Elizabeth Abele

The Screwball Heroine Saves the Day

Joan Wilder: You're leaving? You're leaving me?!
Jack Colton: You're gonna be all right, Joan Wilder. Yea. You always were.

     Like a contemporary Dorothy, Romancing the Stone's Joan Wilder must travel to Columbia and survive incredible adventures to learn that she had always been a capable and valuable person. Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis, 1984) is part of a series of 1980s action comedies that disrupted previous expectations for female heroines. These female protagonists manage to subvert the standard action narrative and filmic gaze, learning to rescue themselves and to resist others' limited vision of them. Not only did these action comedies present strong female characters, they also offered a new filmic experience for female audiences. The commercial success of comic action heroines paved the way for women to appear in serious action roles--without the personal sacrifices required of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley. Figures like Joan Wilder serve as an important link between previous strong yet feminine screen personas and current female stars.

     Led by Laura Mulvey, feminist film critics have discussed the difficulty presented to female spectators by the controlling male gaze and narrative generally found in mainstream film, creating for female spectators a position that forces them into limited choices: "bisexual" identification with active male characters; identification with the passive, often victimized, female characters; or on occasion, identification with a "masculinized" active female character, who is generally punished for her unhealthy behavior. Before discussing recent improvements, it is important to note that a group of Classic Hollywood films regularly offered female spectators positive, female characters who were active in controlling narrative, gazing and desiring: the screwball comedy.

     Comedy often allows for a subversion of the status quo that is not tolerated in more serious genres. Beginning in the 1930s, the subgenre of screwball comedy presented female characters who were active and desiring, without evoking negative characterizations as "unfeminine" or "trampish." Screwball comedies represent a specific form of romantic comedy that features a complicated situation--or more often a series of complications--centered around a strong-willed, unpredictable female. The comedy is generally physical as well as verbal. Screwball and other forms of romantic comedy do not just reverse the masculine/active, feminine/passive paradigm--which as E. Ann Kaplan notes accomplishes little in terms of change--but instead strengthens the female and weakens the male just enough to put them on more equal footing. This paper will demonstrate how the hybrid screwball/action comedies built on audiences’ acceptance of the strong screwball female, allowing heroic females to prove ther strength and agency beyond the home, and without the screwball affect. Strong female characters linked to comedy manage to maintain their emotional health better than non-comic "masculinized" female characters or their male action counterparts.

     The creation of female action heroes works against not only societal expectations but the standard construction of mainstream film. Though Mulvey describes a female spectator’s identification with the male hero as natural yet somehow unhealthy: identifying with the masculine gaze allows women to return to the position of the "little man," "offering an identification with the active point of view allows a woman spectator to rediscover that lost aspect of her sexual identity, the never fully repressed bed-rock of feminine neurosis" (71, emphasis mine). Mulvey sees this cross-identification of women with the active male hero as occurring not only in viewing film, but as a common occurrence with a woman's reading of any standard Western narrative. Trans-sex identification through narrative provides a weak solace for women who are prevented from following their ambition in real life: "However, this Nature does not sit easily and shifts restlessly in its borrowed transvestite clothes" (Mulvey 72).

     In "Desire in Narrative," Teresa de Lauretis offers female spectators less conflicted pleasure through their dual relationship to standard quest narratives. While the masculine narrative is active, the hero's Oedipal journey, the corresponding feminine narrative involves waiting for the hero at the end of his journey. De Lauretis suggests that pleasure from narrative is available for women in the double identification with the figure of narrative movement (male) and the figure of narrative closure (female). Since narrative closure requires both figures at once, it allows a resolvable closure of the female spectator's bisexual identification that her double identification with gaze and image (as voyeur and object) does not.

     It might be thought that a female spectator would find even greater pleasure when the gaze and narrative is aligned with a female character, as occurs in "women's films," like melodrama. However, Mulvey posits that when a woman becomes the central point of narrative, the narrative discourse becomes one of "conflicting desires," or in Freudian terms, "an oscillation between 'passive' feminity and regressive 'masculinity'" (74). Instead of naturalizing a woman's assumption of an active (masculine) position, the results for the female character in this position are seen as disastrous, reaffirming the "naturalness" of her passive (feminine) position: "Rather than dramatizing the success of masculine identification, [the active heroine] brings out its sadness" (79). Sigourney Weaver’s persona demonstrates this problem. Despite her being the only actress with an action franchise, her other roles confirm as an unnatural woman, rather than as a positive role model: Ripley is closer to the monster than to any humans; she becomes a monster-bride in Ghostbusters; in Copycat, she is the poster-girl for serial killers; and in Ice Storm, she is a coldly poisonous wife, mother, and lover.

