Bringing Up Baby (1938)

At this moment, I consider Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby the greatest comedy Hollywood ever produced. I may change my mind. I haven’t always been that fond of it. Each time I watched it in the past (there have been many) I saw something iffy, and it was always something different — chunky pacing, stuffy accents, some stumbles by Cary Grant, excessive plot moves. Stuff like that. But at some point the image flipped like Susan Vance’s upside-down map. The sheer density of inspired invention, the seamless fusion of physical and verbal humor, the laughing-gas trance of the plot, Katherine Hepburn’s mind-boggling performance, and then the ultimate flip: the rigorous logic of all the nonsense. Its many little flaws aren’t flaws for me any more, they’re the rough edges that signify spontaneity and inspiration. Lubitsch and Sturges made more knowing comedies and there are other masterpieces, but Bringing Up Baby is one of a kind. It’s like a Joe DiMaggio batting streak. It’s a document of what it’s like to be in the zone, possessed by the Comic Spirit.

Some film scholars believe that screwball comedy was a style designed deliberately to outsmart the Hays Code by sneaking double entendres past the censors in dizzying supersonic patter. I’m skeptical about the theory’s validity for most members of the class but Bringing Up Baby is a gigantic exception. It may be the filthiest sex comedy in cinema history that does not titillate or even mention sex. When I used to teach the film I would tell my students that they should treat anything they think might be a sexual pun or double meaning as intentional. The film could be projected on a split screen, with one screen showing the clean and innocent version that’s family friendly and the other with appropriate subtitles as a sex farce that uses a huge toolbox of sex jokes on a spectrum from Freudian mechanisms to Tampa Red’s hokum blues, “Let me play with your poodle.” It’s one of the wildest, most uninhibited films that Hollywood produced in the era. Although its general zaniness is often considered the limit case of screwball humor, folks often don’t appreciate how much avoiding explicit allusions to sex govern the film. If there’s a core text for the game “phallus, phallus, who’s got the phallus?” Bringing Up Baby is it.

Most critics take note of the subsurface ribaldry but they seem embarrassed enough by it to move on to safer things, like Cary Grant’s and Katherine Hepburn’s acting styles, Hawks’s use of overlapping dialogue and slapstick, or the Connecticut wilderness as a Forest of Arden surrogate (I kid you not). But sexual punning is so frequent, and occurs on so many levels, that it’s clearly not a side-issue, it’s the point — or at least one of them. We have two romantic leads who are both innocently unaware of how much erotic longing infuses their thinking, let alone how the pixillated world they live in runs on good old Freudian sublimation. No matter how much folks try to keep it down, someone — or the comic world itself — keeps bringing it up. Bringing Up Baby is a one-joke comedy: the gap between the characters’ innocent lack of awareness of their sexuality and the audience’s experienced, urbane recognition of it. It’s a single joke, but varied with enormous creativity and humor.

Technically, it begins with the title, which sounds like a parenting manual — but there’s no human baby in the film. In the plot, it refers to the transporting of the tame leopard, a gift for Susan Vance (Hepburn) from her brother in Brazil. But that seems like a trifling thing to hang a movie’s title on, and it’s not an important plot point. Besides, there are no leopards in Brazil. So maybe, just maybe, it’s a ridiculous allusion to something, or some things, else. Perhaps operationally prepubescent male sexuality — like David’s. Before one can have a real baby, one needs to bring the metaphorical one up. In pre-code days Mae West would have gotten a lot of mileage out of that metaphor. Or perhaps it refers to bringing up the “inner baby” of polymorphous perverse pleasure.

In the action itself, the sexual pixillation is introduced with the dinosaur and its missing bone. Dr. David Huxley (Cary Grant) is excitedly expecting the delivery of the last bone to be installed in the reconstructed skeleton of the brontosaurus. But if it’s the last missing bone, what on earth is the bone he’s holding in his hand that he can’t figure out how to place?

