Monday
Today I teach my final Feuding Couples Comedy session in one of Sewanee’s Lifelong Learning sessions. I’ve been alternating between literature and film after tracing the genre back to Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing.
Upon further reflection, perhaps I should have gone back to the Medieval passion plays, where one scene often played for laughs was Noah’s wife refusing to board his ark because she thinks he is crazy.
In any event, I moved from 17th century plays (Shakespeare, Behn, Congreve) to Depression-era screwball comedies (Capra, Cukor, Hawks, Sturges) to 20th century plays (Shaw, Albee). In today’s class I will start with Doris Day and Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk (1959), mention Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977), and conclude with Nora Ephron’s 1990s Meg Ryan comedies (When Harry Met Sally [1989], Sleepless in Seattle [1993], You’ve Got Mail [1998]) and Judd Apatow’s 2000s gross-out comedies (especially Knocked Up [2007]). I will end the course with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005).
Pillow Talk was made when society still put a high premium on a woman’s virginity, which explains the edge to Oscar Levant’s famous quip about Doris Day: “I knew her before she was a virgin.” There’s also tension between the career woman who doesn’t think she needs a man and the womanizer who doesn’t think he needs to settle down. The erotic tension takes the form of quarreling, often over the telephone party line the two of them share. It is resolved through marriage. We never hear what happens to Day’s interior decorating business.
In the 1970s, New York University film scholar Brian Henderson predicted that feminism and the sexual revolution were rendering romantic comedies obsolete. If women could have sex without needing or requiring commitment, what was there left? As if in confirmation, Woody Allen’s Annie Hall doesn’t have the traditional tug and pull, lacks feuding, and doesn’t at all feel like a romantic comedy: Allen and Diane Keaton live together and then separate more or less amicably, agreeing that they’ve got a dead shark on their hands:
Alvie Singer: A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.
Henderson’s observation, however, proved spectacularly premature as feminism didn’t sweep away the gender tensions that, in feuding couples comedy, lead to spectacular verbal fireworks. For that matter, it didn’t sweep away romance or marriage. As has been the case at least since Shakespeare, the two genders simultaneously need each other and kick against that need. They simultaneously desire intimacy and fear the emotional vulnerability that comes with it.
The genre, however, did undergo some changes thanks to the changing times. Sometimes the films end with committed partnership rather than marriage, and more weight is given to the woman’s career. The latter is particularly important for my women students. They don’t want Doris Day to give up her business.
More than anyone, screenwriter and then director Nora Ephron showed that the genre was far from dead with a string of 1990s hits, two of which harkened back to the 1930s with their verbal battles: When Harry Met Sally (1989) and You’ve Got Mail (1998). The following conversation between Harry and Sally makes clear that there is still plenty of relationship tension, and therefore still plenty of comedy, in the post-feminist era:
Harry Burns: You realize of course that we could never be friends.
Sally Albright: Why not?
Harry Burns: What I’m saying is – and this is not a come-on in any way, shape or form – is that men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
Sally Albright: That’s not true. I have a number of men friends and there is no sex involved.
Harry Burns: No you don’t.
Sally Albright: Yes I do.
Harry Burns: No you don’t.
Sally Albright: Yes I do.
Harry Burns: You only think you do.
Sally Albright: You say I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?
Harry Burns: No, what I’m saying is they all WANT to have sex with you.
Sally Albright: They do not.
Harry Burns: Do too.
Sally Albright: They do not.
Harry Burns: Do too.
Sally Albright: How do you know?
Harry Burns: Because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
Sally Albright: So, you’re saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
Harry Burns: No. You pretty much want to nail ’em too.
Sally Albright: What if THEY don’t want to have sex with YOU?
Harry Burns: Doesn’t matter because the sex thing is already out there so the friendship is ultimately doomed and that is the end of the story.
Sally Albright: Well, I guess we’re not going to be friends then.
Harry Burns: I guess not.
