Fashionable Feminism in the Screwball Comedy: Who Wears the Pants?

The following is my entry in the Film Classics Annual Writing Contest.

In the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s, everything is upside-down and backwards — most notably the gender roles. While mistaken identities, slapstick shenanigans and witty banter push and pull the madcap couple together and apart, their behavior often defies sexual stereotypes of the period. The man inevitably becomes emasculated and is ordered around by an independent, pushy woman who either doesn’t like him or likes him too much for him to handle.

The gender-bending doesn’t stop at the characters’ personalities and conduct, however. It also reveals itself in their many — usually ridiculous — outfits. Cross-dressing, whether overt or understated, is a major aspect of the classic screwball comedy. It provokes laughter, moves the plot forward, and develops character. Such sartorial choices were often controversial. Katharine Hepburn’s breezy trousers and Cary Grant’s frilly robes caused a fashion revolution and sexual confusion. While many modern viewers think of bombshells like Marilyn Monroe as the major threats to the Production Code, the screwball stars caused an early stir. As Andrew Sarris says, this type of film was “a sex comedy without the sex.”

In screwball comedies, women wear the pants, both literally and metaphorically. In Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938), Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) moves around her apartment in a pair of polka-dot pants. She dons trousers and flat shoes to partake in a slapstick adventure in her aunt’s backyard. In The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940), Tracy Lord (Hepburn again) prepares for her upcoming nuptials in comfortable slacks and riding pants which show off her long, slim legs. In My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940), Ellen (Irene Dunne) arrives home after years on a desert island wearing men’s clothes. Screwball women reject ladylike frocks in favor of comfortable clothing.

The masculine aesthetic which these women so much enjoy does much to emphasize their characters’ independence and strong wills, but these traits are emphasized further when they begin wearing the heroes’ clothing, and vice versa. In screwball comedies, cross-dressing is often accidental, impulsive or last-resort, but it always says something important about the characters’ hierarchy. In Bringing Up Baby, Susan steals David Huxley’s (Cary Grant) clothes to keep him from leaving, and on her way out the door, she dons his hat. This act draws attention to her more powerful — traditionally masculine — position in their relationship. It is also interesting to note that Susan also destroys many objects of David’s clothing throughout the film. She causes him to slip and fall on his top hat early in the film, and soon after that she tears his jacket. Later she burns his sock while trying to dry off over a fire, and then her antics cause his glasses to break. Susan ruins David’s emblems of masculinity — his male clothing — or takes them for herself. Susan also experiences destruction to her clothing, including when she loses the heel on one shoe and laughs at the fact that now she has uneven feet, singing, “I was born on the side of a hill.” Susan’s joy at flattening her shoe, and the alternating heights at which she stands because of it, point to her complicated gender role.

Similarly, in It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934), Ellie (Claudette Colbert) accepts Peter’s (Clark Gable) pajamas, complete with pants and a button-front shirt, to sleep in. She does this out of desperation, since she’s lost her luggage, but it points to a larger power struggle between the two, as he shows her the ropes and she continuously berates him.

The cross-dressing isn’t limited to women wearing men’s items. Screwball heroes are sometimes forced to wear women’s clothing. The most famous man to do this was Cary Grant. After Susan steals David’s clothes in Bringing Up Baby, his only option is to throw on a woman’s ruffled robe, an item which stands in stark and fascinating contrast with Susan’s seemingly unisex monogrammed robe. David’s cross-dressing becomes even more controversial when he tells Susan’s aunt that he’s wearing it because he “just went gay all of a sudden.” It’s considered the earliest cinematic use of the word “gay” to mean homosexual. Grant gets girly again in My Favorite Wife, when his new bride presents him with a leopard-print robe to match hers. Its sleeves are too short, and its pattern is feminine. The characters’ donning of such effeminate pieces points to their increased emasculation and helplessness at the hands of the heroines.

To answer the historically relevant and thematically significant question of who wears the pants in the screwball relationship, one need look no further than the characters’ literal clothes. Often the important question becomes, “Who wears the frilly robe?” Odds are it’s not the woman.

Side By Side: Annie Hall & (500) Days of Summer

After posting a Side by Side comparison of Antonioni’s L’eclisse and Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, I couldn’t resist starting a whole new category of posts around the idea.