     Luckily for female spectators (and the characters they watch), there have been better options that critics have overlooked. Screwball comedy offers women less conflicted and more pleasurable spectator positions than those described by Mulvey and De Lauretis, while presenting active female characters who are neither punished, saddened, nor masculinized by their success. In Screwball Comedy: A Genre of Madcap Romance, Wes D. Gehring describes the balance in these romantic comedies between an anti-heroic male and a dominant female. In screwball comedies, the female character controls the action (often occupying a superior social/financial position to the anti-hero), but preserves her femininity through her "screwball" affect. Through the course of the film, the anti-hero often regains (through the capers initiated by the screwball heroine) his agency and/or manliness that he was lacking at the beginning of the story.

     Though the narrative and the gaze in a screwball comedy may attempt to follow traditional male patterns, the screwball heroine continually subverts them. Though she present herself as a prospective object of the male gaze, she rarely remains motionless or stops talking long enough to conform to the fully objectified position--in Mulvey's terms, the flow of the action cannot freeze to contemplate her erotically because she won't sit still for it. The only time the heroine slows down is to direct her gaze, and the camera's, to contemplation of the anti-hero. Though her desire for the anti-hero generally becomes evident early on, the anti-hero's awareness of the screwball heroine as the object of his desire is often blocked to almost the end of the film. Similarly, the narrative may anticipate following the direction put forth by the anti-hero only to have the action hijacked by the heroine in another direction entirely. In this genre it may be more appropriate to discuss a female masculine gaze and male masculine gaze, since both perspectives are active, but not necessarily supportive of each other.

     Gehring cites Rosalind Russell's autobiography as an example of the agency of the actresses who regularly appeared in screwball comedy:

     Hawks] encouraged us [in His Girl Friday] and let us go ...once Cary [Grant] looked straight out of a scene and said to Hawks (about something I was trying), "Is she going to do that?" and Hawks left the moment in the picture--Cary's right there on film asking an unseen director about my plans.

     The fact that Hawks left in Grant's appeal for aid demonstrates that the anti-heroes inability to control the screwball heroine is a part of the genre–as is the male star and director’s inability to tame the screwball actress. Perhaps not coincidentally, Gehring individually identifies Katharine Hepburn and Carole Lombard, two of the defining actresses of this genre, as daughters of suffragettes/proto-feminists.

     Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) is considered a classic screwball text, that can also be read as a heroic quest/action text. Grant plays David Huxley, a paleontologist who is trying to finish reconstructing a brontosaurus skeleton, marry his fiance, and secure a million-dollar gift for his museum in one weekend. Not only does Susan consistently interfere with David’s completion of his goals, she drafts him into helping her with a pet leopard, Baby. Susan’s active desire for David, which leads her to constantly change his narrative, is revealed in the camera’s constant and luscious gaze directed at David/Grant.²

     The camera has a harder time gazing at Katharine Hepburn in this film. Susan first appears as she interrupts David’s golf game with his potential benefactor, hijacking David’s putt and his car.³

     The action/quest elements of the story are introduced when Susan and David take the pet leopard to her aunt’s farm in Connecticut: "Baby" escapes; David’s priceless bone is buried by the dog; and a vicious zoo leopard is also roaming the countryside. Though Susan proves that she could have solved these misadventures on her own, she plays the screwball to convince David that she needs him by her side. "Without me, Susan is helpless," he exclaims, just before she drags the wild leopard into the police station. David is given the chance to play the hero, as he drives the leopard into a jail cell.

