So “up” is good and “down” is bad. Everyone wants to be “up,” no one wants to be “down.” Except for the beatniks, of course, who live “downtown” and whose oddball coffee bar is located in a basement. That’s just like those beatniks, turning the status quo on its head and drinking carrot juice on New Year’s Eve. Buzz the Elevator Gnat gets a great thrill from taking people up to the top or sending them down to the bottom. Norville Barnes must take a dozen different rides in that elevator in his journey from the bottom to the top to the bottom and back up to the top.

“Up and down,” it seems, in the world of The Hudsucker Proxy, are heavily loaded terms, full of danger and stress and sorrow. Fortunately, there is a solution: a thing that goes round and round, specifically the hula hoop, the blockbuster idea that Norville carries around in his head and The Hudsucker Proxy‘s narrative secret weapon. His blueprint for the hoop, a simple circle drawn on a piece of scrap paper, baffles and confounds all the Hudsucker employees who behold it. No wonder: they live in New York City (the most grid-like major city on Earth), and work in a building that’s all about rising up and falling down. There’s nothing “round and round” about their lives, and Norville seems either quite stupid or stunningly insane to them for thinking of a circle (the hoop prototype is even made crimson red, to better set it off from all the squares and rectangles in the board room).

The hula hoop, like the baby in Raising Arizona, is nothing less than a holy ideal, one the “squares” (another beatnik term!) in Hudsucker Industries aren’t quite ready for. In a world of up and down, Norville thinks in terms of round and round, and that makes him inscrutable, unpredictable and dangerous. And so much of the dialog around Hudsucker Industries concerns things going up and down and round and round. The business stock falls, then rises, then falls again, then rises again, four different characters are compelled to jump out the 44th floor (45th, not counting the mezzanine), while divine, ineffable notions are expressed in terms like “the great wheel of life” or “what goes around comes around” or “the music plays and the wheel turns.”

What besides divinity could explain the actions of the lone hula hoop, the one that escapes its death in the alley of the toy store to roll purposefully out into the street, through the grid of the small town streets, to circle a child and land at his feet (upon the firmly-stated grid of the sidewalk)?

(A scientist shows up in a newsreel to tell us that the hula hoop operates on “the same principles that keep the earth spinning around and around,” and keep you from flying off into space — an instance of science vainly trying to explain the divine, as though there were a quantifiable “reason” why the Earth spins.)

(We know that the hula hoop is a divinely inspired creation because Waring Hudsucker’s halo, at the end of the movie, is also a hula hoop. He even makes a comment about how halos on angels won’t last, are simply “a fad.”)

(The hula hoop is not the only “holy spinning thing” that shows up in Coen Bros movies. There is also the hubcap/lampshade/flying-saucer in The Man Who Knew Too Much and the bowling balls in The Big Lebowski.)

In between the square and the round, quite literally, is the big clock at the top of the Hudsucker building. The clock symbolizes Time, which, it has been noted, moves on (“Tempus Fugit” is the slogan of the newsreel shown halfway through, Tidbits of Time). Yes, time does move on, as we are reminded whenever we see the enormous clock hand sweep through the office of Sidney J. Mussberger. The narrator (another Coen mainstay), Mose the Clockkeeper, does not identify himself as God but that’s the role he plays in Hudsucker. Time is money, says Mose, and money is what makes the world go around, and that, I suppose, is why the round clock is fixed in its square hole on the side of the rectangular Hudsucker building. Because Time may be round, and so is the world (at least the globe in Mussberger’s office is) but Money is square in both shape and temperament, and I guess that means Mose’s job is to square the circle and keep everything in balance, which I suppose is why the clock in The Hudsucker Proxy is so influential. When the Hudsucker clock stops, everything stops (except the snow, oddly).

(That clock wasn’t chosen at random — it bears a startling resemblance to the clock in Metropolis — another movie where down is bad and crowded, up is good and roomy, and a clock rules the world.)

