Gender and Ideology in His Girl Friday

Donald Jellerson and Nathan Anderson

http://www.thecine-files.com/gender-and-ideology/

"About halfway through the film, Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) tears up the news story she’s written for Walter Burns (Cary Grant). Claiming she is leaving the newspaper business to “live like a human being” instead of a reporter, she likens Walter to a “chimpanzee” and a “monkey.”[4] She wants to be a “woman” instead of a “news-getting machine”; she wants to have babies and “watch their teeth grow.” She directs much of her diatribe at Walter through the telephone until, in her pique, she accidentally cuts the conversation short by ripping the cord out of its connection. She directs the remainder of her speech at the assembled reporters, whom she calls “chumps.” Here, as throughout much of the film, Hildy expresses her desire to leave the newspaper business. Her rhetoric suggests, quite accurately as it turns out, that the world of reporting is dehumanizing—an animalistic world of counterfeit, double-crossing, and corruption. She longs to leave the city behind for an idealized “Albany,” coded as a “human” space in which she can be a domestic “woman” who nurtures children. As elsewhere in the film, her dialogue relies on binary oppositions such as unfeeling masculinity opposed to nurturing femininity, the bestial opposed to the human, the “chumps” manipulated by the system opposed to those with the power to manipulate it, and so on. Nevertheless, for all her longing to escape the masculinized world of the press, marry an insurance salesman, and embrace traditional womanhood, the gathered reporters correctly observe that Hildy fits uneasily into such a role. “I give that marriage three months,” one of the reporters says, “and I’m layin’ three to one.” The film makes it difficult for its audience not to agree; Hildy seems ill-suited for a domestic life in Albany.

In the film’s terms, Hildy is an accomplished “newspaper man” who longs to reject her male persona and affirm her (already visually obvious) status as “woman” by embracing stereotypical domesticity. The film thus defines what it means to be male in opposition to what it means to be female even as it highlights Hildy’s paradoxical status as both. This tension drives the narrative. Throughout the film, Hildy seeks a resolution for the competing masculinized and feminized desires she embodies, going back and forth between rejecting masculinity and embracing it, rejecting femininity and embracing it. Though Hildy remains uncomfortable with her conflicted and aleatory gender position, the film seems to delight in both the paradox she embodies and the resulting confusion in her choices. She is, in the film’s terms, both woman and man: she is the best “newspaper man” in the room precisely because she can give her stories a “woman’s touch”—stories which, according to Walter, need “heart.” The fact that Hildy so often frustrates the binary systems offered by the film suggests that she functions as an agent of aporia. If we understand “aporia” to mean a point of doubt or instability within a seemingly natural and logical system of meaning, we can understand Hildy’s embodiment of both male and female, both masculinity and femininity, as an instance of it. In fact, Hildy’s aporetic function goes beyond deconstructing gender binaries. As the film articulates each of its ideological systems, Hildy exposes their workings, effectively deconstructing them by occupying multiple positions within them. She calls her fellow newspaper men “chumps” even as she herself is manipulated again and again by Walter’s machinations. She wants a life of seclusion and domesticity, yet she proudly asserts her expectation that she will one day ride in a “Rolls Royce” and give “interviews on success.” She decries the corruption of the newspaper business and the state, yet she unethically bribes officials and feeds Earl Williams a narrative she invents to write a compelling news story. There is hardly a binary opposition articulated in the film that Hildy cannot destabilize by occupying each side. This essay seeks to draw out the ways in which Hildy’s embodiment of aporia—her unintentional deconstruction of ideologies—provides His Girl Friday with depth, relevance, and interest. The film posits naturalized gender relations based on stereotypical binary systems that perpetuate ideology only to interrupt those systems by drawing our attention to the aporia they create. The film’s deconstruction of the very binaries it posits suggests that His Girl Friday functions as a critique of the ideologies such binaries support.

Much of the scholarship on His Girl Friday concentrates on adaptation, focusing specifically on how Hildy enhances the narrative. In adapting Ben Hecht’s and Charles MacArthur’s stage play, The Front Page, Hawks and screenwriter Charles Lederer change Hildy’s sex from male to female. Some critics praise this choice, arguing that writing Hildy as a woman enhances the comedic potential of the narrative. Jeffrey A. Smith, for instance, proposes that the film must “converge” the professional and romantic aspects of the narrative as part of a successful transition from theatrical to cinematic comedy: “Hawks saw that a female Hildy might accomplish this fusion.”[5]Similarly, Robin Wood suggests that Hawks’ decision to cast Hildy as a woman makes the narrative more believable.[6] Laura Mulvey also agrees that the gender switch works well for the film, adding that the adaptation allows Hawks to articulate his habitual “themes” having to do with “same-sex” relationships, but in heterosexual “masquerade.”[7] While understanding His Girl Friday as an adaptation leads critics to interesting insights, one might also keep in mind that the script of the film takes only a plot outline and some of its character sketches from the play. The film represents a radical enough rewrite to merit analysis on its own terms. The following argument seeks to honor the film’s distinct methods and ends, which differ substantially from those of the play. The Hildy of the play does not function as the kind of aporia that the film’s Hildy does.

