Bringing Up Equality: Gender in Howard Hawks' Screwball Comedy 'Bringing Up Baby'

Scientific Essay from the year 2013 in the subject Communications - Movies and Television, grade: 1,0, Pace University, language: English, abstract: The arts, especially films, have always functioned as mirrors of current conditions in society. Gerald Mast states that the reflection of social reality is the primary intention of commercial motion pictures (203). Film comedies, in particular, are able to deal with these conditions in an iconoclastic manner and can question or even expose 'the shams of society,' because they use 'the entertaining comic form' (21). After the imposition of the Production Code on American film productions in 1934, it appears the conservative values of gender, love and family become more consolidated in films. According to Jane Greene, the outcome of this suppression of, for example, explicit sexuality led to an all new genre - the 'screwball comedy' (45). The iconoclastic quality of comedies during that time, hence, relied on a 'unique aesthetic for destroying Hollywood assumptions while appearing to subscribe to them' (Mast 250). In particular, the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) breaks the classical gender roles and undermines male supremacy in the Hollywood conventions long before the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s. In particular, the female lead's 'screwball' actions can be read as a performance in sharp contrast to the Victorian role model of women. In the following analysis of specific scenes, the film's use of the cinematic techniques of mise-en-scene, cinematography, and its opposing main characters in order to construct an equal gender image will be examined, drawing mainly on readings by scholars such as Gerald Mast, S.I. Salamensky, and Stanley Cavell.