(Waring Hudsucker, when he appears as an angel at the end of the movie, sings “She’ll Be Comin’ ‘Round the Mountain” as he descends from the heavens — a small point perhaps, but he’s not singing about going up a mountain or coming down a mountain, which one would think would be the natural order of things in songs about mountains.)

(Mussberger, it should be said, has his own influence over time — he makes his clacking pendulum balls [five round objects in a rectangular framework] stop on command, something Mose also accomplishes when he stops the world in Act III.)

Mose explains in the opening narration that everyone on New Year’s Eve wants to be able to grab hold of a moment and keep it, but only Norville manages to actually do such a thing, because he is, alone among characters in Hudsucker, divinely inspired. (Well, except for Buzz, who turns out, incongruously, to have his own round idea.)

IS NORVILLE A MORON? This is the question that haunts The Hudsucker Proxy and which, I submit, accounts for its lack of popularity. For the plot of Hudsucker to have maximum impact, the audience must believe, as Mussberger and streetwise reporter Amy Archer do, that Norville is a blithering idiot. Then, when it turns out he is divinely inspired, we are to look at Norville in a new light. The trouble is, the Coens have cast Tim Robbins, an actor who oozes intelligence, to play Norville. To compensate for his innate intelligence, Robbins plays the part as though wearing a neon “DOOFUS” sign on his head. When I read the script, the story of Norville amazed me and made me weep. I could see what the Coens (and Sam Raimi) were after — a comedy along the lines of Mr. Deeds Goes To Town or It’s a Wonderful Life, with a helping of His Girl Friday thrown in for good measure. Trouble is, Gary Cooper and James Stewart and Cary Grant are all long dead, and Tim Robbins, although an excellent actor, is not a Gary Cooper or a James Stewart or a Cary Grant. When I read the script I imagined Tom Hanks in the part of Norville (Hanks would, of course, catch up with the Coens in The Ladykillers) — I’m convinced the star of Big would have knocked Norville out of the park. The result of Robbins’s casting is that Norville’s actions are all in big quotation marks — we don’t see a simple guy trying to front, we see an intelligent actor trying to convince us he’s a country-born rube. The actor holds the character at arm’s length, showing him to us, commenting on him, not quite able to inhabit him.

(I should note that Robbins’s performance is a symptom of a larger problem in The Hudsucker Proxy — the Coens have lured a huge raft of talented actors and instructed them to act in the style of 30s screwball comedies — a task they all pull off with great skill [I am particularly astonished of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s jaw-dropping rendition of Rosalind Russell]. The trouble is that that style of acting was a natural outgrowth of its time, not an homage to an earlier style of acting. Watch The Lady Eve [which Hudsucker explicitly quotes a couple of times] back to back with The Hudsucker Proxy and you’ll see exactly what I mean.)

(And while I’m here, I should note that the Coens, in their script for Hudsucker, have crafted an incredible simulation of a Preston Sturges 30s screwball comedy, but then, oddly, have set the story in a Billy Wilder sort of world of 1950s business comedies. That right there, I think, accounts for people not quite being able to get a handle on Hudsucker, despite its towering achievements. And I do mean towering — this movie, with one of the greatest scripts I’ve ever read, is a bursting cornucopia of invention, wit and bravura moviemaking.)

(And while I’m at it, I should not that I am not immune from this temptation. I once wrote a romantic comedy with roles for Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. Imagine my chagrin when I learned they were, in a big way, not available.)

A SECOND CHANCE: Norville fails, and falls, but rises again. Waring Hudsucker falls and rises, then descends and rises again. Waring Hudsucker could not give himself a second chance, but he posthumously grants one to Norville. It seems everything in The Hudsucker Proxy happens more than once — Norville comes into Mussberger’s office to show him his idea, only to get fired and collapse on the floor. Later, Buzz comes into Norville’s office to show him his idea, only to get fired and collapse on the floor. The music plays and the wheel goes round, humanity keeps repeating the same scenes over and over. And this might be coincidence, if not for Norville discussing reincarnation with Amy — in a way, Norville is both a reincarnation of Waring Hudsucker and his second chance. He arrives at the building the instant Waring hits the street in front of it, is instantly made president, and is ultimately granted all of Hudsucker’s stock — precisely so that he need not make the same mistakes that Hudsucker did. Norville believes in reincarnation and roundness, while Mussberger can only think of up and down, squares and “when you’re dead, you stay dead.”

