Film, Environment, Comedy

Eco-Comedies on the Big Screen

Robin L. Murray, Joseph K. Heumann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781032252162
  9781032250410
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000588620
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores the transformative power of comedy to help connect a wider audience to films that explore environmental concerns and issues.

This book offers a space in which to explore the complex ways environmental comedies present their eco-arguments. With an organizational structure that reveals the evolution of both eco-comedy films and theoretical approaches, this book project aims to fill a gap in ecocinema scholarship. It does so by exploring three sections arranged to highlight the breadth of eco-comedy: I. Comic Genres and the Green World: Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral Visions; II. Laughter, Eco-Heroes, and Evolutionary Narratives of Consumption; and III. Environmental Nostalgia, Fuel, and the Carnivalesque. Examining everything from Hollywood classics, Oscar winners, and animation to independent and international films, Murray and Heumann exemplify how the use of comedy can expose and amplify environmental issues to a wider audience than more traditional ecocinema genres and can help provide a path towards positive action and change.

Ideal for students and scholars of film studies, ecocriticism, and environmental studies, especially those with a particular interest in ecocinema and/or ecocritical readings of popular films.

Part I Comic Genres and the Green World Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral Visions

1 The Green World and the Screwball Comedy A Pastoral World of Play

DOI: 10.4324/9781003282136-3

We begin our foray into eco-(film)comedy with one of its earliest genres, the pastoral comedy, and its emphasis on the green world. In literary history, the genre grew out of medieval seasonal ritual plays and chivalric romances such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,¹ coming of age in Shakespeare comedies, especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In film history, though, the pastoral green world reaches its apex in Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. This chapter maps the evolution of the green world in four screwball comedies, two from the 1930s and two from the 1940s. Although one of the earliest of the screwballs, Libeled Lady (1936), centers on pastoral locations in the United States that primarily illuminate humanity’s estrangement from the natural world, Bringing Up Baby (1938), My Favorite Wife (1940), and The Lady Eve(1941) broach colonial locations that shatter images of the green world as a bucolic pastoral refuge. In these later screwballs, a green world is an imperial world of exploitation rather than restoration.

Figure 1.1 A group of men surrounded by green trees and shrubs.

Source: The Lady Eve (1941)

There is much to enjoy in a well-written screwball comedy, including quick banter, cross-dressing, slapstick pratfalls and facial expressions, battle of the sexes, and class and gender disruption. Wes D. Gehring notes five differences between screwball and romantic comedies, showcasing first screwball’s “emphasis on ‘funny’” slapstick rather than the love of romantic comedy (1). Elizabeth Kendall Michael V. Tueth also highlights distinctive characteristics of the screwball comedy, especially two elements that

define the category more precisely: All or almost all of the characters are eccentric or downright crazy in one way or another, and the main characters seem to have little moral compunction or concern for the needs of others as they pursue their goals.

(39)

And Thomas C. Renzi offers a culturally situated history of screwball comedy as evidence for its “unexpected connections” with film noir, noting that both include some form of the battle of the sexes (20), a “convoluted plot” and “eccentric characters” (21), “romantic triangles” (23), “city rat race vs. country retreat” plots (24), and “sexual innuendoes” (26). Although each work proposes a different premise, their conclusions all rest on common definitions of the screwball comedy that grow out of romantic comedy and, more generally, the comic mode.

The genre’s focus on an escape to Connecticut, however, adds an environmental ingredient missing or sidelined in more recent romantic comedies—the green world. Posited by Northrop Frye in works from A Natural Perspective (1965) to Anatomy of Criticism (1969), this mythology of the green world stems from the traditions of the medieval seasonal ritual play but culminates in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. According to Frye, “The green world charges the comedies with the symbolism of the victory of summer over winter” (Anatomy, 183). For Frye, such a victory is part of the “rituals and myths of the earth,” a “rebirth,” a “death and revival” that “generally involves the heroine” (183). According to Frye,

Shakespearean comedy illustrates, as clearly as any mythos we have, the archetypal function of literature in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from “reality,” but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate.

(184)

Although Frye concentrates his reading primarily on Shakespearean romantic comedies, elements of the mythology of the green world continue and evolve in the screwball comedy, transforming the magic and fantasy of plays into a pastoral escape. As Kathrina Glitre asserts,

Although the screwball green world is idyllic, it is “natural” only in the modern sense of rural and unpretentious; there are no fairies or fools here. … The contrast between artifice and nature remains, … but is recast as a contrast between dehumanizing [sic], urban existence, and liberating, pastoral play.

(74)

This chapter investigates the environmental implications of this pastoral change in relation to the context and genre conventions found in screwball comedies from the early Libeled Lady to the later (more provocative) Bringing Up Baby, My Favorite Wife, and The Lady Eve.

The green world found in these screwball comedies updates Frye’s explanation, adding a Romantic pastoral element found in literature, film, and media of various modes. According to Ecocritic Greg Garrard,

Terry Gifford distinguishes three kinds of pastoral: the specifically literary tradition, involving a retreat from the city to the countryside, that originates in ancient Alexandria and becomes a key poetic form in Europe during the Renaissance; more generally, “any literature that describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban”; and the pejorative sense in which “pastoral” implies an idealisation [sic] of rural life that obscures the realities of labour [sic] and hardship.

