0: Introduction

In the summer I turned 30 years old, I underwent a major life change and moved from Nashville Tennessee to Minneapolis Minnesota.  There are plenty of differences between the two places, be they mundane and technocratic (I can tell you plenty of advantages and disadvantages to a planned grid based civic layout vs one that… wasn’t), or cultural (while Minnesota Nice and Southern Hospitality have a lot in common, they are still profoundly different phenomena). The biggest difference of course between the places is the climate, especially at winter. Winter in Tennessee means grumbling about needing to wear a jacket and long pants as you continue to enjoy the outdoors. Winter in Minnesota is a stark reminder that we’re all going to die and that the sky is trying to kill you with ice.

So we mostly stay inside in the wintertime in Minnesota, and we cope. A surprisingly excellent conversation starter among such terse people as Minnesotans is asking them what their favorite wintertime coping mechanism is, because everyone has one. Some do a lot of baking, some work on projects in the garage, some just look for the bottom of a bottle of aquavit and come up in April. I myself decided to dive deep into the arts of my new frozen homeland. Aside from obsessively listening to the discographies of Prince and The Replacements, I take every winter to revisit the catalog of the states favorite sons of film, Joel and Ethan Coen. 

There is something profoundly Minnesotan about the Coens’ films. Obviously 1996’s Fargo and 2009’s A Serious Man are set here and both nail the aesthetic and culture in a marvelous way, but the rest of their films are full of a strange kind of emotional distance and ineffability that is profoundly Minnesotan. You just can’t get too emotional when you’re stuck in a room with someone for a solid third of a year every year, and the Coens characters will often reflect this. 1998’s The Big Lebowski might be set in Los Angeles, but the stoic non-reaction shot of The Dude, Walter, and Donny driving down the road with a freshly shattered windshield after a stranger demolishes the Dude’s car with a tire iron emits profoundly Minnesotan vibes. 

Pictured: 3 men whose bodies are on Sunset Blvd but whose spirits are on Lake St

So when the topic of conversation of our favorite winter coping mechanisms comes up, I always mention how I watch a bunch of Coens films, starting on New Years Day, as I come down from the revelry of the night previous, and watch The Coens’ New Years film, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994). The second part of that sentence though always give people pause though. “Why Hudsucker?” they ask.  “Why would you start with their worst movie?”. I counter with two statements. One: Hudsucker is miles better than The Ladykillers (2004), and two: while it’s not perfect, I conjecture that it is in fact a great movie. It is simply a weird movie, and a movie that has far too much going on in any given scene, preventing its viewer from easily taking it all in. Too many brilliant details are missed, and if you miss them, the brilliance seems to not even exist. 

As I watch Hudsucker again this New Years Day, I type these words, the first introductory post of a project where every week for one year, I will explore an element of this film I so love, so that hopefully by New Years Day 2021, you, dear reader, will see what I see, and if you do not love it as much as I do, you will understand my love of this gorgeous and brilliant film.