Failure, Waring Hudsucker notes, whether in business or in love, looks only to the past, and the future, as it says on his big clock, is now. This is The Hudsucker Proxy‘s notion of Zen — there is no future, it insists, there is only the moment, grabbing it, holding it, and living in it. Ironically, it was the Coen’s first real commercial disaster, showing them how the real world reacts to the real Norvilles who come along with their divinely inspired inventions.

(Full disclosure: this writer has a tiny role in The Hudsucker Proxy — I would call it a one-line role, but since they messed with my voice, I’m not even sure if I have the one line any more.  It was a lot of fun shooting it and maybe I’ll write a piece about that some day.  But not today.)

Barton is solipsistic, egocentric, self-important, conceited, delusional, inward, dense and utterly humorless. He has a success on Broadway, a kitchen-sink drama about “real people,” cheered by swanky society types in white ties and ball gowns while Barton thinks he’s struck a blow for the “common man.” Meanwhile, he looks down on movies, is completely unfamiliar with the form in fact, as worthless garbage (this at the height of the studio system, the first “golden age” of Hollywood and the year of Citizen Kane). So he loves the “common man” and wants to create a “real theater” for them, while writing plays for the wealthy to coo over and disdaining popular culture.

(How self-involved is Barton? He’s so self-involved that the actor we hear reciting Barton’s lines onstage in the Broadway theater is the same actor who plays Barton, John Turturro. This play, this production, this theater, this success, it seems, is all in Barton’s head. The theater is all in Barton’s head, just as the Hotel Earle, we will find, is all in Charlie Meadows’s head.)

WHO IS BARTON FINK? Maybe Barton Fink is really just a movie about a delusional playwright who leaves New York, goes to Hollywood and gets into a mess of trouble. But I don’t think so. Symbols and indicators keep piling up and the narrative takes a sharp left turn at the end of Act II, turning Barton Fink from an off-center Hollywood comedy to something darker, creepier, harder to “get” and more cosmic. This is, in fact, the movie that, for me, moved the Coens from the “interesting filmmakers to watch” list to the “all-time great, long-term artist” list.

Barton isn’t just a playwright moving to Hollywood. He’s a “serious” playwright moving to Hollywood, a town that has a phobia of “serious,” a town which, since time immemorial, is where writers go to lose their souls. Moreover, he’s a serious playwright moving to Hollywood in late 1941, as World War II raged in Europe and American involvement was just about to begin. The signs of this are everywhere in Barton Fink, but Fink himself remains absolutely oblivious throughout. Even when he goes out to celebrate at a USO show, in a dance floor filled with uniforms, he utterly refuses to acknowledge who these soldiers and sailors are and what they’re about to go do (in Barton’s defense, the all-goyim army at the USO show recognize Barton as a bespectacled Jewish freak — and proceed to attack him).

So: Barton is a delusional, self-involved playwright lost in Hollywood, utterly oblivious to the world situation as he struggles to write a B-movie. And the movie hangs together as far as that goes, but then there is the question of Barton’s Jewishness. People bring it up all the time, and never in a favorable light. The Jews who run the studio call each other “kike” and constantly cut each other down, while the (German and Italian) detectives who come around in Act III are decidedly more ominous in their dealings with Fink. So, Barton, it seems, is a self-involved Jewish playwright who gets lost in Hollywood as World War II rages in The Old Country. (“Minsk, if you want to go all the way back,” offers studio-boss Lipnick, underlining the connection from Hollywood to New York to Eastern Europe.) He’s a Jew ignoring the Holocaust, writing self-important nonsense while his people are slaughtered by the millions. Even when Lipnick himself turns up in a colonel’s uniform and starts spouting patriotic rhetoric (“Don’t you know there’s a war on?!”), Barton remains firmly in his own head. He even stuffs his ears with cotton to drown out the sounds of the hotel as he writes his meaningless, pretentious, self-important screenplay, as blood dries on his bed’s mattress not three feet away.