The next pair of films I would like to compare is Woody Allen’s 1977 romantic comedy Annie Hall and Marc Webb’s 2009 indie rom-com (500) Days of Summer.  It’s a topic I talked about last year on my college’s radio station as part of the show Spectrum.  Anyone interested in listening can go to the Spectrum media archives and download the September 3rd episode.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say (500) Days of Summer is the modern-day Annie Hall.  It places similar themes about love and relationships into a more modern context, and utilizes similarly unconventional storytelling techniques.

First, in terms of mere plot, it’s hard not to recognize the similarities between Annie (Diane Keaton) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel), both of whom lend their names, at least in part, to the titles of their films.  It may be argued that they’re both representative of a stock character called the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” a term coined by critic Nathan Rabin and inspired by Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown (an underrated dramedy, I might add).  Since the term was coined, movie buffs have made lists of which female characters embody this concept, dating from screwball comedies all the way to recent releases.  A recent Cracked video even poked fun at a fictional institution named after Annie Hall which houses Manic Pixie Dream Girls.  The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a free-spirited, often flighty, young woman who brings the main male character out of his shell and turns his world upside down.  Other than this obvious stock character similarity, Annie and Summer are both artsy girls who’ve moved to a big city from the midwest.  Both of them sing, Annie as a bar singer and Summer at a karaoke bar.

Despite the importance of the female characters, both films align the audience with the male protagonists.  Alvy (Woody Allen) and Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are both rather neurotic men who find it impossible to go out with anyone else but the title women.  In both films, the friends and confidantes of the protagonists act as substitutes for the audience, allowing us to understand the hero’s feelings.

Still, a lot of movies feature Manic Pixie Dream Girls and quiet, neurotic men.  What makes (500) Days of Summer so closely related to Annie Hall is the film’s unconventional style of storytelling.  Both films are told in a nonlinear format.  We cut back and forth between time periods throughout the couples’ relationships.  It is evident from the start of both films that the couples are breaking up, and the stories then explain to us how they got to that point.  We get representations of the protagonists’ subjectivity, through fantasy sequences and split screens.  Both films feature some form of animation at one point or another.  Both films feature interviews with the protagonists’ family and friends.  In (500) Days of Summer these interviews are also reminiscent of When Harry Met Sally.  And don’t forget that we see the characters as kids in both movies.

There are two scenes, one from each film, which I think of as representing the unique, experimental style which connects the two films.  In Annie Hall, there is a scene in which Annie and Alvy are getting to know each other.  As they struggle to make themselves sound interesting, we see their thoughts appear as subtitles at the bottom of the screen.  It’s a smart, funny way of letting the audience know what the characters are really feeling.  A similar scene occurs in (500) Days of Summer.  After their breakup, Tom goes to Summer’s house for a party.  In a split screen scene, we see on one side Tom’s expectations of what will happen at the party, involving the pair talking alone for most of the time and eventually kissing.  On the other side of the screen we see the reality.  Summer ignores him for most of the party.  Such experimental techniques for revealing the characters’ subjectivity are what make these two films so closely related.  There’s also a notable split screen scene in Annie Hall which shows the difference between male and female perspectives on relationships.

Ultimately, both films convey similar themes about the end of a relationship.  As both films express, not all love lasts, but that doesn’t mean the experience wasn’t worthwhile.  Often it doesn’t make sense, but we partake in it anyway.

Anyone who loves (500) Days of Summer but who is unfamiliar with Annie Hall should check it out, and vice versa.  Both films are funny, unconventional takes on romance.

Playing Catch-Up: Midnight in Paris

Can I please go to Paris now?

Writer-director Woody Allen’s latest comedy, Midnight in Paris, a four-time nominee at this year’s Academy Awards and winner of the Best Original Screenplay Oscar (which Allen was predictably not present to accept), made me want to fly to Paris as soon as possible.  That’s a fitting response to a film all about longing for a different milieu.

Allen’s latest hero is Gil (Owen Wilson), an idealistic writer visiting Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents.  Inez is a California girl who rolls her eyes at Gil’s romantic musings about Paris in the rain and talks about moving to Malibu, where Gil can continue to write unfulfilling Hollywood movies instead of finishing his novel.  Gil dreams of living in Paris in the 1920s, where artists and intellectuals from Europe and the U.S. alike gathered to work and play.  When Inez runs into an old friend, Paul (Michael Sheen), she drags Gil along to listen to the “pseudo-intellectual’s” “pedantic” lectures on everything from Rodin to Monet, all the while berating Gil for questioning him.  After a particularly pompous wine-tasting, a tipsy Gil decides to say goodbye to the group and take a nighttime stroll through Paris.  He loses his way, and when the clock strikes twelve a vintage car pulls up and a group of boisterous Jazz Age partiers coax him inside for champagne.  Gil soon discovers the time-travelling magic that happens at midnight in Paris.

