. The pin dropping breaks Norville’s concentration as he exclaims “it’s gone now”. Norville is employing a woman to use barber massagers in an off-label way to massage his temples in an attempt to pseudo-scientifically stimulate his brain so that the infamous Idea Man’s ideas come faster.
Norville Barnes, the rube who first steps off the bus at the beginning of the film, is not a man who thinks nothing of himself. He has a fresh college diploma. He has clear aspirations of entering the upper middle class of New York business administration. He has a great idea for a circle that is for kids. Had Norville been truly humble he would have stayed in Muncie and worked at the local bank or in a grain elevator, but he feels himself destined for greater things. It is only after he reaches great heights that we see the extent of Norville’s ego. Despite his initial “aw shucks” demeanor, Norville is, at his core, a man who desires refinement but has no idea how to get there, betraying his own lack of refinement by keeping company with a goon with the funny pages while the string quartet plays a clichéd piece of music. He celebrates his own perceived importance with a giant statue of his head and a brain massage. More substantially however we learn from him talking with Amy that he has laid off hundreds of workers while giving himself a raise. Had the Hudsucker board not conspired to remove him, his ego might have easily been his downfall, allowing Hudsucker Industries to crumble while, as Amy puts it, he’s “sitting around here like a sultan, not doing a lick of work”. It takes the remainder of the third act of the film in which he’s dumped by Amy, falsely accused of wrongdoing by Buzz and Sidney, diagnosed with a mental disorder by a stern Austrian Psychiatrist, and accidentally jumps off a 44 floor building to lay him low enough to learn some actual humility.
Norville seems to have gone from childhood to this exact point where he begins to be chastised by Amy as a nonstop series of successes, first graduating with honors from the Muncie College of Business Administration, to becoming the president of a large corporation within hours of arriving in New York, to creating one of the greatest successes in toymaking history. It might be easy to see how he could do no wrong and thus deserved his absurd rewards in his palatial office. While Sidney Mussburger is no doubt a greedy, evil man, thank God for him for laying Norville low for a moment so that he wouldn’t continue down this shameful road.