Defining Screwball Comedy
[So, um...hi. I intended to write an LJ entry of moderate size, but 4,000 words later, I appear to have an essay. I feel like this might be a metaphor for my life.]
My most recent vid has inspired me to poke some more at my screwball comedy vid. I have several films lined up for it, but I figure I could probably use more, and I might want to switch some of them out for better representatives of the genre. Which led me to the question, apparently rather difficult to answer, of what exactly constitutes a screwball film, or even screwball comedy as a genre. More than most genres, it seems to be a case of "I know it when I see it."
Still, I figured there had to be some kind of guidelines. For answers, I turned to James Harvey's Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges, which the internet tells me is one of the most highly-regarded texts in this field. I skimmed a couple chapters of it for my Modernism and ballroom dance (with a special appearance by Fred and Ginger) paper in grad school, but due to time constraints never read the rest of it.
It's a very good book: extremely readable, well-argued and supported, covering a good breadth of material, making a thorough analysis of specific films or scenes where warranted. Harvey's also an unexpectedly funny guy; the text is aimed at an educated popular audience, but it's still written mostly in academese...except when he calls this character a "dumbass," or says these characters are "talking shit." 1 He also has this hilarious vendetta against Ronald Reagan (the book was published in 1987) that he carries out in the footnotes and which even intrudes into the text in the concluding chapter. He links Reagan to Capra's socially conscious films like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which he deplores basically for being boring and false. This was my favorite bit: "[Y]oung people, who get restive at the high romanticism of old movies...sit rapt and unprotesting and apparently moved through the platitudes of Meet John Doe and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The Capra vision isn't dead. [footnote] Unhappily. Reagan in the White House (a Capra event in itself, though certainly no joke) 'explains' his economic policies to reporters by quoting 'lengthy passages' from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town!"
Harvey and I agree on many things. Our views on Capra are very similar; I find his movies bland and platitudinous, except for It Happened One Night, which is in my top five movies (Harvey loves it too). Like me, his favorite Astaire/Rogers film, at least scriptwise, is Shall We Dance. We both find My Man Godfrey overrated. But we differ on Irene Dunne, and specifically on The Awful Truth, which he considers the epitome of screwball comedies, and which I couldn't even make it halfway through, I found it so painfully unfunny.
He's a little too into the director-as-auteur theory for my tastes, which I think influences his tendency to ramble on about an individual director's whole oeuvre, from westerns to melodramas, rather than focusing on the romantic comedies. The book could do with tightening there. But overall, it's excellent.
It also helped me define screwball comedy for myself. Well, sort of. Mostly. In a way. Because it is a very tricksy genre.
I was at first tempted to define it as a particular kind of manic, farcical energy, where everything is taken to extremes. That energy can come from characters (best example: Susan Vance in Bringing Up Baby) or circumstances. I'll use a modern example for that: Moonlighting, which I think is extremely screwball, albeit an updated version. The thing is, neither Maddie nor David really causes the lunacy around them; they just inhabit a universe that will give them spontaneous pie fights and musical numbers and allow them to merrily punch holes in the fourth wall.
But the thing about using "everything dialed up to eleven and complicated as much as possible" as a definition is that it's hard to separate out from comedy as a whole; after all, isn't comedy basically complication? The complication of farce-misunderstanding piled upon misunderstanding-the complication of elements of a slapstick sequence building on themselves or the repetition of a running gag, even the complication of language, such as the double meaning of words in a pun? Aside from the addition of a romance, what is it that differentiates screwball from the other forms of comedy?
There seem to be two ways you can further define screwball: by a checklist of elements and by a particular way of looking at and inhabiting the world. It seems to me that the real screwball comedies always have both. While there are movies that check off everything on the checklist, especially in the late 1940s, they don't have the same worldview, and it's there that they don't quite make it as screwball comedies.
The checklist is simple. There are only seven items, and only two of them are non-negotiable.
