When Function Meets Mischief in a Movie: The Chemistry in the Contradiction.
From Bringing Up Baby, 1938. Dir. Howard Hawkes. Cinematography Russell Metty
How do we think of function in the context of a story? As it pertains to a scene, a shot, a beat? What purpose they serve perhaps. How they work. The result they lead to. How they relate to something else. Their part in the connective tissue of the story. Maybe their place in the structure. Some point of no return. The end of an act or movement. The start of another. What they set up, pay off, invite, answer, challenge. How they move the story on. How—if they don’t—they merit inclusion in the storytelling. The emotion conveyed. The cognitive engagement of the audience. The bonding of reader/audience to character. An injection of energy. A reversal in the journey of a character, a change in the direction of the story, or the introduction of a new element. A moment of wonder, horror, spectacle, mystery. A contrast to what is to follow, which will render that next step all the more powerful. A seed of suspense. Another, perhaps contradictory layer of character. A new angle, new understanding…
Many possibilities. So much to consider. But common across the board lies the imperative of order, of organization, coherence, meaning.
What—by contrast—do we understand by the word mischief? Troublemaking perhaps. Transgression. Stepping beyond the bounds of decorum. Defacing the fabric of the status quo. Ripping it up. Heresy. The seeds of discord. There’s the currency of populist idiom of course: kicking ass, killing it, crushing it, badassery—cruelty-as-fun the thread, it seems to me (not mischief but conformism to contemporary taste). Accepted morality upended though—there’s mischief for you. There’s mischief as wit too. An amusement. A joke. A comedic flourish. A sly comment or turn of events. An unexpected juxtaposition, funny, jarring, ironic, startling, wrenching. An image blatantly incongruous. Tonal dissonance maybe, warm/cold, joyful/painful, celebratory/sobering. A surprise. A shock. A spirit of disorder, irresponsibility, craziness, freedom from constraint, anarchy. Maybe the narrative takes a surprising step from which we fear it can never recover. A defiance of expectations. Contrarianism. Wild inventiveness. Game-playing—with the story, with a character, with the reader/audience. A misdirection. A trap laid for that hapless reader/audience. A trick.
The concept of mischief is itself mercurial. Does it suggest harmless fun, or something devilish—something innocent, childish, or something fiendishly contrived, something naughty or something malevolent? The mischief of mischief we might call this—the more you think about it, the harder it is to pin down its meaning.
The common thread though? Rebellion. Subversion. Troublemaking…
Totally unsuited bedfellows, one might assume, these dueling concepts…
Take a look at the ending to Howard Hawks’ 1938 Bringing up Baby. In this classic of the screwball comedy genre, Cary Grant’s paleontologist David Huxley has spent four years attempting to complete a fossilized Brontosaurus skeleton but has been lacking one single bone—the "intercostal clavicle." Katharine Hepburn’s Susan Vance, having found the missing item, brings it to Huxley, who, perched atop a platform next to the almost complete skeleton, tries but fails to prevent her from climbing a ladder to give him the bone. As she reaches the top, and the two at last profess their love for each other, the ladder sways wildly from side to side, prompting Vance to clamber onto the skeleton, which brings about the collapse of the entire Brontosaurus, leaving her swinging from her romantic partner’s grasp…
Surely, in all the function-meeting-mischief episodes in movies can there be few other examples so perfect. The romance we’ve been desperate to see succeed throughout the movie is finally affirmed. The skeleton and its absent "intercostal clavicle" are finally re-united. But with what astonishing invention! No sooner is all this achieved, than the hapless Brontosaurus falls to pieces. Huxley’s goal of completing the fossil is snatched from him in a second—you can’t achieve your true goal without losing your false goal, the film seems to tell us.
With entropy comes new harmony, with collapse consolidation, with the disintegration of the old the birth of the new, with the break-up of fossilized bone the flesh-and-blood joy of love, with the demise of the insentient beast the triumph of the sentient characters, with the descent of the skeleton the ascent of Vance, with the peril afforded by gravity the rescue afforded by love, with loss, touch—in short, a symbiosis of opposites, expressed with comedic mastery through the language of the moving image…
Mischief and function in one and the same event—story coming to life on the screen…
Peter Markham April 2021