Bringing Up Baby · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Four years of assembly, and the brontosaurus is one bone short. David Huxley stands on the scaffold, intercostal clavicle in hand — the last piece — while across town a woman he hasn't met yet prepares to make the next thirty-six hours of his life unrecognizable. Hold on the bone. Everything Hawks does to David is already in it: a man who has spent his career sorting the dead into order, reaching to complete a skeleton, just as the living comes for him carrying a leopard.

Start with that bone, because Deleuze has a name for it. A fetish, in his account of cinema, is a part-object charged with far more force than its size explains — a relic the whole film orbits. The intercostal clavicle (the term may be nonsense; that's the joke) is David's: his ambition, his discipline, his manhood, all condensed into one rib of dead lizard. So of course the film's logic demands a dog bury it. George digs a hole, and the entire apparatus of David's professional life goes into the ground in a Connecticut garden. The fetish tells you where to look. Whatever the bone touches, the comedy detonates.

The screwball is usually filed under sophistication — repartee, well-dressed people trading fire. Deleuze lets you see what's actually under the dinner jacket. He called a certain kind of cinema the impulse-image: a world where drives erupt beneath the social surface, where appetite and compulsion run the show and manners are only the crust. Susan Vance is pure impulse. She isn't scatterbrained — the dossier is right that she's strategic, relentless, fully aware. She wants David, and she pursues him the way weather pursues a picnic. Beneath the ordered milieu of museum and estate and engagement, Deleuze would say, lies an originary world — a savage register of pure drive — and Hawks gives it a body. The leopard. Baby is the originary world walking around on four legs inside the drawing room, the drive made literal, purring on the divan while the social world keeps trying to serve dinner.

Now the film's masterstroke, and the concept that unlocks it. There are two leopards. Baby is tame, a gift from Brazil who calms to "I Can't Give You Anything But Love." The other, escaped from a circus, will kill you. They look identical. Deleuze, working through the action-image, names exactly this: the index of equivocity — when the same object or act could belong to two completely different situations, and nobody on screen can tell which. That isn't a plot gimmick. It's the engine of the whole genre. Every screwball misunderstanding is an index of equivocity: the same gesture reads as seduction or assault, the same man as zoologist or escaped lunatic, the same leopard as cuddle or death. Hawks just makes it gorgeously literal by putting two cats in one wood at night and letting his characters embrace the wrong one.

This is why the film moves the way it does. Hawks builds it on what Deleuze calls the small form of the action-image — not a grand situation pressing toward one decisive act, but act after act, each disclosing a little more of a hidden, worsening situation. David tears Susan's dress; the act discloses a new disaster, and now he must walk locked to her, hiding her from the room. Each gesture springs a trap. The cutting, as the dossier notes, "denies relief" — it stacks the next equivocal act before the last one resolves. That's small-form comedy at maximum RPM: disclosure, disclosure, disclosure, no breath.

And at the center of all of it stands a man who cannot act. Deleuze, after Bergson, calls the living center of any action a centre of indetermination — the interval where a creature receives the world and chooses a response. David's interval is jammed. Grant's genius, precisely caught in the dossier, is an exasperation "calibrated to always fall just short of decisive action." He perceives everything and discharges nothing. Comedy, it turns out, found the stalled sensory-motor circuit years before the postwar art film made stalling into philosophy. David in the marabou negligee, springing into the air — "I just went gay all of a sudden!" — is a man whose every motor response has been confiscated. He can only react, and reaction is the joke.

All of it rides a single curve: what Deleuze calls a line of slope, the irreversible descent. David loses the bone, his clothes, his dignity, his fiancée, his ordered life — a downward slide the film treats as joy. The brontosaurus collapses in the last shot, four years of order in rubble, and that is the happy ending.

Hawks didn't invent the parts. Capra's It Happened One Night gave him the plan-deprived man outmaneuvered by an aggressive woman on an episodic road; his own Twentieth Century made dialogue romantic warfare; Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise tuned repartee to erotic combat; The Awful Truth handed him the exact register of Grant's hapless endurance. Baby pressurizes all of it and pushes the verbal toward the physical — the overlapping speech here would go fully systemic in His Girl Friday two years on, and the film became the reference every later screwball measures itself against. What Stanley Cavell saw in this tradition, the comedy of remarriage, Deleuze names from the other side: the social order is a crust, and love is the leopard underneath. Watch it again for the two cats. Once you see the equivocity, you see the whole genre breathing.