But not every movie that can check off those elements is a screwball comedy. There's a particular outlook on life and the main romantic relationship that has to be expressed. In a screwball film, the couple is in the world but not entirely of it. They create a space between them that the other characters of the film and even we as the audience can't touch, can't quite see. There is Nick and Nora holing up together in their hotel suite; the Astaire and Rogers characters sharing a dance; Stanley Cavell's famous "interlude in Connecticut" in Bringing Up Baby and other films. But while those are the best concrete examples, this space isn't limited to those times and places where they're alone; it surrounds them like an aura, so that it's there even when they're in the middle of a crowd. 2 It's a space of their own making and choosing, too; they have chosen zaniness over normality, equality over inequality, playfulness over both staidness and mere unsophisticated madness. (You can't have a screwball comedy without sophistication, particularly urban sophistication.) As Harvey puts it, the movies and the couples both have a "fundamental skepticism": of the social and class system they move through, of the kind of "wildness" that's too pretentious, and most importantly of the purported charms of reality and the commonplace.
For the real world is stuffy, boring, normal. It's also sexist. The real world is Ralph Bellamy, with all that that poor fellow implies. Inside the privileged space the screwball couple creates, though, things are very different. There is:
In the forties, the romantic comedies begin to lose this denial of the commonplace, this quality of being in the world but not of it, the couple separated from the mass but united with each other by amusement. As Harvey points out, beginning with Oz and everything in it turning out to be just a dream in The Wizard of Oz, "the message [becomes] a depressingly clear one. There is no escape from the commonplace. Not even at the movies" (411). At the same time, the postwar pressure to retrench gender roles and have women make way for returning soldiers in the public sphere deals a crushing blow to the screwball heroine. The girl next door, who used to be the dull fiancée who got dumped for the screwball heroine, becomes the heroine. Donna Reed in It's a Wonderful Life is a perfect example of this. 6
Harvey, in a move I like very much because I detest this movie, cites The Philadelphia Story as an example of another way the screwball comedy was systematically dismantled: as Tracy Lord, Katharine Hepburn has to apologize for her "magnificence." Her father blames her for his affairs with chorus girls, because without a devoted and uncritical daughter at home, he had to look for it elsewhere. Her ex-husband claims she's arrogant, since she divorced him for his drinking. (Do you see why I hate this movie? Especially since she ends up with him again at the end!) It is, as Harvey says, the "reverse of the old screwball pattern" (409). The complications of the plot are no longer the result of the clash between the two types of people in the romance, or between their desire to escape the mundane and the world's attempt to hold on to them. They become the woman's fault. The couple doesn't create that privileged space; instead, they run as hard as they can toward the mundane, with all the restraints and power imbalances that implies.
An excellent example of these changes, one I'm surprised Harvey didn't use, is The Barkleys of Broadway. All of the Barkleys' problems are caused because silly Dinah wants to strike out on her own as a serious actress, to prove that she isn't the Trilby to Josh's Svengali. In the end, she recants and says it was stupid to leave and pursue this dream, and from now on she's just going to do musicals with Josh because that's where she belongs. Interestingly, musical comedy serves as the mundane in this film, whereas the drama of the Sarah Bernhardt role Dinah tries on is the lunacy she could choose if she were a screwball heroine. We know the musical comedy cloaks the mundane because it's so wrapped up in her determinedly ordinary life with Josh: note how important it is to the magazine photographers that they get pictures of the Barkleys at home, and note how many scenes between them take place in the domestic space.
The Barkleys also fail at a key moment to create that private space between them-indeed they actively avoid it. "They Can't Take That Away From Me," which in any of their other films would have been the pinnacle of that space, serves to illustrate exactly how out of sync they are, and how they are failing, right now, to transcend reality. (To its credit, that is the point of this dance. But compare it to "Cheek to Cheek": there, Dale thinks Jerry is her friend's husband and is trying desperately not to fall for him, as Dinah is trying not to be charmed by Josh, but almost against her will, they still create that space, and she still falls for him.)
Thankfully, this state of affairs does not continue forever. Movies and other media aren't perfect now, God knows, but their treatment of women, in particular, is a damn sight better now than it was in the forties and fifties. But it seems that screwball hasn't quite come back. I think there are a couple reasons for this: most importantly, the real world is rarely presented as the stuffy, dull place it was in these comedies. We don't have the same sort of strictures to rise above that American society did in the 1930s, and so it's not as exhilarating when a wannabe screwball couple defies standards. Making a screwball comedy today would be like being a rebel without a cause. (Notably, the one movie in the past twenty years that seems, to me, to really work as a screwball comedy is I.Q., which is set in the 1950s and thus does have those constraints to fight against.)