Owen Wilson’s Gil is basically a Woody Allen stand-in, neurotic and stammering.  There are certain lines he delivers, such as when he explains that he and Inez disagree about a lot but they both like pita bread, which can be perfectly imagined coming out of Allen’s mouth.  Wilson has the same phobic, endearing quality Allen has brought to his characters for decades, but there’s an extra something that makes him refreshing.  Rachel McAdams brings her inner Regina George (Mean Girls) to the table as Inez, who’s condescending and clueless at the same time.  The supporting cast is splendid as well, including Marion Cotillard (below, with Wilson) as Adriana, Gil’s golden-age dream girl, and even French first lady Carla Bruni, who’s engaging as a tour guide.  There are a few other exciting cameos mixed in, but I’d like to save the details to preserve the magic.

The film has quite a few Allen staples.  There’s the dislike of California and mainstream Hollywood, represented by Inez and her $20,000 chairs, a sentiment familiar to Allen’s films since Annie Hall.  There’s the distaste for so-called “pseudo-intellectuals,” a term which comes up a lot in Allen’s films, from Manhattan to Hannah and Her Sisters.  There’s also the love of fantasy, present in similar fashion in the delightful The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which a film-crazed woman falls in love with a leading man when he leaves the screen to be with her.  And don’t forget the love for the 1920s, a la Bullets Over Broadway (“Don’t speak!”).  All these Allen tropes are blended charmingly in a witty and nostalgic comedy, which was made all the more entertaining for me since I’ve been reading the likes of Stein, Eliot, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway in my English classes this semester.  Anyone remotely familiar with Modernism, through art or literature or film, will enjoy the movie’s quirky history lesson.

Allen can craft a mighty fine screenplay. From the very start of the film, a voiceover conversation between Gil and Inez establishes in a few words that Gil is our idealistic hero, and Inez is the girl who wants to crush his dreams.  We realize who we’re rooting for from the get-go.  Allen knows how to create characters through their dialogue, the words they choose and when they decide to speak.

Can we talk about the locale?  No matter what era we’re in, Paris is a character.  I know that sounds cliché, especially after countless behind-the-scenes Sex and the City specials have said the same about New York, but it’s really true here.  Paris comes alive and calls to Gil and the audience alike.  How Inez could resist its charms and brush it off as “corny” is beyond me.

I could compare this to Allen’s other recent films, like Match Point, Vicky Christina Barcelona, and Scoop (which I thought was better than a lot of people gave it credit for), but I don’t think it needs a comparison.  I think it’s an ideal blend of everything Allen loves in one enchanting new comedy.

Playing Catch-Up: Crazy, Stupid, Love (Plus a Rant About Movie Theaters)

I’ve seen Crazy, Stupid, Love twice now.  I know, shame on me for not getting a review written sooner.  I could say that I needed two viewings and days to let the film seep into my brain.  But no.  I just got busy and never got around to writing one.  But I’m writing it now and that’s all that matters.

First, before I go into my review, I’d like to vent for one paragraph.  I saw this film at a discount theater a couple of weeks ago, and the experience made me think.  I don’t see as many films in the first-run theater nowadays as I’d like to, unless it’s at the local art cinema, where I’ve been going to weekday matinees in theaters with fewer than ten people.  I usually see more mainstream films at the discount theater months after their release, and I’ve noticed how obnoxious movie-goers have gotten.  And I got to thinking that going to the movies, especially to mainstream theaters, is kind of like having kids.  You know how parents, especially mothers, always say they’ll never have another child after the torture of childbirth and parenting, but eventually they forget that and have another?  Every time I go to the movies, I think, this is the last straw, I’m not doing this anymore, as latecomers shuffle past me and hiss to their friends fifteen minutes into the movie.  The second time I saw the film, at my on-campus movie theater, the girl sitting in front of me carried on extended text message conversations for the entire two hours.  But I know that I’ll be back in the theater very soon.  Because as annoying as it is to have to shell out ten bucks just to have someone distract you with their cell phone or disrupt you with their tardiness, the movies are just swell.

