“Some things are proper, and some things are not”: forgotten men and disciplined women in My Man Godfrey

ABSTRACT

My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936) begins with a critique of Depression-era public relief efforts but then focuses for the remainder of the film on the attempts of one ‘forgotten man’ to restore patriarchal authority to a female-dominated household. In the substitution of disciplined women for politically resistant homeless men, the film maps the consent of the subject to sovereign rule onto the screwball comedy’s plot convention of female submission, thus naturalizing sovereignty, and feminizing the disciplined subject of the welfare state.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• political theory
• screwball comedy
• film criticism
• film genre

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. As Agamben asserts, the exclusion of homo sacer ‘founded sovereign power’, and ‘the production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty’ (Agamben 1998, 153, 83).

2. Homo sacer ‘is precisely neither man nor beast’, and he ‘dwells paradoxically within both while belonging to neither’ (Agamben 1998, 63, emphasis in the original).

3. The term ‘sovereignty’ lends itself to such confusion since, as Wendy Brown points out, ‘sovereignty is both a name for absolute power and a name for political freedom’. See Brown (2010, 53).

4. In his first inaugural address, FDR stated, ‘I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis – broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe’, cited in Agamben (2005, 22).

5. These agencies included, for example, the National Recovery Administration, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Public Works Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

6. Garland (2014). Jürgen Habermas has described the welfare state as a ‘refeudalization of society’ because of its similarities with pre-modern political forms, exemplified by the New Deal’s extended reach of intervention into the private realm. See Habermas (1993, 231).

7. Although women were also ‘forgotten … at the bottom of the economic pyramid’, I write ‘his’ naming because the forgotten man was gendered male in public discourse.

8. On the theological origins of sovereign power, see Boudin (1992).

9. On masquerade and role reversal in screwball comedy, see Jeffers McDonald (2007, 47) and Grindon (2011, 16–18).

10. Godfrey’s very name suggests a merging of sovereign and homo sacer, a divinely ordained ruler and also the banned man who is free of society.

11. See Thomsen (2021), Mitchell (2006), Dudnik (2014), and Marie Smith (2010). On the welfare state’s invasive and discriminatory treatment of women, see Gilman (2008).

12. In her reading of It Happened One Night, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn follows Claude Lévi-Strauss to similarly argue that the film shifts the contradictions of class onto those of gender, ‘another set that is more readily managed’. See Karlyn (1995b, 126).

13. As Agamben writes, in the modern world, ‘we are all virtually homines sacri’ (Agamben 1998, 68, emphasis in the original). Wendy Brown explains that sovereignty’s ‘autonomy from/mastery over the economic’ is a particular challenge during times of economic crisis in the modern era, because capital is ‘accountable to no political sovereignty’ (Brown 2010, 57, 65).

14. Agamben (1998, 60). In contrast to My Man Godfrey, in which the forgotten men are repeatedly compared to the dead, in Fifth Avenue Girl (1939), another La Cava screwball comedy, it is the rich who are referred to as ‘stiffs’ and ‘cadavers’. Like My Man Godfrey, this later film is also about someone experiencing hard times who moves into the house of a rich family in order to help solve their problems.

15. On the differences between René Girard’s account of sacrifice and Agamben’s understanding of homo sacer, see Fitzpatrick (2005, 58–60).

16. When Godfrey says that his family has always been in America, he is no doubt referring to his family’s inclusion in, as Cornelia later says, ‘the old Mayflower crowd’; in response, however, Mrs. Bullock asks Godfrey if he is Indian, a possibility that Tommy Gray supports by saying that Godfrey’s wife was ‘dark’, and, in an equation between Native Americans and animals, that ‘we used to take her on hunting trips to stalk the game’. Of course, the European settlers who came to America in the 17^th century began a long process of asserting their sovereignty over native land and displacing the American Indian population, a process recalled by the displacement of the forgotten men at the city dump. While the film’s critique of social and economic inequities wanes after the first few scenes, there is a moment late in the film when structural inequities are subtly acknowledged by Tommy, who says of the forgotten man’s plight, ‘after all, things have always been this way for some people’. On the plantation as a state of exception, see Taylor (2018).