There are more than a few detective shows on TV that have come pretty close over the past twenty or thirty years, though. Moonlighting, for example, checks off everything on both of my lists. It has the manic energy, the class anarchy (lower-class David is better at survival in their world than rich Maddie), the witty and sexualized banter, the madcap antics. The frequent breaking of the fourth wall even, I would argue, demonstrates their knowledge of how precarious the situations they find themselves in are, and how much energy and belief in the saving grace of amusement it takes to keep them running. David and Maddie also inhabit that shared private world where they are equal (David has the street smarts, but Maddie has the responsibility and logic that makes their business actually succeed; plus, of course, they are a perfect match in trading banter) and where, when together, they choose to give in to amusement and go on that chase through the post office or take that leap off a building into a swimming pool. Both of them are also perfectly sensible, down-to-earth people who have this capacity for amusement, which is what ultimately sets them apart from the rest of the world.
Castle is also rooted in that tradition, although it doesn't aim for screwball exactly so much as it makes conscious nods to it while doing its own thing. (Marlowe, from what I've read, is a big fan of the classic screwball films.) At its best, it has class anarchy-Beckett is endlessly more prepared for the work they do than Castle-the odd piece of witty banter, and the unquantifiable energy. Beckett and Castle also create that shared private space where amusement is their intimacy, though constraints of the medium and the genre mean it can't exist as consistently as it does in the classic screwball films.
So there we are. It's not perfect, and could definitely use tweaking, but I think I've defined screwball well enough for myself, which was my goal at the beginning of this. I think mine is more generous than many other definitions (there's one book I read an excerpt of online, which I unfortunately don't remember the title or author of, which claims that It Happened One Night-which most consider the first screwball film-is in fact not a screwball comedy at all), but right now, it works for me.
Anyway, ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY...what are your favorite screwball comedies? What do you think makes one? OMG, TALK TO ME PLZ.
1 Here's a passage I like especially: "The wall around this sleeping-beauty heroine [Ginger Rogers] is a kind of no-nonsense radar, an invisible shit-detector-which gives her an almost pathological sensitivity to any suggestion of phoniness or pretense. To Astaire, therefore, with his enthusiasm and his romanticism, she is a special challenge. All that might be said against him-and even his romantic obsession about her might be a count in the indictment-is summed up in Rogers' perfection of the deadpan comment, in her unforgettable sidelong glance from time to time at his slightly skittering presence" (198). ↑
2 My favorite example of this: in The Gay Divorcee, Mimi and Guy escape into the crowd of dancers doing the Continental, specifically looking to blend in. But about two seconds after they get to the floor, they wind up creating a space for themselves in the middle of the crowd through the sheer power of their awesome. ↑
3 It's partially for this reason that you don't see much true screwball comedy around nowadays. Not that we've entered the paradise of perfect gender equality, because dear lord we have not, but the particular kind of equality presented in screwball comedies of the 1930s is not as at odds with other movies and with reality as it was then, and losing that sense of opposition to the real world in this particular way robs it of some of its potency. ↑
4 As a consequence of the "immolation" Harvey describes, the end of the movie often has the couple cutting and running, "leaving an aghast lot of people behind them" (241). For example, Ellie escaping her wedding to the aviator in It Happened One Night, in that wonderful shot where she runs, her dress's train streaming out behind her, across the lawn. ↑
5 Edward Gallafent has a passage in his book about Astaire and Rogers that comes to mind in this context: "Perhaps it would be proper to say that they are a couple who know that their feet are on the ground at the beginning of the dance and will return there at the end of it. They have, in [Flying Down to Rio's] imagery, a way of being in the air which is not like flying in an aeroplane (it depends neither on technology nor money) and which makes the ordinariness of sitting down together possible, or bearable. They are content to sit because, from their dancing, they-and we-know that they are, or can be, more than this" (16). They are common sense characters leavened with a transcendent amusement and passion. ↑
6 An interesting example is the Thin Man films. As the series goes on, Nick and Nora have a baby, stop drinking, and even go to Nick's small home town for the duration of one of movie. But they never quite lose that sense of being in the world but not of it, thankfully. They always seem to be sharing something amusing that sets them apart from everyone else. ↑
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comments over there.
My most recent vid has inspired me to poke some more at my screwball comedy vid. I have several films lined up for it, but I figure I could probably use more, and I might want to switch some of them out for better representatives of the genre. Which led me to the question, apparently rather difficult to answer, of what exactly constitutes a screwball film, or even screwball comedy as a genre. More than most genres, it seems to be a case of "I know it when I see it."
