Bringing up baby Essay Example For Students

Bringing up baby Essay Screwball comedy shows irreverence for love associated with childish. For instance, comments such as, Stand still, Godfrey. Itll all be over in a minute, as Carole Lombard says to William Powell as their characters are about to be wed in My Man Godfrey demonstrates the ridiculousness and childishness of the upper classes. She seems almost his mother, chiding an impatient and antsy child, and neither of them seems to understand the gravity of their situation, a fact that would not escape the original viewers. It is almost as though they were children playing at getting married, not thinking about the fact that marriage comes with commitments and responsibilities. Many times the adult thing to do is talk about your feelings, no matter how hard that is, and in Love Crazy, if Steve just told Susan exactly what happened at Isobels apartment and what they did, all the craziness could be avoided. Similarly, in The Awful Truth, if Jerry just told Lucy what he did in California and both discussed their strong doubts and feelings, they would have never jumped to erroneous conclusions as to each others faithfulness and ended up divorced. In His Girl Friday, if Walter just admitted that his love for Hildy was stronger than his love for his work, Hildy would never have left and theyd been together before the movie had even started. All their troubles could be avoided if they were just honest and spoke out about what went on inside them instead of playing such extravagant games and expecting themselves and others to jump through ridiculous hoops. In the world of Screwball Comedy, such actions are triggered by an association with the freedom of childhood. (Gehring, p.38) It is their inherent desire to be selfish that keeps them from doing the greater good. Childish behavior would coincide with Steve being impatient about getting his anniversary sex at the end of the night and therefore ruining the night by convincing Susan to do it in reverse, Jerry demanding answers about the Lucys relationship with her teacher but not feeling any responsibility for his actions in California, or Walters concern for making money and getting his girl but complete unconcern with the greater good of society or Hildys feelings. It can be seen that childishness is their inability to contain their composure and retain control over their own desires instead of letting their desires controlling them. Byrge and Miller compliment Gehring in his attempt to capture the characteristics that would describe a childlike nature to the Screwball comedy characters by describing them as, The innocently aggressive, noisily silly, endearingly defiant, and happily destructive way that little children at play repeatedly disturb the peace and boredom of adults vain attempts at domestic tranquility (2). This childishness and inability to accept adult life is one of the most marked elements of a screwball comedy. Romantic comedies take the exact opposite approach to this question. Instead of reverting to childish antics, such as in a screwball comedy, they hold that adult behavior is a more desirable way to live by. Elements such as careers, morality, truth and the feelings of others play into the decision making. For instance, in My Best Friends Wedding, the heroine Julianne and her gay best friend lie on her bed and discuss the moral and ethical ramifications of stealing a groom from his bride and thus destroying another couples wedding in order to satisfy Juliannes selfish desires. This kind of rational discourse is nonexistent in the screwball world. In fact, in the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby, Grant must make the decision between a normal, safe relationship from which he is already committed to or the zany, unpredictable life with the comic anti-heroine. Comparison of Ambulances and First sight EssayWhile he does the right thing according to society, yet he is still always wrong. No one remembers his name and in the very end he gets locked up in the asylum with no one to save him. In a traditional film in which traditional marriage and gender roles were maintained, the husband would not be weak and the strong men in the film would end up well, not in a mental institution. The last questioning of conventional marriage comes in the form of a strong, assertive woman. All the power in the film lies with Susan, Steves wife. In a completely satiric reversal of roles, she is an uncontrollable force, and, rather than being passive in the stereotype of women at that time, she moves the entire story along by herself. Everything is done according to Susans word; she asks for the divorce, she hooks up with Ward, and she sends Steve to the insane asylum. Screwball comedy is entirely female driven, with an eccentric heroine saving an antiheroic leading man from a rigid lifestyle. A classic example is when Hepburns love rescues Grant from his mundane career and equally sterile fianci e in Bringing Up Baby. In addition, the inevitability of the screwball heroines victory is nicely summarized in Lady Eve, when Henry Fonda learns the moral of the screwball comedy: when you think, consider or try to understand, you lose. By considering the morality of being with Barbara Stanwyck, he ends up unhappy and sets himself into a wacky cascade of screwball moments brought about by our heroines thirst for revenge. Every time Fonda throws a quote such as The difference between man and beast is the ability to understand, he learns facts he didnt want to know, such as how many men Stanwyck had been with before him. Fonda doesnt truly learn his lesson until at the end where he finally says, I dont want to understand. Still, the genre also has room for the antiheroic screwball heroine who wins despite herself. In Bringing Up Baby, Hepburn ruins Grants car, ruins his golf game, and loses his opportunity at getting the million dollars grant, and even destroys the brontosaurs exhibit (symbolically the last vestiges of his academic rigidity), but in the end Grant still falls in love with her. Eventually, she both loosens up the classically rigid male and frees him from a domineering, deadening fianci e. This female dominated relationship is not so apparent in romantic comedies The screwball heroine has lost some of her allure. Sleepless in Seattle borrows from screwball comedy without really becoming a part of the screwball genre itself, because it lacks double entendres, fast talk, and the mock adultery. Despite having zany situations and a romantic plot, Sleepless in Seattle is an addition to the romantic comedy genre (Shumway).