Sally Albright: That’s too bad. You were the only person I knew in New York.
In You’ve Got Mail, the tension involves two conflicting careers as Joe’s new giant bookstore threatens to put Kathleen’s “Little Bookstore around the Corner” out of business. This leads to fireworks like the following conversation—reminiscent of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant–after Kathleen discovers that Joe has visited her bookstore:
Kathleen: You were spying on me, weren’t you? You probably rented those children.
Joe: Why would I spy on you?
Kathleen: Because I am your competition, which you know…or you wouldn’t have put up the sign:”Just around the corner.”
Joe: Our store entrance is around the corner. There’s no other way to say it. It’s not the name of our store. It’s where it is. And you do not own the phrase “around the corner.”
…
The reason I came into your store . . . is because I was spending the day with Annabel and Matt. I was buying them presents. I’m the type of guy who likes to buy
Kathleen: . . . his way into the hearts of children
Joe: . . . who are his relatives.
Kathleen: There was only one place to find a children’s book in the neighborhood.
Joe: That won’t always be the case.
Kathleen: And it was yours.
Joe: And it is . . . a charming little bookstore. You probably sell, what, $350,000 worth of books in a year?
Kathleen: How did you know that?
Joe: I’m in the book business.
Kathleen: I am in the book business.
Joe: I see. And we are the Price Club. Only instead of a 10-gallon vat of olive oil for 3.99…that won’t even fit under your kitchen cabinet, we sell cheap books.
Me, a spy? Absolutely. I have in my possession the secret printout of the sales figures . . . of a bookstore so inconsequential, yet full of its own virtue . . . that I had to rush over for fear it will put me out of business.
You’ve Got Mail ends with (1) Joe putting Kathleen out of business, (2) a Kathleen now free from her mother’s legacy discovering that she can be an editor and author, and (3) Joe and Kathleen pairing up. The ending isn’t that different from Pillow Talk except that Kathleen will undoubtedly continue on in her new career.
Although Ephron wasn’t operating under the Motion Picture Production Code that ruled Hollywood from 1934-1968, her comedies are still remarkably free of physical sex. Like the Depression-era screwball comedies, she knows that erotic tension can be particularly powerful when it get sublimated into verbal battles.
Given how the pendulum swings, however, romantic comedies were bound to get more explicit in the next phase, as they did in Judd Apatow’s films of the 2000s. In Knocked Up, the protagonist (a television host) gets—well—knocked up after a night of debauch and then battles it out with the guy who got her pregnant (he lives in his mother’s basement playing videogames). Yet Apatow’s films have remarkably traditional endings. In the slacker/striver films, as the genre has been called, the slacker realizes he needs to grow up, the striver sees the virtue of motherhood, and together they discover the virtues of committed partnership. It’s Pillow Talk updated.
My favorite feuding couples comedy in recent years has been Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which is essentially a comedy of remarriage. (I talk about Stanley Cavell’s label here.) A romantic comedy masquerading as an action adventure film, the 2005 Doug Liman film shows two undercover agents given the assignment to take each other out. For reasons that are never explained, having agents that are married to each other is apparently “bad for business.”
The reasoning is irrelevant, however, because the shadowy bosses who issue orders are actually just a symbolic articulation of the career pressures that break up marriages. Both John and Jane must work after hours, both keep their extracurricular activities secret from their spouse, and the result is a sham marriage. They may have been enamored of each other once but, since then, they are attempting to live the American dream while living lives of quiet desperation. Or in their case, noisy desperation.
The film’s wit lies in how contracted killing is a metaphor for couples emotionally tearing each other apart. Unlike traditional feuding couples comedy, the tensions aren’t only transmuted into verbal sparring. We see John and Jane literally shooting at each other–and destroying the house in the process.
John’s friend Eddie reveals how the metaphor operates in a rant against emotional attachments after John seeks refuge in his house after Jane has just tried to run over him. (This after he has put a bullet through her windshield.) Eddie’s argument against partnership rings a little hollow by the end:
John: My wife. She tried to kill me.