Still, I figured there had to be some kind of guidelines. For answers, I turned to James Harvey's Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturges, which the internet tells me is one of the most highly-regarded texts in this field. I skimmed a couple chapters of it for my Modernism and ballroom dance (with a special appearance by Fred and Ginger) paper in grad school, but due to time constraints never read the rest of it.
It's a very good book: extremely readable, well-argued and supported, covering a good breadth of material, making a thorough analysis of specific films or scenes where warranted. Harvey's also an unexpectedly funny guy; the text is aimed at an educated popular audience, but it's still written mostly in academese...except when he calls this character a "dumbass," or says these characters are "talking shit." 1 He also has this hilarious vendetta against Ronald Reagan (the book was published in 1987) that he carries out in the footnotes and which even intrudes into the text in the concluding chapter. He links Reagan to Capra's socially conscious films like Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which he deplores basically for being boring and false. This was my favorite bit: "[Y]oung people, who get restive at the high romanticism of old movies...sit rapt and unprotesting and apparently moved through the platitudes of Meet John Doe and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. The Capra vision isn't dead. [footnote] Unhappily. Reagan in the White House (a Capra event in itself, though certainly no joke) 'explains' his economic policies to reporters by quoting 'lengthy passages' from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town!"
Harvey and I agree on many things. Our views on Capra are very similar; I find his movies bland and platitudinous, except for It Happened One Night, which is in my top five movies (Harvey loves it too). Like me, his favorite Astaire/Rogers film, at least scriptwise, is Shall We Dance. We both find My Man Godfrey overrated. But we differ on Irene Dunne, and specifically on The Awful Truth, which he considers the epitome of screwball comedies, and which I couldn't even make it halfway through, I found it so painfully unfunny.
He's a little too into the director-as-auteur theory for my tastes, which I think influences his tendency to ramble on about an individual director's whole oeuvre, from westerns to melodramas, rather than focusing on the romantic comedies. The book could do with tightening there. But overall, it's excellent.
It also helped me define screwball comedy for myself. Well, sort of. Mostly. In a way. Because it is a very tricksy genre.
I was at first tempted to define it as a particular kind of manic, farcical energy, where everything is taken to extremes. That energy can come from characters (best example: Susan Vance in Bringing Up Baby) or circumstances. I'll use a modern example for that: Moonlighting, which I think is extremely screwball, albeit an updated version. The thing is, neither Maddie nor David really causes the lunacy around them; they just inhabit a universe that will give them spontaneous pie fights and musical numbers and allow them to merrily punch holes in the fourth wall.
But the thing about using "everything dialed up to eleven and complicated as much as possible" as a definition is that it's hard to separate out from comedy as a whole; after all, isn't comedy basically complication? The complication of farce-misunderstanding piled upon misunderstanding-the complication of elements of a slapstick sequence building on themselves or the repetition of a running gag, even the complication of language, such as the double meaning of words in a pun? Aside from the addition of a romance, what is it that differentiates screwball from the other forms of comedy?
There seem to be two ways you can further define screwball: by a checklist of elements and by a particular way of looking at and inhabiting the world. It seems to me that the real screwball comedies always have both. While there are movies that check off everything on the checklist, especially in the late 1940s, they don't have the same worldview, and it's there that they don't quite make it as screwball comedies.
The checklist is simple. There are only seven items, and only two of them are non-negotiable.
- A romance. Pretty obvious; whether it's two people meeting for the first time or a divorced couple getting back together, two people are going to be hitched or headed that way by the end. (Variation: Nick and Nora Charles, who are married before their film series begins, and upon whose marriage absolutely nothing ever impugns. For various genre-related reasons, the Thin Man movies are not screwball comedies, but Nick and Nora are a quintessential screwball couple. There's a difference.)
- Andrew Sarris's famous characterization of screwball as "a sex comedy without the sex." The unresolved sexual tension manifests in dialogue, in dance, in slapstick, in violence. (When Dale slaps Jerry the second time in Top Hat, he merely leans against the wall and sighs, "She loves me.") This might be why screwball tends to show up in television more than movies these days. Gotta keep that UST going!
- Witty dialogue that basically lives to get one over on the censors.
- Madcap antics, from chasing a jaguar around the woods to anesthesia-induced crime sprees.
