I had to delete the old app and enter a new one, but all seems to be good now. There were several comments I wanted to start with this time. The first one is a simple observation: if you have seen the movie which involves drawing on various fifties' movie genres, like the western, the noir mystery story, the dance musical, the Biblical spectacular, you get an idea of what HAIL CAESAR is working with. The question for any work of art, however, always is, how is the art coherent, how do the details work to reveal the meaning of the movie (or short story, etc.)? For example, as I was thinking about the movie again, one image comes to mind immediately from the western. The layers are somewhat complicated. The western actor, Hobie Doyle, playing a Roy Rogers-like singing cowboy, takes his Carmen Miranda-like date Carlotta to the premiere of his new movie. In the movie they are watching, the cowboy sings a song, Lazy 'Ol Moon, to his girl in the movie. While he is singing, his Gabby Hayes-like sidekick Curley, sees the bright image of the romantic full moon above them reflected in the horse trough. Curley, ranting at the romantic image, decides to put the treacherous moon out for good and he tries to do that by belly-flopping into the trough and breaking the reflection of the moon into numerous pieces. The audience breaks up, as do Carlotta and even Hobie after he glances at Carlotta and sees she is delighted by the fine comedy.
The point here is that there are various layers and levels of reality in the scene that all contribute to the idea of illusion/reality that is at work throughout the entire movie. There is the western the movie audience is watching, there is the apparent reality of the actors who are making that movie, watching that western, as well as making the movie, HAIL CAESAR, we, as audience, are watching. Hobie, for example, is watching himself act in the western at the same time he is acting in the movie we are watching. And, it doesn't take long for Hobie to get caught up in the kidnapping plot where the communist screen writers have taken Baird Whitlock, George Clooney, to the actor, Burt Gurney's, Channing Tatum's, rather fine ocean front house and indoctrinated Whitlock in the Marxist/Communist line that they believe is a valid perspective on reality and "the future." Again a variety of layers are at work in the film, reflecting a frequently humorous perspective on the not so humorous situation of persecution in the fifties. Baird Whitlock remains in his Roman "skirt"/costume throughout the scene and indeed the entire movie. Hobie "rescues" him while the writers are delivering Burt and the ransom money to a Soviet submarine, where the hundred thousand dollars is lost overboard as Burt, striking a gallant pose, again, chooses to save his dog Engels thereby dropping the money into the ocean. Hobie delivers Baird to Eddie Mannix which leads to what I would call the "epiphanic moment" in the movie: Baird, a rather dim human, has bought into the communist ideology and tries to explain it to Eddie who brings him back to "reality" in the movie with several well-deserved slaps, explains to him the value of movies and sends him out to the crucifixion set to deliver his crucial lines on Faith.
See the movie but just be aware of the various dimensions as it addresses the loss of meaning in our world and the role movies might play in addressing that loss. Just as there are two serious, Eddie Mannix confessional scenes at the beginning and the end of the movie, so there are two "theological" scenes that reflect on the significance of Christ. The first involves a group of religious figures--a rabbi, a Protestant minister, an Orthodox priest, and a Catholic priest--sitting around a table discussing the meaning of the Christ so that the movie presents a non-offensive image of the figure of Christ. Eddie is doing his best for the movie, and the scene is also quite funny, especially as the rabbi thinks the Christians are nuts and dismisses them as such. None the less the Catholic priest, also the figure in the confessional, it seems, comes the closest to defining the second person of the Trinity.
The second scene, the counterpart, is when Baird is sent back to the set after Eddie has defined the role of the actor in such a film and delivers an astonishingly moving speech defining the real meaning of the encounter with Christ and the meaning of faith, except that Baird the Roman character forgets the key word, faith, and immediately reverts to the actor Baird and utters an irreligious expletive. Layers. While Baird is delivering his speech in character, the camera pulls back to reveal the artifice on the one hand and the power and effect of the speech on those workers recording the scene on the other. Layers. What is true and where does the meaning really lie? How does the artifice of the movie reveal a perspective on our situation in an essentially godless, secular world? The movie is very good at being both delightfully entertaining and profoundly critical in revealing that which the modern world has, like Baird Whitlock, ignorantly "forgotten."
It seems to me that the opening image of the large crucifix, the face of the crucified Christ, and the confessional scene with Eddie holding his rosary define the perspective on human nature that governs the movie. We are essentially sinful creatures, fallen creatures, if you will, who have lost the capacity to understand our situation. Only Eddie in the movie takes that reality seriously for himself, even though he spends most of his time in the movie dealing with the consequences of the studio actors' "sinful" behavior, frequently sexual in nature, to "save" their reputations for their careers and for the good of the studio, owned, I think, by the unseen Mr. Schenk, whose name is pronounced "Skank."
Another significant aspect of the movie regarding Eddie is that the science people, Lockheed, are trying to woo Eddie to come work for them for a large salary and a job with regular hours. Their clincher argument is an image of an exploding hydrogen bomb, a defining image of the threat that continues to hang over humanity's self-destructive nature. The Lockheed agent dismisses movies with the phrase that "it's all make believe!" He is the representative of "real reality," that is the hard factual world of science. Eddie of course comes to see the real value of his work and the nature and value of movies, dreams certainly, entertainment as well, yet also with the possibility of telling a story that can reveal the underlying nature of reality. As Eddie tells Baird after slapping some sense into him: "Go out there and be a star." And Baird does, delivering his lines beautifully until he forgets the crucial word, "faith," thereby once again revealing the double perspective at work throughout the movie: "God dammit!" The moment is profound, on the one hand, yet immediately undermined by Baird's profanity as he drops out of character. The profanity, however, in no way negates the artistic meaning in the speech and its recitation before the crucified Christ.
By this time one might remember, as well, the doubleness in Jesus' own telling comment on the coin with the image of Caesar on it. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's. And of course Jesus understood quite well (from Genesis) that the human self was made in the image of God. At which point, ha, one might remember St. Augustine's comment on the restless human heart, found at the beginning of his Confessions: our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.