If he can’t place the bone in his hand, how does he know the intercostal clavicle that he expects is the last bone? Maybe it’s another kind of bone.

DAVID: Alice, I think this one must belong in the tail.

ALICE: Nonsense, you tried it in the tail yesterday and it didn’t fit.

This comedy of cheerful castration thickens when Susan learns what it’s like to be on the receiving end in the restaurant scene, possibly the funniest Freudian scene in American movies, simultaneously applying displacement theory and making fun of it. David arrives at the fancy restaurant dressed like a man about town in tails and a top hat to have another try at Mr. Peabody and Mrs. Random’s funds. (Fittingly, Mrs. Random, Susan’s Aunt Elizabeth [May Robson] will prove to be one of the few rational agents in the story-world. That alone will make her eccentric.) There he encounters Susan once again. She’s wearing a see-through wimple on her head, she’s been drinking martinis, and learning how to toss olives into her mouth from the bartender.

The clowning expands from a vaudeville pratfall into yet another displacement extravaganza. David has been anxious about where to put his top hat, the insignia of both high class and masculine power — you don’t need much theory to recognize it as a vehicle for the comic phallus. He decides to “hold onto it” rather than give it to the attractive hat-check girl, until, that is, he slips on one of Susan’s dropped olives and flattens it. Up to this point, Susan has been in control of David’s objects, but now she’s lost control of one of her own — not that she minds, since it’s David who pays the price…again. The proud and erect hat has been flattened. David puts cause and effect together: “First you drop an olive, then I sit on my hat. It all fits perfectly.” (Unlike the dinosaur bone.) Displacement literally means to move something from its “proper” place. Once displacement reaches a certain pitch one must adopt a word from French, the language of the masters of stray billets doux and straw hats: derangement. David is coming to realize that the world outside his fossil framework is consistently, cheerfully deranged.

Susan remains in her dreamworld but she’s become interested enough in David to take advantage of some outside reference. The convenient surrogate authority from the real world is the Viennese psychiatrist-with-a-tic, Dr. Fritz Lehman (Fritz Feld). Naturally, Dr. Lehman provides her with some displacement theory (“The love impulse in man very frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict”). It’s sound enough both for romance and comedy, but it’s a bit too sane for Susan’s world. She mistakenly picks up the wrong purse — it belongs to Dr. Lehman’s wife, and is uncannily nearly identical to Susan’s, implying maybe that women’s purses mean more than a bag where they keep their money. Susan entrusts the wrong bag to David, who’s left holding it and even gallantly defending Susan’s ownership of it, to his eventual embarrassment. He’s getting it from all sides, his own possessions and Susan’s, too. Susan tends to lose control of her own displacements — but she seems to think it’s normal, not worthy of embarrassment.

David attempts an escape, but Susan, convinced that his anger is displaced “love impulse,” follows him, pulls on his tail (of his coat) and rips it. Then, insulted by David’s suggestion that they play hide and seek in earnest (without the seek), she storms away, unaware that David’s foot is on the hem of her dress, which also tears. Now both have exposed backsides. David gallantly attempts to cover Susan’s by slapping his semi-collapsed top hat on it, eliciting her classic protest: “Will you stop doing that with your hat!” As soon as she recognizes her compromised position, she accepts David’s chivalrous maneuver of pressing close to her from the back as they march out in step like a vaudeville act leaving the stage — to the laughter of the restaurant’s customers.

It’s dizzying how many high- and low- concept gags there are in this scene. Over and above the flattened hat, slippery olives, mistaken purses, and exposed rear ends (the meaning of which is clear to any dog – good thing George was not present) there is a conceptually uproarious focus on a question that’s basically a through-line of Bringing Up Baby: who’s following whom? Freshly armed with her new bit of Dr. Lehman’s psychoanalysis, Susan confronts David with it, mixing it up in a beautifully Freudian projection malaprop.

SUSAN: Do you know why you’re following me? You’re a fixation.

