Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Bringing Up Baby
1938 · Howard Hawks · Bringing Up Baby on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for characters talking through each other, not to. (sound)
Lines cascade fast above naturalistic speech, and characters frequently talk through one another rather than waiting their turn.
Payoff: The overlap alone tells you nobody in this movie is really listening to anybody else.
Watch Grant's double-takes stop just short of doing anything. (performance)
Grant plays David's exasperation calibrated to always fall short of decisive action, stiff posture, a growing helplessness that never breaks into control.
Payoff: His whole comic effect comes from a man who reacts and reacts and never quite acts.
Notice how often the bone gets mentioned or lost. (setting)
The dinosaur bone David needs to complete his museum skeleton keeps resurfacing as an object of pursuit, buried, carried, and fought over.
Payoff: A rib of dead lizard is worth more screen time than almost anything else in the film.
Watch how Susan rearranges David's space the moment she enters it. (staging)
She appears in his orderly world and starts moving his objects and his plans around, and Hawks stages the disruption as pure physical business.
Payoff: Chaos here isn't a mood. It's something you can watch happen to a room.
Count how many new disasters pile up before the last one resolves. (structure)
The film stacks complications on top of complications without pausing to let confusion settle, so relief never really arrives.
Payoff: You're meant to stay slightly overwhelmed the whole time, the same as David.
Once you have seen it
Notice how identical the two leopards look on screen. (structure)
Baby is tame and the escaped circus leopard is deadly, and characters keep embracing or approaching the wrong one because nothing visibly distinguishes them.
Payoff: The same animal reads as safe or lethal depending on which one it happens to be. In the reading: index-of-equivocity. The reading calls this an index of equivocity: the same object reading two completely different ways at once.
Track the bone from David's hands to a dog's hole. (setting)
The intercostal clavicle gets buried by a dog, and with it goes the discipline and ambition David built his whole life around.
Payoff: One small object is carrying his entire sense of who he is. In the reading: fetish. The reading calls this a fetish: a small object charged with far more weight than its size explains.
Watch the brontosaurus skeleton collapse in the final shot. (structure)
Four years of careful assembly comes down under Susan's weight while she confesses her love from the wreckage.
Payoff: The film treats the destruction of his life's work as the happy ending, not a tragedy.
Carry this in: Watch the two leopards. You'll never be sure which one you're looking at, and that's the joke.