Disclaimer
Who knows if I'm right about any of this? My only criteria for success is if I can find support for the ideas coming directly from action and dialog found in the movie, and all I've got are my own notes and memory.
The Coens are well known for using a more intuitive than intellectualized approach to the choices they make about how to tell their stories. So, this all is still only an interpretation of what's happening on the screen. That's all it is, and not a claim about the existence of any grand philosophical design behind the construction of the story.
Problems
- His smoking habit
- Gloria Delamour's French Postcard situation
- DeeAnna's public image
- Baird's disappearance
- Thora Thacker's story about "On Wings as Eagles"
- Thessaly Thacker's story about Baird's disappearance
- Hobie's public image
- Hobie's performance in Merrily We Dance
- His son's playing position in a baseball game
- His outstanding job offer from Lockheed
- CC's near-death choking incident in the Moviola lab
His response to each ranges from taking no action at all (Hobie's performance, his son's baseball game), to developing an elaborate scheme that requires coordination of multiple people to pull off (DeeAnna's image). It's instructive to consider Eddie's contribution in each problem. In each case we'll be led back to a consistent point of view depicted in Hail, Caesar! about the nature of the world and our ability to influence, change, or fix it. This will, in turn, shed some light on why there seems to be little dramatic climax around the resolution to the various problems that arise during the course of the story.
Only in one case is Eddie seen to be taking a deliberate, direct action that unambiguously solves a problem on screen exactly as he set out to do it, and that's saving CC from strangulation at the hands of a vicious moviola film editing machine. There's only one other life-saving action depicted in Hail, Caesar!, and in both cases there's nothing complicated in the minds of the characters about the decision to be made, nor any elaborate plans needed to carry it out.
In every other case with the problems presented to Eddie, it is possible to both question whether he's really solving these problems at all and to insist that his intervention was important and valuable.
In the French Postcard situation, for example, Eddie slaps Gloria around and directs her to follow his plan of concocting a story about how she'd been abandoned by her date at a costume party and gives her a false name to distract the police from her true identity. But of course, the police recognize his car at the house, so they know Hollywood personnel are involved, one of the cops actually recognizes her, Gloria completely flubs her false name, and Eddie ends up handing off a bribe hoping to keep them quiet.
While he does manage to get Gloria out without any charges or an arrest, it's not at all clear that Eddie's bribe will silence any rumors that Thora or Thessaly won't be picking up in the future, so whether the goal of keeping Gloria out of the press has been met is unclear. At the same time, if the police had arrived before Eddie, it's likely that Gloria may well have been charged with some kind of indecency misconduct of some sort or another, so he clearly had an important impact.
On-Screen Plans, Off-Screen Resolution
In all of the other problems presented to Eddie, the focus of the on-screen action is on depicting the nature of the problem, its impact to the studio or the production schedule or someone's career, and the development of schemes to try and solve the problem. The resolution of each problem occurs, in every case, off screen and completely out of view.
In every case, the way in which the problem is resolved does not directly relate to the plans developed to address the problem, though inarguably the plans are seen to be setting a variety of forces in motion that undeniably lead to its resolution.
This treatment of the resolution to problems is quite deliberately taking a point of view that for the most part, the course the world takes in response to our actions is out of our hands, despite whatever sense of title or authority we happen to hold. If this is true for Eddie, it is also true for Laurence Lorentz, the communist screenwriters, Thora and Thessaly, and all the other characters shown to be pursuing their interests.
It specifically takes the focus and value of heroic actions out of the hands of any perceived heroes (either as individuals, ideologies, or as institutions) and distributes it more realistically, and more comically, among the much more unpredictable interactions of many people each operating under the direction of their own inner voice. It has another function of placing the resolution of problems in the minds of the audience; another way of saying that the process of finding answers lies with you, not within the movie.
Or, maybe it's just mirroring what we might imagine most of Capitol Picture's B-movie stories do with their resolutions - they just effortlessly resolve with little explication.
Or, maybe it's just mirroring what we might imagine most of Capitol Picture's B-movie stories do with their resolutions - they just effortlessly resolve with little explication.
If this seems a relatively pessimistic point of view, consider the entirely optimistic flip side of its depiction of what actually happens with these problems. The resolution of each problem is shown to be coming from a much simpler action or decision than the original plans set into motion, and each problem seems to get worked out, both despite, and because of, the plans and actions of the invested characters.
The Course of History
So why take this approach to telling the story? Doesn't it undercut the excitement of the unfolding action of the movie itself as well as what we might all be taking away about the value of our actions in life? For many viewers, that will certainly be the case. The experience of setting all these spinning plates into motion with all this deliberation and elaboration only to (not) see them sort of land safely on the carpet with the merest of nudges gets people scratching their heads and feeling disappointed. Nothing seems really to have changed much.
This question leads back to two other motifs running through Hail, Caesar!: the promise of the emergence of a new era for mankind, and the passage of time.
The most readily accessible motif is the frequent marking of the passage of time. Eddie tracks his progress by the hour, both in terms of the impact of his actions on the relentless advance of the production schedules of the movies of Capitol Pictures, and in terms of the improvement of his immortal soul. Confession is a daily event for Eddie, with each visit reminding him both of his enduring failure to cure his smoking habit or to stop deceiving his wife about his efforts, and of the fact that he's really not that bad to begin with.