(33)

Garrard connects the first of these kinds with classical literature, including the elegy, which “looks back to a vanished past with a sense of nostalgia” (37), the idyll, which “celebrates a bountiful present” (37), and the utopia, which “looks forward to a redeemed future” (37). For Garrard, Gifford’s second kind of pastoral in literature contrasting the country and the city “comes to the fore in Romantic pastoral” present in multiple media, including the novel, television, or ads for conservation organizations (34). Screwball comedy draws on definitions of the pastoral that stress both the retreat from the city to the countryside and “implicit or explicit contrast to the urban” (Garrard 33).

Screwball distinguishes itself from other romantic comedies not only because it more readily promotes the green world and its possibilities but also because it springs from a depression era context and film industry responding to its cultural context. Andrew Bergman claims the genre’s unusual name originated with a 1930s baseball pitch called the screwball. According to Bergman, “It’s a pitch … that sort of flutters and drops, goes in different directions and behaves in unexpected ways” (132). As Bergman asserts, like the pitch, “screwball comedy was unconventional, went in different directions, and behaved in unexpected ways” (132). As a genre, screwball grew out of Shakespearean romantic comedy and the farce and usually includes elements of farce like the following: improbable situations, exaggerated characters, a fast-paced plot, mistaken identities, slapstick humor, sophisticated wordplay and sexual innuendo, and elaborate chase scenes. The wordplay turns into rapid fire overlapping dialogue and a battle of the sexes in screwball comedy, tropes that are enhanced by themes of inversion that showcase male to female cross-dressing and woman power. Perhaps because of this focus on inversion, screwball comedies often have a cynical attitude about marriage, class, and other societal values. Unlike other types of romantic comedy, the emphasis is on physical comedy and internal conflict, as well as a green world. Libeled Lady, Bringing Up Baby, My Favorite Wife, and The Lady Eve demonstrate well the power of a pastoral green world as a space in which the internal conflicts occur, and true feelings emerge. These pastoral green world spaces also open up possibilities for exploring other environmental issues, from colonialism and species extraction to irresponsible science.

As one of the earliest screwball comedies, Libeled Lady showcases the limits and possibilities of a pastoral version of the green world here at home. The film takes the newspaper romantic comedy into the screwball genre, just as His Girl Friday (1940) provides the screwball elements missing in its predecessor, The Front Page (1931). The fun begins in Libeled Lady when socialite Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy) accuses the New York Evening Star of libel for erroneously calling her a “husband stealer” and files a suit against the paper for $5 million. To counter the threat, the newspaper’s editor Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy) hires a former employee Bill Chandler (William Powell) to marry Warren’s fiancé Gladys Benton (Jean Harlow), to charm Connie into adultery and invalidate the suit. The plan seems to be working but backfires when Chandler falls in love with Connie. Then the high jinks ensue.

A floating summer house on the Allenbury Estate serves as a most obvious example of a pastoral green world. According to Kathrina Glitre, “The turning point in Bill’s attitude [toward Connie] comes when he escapes the influence of publicity and mass communications, during his visit to the green world of the Allenbury Estate” (70–71). Glitre details Bill and Connie’s evolution during this visit, emphasizing the late-night conversation shared on a summer house raft in the middle of a lake. Glitre notes how even “the framing signals the process of Bill’s reeducation” (72) during the raft scene. For Glitre, screwball comedy “transforms the function of the green world,” however, eliminating the renewal element of Frye’s description of a cycle that moves from “normal world to green world and back again” (182). Glitre suggests this “green world does not represent an alternative society” (74) and affects only the couple involved, so “there is little sense of social renewal and the couple tend to remain unreconciled with their original society” (74, emphasis Glitre’s). The dialogue emphasizes the superiority of a pastoral green world setting that changes Connie, who exclaims, “It’s all tied up with my childhood. The trees, the air, the water, even the frogs. I’m mad about frogs!” But here, as Glitre argues, the conversation remains private with little opportunity for social renewal.

Other pastoral elements surrounding the Allenbury Estate highlight the contrast between an artificial urban perspective and authentic rural view of nature and its fecundity. The trout river provides the most obvious pastoral setting on the estate, as well as a fertile contrast to Bill’s urban hotel room angling lessons meant to prepare him for “the real thing.” As we noted in our reading of the Bugs Bunny cartoon Hare Conditioned (1945), it seems to illustrate Aldo Leopold’s view of recreation gone wrong. The angling lesson in Libeled Lady takes the artificiality of sports recreation to an extreme. Even writing in the 1940s, Leopold laments how outdoor recreation “has become a self-destructive process of seeking, but never quite finding, a major frustration of mechanized society” (“Conservation Esthetic,” 165–166). For Bill, the lesson provides practice missing from his former book-based research on the ship where he and Connie meet. To impress Connie’s father, J.B. Allenbury (Walter Connolly), Bill borrows all the books in the ship’s library showcasing trout fishing and then memorizes the best bits to recite for Connie’s father.