- Anarchy, often class anarchy. Think penniless Claudette Colbert sneaking into a ritzy party in Midnight, then parleying that into a free hotel room, a weekend at a mansion, and a marriage proposal from a very rich man-whom she of course turns down to be with the cab driver she met on her first night in Paris. The real world, as embodied in people like Ralph Bellamy, is something to escape, to overturn, to otherwise do away with.
- An energy and spontaneity that runs through the film. It's impossible to really quantify, but it's hugely important. The banter is quick, the action is frantic, everyone is on a tightrope and about to fall off. The situation is precarious, and everyone knows it. This has to be the most know-it-when-you-see-it quality, but it's also the most essential on this checklist. The antics actually don't have to be all that madcap if they're performed with this energy.
- Compression of time. Many of these movies take place only over a few days or a week, and those that do take longer never feel like it. Compare the years that go by in When Harry Met Sally, one of the defining movies of the romantic comedy genre, but emphatically not a screwball comedy. I think this ties in with the point about energy and precariousness; those are things you simply can't sustain over an extended period.
But not every movie that can check off those elements is a screwball comedy. There's a particular outlook on life and the main romantic relationship that has to be expressed. In a screwball film, the couple is in the world but not entirely of it. They create a space between them that the other characters of the film and even we as the audience can't touch, can't quite see. There is Nick and Nora holing up together in their hotel suite; the Astaire and Rogers characters sharing a dance; Stanley Cavell's famous "interlude in Connecticut" in Bringing Up Baby and other films. But while those are the best concrete examples, this space isn't limited to those times and places where they're alone; it surrounds them like an aura, so that it's there even when they're in the middle of a crowd. 2 It's a space of their own making and choosing, too; they have chosen zaniness over normality, equality over inequality, playfulness over both staidness and mere unsophisticated madness. (You can't have a screwball comedy without sophistication, particularly urban sophistication.) As Harvey puts it, the movies and the couples both have a "fundamental skepticism": of the social and class system they move through, of the kind of "wildness" that's too pretentious, and most importantly of the purported charms of reality and the commonplace.
For the real world is stuffy, boring, normal. It's also sexist. The real world is Ralph Bellamy, with all that that poor fellow implies. Inside the privileged space the screwball couple creates, though, things are very different. There is:
- Equality. Screwball comedies of the 1930s are amazingly good to the female leads compared to other genres and, you know, reality. 3 The screwball heroine is more than a match in wit and agency to her male partner, and it's always her innate screwiness (or her resistance to it in her partner-for example, Double Wedding) which drives the action of the movie. One thing that annoys me about the modern vogue for Manic Pixie Dream Girls is how often they are objects, there to develop the man who falls for them, but when the MPDG shows up in these old films, we always see the story from her point of view. Both the MPDG and her opposite, the common sense woman who is seduced by the Manic Pixie Dream Boy (such as Ginger Rogers in most of the A/R films), need and are affected by their opposite as much as he needs and is affected by them.
- Independence. Each member of the couple has their lives improved immensely by the presence of the other, but you always get the impression that if they'd never met, they could carry on just fine-more boringly, but fine. The are two complete people who are linked, rather than two parts of a whole, which is an important distinction.
- With that independence, they choose lunacy. It's not that the Manic Pixie Dream Person can't tether her or himself to reality, it's that they choose not to. Peter P. Peters in Shall We Dance could, in their first meeting, present himself to Linda Keene as the ballet star he is; instead, he chooses to put on the persona of a crazy Russian, which of course piques her interest more than just showing up as "a simpering toe dancer."
- Common sense. I'm just going to quote Harvey here, because he puts it so well:
It's significant that the screwball style, which sets so much store in "letting go," should also be clear about the kinds of letting go...that won't do at all....The screwball couple are committed above everything to common-sense standards....Otis Ferguson, writing in 1939, argues that the great distinction of the Hollywood comedy (the implied comparison is the stage) is its sense of ordinary life. At first this insight could hardly seem to apply to movies about heroes and heroines who live in penthouses and have dogs for children. Except that the screwball couple are plain people, figures of ordinary life in all but their fantasy trappings: in their common sense and downrightness, in their aversion to anything high-flown or disproportionate...They are temperamentally conservative in this respect, with as acute a sense of how things will look to the neighbors as any small-town matchmaker might have. With this absolute difference: they concern themselves with appearances finally so that they can defy and rise above them. They immolate themselves like other great lovers-but for laughs. 4 The skeptical and reductive comic vision-the wonderful wised-up voice of the movies themselves-becomes in them something overtly romantic: an element liberating and transcendent as passion is. (240)
In keeping with that, as Harvey later writes, "the screwball heroine [is] a powerfully sensible woman with a passionate, even dangerous susceptibility for being amused, for 'going wild'" (248). 5 - And this amusement, this laughter, is intimacy for the screwball couple. It's the foundation of the separate space they make for themselves, in the world but not of it, knowing the strictures so that they can ultimately defy them.