DAVID: I’m not following you. I haven’t moved from this spot.

SUSAN: Please, you’re following me.

DAVID: Don’t be absurd.

SUSAN: Who’s always behind whom?

DAVID: My dear young lady, I haven’t been behind anything…but what they might call the eight ball.

Everybody knows coincidence is not causality — except in art, dreams, and delirium. David has never intended to meet Susan but circumstantially she’s correct. He caught up with her on the golf course, he lagged behind her in the parking lot, he arrived after her at the restaurant, and he literally walks behind her as they exit it. This will happen again and again for quite some time — David will be following Susan’s lead whether he likes it or even knows or not. He also follows Mr. Peabody, George the dog, and Baby the panther. But it’s not only a matter of David’s cluelessness and timidity. It’s about the logic of cause and effect. David is the straight man for whom effects follow causes like logical propositions. For Susan, they get mixed up — effects come before causes, just as attraction seeks its occasions. None of Susan’s ostensibly reasonable plans work the way she plans them, but somehow she stays in the lead and David follows. (When David leads, disaster follows — torn tailcoats, buttslides down a riverbank, dunkings in the river.)

All that and we’re barely 17 minutes into the film. “Baby” finally appears, basically out of nowhere. Susan’s brother has sent her a gift leopard from Brazil, aka the Unconscious. Susan is totally comfortable with the beast — a big gentle cat who likes jazz-pop. He’s a pretty hip cat. Susan’s affinity with Baby is marked by the tiger-striped dress she’s wearing when she lets David into her apartment, having invited him to rescue her by faking a mortal cat attack. David arrives holding tightly a box containing the newly delivered brontosaurus bone. In contrast with the tiger-woman, David is freaked out by the leopard like a cartoon housewife who’s seen a mouse. Not only has Susan retained the phallus, her power is growing tremendously. She’s a tiger-woman with a leopard pet. He’s a housewife-man hiding his bone in a box. Commentators often see the leopard as an emanation of Susan’s id, in libidinal contrast to David’s superego-wracked fossil of an extinct dinosaur. What’s more, the dangerous beast from Brazil really takes a shine to David.

Delirious coincidences expand — in terms of both the plot and the metaphors. Baby proves to be able to move from automobile to automobile as freely as Susan does. Another car is abducted, this time the horsepower of Dr. Lehman himself, who just happens to be on the scene in a Connecticut town that just happens to be hosting a carnival complete with a circus just as David just happens to be buying raw meat for the libidinal panther Baby and in front of Constable Slocum (Walter Catlett), the diminished local representative of Law and Order. Susan drives her stolen getaway car with David and Baby in tow, leaving the helpless little superegos, Slocum and Dr. Lehman, in the dust.

Arriving at the Connecticut estate of Susan’s Aunt Elizabeth (who is also of course the Mrs. Random of the endowment funds) where they intend to park Baby, David’s epic of masculine humiliation moves from culture to nature, and his comic psychoanalytic conflicts move from social gender status to biological myth. Up to this point David has seen his masculinity humiliated as a marital partner (no honeymoon for you), a professional expert (“where does this bone go?”), a virile sportsman (“you’re playing my ball”), a shrewd negotiator (“I’ll be with you in a minute, Mr. Peabody”), a man about town (“you sat on your hat”), a man of reason (Dr. Lehman, on occasion of David refusing to surrender the purse: “It is madness for you to say it is not my wife’s”), and a defender of women (“I don’t like leopards”).

In the scenes set in Aunt Elizabeth’s Riverdale, a pastoral preserve, the intercostal clavicle slips out of David’s grasp into the jaws of George the terrier, who spirits it away and buries it in one of the many holes he digs. And that bone is no longer just the lack in his social manhood, it has become a lack in his male nature. The new humiliations are mythic regressions, beginning with his heterosexuality. (For Freudians, homosexuality represented a more infantile sexual orientation than good upstanding, mature, adult heterosexuality. )

David then loses in short order his name (becoming “Mr. Bone”), his adulthood (as he chases George like a child), and finally even his humanity (as he becomes-dog, imitating George’s hole-digging technique). All this regression is gleefully facilitated by Susan — whose spirit of play is delighted not to fit into any rigidly fixed qualities of a normal adult.