If Barton is a self-involved Jew, the mosquito that keeps him up all night is that thing that would keep any Jew up all night in 1941, that niggling, inescapable sensation that something is coming for you, something that wants your blood. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but the mosquito’s buzzing seems to echo the tinny sound of a faraway air-raid siren.

Who gets Barton into this mess? His decidedly non-Jewish agent in New York, Garland Jeffries. And who does Barton aspire to be, who does he look up to? William P. Mayhew, respected Southern Novelist. And, it turns out, a complete fraud.

(Later, Barton will find himself, ironically, becoming more and more like Mayhew — a failed has-been who can’t get his scripts made, a fraud who gets his ideas from Mayhew’s muse, and an early-morning drinker.)

WHAT IS THIS HOTEL? Barton moves into this run-down hotel, the Earle. What is the Earle? There are strong indications that it’s not a “real” place. First of all, we never see anyone there besides Barton, the desk clerk and Charlie, Barton’s next-door neighbor. Secondly, Barton’s room hasn’t been touched in years — almost as though this room has been waiting here for him all his life, that he is the first and last guest ever to stay here.

Then there’s the wallpaper, which keeps falling off the walls, with icky, sticky gunk dripping from it. The same icky, sticky gunk is seen later dripping from the ears of Charlie, making a solid connection between the hotel and Charlie. Charlie mentions at one point that he can hear the couple on the other side of Barton making love, suggesting that he can, in fact, hear everything in the hotel. Later on, Charlie suggests that the hotel is, in fact, his home. All these things suggest that the hotel is a part of Charlie, that Barton, essentially, lives inside Charlie’s head.

(As the wallpaper peels off, the veneer of the mask of the hotel peels away too. It’s not for nothing that the wallpaper catches on fire as Charlie/Karl charges down the hall at the end of the movie.)

THEN WHO IS CHARLIE? Well, first off, we know by the end of the movie that Charlie isn’t Charlie, he’s Karl Mundt, a crazed killer who chops up bodies and keeps their heads. If the Earle is his home, his “head office” (a term Charlie uses in Act III: “I know what it’s like when things get balled up at the head office”), I’m going to go out on a symbolist limb here and say that Charlie is Satan and the Hotel Earle is Hell.

(“You come into my home and complain about about too much noise?” cries Charlie in disbelief, just before setting Barton free from the holocaust he’s created.)

(I might mention here that, just as Charlie is not really Charlie, Chet [the bellman] may not really be named Chet — we only have his word for that, and his business card is a blank rectangle with the word “Chet!” scrawled on it [rather like a movie screen, that blank white rectangle — another blank for projecting a fantasy].)

(The devil Charlie does not challenge his doomed to a chess match — no, he’s a regular-guy, blue-collar kind of devil — he invites Bart to a wrestling match. And soundly trounces him. To make the connection clearer for the audience, the Coens have Barton watch the dailies of a picture called Devil on the Canvas, featuring an enormous man repeatedly shouting “I will destroy him!”)

(It’s ironic that Barton first meets Charlie after he complains about Charlie making too much noise while sobbing next door — for a man who doesn’t listen, refusing to pay attention to suffering [while making it the subject of his writing, of course], he’s got a mighty sensitive ear.)

In Act III, a couple of detectives, Deutsch and Mastronetti, come looking for Mundt, and act extremely threateningly toward Barton. It cannot be a coincidence that the men looking for Satan in the Hotel Earle in 1941 are German and Italian, hate Jews, and end up being destroyed by the entity they seek, any more than it could be a coincidence that Charlie/Karl/Satan mockingly chirps “Heil Hitler” before blowing off the German’s head.