Critics often cite His Girl Friday as a paradigmatic screwball comedy, “a variation of romantic comedy,” William Castanzo writes, that typically involves fast-paced, “hostile” exchanges between the characters.[8] Ed Sikov understands Walter and Hildy as products of screwball, adding that the genre “is better at exposing social and sexual tensions than at resolving them.”[9] This essay is interested in screwball comedy insofar as the genre clearly encourages the possibility of exploring such tensions—gendered, sexual, social, or otherwise—by virtue of its tendency to exaggerate stereotypes for comedic effect. Indeed, the film’s consistent reliance on diametrically opposed stereotypes in conflict invites this essay’s analysis of the aporia such a clash can produce.

The opening scene demonstrates how the film, from its beginning, relies on binary gender stereotypes. Following an establishing title card that sets the scene in the “dark ages” of the newspaper business, the film opens in the press room. Both men and women sit working at desks, engaged in paperwork or feeding information through telephones. As the camera tracks left across room, interrupted by a dissolve to two women working the telephone lines, a gendered division of labor begins to emerge. A male reporter informs the female switchboard operators that if “anybody asks for me, I’m down at the courthouse.” The camera catches him running for the elevator, followed by another male reporter, and two more men rush through the gate into the press room. Men come and go, foreshadowing the film’s concern with how men control and define the functions and limits of the newspaper business, while women such as those operating the switchboard serve as facilitators and conduits of exchange.

A small swing gate reading “NO ADMITTANCE” separates the workroom from the entrance lobby. The clear split between the workstation and the outside indexes the film’s preoccupation with clear divisions and oppositions—newspaper business insiders and outsiders, systemic knowledge and ignorance, Albany (or the country) and the urban, and so on. Both mise-en-scène and cinematography demonstrate how wielding the gate of the press room signals masculine activity, but as Hildy and Bruce walk out of the elevator and approach the gate, Hildy pushes against his chest, signaling that he must wait passively outside its limits. Hildy’s passage through the gate and Bruce’s exclusion from the workstation are aberrations. If only men pass in and out of the gate as agents of the system, then we might begin to suspect that Hildy’s entrance marks her as an exception. Likewise, Bruce’s status becomes suspect. Why must he remain outside the gate, unlike the other men? When Hildy returns to the gate to inform Bruce that she will only be ten minutes, he claims (sounding like a stereotypical melodramatic woman) that “even ten minutes is a long time to be away from [her].” Momentarily charmed, Hildy baits him to repeat himself, but Bruce grows bashful and repeats in a clunky, informative manner. He doesn’t understand that Hildy simply enjoys receiving his affection: “I heard you the first time. I like it. That’s why I asked you to say it again.” As the exchange begins, Hildy is immediately inside the gate, while Bruce is just outside. The camera shows them from the waist up and includes the gate that separates them; however, as Bruce fumbles through the romantic moment, the camera cuts to over-the-shoulder shots of their faces. In these shots, the camera momentarily obscures the gate, suggesting that, ideally, nothing can separate them. Even with the gate out of sight, however, their rhetoric reminds us that Hildy and Bruce are indeed divided. The incommensurable gap between Bruce’s naïve, sentimental rhetoric and Hildy’s rhetorical finesse suggests inherent differences between them: that Bruce is a dope and Hildy is keen, that this is foreign territory to him and native to her, and that he isn’t manly and she evidently is. Bruce attempts to recover his masculinity by offering to become violent with Walter—“I’d like to ‘spoil’ him just once”—suggesting that he might be of use “if things get rough.” But Hildy brushes him off, assuring him that she can “handle it.” The scene upsets the stereotypical, hierarchical difference between men and women. No sooner does she endearingly ask Bruce to repeat his affection than does she feel the need to explain the scripted romance between them (as if to a child) and wave off his assertion of physical prowess. “I’ll come a-runnin’ partner,” she assures him, mocking his attempt at cowboy valor. Meanwhile, Hildy stands within the limits of the press room, having swung open and walked through the gate. She is neither man nor woman; she crosses such borders from the film’s beginning.

