Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby.

Bringing Up Desire
Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938) is considered a classic screwball text. Grant plays David Huxley, a paleontologist who is trying to finish reconstructing a brontosaurus skeleton, marry his fiancée, and secure a million-dollar gift for his museum in one weekend. As his fiancée presents him with the final and long-awaited bone for his brontosaurus, she runs down his upcoming schedule for him. The camera's gaze pays little attention to Miss Swann, focusing instead on David who is disappointed to learn that Miss Swann's agenda does not allow for a honeymoon or a marriage with children, to allow them to put all of their energy into his work. He whines like a little boy, but submits to her judgment.

Of course it is implied that Miss Swann's edict against "distractions" includes not only a honeymoon and children, but sex as well. Though Miss Swann refuses to look at David as an object of desire, his full-front, boyishly whiny appeal encourages the audience to see his potential as an object of desire.

The camera has a harder time gazing at Katharine Hepburn in this film. To secure the endowment for the museum, David meets Alexander Peabody for golf. The game is interrupted when Susan (Katharine Hepburn) takes his golfball and his car. She refuses to acknowledge David or his ownership claims, driving away in his car with David on the running-board. The first real close-up of Susan is not presented until the next scene, when she is elegantly dressed--but seated at a bar, trying to catch olives in her mouth (a trick she has just learned from the bartender). The silliness again disrupts the gaze from capturing her as an object of desire. Though her actions might be read as masculine (playing golf, driving, doing bar tricks), her constant clumsiness "feminizes" her actions. Though she drives the action of the film, her ability to maintain any consistent control of herself or others keeps her from becoming "too masculine," but with a femininity and attractiveness markedly different than the traditional objectified female.

Susan (Katharine Hepburn) practices catching olives in her mouth in Bringing Up Baby. View an animated GIF of this scene. (12 frames, 90KB)

In a thoroughly screwball manner, Susan manages to thoroughly control the story's action. Despite David's best attempts to meet with Mr. Peabody or Miss Swann, Susan keeps managing to divert him. Insisting that she "needs" his help with her pet leopard "Baby," she gets him to her family farm in Connecticut. At this point, Susan's active desire is fully revealed, as is David's body as an object of desire. He is seen without his shirt peeking through the shower door (rather risqué for the period). When he finds his clothes are gone, he parades around in a flowing women's robe, answering the door for Susan's aunt, and jumping into the air. He then puts on a skin-tight riding costume, before Susan relents and finds "clothes" for him. She repeatedly calls attention to how much more handsome he is without his glasses; this entire sequence focuses attention on David's body (Susan manages to shower and change clothes without putting herself on display).

After Susan steals his clothes, David wears
a woman's robe in Bringing Up Baby.

But as mentioned before, the screwball heroine generally ends with the upper hand. To win David for certain, Susan must keep pursuing him. After the dust has fallen from David's lost donation, dinosaur bone and fiancée, Susan finds David at the museum with the brontosaurus skeleton. Though 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 he incoherently mutters, "I . . . I . . . Susan . . . I . . . Oh, dear," submitting, as in the opening scene, to a woman--but this time to a woman who desires him. While in Teresa de Lauretis' discussion of patriarchal narrative the heroine waits at the end of the hero's journey, the screwball heroine must journey to claim her man. And though Susan's face is obscured throughout this scene by a veil, the dinosaur, or David's shoulder, the beauty of David (no glasses, though back at the museum) remains available to the camera and spectator.

	Page One Introduction
Page Two Unmasking the Female Gaze
	Page Three Suspicious Looks
Page Four Screwball Cary
	Page Five Bringing Up Desire
Page Six Conclusion