47: The 45th Floor
As Old Moses delivers his final monologue on the legacy of Norville Barnes and Hudsucker Industries at the end of The Hudsucker Proxy, he delivers one final cryptic line. “You know they say there was a man who jumped from the forty-fifth floor… but that’s another story…” he says, finishing with a peal of laughter as the camera pans away from the Hudsucker building and fades into the closing credits. This line is a play on the fact that the Hudsucker board can’t quite agree on how many floors the Hudsucker building has, as every mention of the building having 45 floors is followed by a correction of 44, and every mention of it having 44 is followed by a correction of 45 depending on whether one counts the mezzanine. Old Moses seems to fall squarely in the “don’t count the mezzanine” camp, as he refers to “how Norville Barnes climbed all the way up to the forty-fourth floor of the Hudsucker building and then fell all the way down but didn’t quite squish himself”. The fact that Moses considers the top floor of Hudsucker to be the 44th floor makes his statement of someone falling from one floor above it to be absurd. He suggests that someone fell from a floor that doesn’t exist, which should be nonsense, but somehow it doesn’t register as nonsense, and I suspect the reason why has its origins in the 28th chapter of the book of Ezekiel in the Bible.
Ezekiel belongs to one of the books of the Old Testament of the Bible commonly called “The Prophets” in Christian traditions and “The Nevi'im” in Jewish ones. On their faces, the Prophets are full of dire warnings, telling the rulers of the day about how unrighteous they are and how they will soon bring the wrath of The Lord upon them. Ezekiel is no different. It has sections railing against the rulers of the Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Philistines, and Egyptians, as well as the rulers of several Phonecian cities, including the city of Tyre. The admonition against the King of Tyre in Ezekiel 28 veers in an unexpected direction for someone delivering criticism of a Mediterranian nobleman. The text’s admonition speaks of how the king was once in the Garden of Eden, was anointed as a cherub and was on the holy mount of God until his heart was filled with violence and he sinned, and so God expelled him down to Earth. Unless we are to believe that the King of Tyre is thousands of years old and a non-human supernatural creature, the admonition is to be taken metaphorically. An easy interpretation is that the admonition was meant to state how noble and virtuous the King once was and how he has since descended into wickedness, but that’s not nearly as fun as the interpretation of some Christian traditions take, which is that the King of Tyre is in fact a metaphor for The Devil.
For a figure so central to modern Christianity, explicit references to the Devil occur few and far between in the Bible. In the Gospels, there is the story of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, and in the Old Testament there is the story of Satan’s conflict with God over the soul of a man named Job. Outside of a couple of fleeting references across the remainder of the text of the Christian Bible that’s it*. In the Gospels, Jesus retreats to the wilderness to have a little bit of solitude and reflection, and apparently explicitly to be tempted by the Devil. Matthew 4 begins with “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” “Devil” in this instance is the transliteration of the greek word διαβόλος, which itself is the nominal form of the word διαβόλια, meaning “slander”. A perfectly valid translation of the opening of Matthew 4 would be “Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the slanderer”. The entirety of the book of Job is set up by a friendly bet between God and Satan, as Satan believes he can make the good man Job curse the name of God if his material circumstances change. The word used in Job is שָׂטָן, transliterated into English as “Satan” which means “adversary”, as in 1st Kings 11:25 “He was an adversary to Israel all the days of Solomon”. In both stories however, the Devil is not so much an adversary or slanderer as a tester. In the Gospels he suggests to Jesus that he uses his own divine powers to his own gain, which Jesus refuses. In Job he suggests that the man Job’s faith can only be attributed to his own material privilege, and therefore he tests that faith by taking these things away from him to see how he reacts**. Neither instance is of a figure who cackles with glee at the suffering of humans or seeks to make chaos for its own sake, but is a figure who sees the faithful and virtuous and wishes to see if they remain so when you scratch the surface. In blacksmithing, after hardening steel by rapidly cooling it once it’s red hot, the smith will test the hardness of the steel by taking a rasp to it. If the rasp bites into the steel it is not sufficiently hard. If the rasp skates across the steel, it is. The biblical Devil is such a rasp, testing the virtue and faith of humanity. Jesus and Job, both being righteous, do not stumble before Satan’s temptations, but one can easily see how a lesser man might.
This of course is not the entirety of how we think of The Devil. In the early days of Christianity there was a hotly contested theological debate over whether Good and Evil were equal forces in conflict with each other, and that the Devil was the dark mirror who created evil in equal stature with God who has made good, or whether the only true theological force was God with the Devil being merely another part of creation. The former interpretation has the troubling implication that Evil is as powerful as Good, and that these are two equal sides may potentially be forever in conflict without goodness being able to prevail, while the latter contains the troubling implication that God created the Devil on purpose, and therefore the God who creates good also creates evil, and how are we to trust such a God that creates evil? An early attempt to rectify this debate came from an early church father named Origen of Alexandria, who in his treatise Contra Celsum made the assertion that the Devil was another part of creation and thus initially good, but one who rebelled against God and thus fell from his celestial presence and has been cursed with sowing evil. Origen took the admonition against the king of Tyre as actually being about Satan, and also took another passage: Isaiah 14:12 as being a secret message about Satan being a fallen divine creation. Isaiah 14:12 reads “How you have fallen from heaven,morning star, son of the dawn!”. “Morning star” in this context refers to what we now know to be the planet Venus: a bright celestial body that appears in the night sky in the east just before the sun rises. At the time when Origen wrote, the morning star was primarily known by its latin name meaning “bringer of light”: Lucifer. Over time the “fallen angel” idea of Satan became a standard part of Christian theology, especially after it was dramatized to great effect by the poet John Milton in his epic Paradise Lost in 1664.
