Surface vs depth: Ernst Lubitsch's That Uncertain Feeling as anti-late modernism

Abstract

ABSTRACTScrewball comedies generally involve a small-size kind of conflict: the one opposing husband and wife. However, they can often mirror much larger conflicts, for instance the clash between two very different ideas of society that so-called modernity has brought along between nineteenth and twentieth century. This fight finds an outstandingly subtle and significant expression in Ernst Lubitsch's That Uncertain Feeling. By means of a close allegorical reading of a few key moments in that film, my article will try to demonstrate that this motion picture is seemingly prescient of late modernism, that is, according to Fredric Jameson (the main theoretical reference of my argument) modernism's terminal phase in the years postmodernism had already started to dawn (typically, the two decades following Second World War). Neither a ‘modernist’ nor (of course) a ‘postmodernist’ work, Lubitsch's film deals with the conflict between these two historical dimensions, especially by emphasizing a particular binary opposition: depth vs surface.