I’ve been thinking about David Byrne’s big suit for months now, ever since a reel of The Talking Heads popped up in my feed. If you were alive in the eighties, you know the big suit. Even if you weren’t alive in the eighties, I’m guessing you might have a sense of what I’m talking about, because culturally we haven't forgotten it. We can’t get over that big suit.
The suit has become such a part of our cultural lexicon, that I’ve misremembered it. I thought that it was in multiple music videos (this was the early MTV era), that it was a recurrent part of the Talking Heads whole schtick, but no. From what I can tell, the big suit makes only two appearances: for one song in the 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, and as a cover image for the accompanying album. In that cover image, it’s not even really a big suit so much as it is a reference to the big suit. I mean, it’s cropped in such a way that the full effect is lost.
The one true appearance of the big suit is this: in the last half hour of Stop Making Sense, David Byrne departs the stage for the length of one song, and returns in time to sing “Girlfriend is Better”. Initially, he’s a wide-shouldered shadow. Then the camera pans down in time to show Byrne approaching the microphone looking earnest and pale, his head diminished by the suit.
The thing about the suit is that it’s not really that big. I mean, it both is and it isn’t. It’s just a step or two away from being an everyday ill-fitting suit, one step towards absurdity. There’s power there, I think, in flirting with the line between reality and exaggeration.
One question that I won’t attempt to fully answer is: how does something so fleeting like a costume choice for one song of a rock concert become an enduring image, one that people are still discussing forty years later? Why are we so compelled by it? What does it mean?
A few months ago, YouTube suggested I watch a video titled “David Byrne Explains the Giant Suit.” It’s an interview with David Letterman from 1984 in which Letterman, tiresomely IMO, prods Byrne to explain various aspects of his performance. His opening question is: “Stop Making Sense: that’s the title—what does it mean?” to which Byrne patiently answers, “It’s, uh, good advice. It’s advice not to be rational all the time.” Several questions later, Letterman asks Byrne to “explain the jumbo suit,” and Byrne, ready for it, says that a friend in Japan told him that “in the theater everything should be a little bit bigger than real life… and I thought, That solves my costume problem!” In another YouTube video from nearly 40 years later, Jimmy Fallon asks Byrne the same question and Byrne offers, almost word for word, the same answer.
I was so disappointed by this answer. It took me a while, months I guess, to understand. It’s not that I’d been ripped off. It’s that there’s no good answer to the prompt, Explain the jumbo suit. Byrne’s answer is an evasion, not an explanation.
It’s been a while since I taught a college literature class, but there’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed where we’re reading a novel together and talking about some central image, about how we understand it, what makes sense to us about it and what remains haunting and perplexing, and then somebody jumps in. “I read an interview with the author and they said that image doesn’t mean anything. It just came to them in a dream and so they put it there.” It’s a real conversation killer—I’d go so far as to say a buzzkill. Suddenly no one wants to talk about the image anymore.
The thing is, I had my own story about the big suit and what it meant. Because I’d never talked to anyone about it, I clicked on the video hoping David Byrne would confirm my personal interpretation. But that’s not his job. I wanted him to take my uncertainty away from me, but uncertainty is part of the point. Art isn’t exposition. A song is not an op-ed.
A strong image is strong because it is, perhaps, both clear and perplexing. Because it’s inexplicable. And to be clear, I think we should be talking about the images that haunt us. We just shouldn’t be looking to the artist for an answer key. We should be trying to make sense of them and coming up a little short.
A Prompt
Think of an image (from life, from art) that has stayed with you and haunted or perplexed you. Allow it to bring you somewhere through free-association. Write down whatever memories or scenes (real or imagined) come to you as you hold that image in mind.
In 1980s NYC we understood David Byrne’s suit to be understood a”zoom suit” - a fashion thing loaded with meaning, way more meaning than I knew at the time. I was/am a Talking Heads fan, and as I think about Byrne’s zoot suit now and his empty responses about, it makes me think, sadly, he was just one more white guy blindly co-opting black culture...and apparently still isn’t bothering to go into any deeper self reflection of his own choices. I agree with you, Jenn, we oughta care about images.