Thinkers Need Doers Need Thinkers Need Doers Need Thinkers Need Doers

Grant's femininity compliments Hepburn’s androgyny.

Screwball comedies Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Lady Eve (1941), and Balls of Fire (1941) invert gender roles. The fictional female characters are independent and intelligent, and as influential as the ‘real’ movie stars who portray them. These unruly women didn’t need domesticity to fulfill their Utopian desires, as seen in earlier films of the genre. In fact, they possess powers to tame men with laughter and their brazen gazin’. And in the broader narrative regarding the evolution of Women’s Rights in America, they primed a generation of American girls and young women to ‘wear the pants’ and jump the gender divide.

With legs crossed, Carey Grant is the feminine thinker.

The genre parodies Romantic Comedies to reveal their dwindling relevance to social norms. These films, in particular, do it at the expense of the leading men. In her 2011 essay, Professor Heroes and Brides on Top Kathleen Rowe details how the ‘shadow figures’ of the less-than-ideal leading men are liberated through humiliation triggered by misunderstanding, wordplay, and lies of the predatory parallel figures who love them. For Freud, women ambivalent to being home-makers or -wreckers exemplify the uncanny. For me, this period in Hollywood filmmaking became more interesting when Rowe presents this trio of films as an investigation of the masculinity of an intellectual man. Which leads to my question – Did lexicographer Bertram Potts, befuddled paleontologist David, and Charles the amateur herpetologist serve as role model for gay men of the time who felt pressured to couple? Was Science seen as a haven for gay students?