Eventually, David loses his status as an upright law-abiding bourgeois, ending up in Slocum’s jail under suspicion of being the arch-criminal, Jerry the Nipper. (It’s good to recall that criminality was widely believed at the time to be a biological trait.) Susan has re-named him a second time, to a second archetype. (It’s worth noting that David’s “real” name, Huxley, intimates many latent jokes about Darwin’s most famous student, Thomas Huxley, the vocal advocate of progressive evolution and originator of the ape-to-human chart that might well finish with the image of Rodin’s Man-the-Thinker, the pose in which we first see David. One of those jokes is how Man-the-Hard-Thinker “evolves” through Susan’s mediation into homo ludens, the playful human.) David has become the total schlimazel. He’s comically deprived of almost everything that could embody his masculinity, and Susan has been the cause — formal, final, and efficient. At every step she has appropriated the tools of his manhood — sometimes voluntarily (by stealing his clothes), but usually unconsciously in the course of being who she is. It’s also significant that all three of the libidinal animals, the two leopards and George, come into David’s world from hers. The movie beasts have inspired a lot of interpretation. Most of it identifies the animals as “life forces” versus the brontosaurus fossil, or alternatively pinning the leopards and the terrier down as emanations from David’s and Susan’s unconscious, respectively. But making them into formal surrogates doesn’t work very well, since all of them emanate from Susan’s terrain — Baby emerges from her apartment bathroom, George first appears at her aunt’s estate, and Susan’s the one who releases the killer panther from its cage and eventually drags it to the jailhouse. By the end of the film, basically every object and animal that David either possessed or was connected to has been touched and transformed by Susan — including, in the final scene, the most important object that had escaped her, the dinosaur. There is one exception to this relentless comic pattern: the jailhouse chair that David improvises into a lion-tamer’s tool, turning himself into an involuntary lion tamer — for a moment doing timidly, fearfully, but instinctively what a man is expected to do in moments of dire danger. After which he faints into Susan’s arms. (Though a sharp eye will detect that before David grabs the chair, Susan touches it lightly in haste, as if she were calling dibs on it, too.)

I called the story a quest for the missing bone, but that was ironic. Comedy doesn’t care much for such elevated missions as quests. In comedy the quest usually becomes something more genre-appropriate: a runaround. For something to be displaced it has to move or be moved. It has to be put in motion. In the carnival of Bringing Up Baby‘s displacements Susan and David never stop moving. Hawks said that he was trying to capture some of the feel of silent comedies in the film (he originally wanted Harold Lloyd to play David), and that requires constant motion. Bringing Up Baby is a symphony of comic chase scenes — David chasing Mr. Peabody, David chasing his golf ball, Susan chasing David, David chasing his clothes, David and Susan chasing George and the bone, Dr. Lehman and Slocum chasing Susan, Susan chasing Baby, the circus workers chasing the bad leopard, Mrs. Ransom chasing Susan. The runaround is the chase turned into a core comic structure. As Henri Bergson defined it, it displays the funny incongruity of great, complicated effort for a little, simple outcome. It was a staple element of silent comedies; Buster Keaton was its undisputed master. It’s also a key aspect of screwball’s slapstick, both in the zigzags of plot and in the dizzying patter. And of course many a real courtship could be called a runaround. Bringing Up Baby matches Keatonesque corporeal speed with verbal speed. That’s screwball.