     As mentioned before, the screwball heroine generally ends with the upper hand. After the dust has fallen from David's lost donation, dinosaur bone and fiance, Susan corners David in the museum with his brontosaurus skeleton. Although he scrambles up a platform to avoid her, she climbs a ladder to talk to him, presenting him with the lost bone and the million dollars. As she laments that he hates her (and her ladder begins to wobble) David admits that he loves her--a moment that is interrupted by Susan's falling ladder and then the crumbling skeleton. David "saves" Susan, but she immediately takes over with her chattering--"Oh, David. Forgive me. You can. You still love me. You do."--wrapping up the film's narrative. While in Teresa de Lauretis' discussion of patriarchal narrative the heroine waits at the end of the hero's journey, the screwball heroine will journey to claim her man.

     Building on the desire, strength and agency of the female character in this genre, the screwball comedy has served as a model to bring female protagonists into the action genre: Desperately Seeking Susan (Susan Siedelman, 1983), Romancing the Stone (Robert Zemeckis, 1984), American Dreamer (Rick Rosenthal, 1984), and Innerspace (Joe Dante, 1987). In her discussion of the first three comedies, Mimi White focuses on their relation to the melodrama as well as to romance novels, rather than focusing on their use of comedy. While White acknowledges that the positioning of these narratives within fantasy allows for greater ideological play, she is concerned that the films’ use of fantasy may subvert them as depictions of women's independence¹ and agency. However, I believe their connection to writing provides a strong enough foundation for their agency that the charges of fantasy become moot. Through their position as writers--from Rosanna Arquette’s private journal writing to Meg Ryan’s work as an investigative reporter--these women not only question and shape the narrative of their own lives, but also enhance their professional position. As a way of introducing to mainstream cinema the image of women as creative, courageous, and determined, these hybrid romance/comedy/fantasy/action films made these "new" women palatable--and highly commercial.

     Like earlier screwball comedies, Romancing the Stone is a female-controlled narrative: the film even begins with romance novelist Joan Wilder's (Kathleen Turner) voice-over narration of the ending of Angelina's Revenge, that is in turn told through Angelina's first person narration, creating a doubly female-controlled opening narrative. Though Angelina is dressed provocatively, the camera's focus is on what she sees and her desires. The novel ends with her achievement of her greatest desire, Jesse.

     The author/narrator Joan is revealed in tears, without make-up and in flannel, a figure resistant to the desire of the male gaze (somehow this film manages to make Kathleen Turner look plain for the first hour). A poster of Jesse watches over Joan; the only man Joan finds worth desiring is this one that she has created. Despite her professional success, her "screwiness" is suggested in this first scene: since she is out of toilet paper and kleenex, she must blow her nose on the note reminding her to buy these items.

     Joan's humdrum reality is disrupted when she must take a treasure map to Columbia to ransom her sister--but the kidnappers only temporarily manage to highjack Joan's mastery of narrative. The kidnapping introduces two key elements to the film: the melodrama of her sister’s danger justifies Joan moving into an active role; and Joan’s masterful sister is revealed as a whimpering fraud, dependent on the "softer" Joan.

     The formula for Romancing the Stone most closely resembles the dynamics of the screwball classic It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) in which Claudette Colbert plays an heiress and Clark Gable plays a rough newspaper reporter who helps Colbert and travels with her as she tries to evade her father. He starts out helping her out of self-interest, but somewhere along the road his concern for her becomes real.

     But since this is also an adventure film, Joan's bus strands her in the midst of the Columbian jungle, not at a Florida bus station. When the sinister General Zola threatens to shoot Joan to get the map, Jack (Michael Douglas) appears over the hill, presenting the same silhouette as the poster of Jesse. The action freezes on this shadowy figure, before Jack draws his rifle and drives Zola away. The bedraggled and shaken Joan must pay Jack to escort her through the jungle to a phone--but she still maintains enough control to bargain him down from $500 to $375.

     Though it initially seems that Joan is totally dependent on Jack--she is woefully unprepared for walking through the jungle--she soon shows her worth and ability to set the course of action. When they are attacked by Zola's soldiers, she accidentally finds a way across the ravine that Jack follows; when Jack tires, she takes over clearing a trail with the machete; when they find a village of drug runners, Joan turns a dangerous drug lord into an ally. A fan of her books, Juan begs her to make him a character in her narrative.

