Fractals, Duality, and the Search for Truth in Hail, Caesar!

This entry is for people who've both seen Hail, Caesar! and read the viewing guide. If that's not you, read the guide first, then (re-)watch the movie, then continue on.

If you saw Hail, Caesar! and either loved it for its own sake, or completely hated it, and aren't really interested in any of the additional layers or details of what's going on in the movie, this entry probably won't help. If, on the other hand, you saw it, felt confused, and wanted to understand more about what's going on in the movie, this entry might help get the ball rolling for you.

TL;DR

Hail, Caesar! is something something something FRACTAL something something DUALITY something something something.

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 is only my 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.

Fractals? Duality? What?

So the guide claims that Hail, Caesar! is a movie about finding your way. There's something about the "fractal" nature of the story, and something about confusion sending people on a search for (some kind of) truth.

This series of posts is about evaluating some of the details of the action and dialog found in both the trailers for Hail, Caesar! and the movie itself, and how these same elements are driving every aspect of the dramatic action found within the movie. I'm only going to walk through the trailers in this post to get the basic concepts in place, future posts will dive into the actual movie content.

Geek Words

Fractal is a total geek word, exactly the kind of word I'd use to describe the nature of this movie, but not one that the Coens themselves probably ever used in developing or describing it, it never appears in the movie, and it's probably not one you want to use in describing it to your friends, or anybody you hope to convince to see it (again). Something is fractal if it looks the same no matter how much you zoom into it. You can keep zooming in, but things everywhere will pretty much look the same as they did before. And you can do it forever. Keep on changing, things keep on looking the same. I think the core story in Hail, Caesar! is like this, and you'll see what I mean as we go along.




Duality is also a total geek word, and I suppose literature and film analysis people probably use it, physicists and philosophers use it, but you'll probably never hear the Coens use it to describe the action in this movie, and the word is never used within the movie. It's a word used to describe something - one thing - that has two characteristics that seem very different from each other, maybe even contradictory. So, while the word is never used in Hail, Caesar!, the idea it refers to is rampant throughout all kinds of characters, action, and dialog all over the place in the movie. The Coens use word play to echo the concept in dialog throughout the movie. An obvious example can be found in Hobie Doyle's two lines: "would that it were so simple" and "it's complicated". Two very different phrases that mean exactly the same thing. Another easy example: who's directing Hobie in "Merrily We Dance"?




Dialectic. This is a geek word that actually appears in the movie. Twice. Unlike some of the other ideas that are presented in the movie, this word is not defined for you within the movie. You either whip out your phone right there in the theater, or you wait until you get home and nobody's looking so you can figure out what the hell it means.

It refers to a process of trying to establish the truth between two people who have opposing viewpoints. It's another clue you can find within the movie about its interest in people trying to understand what's right or true.

The Four Questions Motif

The four questions highlight a specific kind of action that's found everywhere in the movie. It's a motif that I think is referring to a theme. In a movie that is set in the movie-making industry, the opportunities for ambiguity and multiple meanings to the terms, "role", "actor", and "director" are rich. Worse, there's another motif of showing you movies within the movie, so answers to the 4 questions about who's fulfilling what role in what movie and who the director is can be as simple or as complicated as you want.

An Example

Eddie Mannix has a role he is supposed to fulfill for the studio. The studio heads tell him what his role is (they direct him), but the direction they give him is open-ended and seems ill-conceived. But, he has to decide how he's going to act, what he's going to do to fulfill his role. Is he directly fixing anything, or is it out of his hands, or is it both? Could he be taking on a different, more significant role (at Lockheed)?

There is also the meta-role that we, the audience, seem to want to give Eddie, a kind of meta-Jesus taking on the sins of his world and tending to his flock. Is he fulfilling that role? Who gave him that role? There is evidence within the movie that he is explicitly being given that role, and even having it explained to him within another movie-in-movie bit, one whose set, unlike all the other movie-in-movie pieces, we aren't explicitly shown.

To What End?

The point of the motif isn't to just have a bit of fun warping your noodle, though it can do that. It's to highlight a central question of the movie: how are we supposed to act? How are we supposed to be? What should we do? How does what we do contribute to the wider world? Is it the right contribution, a good one? Could we be making a better one?

The fact that these questions can be found in all kinds of sequences in the movie is another hint that the movie is interested in a broad sense of this question about how to act. It's not only Mannix, and not only actors, but writers and directors themselves, that are trying to do their best struggling with these questions. But, it's also not just the characters in this movie.

The movie-in-movie motif serves to put viewers directly into a participating role as well. This is one of the senses in which the word "fractal" appeals to me. We don't just get to sit and watch everybody on screen wrestle with these ideas. We are brought into the story in our role as audience for the movie. How will we interpret the story it's telling? As a simple, enjoyable story about delight and revelry in 1950s-era Hollywood? A more complicated one of a broad philosophical exploration? Can it be both at the same time? Are we all talking about the same movie? Asking the same questions?

Now flip it around. What if you're in the role of storyteller? What story should you tell? Is there an authority on storytelling? Who can tell you what story to write? What makes a good story? How do you get your story out to the broader world? Will the story you tell be the one the audience experiences? I think these kinds of questions can be found in Hail, Caesar! too.

A Tale of Two Trailers

The first thing is just to talk about most people's experience with the movie. How that goes. The viewing guide mentions that a lot of this experience includes an exposure to the trailer before seeing the movie, and then being really confused or, actually, in a lot of experiences, completely despising it.

Most everybody's referring to Trailer #1 - it's the main trailer used to try and bring people in, the one you'd see during the previews for other movies. I call it The Question Trailer.

The other trailer is Trailer #2. I call it The Answer Trailer.

