44: La Habanera

It is a reasonable assumption to think that someone silly enough to devote a year to writing essays about a single film knows everything there is to know about the film. I, as the author of such a project will happily say that I know a startling amount about The Hudsucker Proxy. I know the alternate credits of dozens of character actors who appear in the film for mere moments and yet for whom Hudsucker is their most notable part. I know that in the scene immediately following the opening credits that despite appearing for fractions of a second that there are job postings for “Cantor (Reform)”, “Carny” and “Trombonist (Experienced Applicants Only)”. I’ve researched the brand of hand massagers used to massage Norville Barnes’ head as he sits in his office listening to chamber music. If there is ink that has been spilled on the film I’ve read it, and can tell you about how confused Paul Newman was by the Coens’ directorial style and how disappointed Joel Silver was with the film’s poor commercial reception. I do not know everything though. Some mystery remains, and the biggest one is the entirety of the existence of a dance scene in the film’s third act.

As Amy Archer walks away from Norville after having resigned her position as Norville’s secretary the film cuts to white. Slowly this white fades in on a woman dancing. She has long chestnut hair, eyeliner, lipstick, fishnet stockings, high heels, black silk gloves, a silver necklace and a strange and unique single article of clothing. It appears to be a single scarf-width piece of black fabric that has been wrapped and tied around the dancer’s body covering her bathing suit areas with nothing over her shoulders, back, legs, or stomach. It is tied in a comically oversized bow at her lower back, and emanating from it are two large sheer burgundy colored pieces of fabric that are attached to her wrists. The fabric is being blown about by a breeze, giving the fabric almost an appearance of a cape that’s worn from the waist rather than the shoulders.

The dancer’s style is decidedly modern. That is not to say that it was the most up-to-date style of dance in 1994 when the film was created or in 1958 when it was set, but rather the broad style of dance rejecting classical ballet that came about in the early 20th century, favoring freedom of physical expression over rigid rules of poses and movements. The dancer does not rhythmically punctuate her movements as is done in tap, ballroom, or swing dancing, but rather lets her physicality exude the mood and feel of the music. She’s clearly a trained dancer in that her movements are well executed and physically demanding, especially when compared against her dance partner. Modern dance remains today a symbol of artistic inscrutability. It is not a dance style that implies delicate old world beauty in the way that balet does, nor does it imply the joyous and spontaneous joy of music in the way that swing or hip hop does. Modern dance implies that there are serious things happening. It implies that art is happening, and the viewer should find it moving and important.

Loie Fuller, pioneer of modern dance in a picture from 1902

The dance is thus artistic, but that is not all there is to it. To say that the dancer is also meant to be sensual and erotic is about as meaningful an observation as saying that there is little rainfall in the Sonora Desert. In case there were any confusion however the script makes it abundantly clear with the description of her entrance:

After a beat, a woman ENTERS against the unblemished white background, dressed in a flowing white dance robe, trailing a long, diaphanous veil. She performs a flowingly sensuous dance moderne; the MUSIC is a sensuous saxophone solo with lasciviously bending blue notes.

One imagines the music as intended in the script would be something like the Louis Prima recording of the instrumental standard “Night Train”

While Louis Prima probably intended only to record a catchy song, his brother, New Orleans nightclub owner Leon Prima made Louie’s version of “Night Train” a regular feature of stiptease acts, and via his influence in the Crescent City and beyond, long legato blaring sax parts became shorthand for sexy times in America in the mid 20th century, doubtless the intent of putting “a sensuous saxophone solo with lasciviously bending blue notes” in the script.

The song in the dance dream in Hudsucker is not a “sensuous saxophone solo with lasciviously bending blue notes”. It is an aria from the Bizet opera Carmen, technically titled “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” [Love is a rebellious bird] but most often referred to as “La Habanera”. “La Habanera” is one of the most well known opera arias in existence. If you ask a random person to sing some opera and they don’t make some vaguely soprano squawks, “La Habanera” is one of the four tunes they might sing (the other three being “Toreador” also from Carmen, “Largo al factorum” from The Barber of Seville, and “La donna è mobile” from Rigoletto). Carmen is the story of a Spanish soldier named José who falls in love with a Roma woman, the titular Carmen, whose wild and free nature causes him to fly into a jealous rage with tragic ends. “La Habanera” is a statement of purpose of Carmen, as she sings about how loving her is an act of folly, with its repeated line “si je t’aime regarde-toi” [if I love you, watch yourself] being both a warning to all listening that a love affair with her is a bad idea and a flirtatious foreshadowing of what is to become of José. While seeming a little classier than a saxophone solo, it is no less erotic. “La Habanera” is one of the first pieces of Carmen and is designed to establish its mood of forbidden and dangerous love. A dance scene set to an operatic aria might seem classy today, but that’s only because of the veneer of class that any art that survives and remains relevant for long periods of time gains. “La Habanera” was the “WAP” of its day.

