You can learn a great deal about a culture from its fantasies. If Sex and the City is anything to go by, ours are pretty impoverished. The first film version of the HBO series is going into production and will be released next year, guaranteed to offer its trademark view that femininity today is defined by shoes, shopping and sex. I like all three as much as the next girl — unless the next girl is a character on Sex and the City — but my fantasies are rather more ambitious. They were formed years ago by a passionate devotion to the peerless romantic comedies of the 1930s, known as screwballs. Some 65 years before Sex and the City offered ‘groundbreaking’ stories about professional women seeking true love in the big city, screwball comedy did the same thing, except that its ideal women were usually minding their own business instead of desperately seeking a husband. Not exactly progress.
Screwball imagined the battle of the sexes as exquisite cosmopolitan fun, a new kind of comedy of manners, chic fairy tales in which sophisticated urban lovers crossed wits, crossed country, and, occasionally, cross-dressed. Men in tuxedos and women in satin evening gowns teased, taunted, and tormented each other into submission. Screwball was Jane Austen in Art Deco, Beatrice and Benedick at the Stork Club, with slapstick added to the mix: Cary Grant in a tuxedo slips on an olive at the Ritz in Bringing Up Baby; Myrna Loy in furs does a skidding pratfall across the glossy floor of a bar in The Thin Man. Screwball imagined women who were as smart, stylish, witty, independent and forceful as the men who tangled with them.
From the start, Sex and the City was nostalgic for a different era in Hollywood romance — the most infantile and repressive era, the late 1950s. The opening words of the first episode were: ‘Welcome to the age of un-innocence. No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember. Instead we have breakfast at
7 a.m., and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. How the hell did we get into this mess?’ By watching the wrong movies, apparently. Being nostalgic for Breakfast at Tiffany’s and An Affair to Remember means identifying with a version of prelapsarian romantic bliss in which the woman is either a prostitute in all but name or ends up in a wheelchair. It’s a revealing choice.
Screwball imagined an altogether more robust world, in which lovers didn’t need each other desperately; they were not so insufficient. Nor could man hope to conquer woman; the best he could achieve was détente. In screwball women and men gave as good they got, artists at one-upmanship and masters of the Parthian shot. Neither admitted defeat; neither was in the wrong for long. Except in the sense that love would conquer all, the game was never rigged: screwball admired both its protagonists equally, and meted out impartial justice that was very nearly irrespective of sex (bar the occasional spanking). If Clark Gable taught Claudette Colbert how to dunk doughnuts properly in one scene in It Happened One Night, she taught him how to hitchhike in the next. If Carole Lombard got punched in the jaw in Nothing Sacred, she socked Fredric March right back. The lovers in screwball were as perfectly matched as their wardrobes, as for a brief period during the Depression Hollywood stopped worrying and learnt to love the bombshell.
Take the following exchange, which opens the incomparable His Girl Friday, in which Rosalind Russell comes to see Cary Grant, her ex-husband, for the first time since their divorce. She tells him he wouldn’t know her any more, and he replies:
Walter: I’d know you any time. Any —
Hildy: ‘Any place. Anywhere.’ You’re repeating yourself, Walter. That’s the speech you made the night you proposed.
Walter: I notice you still remember it.
Hildy: Of course I remember it. If I didn’t remember it, I wouldn’t have divorced you.
Walter: Yeah, I sort of wish you hadn’t done that, Hildy.
Hildy: Done what?
Walter: Divorced me. Makes a fellow lose all faith in himself. It gives him — it almost gives him a feeling he wasn’t wanted.
Hildy: Ah, now look, junior, that’s what divorces are for.
Walter: Nonsense, you’ve got an old-fashioned idea divorce is something that lasts forever. ‘Till death do us part.’ Divorce doesn’t mean anything nowadays, Hildy, it’s just a few words mumbled over you by a judge. We’ve got something between us nothing can change.
Hildy: Oh, well I suppose you’re right, in a way, Walter.
Walter: Sure I’m right.
Hildy: I am fond of you, you know.
Walter: Thattagirl!
Hildy: I often wish you weren’t such a stinker.
Sex and the City never came near this kind of wit, in part because its comedy relied on the one-liner, a self-indulgent and short-circuiting form of humour that creates conversations as abortive as the characters’ relationships. More important, the men never participated. Screwball relied upon give and take, distributing cleverness equally, and without gender bias, between its central couple. Sex and the City only cares about satisfying its women, who only care about satisfying themselves. It makes for fairly onanistic viewing. There are certainly some sharp lines, but the women get all of them. Of course, such chauvinism flatters the women watching it, but one wonders why they would ever desire the stereotyped, boring cartoons who pass for the men in the series. Sex and the City concerns women; screwball comedy concerns heterosexuality. It’s about couples battling it out, and achieving a truce, overcoming difference in a comedy of reconciliation. Sex and the City is about self-gratification.
One of narrative’s most powerful abilities is its capacity to create and sustain desire. It teaches us what — and whom —we should want. Screwball offers infinite possibilities for fun, and for pleasure. Sex and the City has two: orgasms, and shopping. The irony is that the notoriously ‘uncensored’ fantasies of Sex and the City are so barren, while the heavily censored screwballs offered such extravagant, exuberant variations on wish-fulfilment. To be sure, both present elitist fantasies in which happiness is defined as romance and luxury — but then so do all fairy tales. At least screwball sets high standards for its idealised central couple. The men and women in screwball yield to no one in the elegance and glamour stakes: it was Cary Grant who invented and perfected the metrosexual, while the peculiar veil that Katharine Hepburn wears during the Ritz scene in Bringing Up Baby looks like it was designed by Le Corbusier and makes her somewhat resemble a Martian. It was a far more outré fashion statement than any of Sarah Jessica Parker’s studiedly kooky outfits in Sex and the City. The women of screwball comedy wear gorgeous shoes with killer heels as a matter of course: they just have better things to talk about.
Sarah Churchwell is senior lecturer in American literature and culture at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a book about screwball comedy.