The movie’s runaround ends as both quests and farces do, where it began. At the fossil. Susan arrives, bone in hand. Early in the film David tells Susan he has only two purposes, to get married and to complete the dinosaur skeleton. He also makes clear he needs to maintain his dignity — the upright posture that’s the target of every comic trick, and which David loses with regularity. When Susan arrives, Miss Swallow has left the scene after rejecting David for his flightiness, and the skeleton remains incomplete without the intercostal clavicle. David admits at what is basically the last moment in the film that Susan has helped to him find new joy and vitality. The cost is the collapse of the fossil and his pedantic professional purpose. He’s still far from the American masculine ideal. Most of the lost fetishes haven’t been restored to him. That goes for his dignity, too. The ones that are — the money and the bone — are delivered by Susan. And that’s okay. The skeleton is a pile of rubble, but the bone and the money have arrived.

So, where did we really end up? That’s the happy ending? Hawks probably did not know or care much about Freudian theory, but we know he knew a lot about comedy, especially silent comedy, which invariably features humiliated schlemiels and schlimazels as heroes. The director most frequently associated with heroic dramas of male social bonding seems also paradoxically — or maybe logically — to have had an affinity for a male who loses his bone. While in the Freudian superego world castration is the ultimate catastrophe, something else is going on in Bringing Up Baby. The more David loses things that signify his masculinity in a male-determined, phallocratic world, the freer he becomes. To a great extent it’s because David does not recognize that his fantastic movie-world is not the phallocracy he thinks it is — and as the turncoat Miss Swallow insists it is. In Bringing Up Baby it’s clear that women have more power than we’re used to seeing even in comedies. It’s Aunt Elizabeth who has the money, not Mr. Peabody. It’s Miss Swallow who sets the terms of her marriage to David. And it’s Susan that facilitates David’s liberation, not because she misappropriates his fetish objects, but because she doesn’t see what the big deal about them is. “What does it matter, it’s only a game,” she can say about the sacred male ritual of business golf. “Your golf ball, your car? Is there anything in the world that doesn’t belong to you?” she can say about David’s claim to his car. “I wanted him to stay here, so I gave him this purse…” she admits in the restaurant. The men who believe they represent the phallic faculties of Law, Logic, and Force — Constable Slocum, Dr. Lehman, and Major Applegate — are ludicrously little men. Aside from Peabody, who is in service to Aunt Elizabeth, the human males in Bringing Up Baby don’t have much jam. David, so worried about keeping his dignity, ends up with zero in that regard. And yet, he feels more free and alive.

Whatever Hawks and crew were thinking they were doing, they created a comedy of what Freud termed polymorphous perversity, which he considered the infantile proclivity to seek pleasure from any stimulus, without regard for the proper social channeling of erotic desire. For Freud, maturation involved growing out of this phase and learning to discipline one’s desires in socially proper ways. For males (and even in a twisty sense for females), this would culminate in the phallic phase, which would involve not only localizing physical pleasure in one specific sexual organ, but also displacing it into the objects, behaviors, and institutions that contain it in the wider social world. In Susan’s free-for-all, David steadily becomes less phallic himself as he loses control of those containers. He learns to play — like those creatures that don’t get to claim the status that masculine power supposedly confers: gays, children, and animals — and of course women like Susan, whose sense of play lets her ignore disciplinary boundaries and rules. Superego guys can see all this as castration, diminishment, regression, infantilism, and loss. That dinosaur is important to them. But in Bringing Up Baby, Susan essentially says of the bone what she said of the golf ball: “What does it matter? It’s only a game.”

Later in life Hawks wondered whether he had made a mistake by making all the characters zany. If he had included one or two raisonneurs, perhaps the film would have been more successful. But hindsight is often just blindness. Mr. Peabody does act as a rational observer — and it’s important that the audience perceive that he has no power of his own. Introducing a major character with a “disciplined” mind, like Godfrey in LaCava’s My Man Godfrey, would have made Bringing Up Baby impossible, both as a film and a world. What makes it unique and dazzling is not the characters, but the joyous, inventive polymorphous perversity of its spontaneous structure and its hidden world. In other words, its cheerful freedom, the phallus set free.