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.
47: The 45th Floor
47: The 45th Floor
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.