Anyway, after that rather long tangent, on to the film.  I was really pleased with it, and I pretty much got what I expected.  The trailers aren’t misleading.  Julianne Moore crying about how bad Twilight is (Seriously, why is it so bad?) is just as funny the fiftieth time you hear it, and Steve Carell is just as endearing as he looks.

In case you don’t know, the film is about middle-aged husband and dad Cal (Carell), whose wife Emily (Moore) decides she wants a divorce.  While wallowing at a hip bar, he meets Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a stylish ladies’ man who decides to take Cal under his wing and help him move on after a blow to his manhood.  Cal gets a better fitting suit, a wallet without Velcro, and a new way with the ladies.  But something’s still missing.  Meanwhile, Jacob falls for Hannah (Emma Stone), a bright law student who initially scoffs at his advances.

Dan Fogelman’s script is great, the ideal balance between biting and tender.  The cast is pitch-perfect.  Carell and Stone are just as lovably funny as they always are, although I really needed more Emma.  There just wasn’t enough of her awkward, adorable self, and the stretch of screen time during which we see nothing of her was like an eternity.  Moore and Gosling put drama aside for a while and didn’t seem out of their element.  And supporting actress Analeigh Tipton, who you might remember from cycle 87 (That’s a lie) of America’s Next Top Model (That’s not a lie), is a promising rising star.

Basically, if you like what you saw in the trailer, you’ll like what you’ll get from the film.  If you love Emma Stone, you might be a little disappointed at how little of her there is.  But go watch Easy A and feel better.

Have You Seen It?: The Romantics

I apologize for the lack of posts this past month.  A lot of reading plus a few papers added up to very little free time.  Never fear, however.  I’m back in the sliver of time before finals to share my thoughts on some movies I’ve seen in the past month or so.  The first of these films is The Romantics.  I’d been dying to see this film for a very long time, because it features clothes from J.Crew, and the stars of the film appeared on the clothing brand’s website last year.  As an obsessive fan of J.Crew, I couldn’t resist renting the film.  Oh, how disappointing.

The film is based on a novel by Galt Niederhoffer, who wrote and directed the adaptation.  It follows a group of friends who all dated each other in college.  Now two of them (Anna Paquin and Josh Duhamel) are getting married, and they’ve all gathered for the wedding.  But Katie Holmes’ character might still be in love with the groom.  It’s a pretty basic plot, sure, but it could have become something so witty and interesting.  Instead it turned into a big pile of pretension.

The Romantics tries out every indie hipster cliche in the book.  That’s something I’m normally okay with.  In fact it’s what draws me to movies.  Give me a bunch of people in striped tee shirts and messy hair drinking out of homemade coffee cups in sun-drenched houses and apartments they would obviously never be able to afford shot with a shaky camera and I’ll come running.  But here it’s just so gratuitous.  There are a lot of shots of ethereal trees and old attics in The Romantics.  Things that make you say, “I want to go to there.”  The only problem is that these dream spaces are filled with such unlikable people.  They’re all whiny privileged adult children who refuse to get over what happened to them in college.  They refer to specific streets where incidents happen and blow minor events like stolen dresses and paper-writing out of proportion.  They all think they were once these ingenious intellectuals who wrote 50-page papers on Romantic-era poetry in one night and who edited “The Lit.”  It made me cringe.  And the image of Josh Duhamel and Katie Holmes reading a Keats poem on their phones?  Shudder.  I think Jennie Yabroff of Newsweek said it best:

“There is a brilliant 30-second iPhone commercial hidden in the 95-minute movie The Romantics …. Laura spends the movie trying to get Tom to admit he’s marrying the wrong L, to which end she recites snippets of a Keats poem they both liked in college that Tom now claims not to remember. In a fit of passionate frustration, Laura looks up the poem on her iPhone, then sets out in search of Tom, holding her phone’s lit screen like a beacon. And there, across the massive lawn, is Tom, striding toward her with his own outstretched iPhone, Heathcliff by way of the Apple Store. Isn’t it romantic? Doesn’t it just make you want to … text someone?”

This film could have been something.  It had all the pieces.  But unfortunately, because all the characters were so immature, it left me cold.

And unfortunately the film only takes place over the course of a couple of days, so there were very few outfits to ogle…