The Handbook for Hawksian Happiness All humans have the ultimate goal of achieving happiness. The United States of America is built upon the pursuit of happiness. Any update on an app is to make the user slightly more happy with its functions. A recently-popular song asked everyone to “clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth” (“Happy” by Pharrell Williams). Usually the path to happiness stems from the ideas of “be who you truly are” and “don’t hold back”. Twentieth century film director Howard Hawks built his screwball comedies on similar ideas with radical twists. According to Hawk, in order for a person to be successfully happy, he or she should become someone else; this is the way to find one’s true self. In His Girl Friday,
…show more content…
David Huxley is introduced as a respectable (and somewhat boring) museum professor in a room full of ancient and dead objects. He believes that he belongs in this carefully ordered world, yet little things such as his spontaneous kiss on his fiancée’s cheek and a sudden use of slang (“I’ll knock him for a loop!”) demonstrate that David is “painfully scattered” about his identity (Mast, “Bringing Up Baby” 298). After meeting the vibrant Susan Vance, David is at first uncomfortable with how events work out; he has to take on an alias of a lunatic big-game hunter named Bone with all the new people he consequently meets. With Susan’s aunt, he tries to reassure her that he “is not quite [himself] today”, yet the viewer sees that David is actually a natural at being this new spontaneous person (the exclamation “Because I just went gay all of a sudden!” and the straight-faced naming of “Mickey-the-Mouse and Donald-the-Duck” as his accomplices come to mind). By the end, despite all the odd incidents of digging with a dog, chasing after a leopard, and being arrested for being a supposed Peeping Tom, David “discover[s] that was the best day [he] ever had in [his] whole life.” As Jim Leach summarizes in The Screwball Comedy, the “kind of order” David previously maintained was “a denial of life,” and by improvising, he “finally opts for challenge, excitement, and a full life” …show more content…
She takes on the name and persona quite well, at times seeming to forget her origins. However, after some time, Lily decides that she wants to go back to being the normal person she used to be, have a house, “a home with a little attic and a cookie jar.” But she cannot go back, because “Lily Garland really is Lily Garland and not Mildred Plotka. She has the soul of Lily Garland in the body of Mildred Plotka... an implication arising from the ease, success, and completeness of Mildred’s becoming Lily” (Mast, “Howard Hawks, Storyteller” 206). In other words, as with Hildy Johnson and David Huxley, being an entirely different person allows Mildred-Lily to achieve true happiness with herself, and going back to what she used to be would be
David Huxley is introduced as a respectable (and somewhat boring) museum professor in a room full of ancient and dead objects. He believes that he belongs in this carefully ordered world, yet little things such as his spontaneous kiss on his fiancée’s cheek and a sudden use of slang (“I’ll knock him for a loop!”) demonstrate that David is “painfully scattered” about his identity (Mast, “Bringing Up Baby” 298). After meeting the vibrant Susan Vance, David is at first uncomfortable with how events work out; he has to take on an alias of a lunatic big-game hunter named Bone with all the new people he consequently meets. With Susan’s aunt, he tries to reassure her that he “is not quite [himself] today”, yet the viewer sees that David is actually a natural at being this new spontaneous person (the exclamation “Because I just went gay all of a sudden!” and the straight-faced naming of “Mickey-the-Mouse and Donald-the-Duck” as his accomplices come to mind). By the end, despite all the odd incidents of digging with a dog, chasing after a leopard, and being arrested for being a supposed Peeping Tom, David “discover[s] that was the best day [he] ever had in [his] whole life.” As Jim Leach summarizes in The Screwball Comedy, the “kind of order” David previously maintained was “a denial of life,” and by improvising, he “finally opts for challenge, excitement, and a full life” …show more content…
She takes on the name and persona quite well, at times seeming to forget her origins. However, after some time, Lily decides that she wants to go back to being the normal person she used to be, have a house, “a home with a little attic and a cookie jar.” But she cannot go back, because “Lily Garland really is Lily Garland and not Mildred Plotka. She has the soul of Lily Garland in the body of Mildred Plotka... an implication arising from the ease, success, and completeness of Mildred’s becoming Lily” (Mast, “Howard Hawks, Storyteller” 206). In other words, as with Hildy Johnson and David Huxley, being an entirely different person allows Mildred-Lily to achieve true happiness with herself, and going back to what she used to be would be