Eddie: Yes. And you know what? Gladys tried to kill me. Not with a car. At least Jane was a man about it. But they all try to kill you. Slowly, painfully, cripplingly. And then, wham! They hurt you. You know how hurt I used to be? I used to beat myself up. Now I’m great. I got dates all the time. I just woke up from a thing, I’m in my robe.
John: You live with your mom.
Eddie: I choose to. Because she’s the only woman I’ve ever trusted.
We see the emotional fireworks, worthy of any screwball comedy, in a scene where John and Jane dine out. The difference is that they have just literally tried to kill each other:
John: We have an unusual problem, Jane. You obviously want me dead. And I’m less and less concerned of your wellbeing.
Jane: So what do we do?
John: Do we shoot it out here? Hope for the best?
Jane: Well, that would be a shame, because they’d probably ask me to leave once you’re dead.
John: Dance with me.
Jane: You don’t dance.
John: That was just part of my cover, sweetheart.
Jane: Was sloth part of it too? Think this’ll have a happy ending?
John: Happy endings are just stories that haven’t finished yet.
Jane: Satisfied?
John: Not for years.
Jane: Why is it you think we failed? Cos we were leading separate lives? Or was it all the lying that did us in?
John: I have a theory. Newly formed.
Jane: I’m breathless to hear it.
John: You killed us.
Jane: Provocative.
John: You approached our marriage like a job, to be reckoned, planned and executed.
Jane: And you avoided it.
John: What do you care, if I was just a cover?
Jane: Well, who said you were just a cover?
John: Wasn’t I?
Jane: Wasn’t I?
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, however, has a happy ending. Despite all of the career pressures pulling couples apart, the two manage to team up, beat the odds, and emerge still married. It’s an ending reminiscent of Awful Truth, Philadelphia Story, and Adam’s Rib. One of my favorite scenes is how, after they’re coming back together, they realize that a new level of truth-telling is necessary. The conversation occurs when they must coordinate their efforts to defeat anonymous killers, who are shooting at them in an epic car chase. Imagine the following talk interrupted by gun shots, leaping assailants, exploding cars, and other theatrics:
John (who has insisted on driving an unfamiliar SUV): It’s called evasive driving, sweetheart. Hold still. This thing’s all over the place. How do you drive these things?
Jane: Honey! Honey, let me drive.
John: I got it.
Jane: Move over. Move. I’m the suburban housewife, sweetheart. You move.
John: Fine. Go.
Jane: Go. (They switch places)
John: I think I should probably tell you. I was married once before. (She starts hitting him.) What is wrong with you?
Jane: You’re what’s wrong with me.
John: It was a drunken Vegas thing.
Jane: That’s better. That’s much better. Great.
John: Stop it. (The following cars bear down on them) Go, go, go!
Jane: Her name and social security number?
John: No, you’re not gonna kill her.
And a little later:
John: You know, sweetheart, you’re being a bit hypocritical. It’s not like you’re some beacon of truth.
Jane: John, my parents . . . They died when I was five. I’m an orphan.
John: Who was that kindly fellow who gave you away at our wedding?
Jane: Paid actor.
John: I said I saw your dad on Fantasy Island.
Jane: I know.
John: I don’t even want to talk about it.
. . .
We’re gonna have to redo every conversation we’ve ever had.
Jane: I’m Jewish.
John: Can’t believe I brought my real parents to our wedding.
The film ends with (1) the two have survived as a couple after overcoming insurmountable odds and (2) a couples counselor indicating they’ve made significant progress since the session that opens the film.
Which is the point of the genre from the beginning. Relationships can be like a minefield but, thanks to the holy gift of laughter, we can acknowledge the challenges without being emotionally destroyed. Feuding Couples Comedy steps up when the challenges are particularly intense.
