Not sure why but Hobie/Carlotta was my favourite thing in the movie

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I agree, in some sense their meeting really is at the heart of the movie! Sure, it would be easy to dismiss as a piece of irrelevant fluff, but when you look at it more closely, I think very much actually turns on this pairing – perhaps the whole feel of the film (what would it have been without it?). Especially if you look at the full development that Hobie Doyle undergoes in the story.

Hobie goes through a number of changes: he begins as a simple ”dust actor”, pretty much all-powerful in his wild, untamed domain, where he rules over life and death and is in touch with the animals – but still a mere boy, outside the ”real” world (”the man can barely talk”, as Mannix says). Then, since ”they’re changing your image”, he is led into the lifeless world of ”Merrily We Dance”, where mirthlessness and ruefulness prevail, and he has to talk as well as walk, which to begin with proves very difficult, and he is brutally humiliated (both in the picture, as he is betrayed by Allegra, and on the stage, as the director L. lectures him on his lines and on his own name – the name of the father, perhaps). But, he carries his burdens cheerily, and proves to be useful in the real-real world: Eddie Mannix recognizes him and puts his trust in him, as one who knows about extras and their possible hidden agendas, and finally he spots a grip that shouldn’t be there, which leads him to recover the lost star, perhaps the absent father (”he’s not home, he’s never home, try one of his chippies”: out on a bender, in the middle of the day?). And in between, there is the lovely scene with Carlotta Valdez – the name taken from Hitchcock’s picture, here basically turned around to its opposite: from a lifeless and threatening demon to an exuberant and life-affirming woman, where Hobie kind of finds his proper place – recognition (at the cinema) and the ability to talk to women (who are not stuck up in stuffy drawing rooms and don’t mind if you play with your food). ”That threw me a little at first, but I think I got my leg upon her now.”

So: Hobie is Mannix inner child, growing up and shouldering his responsibilities, by facing his innermost fears: without feeling he has to work for Harmageddon to be a real Man. A Serious Man. A Man of Constant Sorrow. The Man in Me Must Hide sometimes … The Man Who Wasn’t There. Eddie Mannix …

Agreed, I really enjoyed their pairing along with the clever cowboy lassoing.