In the hotel room, outdoor recreation is not only mechanized (as Leopold argues). It’s also an illusion. In this artificial but comic angling lesson, Bill catches lampshades and Gladys’s clothing, but nothing resembling a fish, highlighting what Dana Phillips calls representation rather than presence (209), an image repeated in Hawk’s Man’s Favorite Sport (1964) where sporting goods store angling expert Roger (Rock Hudson) has never seen a river, let alone fished in one. The scene serves as an apt contrast to the actual river in which Bill unexpectedly catches the famous trout Walleye, setting up the Allenbury estate as a pastoral antidote to urban disconnection from the natural world. Here the book learning and outdoor recreation meet head-on, with Bill literally following instructions in a book as he angles for trout in the river that cuts through the Allenbury’s estate. By hooking Walleye, Bill has proven himself a “real outdoor man,” according to J.B. But, in a comic exchange built on dramatic irony, Bill connects the urban hotel room with the trout stream: J.B. asks, “How’d you do it?” And Bill answers honestly, “I just followed the book” but corrects himself quickly, muttering, “The hook.” The audience is in on the joke, but J.B. and Connie’s excitement also begins to transform Bill’s view of Connie and the restorative pastoral setting of this green world.

Libeled Lady also offers another possible pastoral green world that bridges the so-called normal and green worlds, that of the charity bazaar on the Allenbury’s mansion grounds. This green world is where Bill and Connie resolve the love triangle, joining social and economic classes for a sense of social renewal straight out of a Jane Austen novel. Instead of maintaining privacy, Bill reveals his “marriage for show” to Connie, so she is prepared when Gladys confronts her, prompting another goofy set of conversations that highlights the screwball comedy’s iconography, tropes, and themes. Although a final fight scene between Haggerty and Chandler reconnects Warren and Gladys, it is Connie’s quiet assertion that convinces Gladys and provides the opportunity to renew a stale society with a fresh view of marriage that emphasizes love over legal union and bridges both classes and battling institutions—marriage, newspapers, and litigation.

Libeled Lady promotes a pastoral green world in which truth and renewal become possible, but the emphasis the film places on trout fishing and the skills of angling begins to complicate the pastoral vision of screwball comedy, suggesting pastoral’s “golden age” when people lived together in harmony with nature (as in Hesiod’s Works and Days) is an illusion. Instead of learning to commune with nature and share its resources, for example, Bill dives into books teaching angling, practicing techniques in an urban hotel room completely apart from the natural world. And the transition is from river to dinner table, where Walleye becomes the main course. In Libeled Lady, the green world seems both pastoral and constructed, a merging of human and nonhuman nature. This early screwball comedy opens up possibilities for not only exploring the environmental potential of a pastoral green world but also reexamining later screwball comedies through a variety of ecocritical lenses.

Figure 1.2 A man reaching out across dinosaur bones towards a woman on a ladder.

Source: Bringing Up Baby (1938)

Bringing Up Baby, My Favorite Wife, and The Lady Eve may not only draw on Shakespearean romantic comedies and the myth of the green world but also respond to their imperialist cultural contexts, reflecting contemporaneous attitudes toward colonialism and science that rest in fair use visions of ecology. These films describe exploitation without acknowledging it. Bringing Up Baby showcases multiple pastoral green worlds: a golf course, the off-screen Brazilian rainforest from which the leopard Baby is captured, and the multiple Connecticut settings where Susan (Katherine Hepburn) and David (Cary Grant) take and search both for a buried bone to complete David’s brontosaurus and for Baby. But the film also broaches other environmental issues, from the impact of colonialism and species extraction to the dangers of science and over-eager scientists. The film’s narrative is iconic and promotes a cynical view of marriage and a rational urban society. Focusing on the unlikely paring of zany heiress Susan and befuddled paleontologist David, Bringing Up Baby broaches multiple ecocritical questions: Does a natural history museum and its paleontologist David deserve a $1 million donation from Susan’s Aunt Elizabeth (May Robson)? Is a rational woman like David’s fiancé Alice (Virginia Walker) more or less appealing than an irrational but sexualized Susan? Should wild creatures be extracted and domesticated from colonized jungles? And does reconstructed nature trump the natural landscape of the gendered body?

As what Stanley Cavell calls a comedy of equality, “evoking laughter equally at the idea that men and women are different and at the idea that they are not,” (“Leopards in Connecticut” 251, emphasis Cavell’s), Bringing Up Baby first showcases green worlds in which gender roles are blurred or even reversed. As Northrop Frye asserts, in screwball comedy’s green world, “the rebirth is generally a female figure” (183). David a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Film, Environment, Comedy: Eco-Comedies on the Big Screen, Defining Eco-Comedy
• Part I Comic Genres and the Green World: Pastoral, Anti-Pastoral, and Post-Pastoral Visions
• Part II Laughter, Eco-Heroes, and Evolutionary Narratives of Consumption
• Part III Environmental Nostalgia, Fuel, and the Carnivalesque
• Conclusion: Eco-Comedies in Context
• Filmography and Works Cited
• Index