This essay’s argument expands on those by critics who understand the film’s interest in Hildy’s gender by understanding the filmmaker, Hawks. “Hawksian Women,” in Naomi Wise’s words, tend to have similar characteristics. Women in Hawks films often take on lead roles as heroines, Wise notes, entering the world of danger in ways typically reserved for men.[10] Hildy, she argues, is an apt model of the Hawksian woman. Molly Haskell reads Hildy similarly. In identifying the roles of women in films in the first half of the twentieth century, she uses the term “superfemale” to describe the overly feminine woman who, while ambitious, fails to realize any sort of rebellion against “traditional society” as opposed to the “superwoman,” the intelligent woman who “adopts male characteristics in order to enjoy male prerogatives.”[11] She credits Hawks’ “intuitive genius”[12] in changing Hildy’s character from a man to a woman, a switch ultimately resulting in the sharp-witted “superwoman.” Pushing this kind of argument further, this essay understands Hildy as aporetic within what Haskell calls “male logic and ideology,” suggesting that her actions are neither defined by what it means to be a “woman,” in the film’s terms, nor circumscribed by the choice of either joining or opposing patriarchy.[13] In fact, by both joining and opposing, signified as both man and woman, she effectively denaturalizes the film’s “male logic and ideology,” which relies on clearly defined, hierarchically arranged binaries.

In His Girl Friday, the currency of patriarchy is counterfeit. (In fact, counterfeit is so pervasive that it becomes one of the very binaries—in opposition to truth—that the film seeks to destabilize.) The film introduces counterfeit in its rhetoric of blame. As Hildy leaves Bruce behind, she crosses the press room, greeting its occupants. “Hello Beatrice,” she says to a middle-aged female writer, “how’s advice to the lovelorn?” “Fine,” Beatrice responds, “my cat just had kittens again.” Without breaking stride, Hildy comments, “it’s her own fault.” This seemingly random ascription of blame for a natural event brings into question the film’s coding of fault, blame, and the privilege of ascribing it. It is evidently awry, for how can one blame a cat for giving birth? Furthermore, why does Hildy, a woman and a newspaper man, ascribe the blame? This could be dismissed as an offhand quip, except that the converse of the moment occurs soon after in Walter’s office. Walter feigns a telephone conversation with Sweeney in which Walter pretends that Sweeney is out on emergency leave to “have a baby.” Hildy responds, “Well, he didn’t do it on purpose, did he?” Again, Hildy assumes the right to assign blame. Meanwhile, Walter continues a tirade about lack of “honor” in the business, referring to Sweeney’s dedication to domesticity over professionalism. But Walter’s ascription of blame, much like Hildy’s blaming of the cat for having kittens, makes no logical sense because it is detached from any legitimate occasion for its exercise. It is, rather, a performance of masculinized power that manufactures its own occasion (in this case, procreation: kittens or babies). It counterfeits social currency. The film makes a point of demonstrating both Hildy’s and Walter’s authoritative power in assigning blame, associating such power with masculinized professionalism over and against the feminized domestic realm.

The film’s obsession with the way in which masculinized ideological systems assign blame introduces its themes of corrupt counterfeiting. There is hardly a news story described in the film, for instance, that does not falsify the truth to assign guilt. From its beginning, the film insists that counterfeit functions as a modality for masculinized patriarchy, normalizing falsehood within the film’s narrative. As soon as Hildy walks into the newspaper’s office to confront her ex-husband, we begin to witness such corruption. Walter is not alone in the office. Louie holds a mirror while Walter shaves. He calls Walter “boss,” suggesting that Walter employs him. But Louie’s accent and dress suggest the typical movie gangster. Confirming this impression, Hildy greets him by asking, “how’s the big slot-machine king?” By way of “slot-machines,” the dialogue associates Louie with gambling and therefore gangsters.[14] “I ain’t doin’ that no more,” Louie responds. “I’m retired.” But why does the editor of a respectable paper employ a gangster, even a “retired” one? Just after we meet Louie, Walter improvises a plan to strong-arm the Governor into reprieving Earl Williams. Walter will back the republican Governor in his bid for Senator despite the fact that the paper has been “a democratic paper for over twenty years.” Walter himself describes the plan as a “double-cross.” Finally, we discover later that Louie is walking around with $450 in counterfeit money, which makes its way into the plot and literalizes the film’s interest in cover-ups, double-crosses, half-truths, and lies."