The Hudsucker Proxy seems an unlikely place to experience these finer points of theology, but for the fact that the film itself implies the existence of a Christian theology in its runtime. As Norville Barnes plummets to what he would expect to be his doom, time stops, and he is visited by Hudsucker Industries’ former president Waring Hudsucker. Hudsucker is not wearing his pinstriped suit that he wore in his mortal role, he is wearing a white robe and a halo and has large white wings, a look he describes as “they’re all wearing them upstairs, it’s a fad”. Apparently Waring Hudsucker thinks on a longer time scale than most, as the way he is depicted is the same way as angels have in Christian paintings for the past 1600 years.
The joke is of course one on his non-standard-angelic accessory, a Ukulele. The Ukulele was itself a fad instrument in the 1950s owing to its connection to the Hawaiian islands. In the ramp up to its statehood in 1959 anything Hawaiian was in vogue, such as the hula after which Norville’s Hula Hoop is named.
The explicit existence of a Christian angel in The Hudsucker Proxy implies the existence of a Christian God and a Christian Devil. The only other figures who can move about and exist normally after time has stopped are of course Old Moses the clock-keeper and Aloysius the sign painter, implying that they are no mere humans. For reasons that are never made explicit in the film, Moses has helped Norville and Aloysius has hindered him. Moses, despite having no good reason why, knows both the details of Musburger’s stock swindle and that Norville’s drawing of a circle has some merit to it. His clear pro-Barnes slant leads Amy to change the direction of her reporting, and as Norville falls from the top of the Hudsucker building he jams a broom handle between the clock gears and stops time to save his life. In the meantime Aloysius the sign painter seems irritated at the existence of Norville Barnes and his youth and idealism. He sneers at Norville as he enters his office. He delivers evidence to Musburger that Norville’s secretary is in fact an investigative reporter, and he closes the window of Norville’s office as he stands on the ledge, startling him into slipping and falling. Norville is no angel himself, taking his successes as a sign that he deserves a lifestyle of opulence, giving himself a big fat raise at the expense of hundreds of Hudsucker workers he lays off, but nonetheless, he is apparently on the side of the angels, as an actual angel delivers the information that lets Norville go on to continue running Hudsucker Industries. The fact that both the angelic Waring Hudsucker and Old Moses intercede supernaturally on the same side suggests that Old Moses, if not a godly avatar himself is at least imbued with some godly power that allows him to stop time.
This would put Aloysius on the side of the Devil. He aids Musburger and hates Barnes, and if Barnes is beloved by heaven it only fits that Musburger should be beloved by hell, and is aided by the demonic force Aloysius. Between the celestial pleasures of its 44th floor offices and the infernal suffering of its basement mailroom, the theological struggle of human life on Earth is set in miniature in Hudsucker Industries. What is interesting though is that Aloysius as a demonic figure seems to do the exact kind of testing for virtue that the Biblical Satan does.
Norville Barnes’s life has been one long string of successes. He made the Dean's list at the Muncie College of Business Administration. He became president of a large corporation within hours of arriving in New York City. His first product pitch became a massive nationwide success. All this success went to Norville’s head, causing him to sit in his top floor office and soak up praise at the expense of Hudsucker’s baseline workers. Yet in 1959 and beyond we are to believe that according to Old Moses Norville “ruled with wisdom and compassion”, and given that this line is delivered by the same character who knew that Norville’s circle would be a success against all odds, I believe him. By virtue of the adversity that Aloysius puts Norville through, he realizes his own humility. It’s not that Norville was a good man and this was proven by being tested. Norville becomes a good man by being tested.
The very same theological problem that caused Father Origen to come up with his idea of the idea of the Devil as a fallen angel still exists with his explanation. If God created everything, and evil and the Devil exist, does that not mean that God created evil and the Devil? Even if the Devil was created good and turned bad, does not an omnipotent God know this? This is where the theologian typically turns to the idea of divine inscrutability. The ways of God are ultimately unknowable to us mortals, as is born out in the very same book of Job where after chapter after chapter of Job asking why God has so allowed him to suffer, God appears in a cyclone and gives Job no explanation; he simply tells him that he knows nothing as a mortal man. Similarly so as a divine agent Moses understands more than we mortals possibly can. Unlike the God of the cyclone in Job though, who expresses his own unknowability in anger, Moses expresses his own unknowability in a joke. He asks us as the viewer to consider a fall from above the top floor of the Hudsucker building, a fall from the heavens themselves, but he does not express this with any lamentation or remorse. He knows how the story turns out, and so he alone knows that a fall from heaven is simply the first act of a screwball comedy, and so he laughs.
* I will admit that one of these “fleeting references” is Chapter 12 of the Revelation of St John which is slightly more than a fleeting reference. However if I were to get into exegesis of The Revelation we’d be here all day.
** For further material on the connections of the work of the Coens and the book of Job, please note the entirety of A Serious Man (2009), in which Satan tests the good man Larry Gopnik with the loss of his livelihood, the loss of his family, and erroneous charges from the Columbia Record Club for Santana’s Abraxis.