- Another facet of this particular kind of amusement is its playfulness. The screwball couple delights in witty banter for its own sake. They compete with and fight against each other because it's fun, even more so than dinner and a movie, or kissing, or (the entire point of these films) sex. And have you ever noticed how often they playact different roles? Most of these films have a masquerade element, from newspaperman Bill Chandler pretending to be an angler in Libeled Lady, to Lucy pretending to be Jerry's sister in The Awful Truth, to Peter Peters' Russian impersonation, to Ellie Andrews and Peter Warne pretending to be married in It Happened One Night. The playacting serves a story purpose, but the characters also delight in it, like children.
In the forties, the romantic comedies begin to lose this denial of the commonplace, this quality of being in the world but not of it, the couple separated from the mass but united with each other by amusement. As Harvey points out, beginning with Oz and everything in it turning out to be just a dream in The Wizard of Oz, "the message [becomes] a depressingly clear one. There is no escape from the commonplace. Not even at the movies" (411). At the same time, the postwar pressure to retrench gender roles and have women make way for returning soldiers in the public sphere deals a crushing blow to the screwball heroine. The girl next door, who used to be the dull fiancée who got dumped for the screwball heroine, becomes the heroine. Donna Reed in It's a Wonderful Life is a perfect example of this. 6
Harvey, in a move I like very much because I detest this movie, cites The Philadelphia Story as an example of another way the screwball comedy was systematically dismantled: as Tracy Lord, Katharine Hepburn has to apologize for her "magnificence." Her father blames her for his affairs with chorus girls, because without a devoted and uncritical daughter at home, he had to look for it elsewhere. Her ex-husband claims she's arrogant, since she divorced him for his drinking. (Do you see why I hate this movie? Especially since she ends up with him again at the end!) It is, as Harvey says, the "reverse of the old screwball pattern" (409). The complications of the plot are no longer the result of the clash between the two types of people in the romance, or between their desire to escape the mundane and the world's attempt to hold on to them. They become the woman's fault. The couple doesn't create that privileged space; instead, they run as hard as they can toward the mundane, with all the restraints and power imbalances that implies.
An excellent example of these changes, one I'm surprised Harvey didn't use, is The Barkleys of Broadway. All of the Barkleys' problems are caused because silly Dinah wants to strike out on her own as a serious actress, to prove that she isn't the Trilby to Josh's Svengali. In the end, she recants and says it was stupid to leave and pursue this dream, and from now on she's just going to do musicals with Josh because that's where she belongs. Interestingly, musical comedy serves as the mundane in this film, whereas the drama of the Sarah Bernhardt role Dinah tries on is the lunacy she could choose if she were a screwball heroine. We know the musical comedy cloaks the mundane because it's so wrapped up in her determinedly ordinary life with Josh: note how important it is to the magazine photographers that they get pictures of the Barkleys at home, and note how many scenes between them take place in the domestic space.
The Barkleys also fail at a key moment to create that private space between them-indeed they actively avoid it. "They Can't Take That Away From Me," which in any of their other films would have been the pinnacle of that space, serves to illustrate exactly how out of sync they are, and how they are failing, right now, to transcend reality. (To its credit, that is the point of this dance. But compare it to "Cheek to Cheek": there, Dale thinks Jerry is her friend's husband and is trying desperately not to fall for him, as Dinah is trying not to be charmed by Josh, but almost against her will, they still create that space, and she still falls for him.)
Thankfully, this state of affairs does not continue forever. Movies and other media aren't perfect now, God knows, but their treatment of women, in particular, is a damn sight better now than it was in the forties and fifties. But it seems that screwball hasn't quite come back. I think there are a couple reasons for this: most importantly, the real world is rarely presented as the stuffy, dull place it was in these comedies. We don't have the same sort of strictures to rise above that American society did in the 1930s, and so it's not as exhilarating when a wannabe screwball couple defies standards. Making a screwball comedy today would be like being a rebel without a cause. (Notably, the one movie in the past twenty years that seems, to me, to really work as a screwball comedy is I.Q., which is set in the 1950s and thus does have those constraints to fight against.)
