Screwball Comedies: Constructing Romance, Mystifying Marriage

Abstract

As floating signifiers go, romance has gotten around more than usual. The term has long designated several different generic categories of prose fiction, as well as a particular kind of subject matter with which fiction, romance or novel, may deal. There are film genres, such as romantic comedy, that derive their identity from their concern with love and courtship. But in film studies, the term has additionally named both a self-conscious component of a Hollywood product, its love-interest, and also a frequent element of the ideological effect known as narrative displacement. Romance is very often the receptacle of displacement, which is fitting for a term that also has come to be almost a synonym for illusion. But to treat romance as merely illusion or false-consciousness will lead one to ignore the particular characteristics of its construction and effect. What most analyses of both literature and film have failed to acknowledge is that romance has itself been treated as an ideology by feminist writers such as Shulamith Firestone and Juliet Mitchell. While this ideology is pervasive in Hollywood films, it is perhaps most central to the screwball comedy.1 The most sustained analysis of screwball comedy to date is Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness. Despite the fact that the focus of Cavell's argument is marriage, he neglects the feminist perspective almost entirely and the significant body of feminist film study completely. This is certainly a major reason for his failure to understand the cultural work of the genre. Where Cavell goes wrongand it is hardly a peripheral place-is his position that the screwball comedies he discusses succeed in enlightening us about marriage itself. My argument is that they do just the opposite: they mystify marriage by portraying it as the goal-but not the end-of romance. The major cultural work of these films is not the stimulation of thought about marriage, but the affirmation of marriage in the face of the threat of a growing divorce rate and liberalized divorce laws. What an analysis of screwball comedies will show is that romance functions as a specific ideology that is used by these films to mystify marriage. I hope to show how screwball comedies typically construct the viewer as subject of their romance so that he or she must feel marriage as the thing desired. I will then consider how certain elements in the genre suggest a critique of marriage, and examine how these elements can become dominant in such films as Adam's Rib and Desperately Seeking Susan.