The dancer is of course not alone. As the music swells a second dancer appears: Norville Barnes. He leaps into the scene and immediately becomes a point of contrast with the unnamed dancer. Unlike she, he is fully dressed, albeit without his jacket. While her movements are trained and purposeful, his are graceless. His lanky frame and goofy grin is about as unerotic as it gets. Also his short hair and jacketless outfit means that nothing of him will blow about in the wind unlike the dancer’s veil or hair except for his tie, making him appear shabby and unkempt where the dancer looks wild and free.

They make for an unlikely pair, but seemingly the dancer cannot get enough of him. She places her leg on his shoulder and gets nose to nose with him in a deep embrace. Afterwards she arches her back backwards leaving Norville alone with her leg which he practically licks. They briefly then spin away from each other and he playfully chases her until they square off on opposite ends of their white background, with her raising her arms gracefully and him going into a Karate Kid crane kick pose. As they rush towards each other and re-embrace she arches her back once more into a deep dip and he follows, seemingly about to kiss her until the voice of Buzz the elevator operator calls to him and the scene ends, the dance being a dream.

The fact that Norville is dreaming about a gorgeous and graceful dancer with few clothes on is clearly a statement of Norville’s sexuality. Just as the immediately preceding scene represents how Norville’s unchecked id spends his money and influence, this scene clearly shows us what an unchecked horny Norville Barnes desires, but to what end? He’s just learned that Amy and he are over as a couple, but it’s not obvious that this represents him missing her or regretting their breakup. The dancer more resembles Amy than Za Za, the only other woman Norville shows a romantic interest in, but if the dream was to be about Amy or an Amy-like figure, why not have Jennifer Jason Leigh play the dancer? Surely while she might not be a trained dancer some practice and some trick photography paid for by that Joel Silver budget could have made the dancer more obviously Amy if it were meant to be her. I don’t think she’s meant to be Amy. She is merely meant to be an object of Norville’s desire. The dream dancer simply exists for all of a minute of screen time and disappears into nothingness.

But why? The dance scene is too short to be enjoyed on its own merits as a dance scene, as with the “No Dames” dance scene from Hail Caesar! twenty-two years later. It is not weird enough to be enjoyed on its own merits as a dream as with the “Gutterballs” sequence from The Big Lebowski. It adds nothing to the character of Norville beyond “sometimes he has erotic dreams”, a characterization that can easily be inferred by the fact that he’s a human in his early 20s. It seems like it should have more meaning and weight behind it than simply “Norville has a horny dream and is thus cranky when Buzz the elevator operator wakes him”, but if there is such weight and meaning, I cannot find it. It simply is. As with the Pants scene before it, it is all setup and no punchline. A penguin walks into a bar and that’s it. Norville Barnes occasionally dreams of sexy dancers with whom he dances to opera and that’s it. In a Coens’ prior film, Miller’s Crossing, there is a scene where the protagonist Tom dreams of a hat. As he relays the specifics of the dream to his romantic interest Verna, she guesses as to its meaning:

And you chased it, right? You ran and ran and finally you caught up to it and picked it up but it wasn't a hat anymore. It had changed into something else--something wonderful.

To which he replies

No. It stayed a hat. And no I didn't chase it. I watched it blow away. Nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat.

Gabriel Byrne who plays Tom assumed that his character was hiding something, and so he asked Joel Coen on the set what its significance was. The response was Joel calling his brother over and asking “Gabe wants to know what the significance of the hat is”, to which Ethan’s said simply “oh yeah, it was significant” before walking away, offering no other information. One gets the sense that would be the explanation of the significance of Norville’s dream dancer if the Coens would deign to talk about it. The dancer is significant. That’s it.