     But before she becomes a true action heroine, Jack sees her as more of a screwball heroine, controlling the action and him through her misdeeds: "Did you wake up this morning and say 'today, I am going to ruin a man's life?'" Joan’s opening clumsiness obscures her abilities from herself, Jack, and the audience: she takes the wrong bus; she distracts the bus driver, causing him to wreck into Jack’s jeep; she has no practical clothes; and a mudslide carries her down a mountain. The famous scene in which Joan and Jack get caught in a mudslide is reminiscent of a (less dramatic) scene from Bringing Up Baby when David and Susan slide down a small hill. Joan's introduction as a screwball heroine allows the audience and other characters to gradually adjust to her position as action heroine.

     For the majority of the film, Jack's attractiveness is displayed more prominently than Joan's. She initially resists seeing Jack as desirable, resists seeing the obvious fact that Jack is the living embodiment of Jesse: all she sees is Jack's rudeness, that he's not "trustworthy." Only after he saves her from a poisonous snake does she really look at him, asking Jack to talk about himself. He tells his story directly to the camera, while she is off to the side gazing sleepily at him. The scene ends with her asking what the "T" stands for in "Jack T. Colton." When he replies charmingly in full close-up, "Trustworthy," he presents himself as her object of desire.

     Joan does not begin her duckling-into-swan transformation until after Jack sees Joan through the eyes of Juan, a die-hard fan of hers, who gives Jack one of her novels. Her professional position is tied to her attractiveness as a woman, rather than presented as a detriment. Before this scene, Jack only looked at a picture of a sailboat with desire, even addressing it as "honey." But after Juan helps them escape, Jack looks up from reading Joan's novel to see her picking flowers: Joan's hair is flowing, her legs are exposed, and her face is radiant, resembling Angelina. Though she arrives at the evening fiesta in a new outfit, his attire and dancing still displays him as the to-be-looked-at: she seems awkward and her clothes hide her body, while he is suave, his clothes tight-fitting, and his shirt almost completely unbuttoned. However his greater attractiveness and confidence are needed to balance her superior power and position, making him a worthy partner.

     After they make love, Joan agrees to take a more aggressive stance with the kidnappers, to find the Stone before they surrender the map. Joan emerges as the more competent one in the treasure hunt and the rescue of her sister. Though Jack participates, she is responsible for their success: deciphering the map’s clues, suggesting a solution from her novel, and driving the car into a wild river to evade Zola’s men. Later while Joan is battling Zola to save herself and her sister, Jack is trying to prevent a yellow-tailed alligator from disappearing with the treasure in his stomach. Though he releases the alligator to respond to Joan's cries for help, she actually defeats Zola before he arrives. However, it was necessary to the story that he release the alligator to prove that he cared more for Joan than the Stone. As he is about to disappear after the alligator, he tells her--"You're going to be all right, Joan Wilder. You always were."--acknowledging the strength and ability that she had before she ever met him.

     The Joan that is seen in New York (presenting her publisher with a novelized version of her Columbian adventures) is beautiful, radiant and confident--unlike the nervous mouse at the start of the film. Also, unlike Susan, Joan is no longer a screwball heroine: she is fully aware of her desires and her abilities. Her latest novel ends with Jack’s character surprising her at the airport--instead he surprises her in New York. When she sees parked in front of her apartment building a sailboat and Jack, she climbs the ladder to him, bringing him flowers (as with Susan’s ascent in Bringing Up Baby this is a "masculine" move, indicative of her active desire). He tells her that he missed her so much that he even read one of her books; she replies: "Then you know how they all end," closing the narrative. As the final shot reveals that the name of the boat is "Angelina," Joan's control of this narrative and its ending is reinforced.

     The resolution of the film with Joan confident of her strength and beauty and Jack financially secure through the Stone is necessary for the characters to join on equal footing. As she proved herself to him (and herself) through the action narrative, he must prove himself through the unseen fight with the alligator. But the focus of the film is about her agency, her adventure, her desire--not his.

     While Sigourney Weaver’s masculinized persona has proved problematic, Kathleen Turner frequently portrayed women who were loving wives or mother, despite consistently playing women of strength, often in stereotypically male professions. Similarly, Meg Ryan, Holly Hunter, Geena Davis, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Helen Hunt have successfully moved from romantic comedy into serious action roles without having to abandon feminine possibilities. Romance and comedy allows a female actor’s persona to be strong without becoming emotionally frozen or deformed.