The Question Trailer

This trailer gives off a certain kind of vibe. There’s the noir look to it, there’s a mysterious and intriguing-sounding kidnapping. Baird Whitlock seems like the center of attention, and Hobie barely registers. There’s the thumping, rumbling, pulsing drums, and it all looks kind of thrilling.

But, check out what's happening at the 2:20 mark. There's a shot of the communist "study group" that Whitlock walks in on. The leader looks at the camera (you) and says, “wondering what’s going on?”. Whitlock responds to this question with a mumbling, shrugging, WTF kind of noise.

This trailer seems to be anticipating our response when we see the actual movie. It seems to be aware that we'll find a contradiction between the experience of watching this trailer and the experience of watching the movie, and it's giving a little wink that we won't be able to recognize until after we've seen the movie.

There’s also an important refrain going on between the music, and the spoken voices heard starting at the 1:43 mark:

• There's Tilda Swinton’s voice saying “I want to know what the hell is going on here”.
• Cut to Thessaly saying, “twenty million readers want to know the truth, Eddie”.
• Cut to Thessaly's POV and you see Eddie trying to get away from her holding the overstuffed briefcase, and he’s saying “truth….yes….hm”. It’s a pretty dismissive-sounding response, like he’s just humoring her, or maybe confused or doesn't even have the answer.
• The music comes up. It’s "Rumble and Sway” by Jamie N Commons, and it’s chanting: “don’t you tell me no truths, I want all of your lies”.

So, this trailer is setting up the relevant questions for the movie. There is something about making movies, something about looking for the truth, and something about the truth getting away from you (or being concealed or unavailable). Of course, this is all accurate in a strict sense - all of the elements from the trailer are found in the movie, but the trailer can't be said to have the same characteristics as the movie at all.

But you have no hope of knowing any of this until you go and see the movie.

The Answer Trailer

The 4 questions are all in play in this trailer, and here they translate pretty literally to a Hollywood actor looking to understand his role in a movie, receiving guidance from a Hollywood director. In addition to the main joke at the 1:47 mark, there’s also an ambiguity, an irony, an apparent contradiction, and a mystery all packed into this sequence.

• The ambiguity comes from the missing context of Hobie’s final line: exactly what is complicated?
• The irony is that the phrase “it’s complicated” is a simple way to say “would that it were so simple". The simple phrase contains the word 'complicated', and the complicated phrase contains the word 'simple'
• Whatever the “it” is that Hobie’s talking about, is it complicated, or simple? Or, is it something that seems complicated, but is in fact simple? The apparent contradiction is that it seems he may be saying that both are true at the same time.
• The mystery is: how did that dialog mess in the studio get resolved into the final product shown in the theater?

This trailer seems more honest:

• The tone and the experience of watching it more closely matches the experience of watching the movie
• It's suggesting that Hobie's at the heart of the movie (while Whitlock is seen only fleetingly)
• It's suggesting that there's something within the movie that's complicated (or simple, or both)
• It's suggesting that there's a mystery related to the process of working through these conflicting messages to arrive at a result (the finished movie) that you can be (sort of) proud of

It's also giving away one of the best scenes from the movie, so it's a trailer you wouldn't have wanted to see prior to the movie. In fact, it seems to be designed for people who've already seen the movie once, and are looking for answers to all the questions they had after watching it, having set their expectations based on The Question Trailer.

Dueling Trailers? Or Trailer Duality?

So now, consider these two trailers together. They're referring to the same movie, but they give two very different impressions of the content.

The Question Trailer is more "Hollywood", featuring a very well-known star at the center of the story, and The Answer Trailer is more "Not Hollywood", featuring a lesser-known actor at the center. The Question Trailer pushes you into the theater on false expectations of a taut, fast-paced noir kidnapping thriller, like most trailers do. The Answer Trailer seems to be sending you back in to try and find the answers to the questions you have about the more contemplative enigma you actually experienced.

You could say that these two trailers are just marketing to two different audiences: one that prefers goofy kidnapping thrillers, and one that likes philosophical parlor dramas with british accents and classical music.

And yet another way to look at these two trailers is in reference to the "the dialectic". From Wikipedia::

The purpose of the dialectic method of reasoning is resolution of disagreement through rational discussion, and, ultimately, the search for truth. One way to proceed—the Socratic method—is to show that a given hypothesis (with other admissions) leads to a contradiction; thus, forcing the withdrawal of the hypothesis as a candidate for truth (see reductio ad absurdum).

Here, these trailers have given us two competing hypotheses about what this movie is all about. It's a goofy kidnapping thriller! It's a thoughtful philosophical parlor dramedy!

What are we supposed to do with this? Find the truth? Pick your hypothesis about the movie and see if you can find a contradiction when applying it to your experience with the movie. What kind of viewer are you? Get in, enjoy it, and get out? Overanalyze it and dive into never-ending rabbit holes about fractals and economic and religious philosophies?

These two trailers, taken together, seem to exhibit an awareness that getting to know this movie is a truth-seeking process in itself, and suggest that it can be confusing or complicated. Or, maybe it's really simple (or both). They refer to the same movie, but are also the opposite of each other, while at the same time containing their opposites.

Where to next?

Of course we can't know if the trailers were designed with this purpose in mind, but taken together, they seem to have a form and relationship that I'm claiming can also be found among the chief story elements in the movie itself.

Do the trailers really resemble the movie? Zoom into the movie, and what will we find? Will all this same kind of stuff really be found in the actual movie?

Yes. Yes, it will.

Will it be really confusing?

Yes. Yes, it will.

Really?

No, no it won't.

Next time, on Mr. Persnickety.