NOW THEN: If Miller’s Crossing is about hats, Barton Fink is about shoes. (And, conversely, heads.) I was watching Barton Fink a few times ago and thought “Barton is concerned about his soul, and there are all these prominent shots of shoes in the movie. Could the Coens be making a glib “soul-sole” connection? And yet, once I had made the connection myself, the whole movie fell into place. Barton moves into the Earle, which is Hell. The bellman, Chet, emerges up from a trap door in the floor, clutching a shoe, the sole toward the camera. Chet, it seems, is a demon in Charlie’s Hell whose job it is to collect souls. Later in the movie we see him moving his shoe cart down the empty hall, that empty hall of the hotel with no one in it, and yet there is a pair of shoes outside every door. The people are gone, the souls remain. At another point, Barton and Charlie get each other’s shoes (Barton finds Charlie’s too big for him). Still later, when studio-boss Lipnick wants to show his devotion to Barton’s purity, he kisses the sole of his shoe.

(Barton first discovers Charlie because he hears Charlie weeping next door, but by the end of the movie it is Barton we can hear weeping alone in his room from the empty, shoe-filled hallway.)

AND THEN THERE’S THE HEADS: The Broadway theater is all in Barton’s head, the hotel is all in Charlie/Karl’s head, Mayhew’s career is all in his head, his muse’s head is (supposedly) in a box on Barton’s nightstand, Charlie/Karl complains about things getting “balled up at the head office,” which is his code phrase for “I’m getting the overwhelming urge to kill again,” but when Mayhew’s muse’s body is discovered he insists “We have to keep our heads.” Lipnick tells Barton twice that his studio owns “Whatever rattles around that fat kike head of yours,” Charlie complains that his head is killing him, just after charging down the hallway screaming “I will show you the life of the mind!” and earlier comforts Barton by saying the extremely uncomforting homily “Where there’s a head, there’s hope.”

SO WHO’S THE GIRL? As Barton writes, a photo of a girl on a beach hangs over his desk. He often contemplates this picture, and then, magically, meets the same girl on the same beach at the end of the movie. Is the girl a siren, an unattainable mirage, there to tempt Barton ever onward onto the dangerous rocks of Hollywood? Why does he place Charlie/Karl’s picture next to hers for inspiration? Is it because, when he first heard Charlie laughing/crying in the next room, his voice seemed to come from the picture? Is the girl just another incarnation of the devil, tempting Barton toward his fate? When Barton meets her, she says “It’s a beautiful day” and Barton, typically, cannot hear her. When he asks if she’s in pictures, she says “Don’t be silly.” Barton, of course, is asking “Are you the same girl who’s in the picture over my desk?” but the girl responds as though he’s asking “Are you an actress?” By replying “Don’t be silly” is she saying that she’s not the girl in the picture, or is she saying that movies are, as Barton has suspected all along, silly? And what does it mean when Barton, while watching the dailies for Devil on the Canvas, hears the pounding sea on the soundtrack? And what does it mean when the shots from Devil on the Canvas are echoedin the USO fight? And why do the grunts and yells from Devil on the Canvas are echoed in the drainpipe the camera disappears down at the end of Act II? Do we hear the shouts from Devil on the Canvas because the pipes are within Charlie/Karl’s head, or because the pipes lead to the sea (classic symbol of chaos), where the girl sits on the beach?

ANOTHER VIEW ON BARTON’S DILEMMA: When Charlie/Karl pulls his shotgun out of his policy case, I am reminded of a lecture I once saw by David Mamet. He told the audience that the purpose of art is “not to instruct, but to delight.” An audience member raised their hand and said, in a very Barton Fink sort of way, “Yes, but doesn’t the artist have a duty to try to change the way people think?” To which Mamet said “If you want to change the way people think, art is not a very good tool for that. There is, however, an excellent tool for changing the way people think — it’s called a gun.”

ECHOES: Barton Fink, like many Coen movies, is about a non-talker lost in a sea of blabbermouths. Barton only talks when he’s feeling confident enough to do so (and then he’s a gibbering moron), but Charlie and Lipnick and Geisler are all motor-mouthed yappers.

Tony Shaloub plays Geisler, and the Coens, apparently, liked the scene in the studio commissary where Geisler counsels Barton while stuffing his face so much that they had him do the exact same scene again in The Man Who Wasn’t There.