     Following these writer/fantasy films, other comedies featured active women in adventure/comedies, presenting characters in a wider range of professions, bringing in elements of others genres, and occasionally relegating romance to a garnish. While Romancing the Stone focuses on claiming the narrative, Adventures in Babysitting (Chris Columbus, 1987) questions the primacy of the gaze and romance in a young woman’s discovery of her own agency. This hybrid film opens like a teen romance, only to push aside romance to the margins of this adventure parody; Adventures builds on the foundation of Romancing the Stone, but offers a new step forward through its independence from romance and exotic locales. Despite the irony-laden dialogue ("I’ll guard [Sara] with my life"--which she does), the respect and authority expressed toward the heroic babysitter is meant to be sincere and deserved.

     Chris is first seen as a typical teen romantic lead, primping for a date and lip-synching to the passive-female ditty "And Then He Kissed Me." As she rushes down the stairs, she tells herself: "This is going to be the greatest night of my life." Alas, her boyfriend Mike cancels the date and her best friend Brenda lectures her unsympathetically before abandoning Chris to babysit the Andersons’ daughter Sara. Their adolescent son Brad has long worshiped Chris from afar, and his best friend Darrell thinks she looks like the current month’s Playboy centerfold. Prior to this adventurous evening, Chris has been a compliant and willing object of masculine gaze.

     The action is again prompted by the melodramatic pleas of the "independent" female: a hysterical Brenda is stranded at the downtown Chicago bus station. Chris can find no solution but to take the three kids with her. Babysitting is treated throughout the film as a professional responsibility that cannot be easily laid down once begun.

     Unlike screwball comedies or even screwball/action comedies, Chris navigates the perilous journey from the suburbs into the heart of the jungle (Chicago) without a male partner. The kids all try to help, but they are ultimately dependent on her courage and direction. Despite the absence of the anti-hero and a screwy femail, this film maintains the feel of a screwball comedy through the constant flow of extreme situations. As she successfully negotiates a freeway blowout, a domestic disturbance, a carjacking, a highwire escape, a gang standoff, and a frat party, Chris proves that she is more than a pretty face. Brad confesses that he initially had a crush on her just because she was pretty; now that he understands that she is smart and "really cool," he tells her that she deserves better than Mike, "a loser airhead." Those who mistake her for the Playboy centerfold, the ultimate objectified female, are portrayed as foolish and are corrected: "she doesn’t hold a candle to you."

     In the opening sequence, Chris is purely visual, capable of only lip-synching or appearing on her boyfriend’s arm. Through the course of the evening, Chris gains confidence in her own abilities and find the courage to speak up for herself and her charges. When they end up on a nightclub stage in their flight from the gangsters, she is told, "no one leaves this stage until they sing the blues." Despite her protests that she can’t sing, Chris finds her voice, ably singing her troubles in "Those Babysitting Blues." The band joins with her to proclaim that her work is "so hard." Male characters throughout the film affirm that babysitting is difficult and dangerous, and that Chris is doing a great job. She finds strength in her position. "No one fools with the babysitter," she threatens, as she pulls the knife from Brad’s toe and holds off gang members.

     Chris learns that she can stand on her own. Toward the end of the evening, they see her boyfriend Mike out with another girl. Chris breaks up with him without hesitation or a great display, though Brad and Darrell can’t resist the opportunity to tell him off and publicly humiliate him.

     The naturalness of Chris’ active role is confirmed by Sara. This curly-haired blond girl worships the comic-book character Thor, wears her helmet constantly, and even steals her brother’s Clearasil to color pictures of her idol. (She has no sympathy for her brother’s fussing over his appearance). Though the youngest, she is brave and resourceful throughout the course of the evening, even crawling out a skyscraper window to escape a gangster. Sara is also responsible for overcoming a major barrier: when the garage owner refuses to release their car, she insists on believing in his goodness (he resembles Thor) and generously offers him her beloved helmet. Neither Sara nor Chris need to play the screwball to be strong and girlish.