There are more than a few detective shows on TV that have come pretty close over the past twenty or thirty years, though. Moonlighting, for example, checks off everything on both of my lists. It has the manic energy, the class anarchy (lower-class David is better at survival in their world than rich Maddie), the witty and sexualized banter, the madcap antics. The frequent breaking of the fourth wall even, I would argue, demonstrates their knowledge of how precarious the situations they find themselves in are, and how much energy and belief in the saving grace of amusement it takes to keep them running. David and Maddie also inhabit that shared private world where they are equal (David has the street smarts, but Maddie has the responsibility and logic that makes their business actually succeed; plus, of course, they are a perfect match in trading banter) and where, when together, they choose to give in to amusement and go on that chase through the post office or take that leap off a building into a swimming pool. Both of them are also perfectly sensible, down-to-earth people who have this capacity for amusement, which is what ultimately sets them apart from the rest of the world.
Castle is also rooted in that tradition, although it doesn't aim for screwball exactly so much as it makes conscious nods to it while doing its own thing. (Marlowe, from what I've read, is a big fan of the classic screwball films.) At its best, it has class anarchy-Beckett is endlessly more prepared for the work they do than Castle-the odd piece of witty banter, and the unquantifiable energy. Beckett and Castle also create that shared private space where amusement is their intimacy, though constraints of the medium and the genre mean it can't exist as consistently as it does in the classic screwball films.
So there we are. It's not perfect, and could definitely use tweaking, but I think I've defined screwball well enough for myself, which was my goal at the beginning of this. I think mine is more generous than many other definitions (there's one book I read an excerpt of online, which I unfortunately don't remember the title or author of, which claims that It Happened One Night-which most consider the first screwball film-is in fact not a screwball comedy at all), but right now, it works for me.
Anyway, ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY...what are your favorite screwball comedies? What do you think makes one? OMG, TALK TO ME PLZ.
1 Here's a passage I like especially: "The wall around this sleeping-beauty heroine [Ginger Rogers] is a kind of no-nonsense radar, an invisible shit-detector-which gives her an almost pathological sensitivity to any suggestion of phoniness or pretense. To Astaire, therefore, with his enthusiasm and his romanticism, she is a special challenge. All that might be said against him-and even his romantic obsession about her might be a count in the indictment-is summed up in Rogers' perfection of the deadpan comment, in her unforgettable sidelong glance from time to time at his slightly skittering presence" (198). ↑
2 My favorite example of this: in The Gay Divorcee, Mimi and Guy escape into the crowd of dancers doing the Continental, specifically looking to blend in. But about two seconds after they get to the floor, they wind up creating a space for themselves in the middle of the crowd through the sheer power of their awesome. ↑
3 It's partially for this reason that you don't see much true screwball comedy around nowadays. Not that we've entered the paradise of perfect gender equality, because dear lord we have not, but the particular kind of equality presented in screwball comedies of the 1930s is not as at odds with other movies and with reality as it was then, and losing that sense of opposition to the real world in this particular way robs it of some of its potency. ↑
4 As a consequence of the "immolation" Harvey describes, the end of the movie often has the couple cutting and running, "leaving an aghast lot of people behind them" (241). For example, Ellie escaping her wedding to the aviator in It Happened One Night, in that wonderful shot where she runs, her dress's train streaming out behind her, across the lawn. ↑
5 Edward Gallafent has a passage in his book about Astaire and Rogers that comes to mind in this context: "Perhaps it would be proper to say that they are a couple who know that their feet are on the ground at the beginning of the dance and will return there at the end of it. They have, in [Flying Down to Rio's] imagery, a way of being in the air which is not like flying in an aeroplane (it depends neither on technology nor money) and which makes the ordinariness of sitting down together possible, or bearable. They are content to sit because, from their dancing, they-and we-know that they are, or can be, more than this" (16). They are common sense characters leavened with a transcendent amusement and passion. ↑
6 An interesting example is the Thin Man films. As the series goes on, Nick and Nora have a baby, stop drinking, and even go to Nick's small home town for the duration of one of movie. But they never quite lose that sense of being in the world but not of it, thankfully. They always seem to be sharing something amusing that sets them apart from everyone else. ↑
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