17. As Agamben writes, ‘the magistrate’s imperium is nothing but the father’s vitae necisque potestas extended to all citizens. There is no clearer way to say that the first foundation of political life is a life that may be killed, which is politicized through its capacity to be killed’ (Agamben 1998, 56, emphasis in the original). Similarly, Foucault argues ‘that the family is a sort of cell within which the power exercised is … of the same type as the power of sovereignty’ (Foucault 2006, 79).

18. Sometimes family genealogy and blood ties are presented as important in the film, while at other times they seem easy to leave behind. On the one hand, in response to police questioning, Mr. Bullock is quick to deny that Carlo is his son; on the other hand, when a police officer calls Molly ‘sister’, she says she would disown her parents if that were true. Ultimately, Godfrey proves the importance of family lineage; although he tells Mrs. Bullock that ‘one can never be sure of one’s ancestors’, his superiority to the Bullocks is established in part by the fact that his family arrived in America on the Mayflower, while the Bullocks arrived on ‘the boat after that’.

19. Not surprisingly, Godfrey’s family explains his absence by telling people that he is in South America, outside the sovereign rule of the U.S.

20. Foucault (1990a, 139). On the differences between the theories of biopower of Foucault and Agamben, see Lemke (2005), Erlenbusch (2013), Oksala (2010), Paul Patton (2007), and Catherine Mills (2007).

21. As Charles Lee writes, ‘biopower taps into bodies to ensure the reproduction of the social body in a “proper” mode and “proper” way’. See Lee (2010).

22. On the role (or lack of a role) of the mother in romantic comedy, see Karlyn (1995a, 39–59).

23. On the history of families turning over their members to disciplinary institutions, see Taylor (2012).

24. As William Rasch writes, ‘those who are democratically inclined’ replace sovereignty with the rule of law, ‘as if the rule of law had no need of the personified sovereign because it made use of impersonal reason, that is, as if reason were not itself another name for the figure of sovereign self-exemption’. See Rasch (2007).

25. Review in Variety, September 23, 1936, quoted in Gehring (1986, 51). Leger Grindon writes that the father in screwball comedies typically represents ‘the established order’ and ‘reasoned judgment’ (2011, 3).

26. Agamben describes the ‘destituent power’ of the ‘ungovernable’ subject who resists and deactivates the power and techniques of existing governmental apparatuses. See Agamben (2014).

27. David Shumway describes the way that ‘the males in screwball comedies typically scold, lecture, admonish, or preach’, a type of dialogue that ‘mimics rational persuasion’, but he does not consider the extent to which rational persuasion itself has gendered and political meanings. See Shumway (2012, 471).

28. In his first Fireside Chat on the banking crisis, FDR said, ‘I can assure you that it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress’. See Roosevelt (1999, 37).

29. On FDR’s manipulation of markets, see Edwards (2018).

30. As Wendy Brown explains, ‘Sovereignty circulates – it works as currency and through currency, and not only through law or command’ (Brown 2010, 57).

31. Godfrey’s normative masculinity is questioned a few times as well – when Mrs. Bullock asks about Godfrey ‘what would a man want with pearls?’ and when his friend Tommy Gray chides him for the domestic work that he does as a butler. Similarly, Mr. Bullock’s normative heterosexuality is put into question when he asks Godfrey if he has noticed anything ‘queer’ about him.

32. In this way, Godfrey fulfills the promise of sovereignty ‘to convene and mobilize the energies of a body to render it capable of autonomous action’ (Brown 2010, 52).

33. On the similarities between the male lead and the father in screwball comedies, see Gehring (1986, 167).

34. On the violent undertones and male dominance of screwball comedies, see Carson (1994, 213–25).

35. Harvey (1998, 216). Godfrey’s self-discipline – so expertly embodied by William Powell’s noted nonchalance and self-possession – adds to the impression that he is in complete control of his actions and emotions. On Powell’s star text, see Winokur (1987), and Walsh (2013).

36. Foucault (2006, 25). For an example of bare life mobilized against the sovereign state, see Ewa Plonoswska Ziarek’s insightful analysis of the hunger strikes of British suffragettes at the beginning of the twentieth century (2008).

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Anna Siomopoulos

Anna Siomopoulos is Associate Professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley University and author of Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal: Public Daydreams (Routledge, 2012). Her work has appeared in Cinema Journal, Film History, Arizona Quarterly, The Moving Image, Camera Obscura, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video, as well as several edited collections.