     When the four have safely returned to the suburbs--barely beating the parents home--the kids thank Chris for giving them the "greatest night of their life." Chris tells them that it was also the greatest night in her life. Joan Wilder similarly tells Jack that he has been her "best time." While Joan’s best time involved adventure and romance, Chris’s best time involved adventure and friendship, as well as the rejection of Mike and false romance, whom she originally thought would give her "her greatest night." The film does end with the appearance of the nice college boy who helped them earlier–someone who respects Chris, and even Brad approves of–but this promise of romance was not necessary for Chris or the successful completion of the narrative. She has the courage to stand alone, as well as the courage to not lose herself or her agency in a new relationship.

     My purpose in discussing screwball comedy is to show one area within classic Hollywood cinema where more complex representations of women and female spectator positions existed--and with Romancing the Stone and Adventures in Babysitting to demonstrate how these possibilities for female pleasure have been built on and are continuing to be built on. The comedic and/romantic elements of Raising Arizona (Joel Coen, 1987), Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), True Lies (James Cameron, 1994), Congo (Frank Marshall, 1995) and Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) reinforced the image of the strong woman, a figure essential to the box office success of films like Twister (Jan de Bont, 1996), Titanic (James Cameron, 1997), Double Jeopardy(1999), and The Bone Collector (Philip Noyce, 1999).

     Robin Wood wrote that "works are of especial interest when the defined particularities of an auteur interact with specific ideological tensions and when the film is fed from more than on generic source" (479). Though I am not here to defend the "auteur" status of any of these directors, it is safe to say that directors like Robert Zemeckis, Chris Columbus, Joel Coen, and James Cameron have proven their ability to create multivant yet highly popular films that manage to challenge previous notions of heroism, family, and gender. And an essential to their success has been the way that they have blended previous generic formulas, previous familiar images, to create new formulas for an evolving society.

     Despite the best efforts of feminism, we still live in a patriarchal society. But as feminism has made inroads in creating a less rigid version of patriarchy, so has feminist attitudes and feminist cinema worked to create less rigid representations of women, their desires and their agency. My purpose in this paper has not been to deny the misogynistic attitudes that were reproduced in Classic Hollywood cinema but to reveal some images of women that were simultaneously present in these films that produced resistant models and pleasures for the female spectator. As there were strong women in America before feminism, there were strong representations of women before feminist cinema. More can be achieved if we recognize and build on the accomplishments of our complete history, rather than to build a resistance from scratch.

Works Cited

• Bell-Metereau, Rebecca. Hollywood Androgyny. 2^nd ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.
• De Lauretis, Teresa. "Desire in Narrative." Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. 103-57.
• Gehring, Wes D. Screwball Comedy: A Genre of Madcap Romance. New York, Greenwood, 1986.
• Kaplan, E. Ann. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Methuen, 1983.
• Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Feminism and Film Theory. Ed. Constance Penley. New York: Routledge, 1988. (first appeared in Screen, 1974)
• ---. "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' inspired by Duel in the Sun." Feminism and Film Theory. Ed. Constance Penley. New York: Routledge, 1988.
• White, Mimi. "Representing Romance: Reading/Writing/Fantasy and the 'Liberated' Heroine of Hollywood Films of the 1980s." Gender: Literary and Cinematic Representations. Ed.Jeanne Ruppert. Gainesville: UP Florida, 1989. 96-117.

Notes

• 1. Gehring defines the anti-hero as an American humorous figure, who is urban, apolitical, childlike, with an abundance of leisure who is frustrated by society in general and women in particular.
• 2. I discuss Bringing Up Baby and active female desire in greater detail in "The Glory of Cary Grant and Other Girlish Desires" in Images.
• 3. Rebecca Bell-Metereau writes in Hollywood Androgyny: "Part of [Hepburn's] appeal resides in the fact that we see her (not a stand-in) exerting herself, tensing her muscles, and being active in a way that many movie heroines were not" (237).

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Elizabeth Abele (sounds like probably) has just moved to the New York City area, where she is editing her dissertation, an examination action films and domesticity. A Ph.D. candidate in English at Temple, her essay on Cary Grant was selected for Best American Movie Writing 1999 from St. Martin's Press.

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