Rube Goldberg and "The Way Things Go"

(By Kirk 4/20/05)

To describe something as "a Rube Goldberg process" or "a Rube Goldberg device" is to say that it is overly complicated.

This is because Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist in the early 20th Century who is best remembered for his comic strip "Sideshow" which featured drawings of machines that were way more complicated than they needed to be.

Mr. Goldberg did a lot of other cartooning and even won a Pulitzer Prize for his editorial cartooning, but still he will always be remembered for his many machines.

Years later, Rube Goldberg's drawings inspired a children's game called Mousetrap by Milton Bradley.

In 1987, two Swiss artists named Peter Fischli and David Weiss made a groundbreaking film called Der Lauf der Dinge, and released in the English-speaking world as "The Way Things Go". Whether Rube Goldberg's drawings were a direct influence on Fischli and Weiss, I don't know. But many people saw the movie as the artistic decendant of Goldberg's art.

Then, in 2003, Wieden+Kennedy, an advertising firm in the U.K. made a commercial for Honda which was titled "Cog". This commercial seemed to be quite deliberately a reference to "The Way Things Go", although the creators denied it and there was a fair amout of controversy about that. (<<This link is also a great place to see a bit of the film and the commercial).

Most recently, in 2005, the New York band The Bravery has immitated "The Way Things Go" in their video, "Honest Mistake". I don't know if The Bravery or their record label has spoken about the legacy of Goldberg, Fischli and Weiss in the video, but it's pretty clear and I think it's a very cool use of the machines.

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