The message that, really, things are ok, is one that resonates with Eddie. Of the different institutions depicted in Hail, Caesar!, this is the message of Capitol Pictures, and it's a message that stands in contrast to those on offer from all of the other institutions: Christianity, capitalism, and communism. This is underlined within Capitol Pictures' Hail, Caesar! story, where the march of Caesar's centurions is described as being threatened by a "new wind from the east". Cuddahy from Lockheed describes the aviation industry as ushering in "a new age" of jet planes and hydrogen bombs. The communists are certain that through direct action they will "accelerate the dialectic and hasten the end of history and the creation of the new man", that Capitol Pictures is just there to confirm "the status quo".
These references out to the history of civilization, religion, and economic systems hint at what we can expect from these messages of human liberation within Hail, Caesar!. Judaism promised the arrival of a messiah that Jews are still waiting for, Rome rose and fell, Christianity promised the second coming of Jesus and an imminent resurrection marked by an end of times that Christians are still waiting for, Capitalism brings private ownership and wealth accumulation even as it increases social inequality and materialism, the march of technology introduces a morass of new social and political problems even as it solves others, and the idea that Communism might once have been seen as representing "The Future" we know today to be pretty optimistic.
But all of that is assumed knowledge outside the space of the action in the movie. On screen within Hail, Caesar! we have the two stories that Thora and Thessaly Thacker are pursuing that underline this same condition. Thora is investigating an "old story" about how Baird Whitlock got his role in On Wings as Eagles that was probably also an "old problem" that Eddie must have had to fix at one time (but which is not still fixed, since Thora's still looking into it). Thessaly, who insists that Thora wouldn't know a "new story if it bit her on the posterior" is interested in publishing "a story about today", about Baird's disappearance.
The solution to the problem behind Thessaly's "new story" turns out to also solve the problem of Thora's "old story". Tied up in those two supposedly different stories is, in fact, the same story repeating itself with two different actors. This sameness is also underscored by the choice to make Thora and Thessaly twin sisters who are not only physically identical, but you can't even tell the difference between the kind of reporting they do, despite their emphatic insistence that they are in no way the same kind of journalist. Another duality.
The old story about Baird we can safely assume to be true, both by way of his reaction to the communists' threat of revealing him, and his own off-the-cuff story he tells to the communists about waking up after a party together with Clark Gable ("that was before Gable was Gable"). The source of the "new story" is of course Burt Gurney, who we've seen is also a rising star in a sexual relationship with the same director that gave Baird his start.
So the course of conflict and resolution within Hail, Caesar! reflects the nature of The Human Condition. Or of B-movie endings. Whatever the motivation, Mannix sticks with the status quo, offering affirming messages to "all the weary peoples of the world", the communists continue to wait for the emergence of the New Man, Christianity awaits the resurrection, Judaism awaits the messiah, Capitalism churns out the next big market-changer, and people continue to struggle with all the same moral, sexual, economic and class issues they always have since time immemorial. Despite the promise of a new age and the excitement surrounding the plans to get there, in the end nothing really seems to be curing all our ills.
It's worth asking whether Hail, Caesar! can be said to be tipping its hand in favor of any specific way to be in the face of this circus of promises about liberation. There seems to be this Hobie Doyle character coming up as the character at the center of this question. Is he offering answers?
Good question.
These references out to the history of civilization, religion, and economic systems hint at what we can expect from these messages of human liberation within Hail, Caesar!. Judaism promised the arrival of a messiah that Jews are still waiting for, Rome rose and fell, Christianity promised the second coming of Jesus and an imminent resurrection marked by an end of times that Christians are still waiting for, Capitalism brings private ownership and wealth accumulation even as it increases social inequality and materialism, the march of technology introduces a morass of new social and political problems even as it solves others, and the idea that Communism might once have been seen as representing "The Future" we know today to be pretty optimistic.
The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
But all of that is assumed knowledge outside the space of the action in the movie. On screen within Hail, Caesar! we have the two stories that Thora and Thessaly Thacker are pursuing that underline this same condition. Thora is investigating an "old story" about how Baird Whitlock got his role in On Wings as Eagles that was probably also an "old problem" that Eddie must have had to fix at one time (but which is not still fixed, since Thora's still looking into it). Thessaly, who insists that Thora wouldn't know a "new story if it bit her on the posterior" is interested in publishing "a story about today", about Baird's disappearance.
The solution to the problem behind Thessaly's "new story" turns out to also solve the problem of Thora's "old story". Tied up in those two supposedly different stories is, in fact, the same story repeating itself with two different actors. This sameness is also underscored by the choice to make Thora and Thessaly twin sisters who are not only physically identical, but you can't even tell the difference between the kind of reporting they do, despite their emphatic insistence that they are in no way the same kind of journalist. Another duality.
The old story about Baird we can safely assume to be true, both by way of his reaction to the communists' threat of revealing him, and his own off-the-cuff story he tells to the communists about waking up after a party together with Clark Gable ("that was before Gable was Gable"). The source of the "new story" is of course Burt Gurney, who we've seen is also a rising star in a sexual relationship with the same director that gave Baird his start.
The Neighborhood of Make-Believe
It's worth asking whether Hail, Caesar! can be said to be tipping its hand in favor of any specific way to be in the face of this circus of promises about liberation. There seems to be this Hobie Doyle character coming up as the character at the center of this question. Is he offering answers?
Good question.
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