BY LAUREN RAMANATHAN

In print | Published March 5, 2009

For those of you not familiar with Bryn Mawr traditions, it is not the somber tones of “The Graduate” (Mike Nichols, 1968), but the happily bourgeois “The Philadelphia Story” (George Cukor, 1941) that is the movie of choice for the student body. Every year after May Day (which is right around the time of Worthstock, but with more white dresses and way shittier music) they show “The Philadelphia Story” in the basement of musty old Thomas, hall of the elders.

Looking back, I used to love that movie. The witty dialogue, the sexual tension between Macaulay Connor (Jimmy Stewart), Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) and C.K Dexter Haven (Carey Grant), the dazzling yet subtle cinematography. But when watching it last year I was able to see it for what it was: a mediocre, bourgeois, formalist narrative that is sexist and wholly predictable. But let’s concentrate on one of the aforementioned adjectives for a minute. Bourgeois. What makes “The Philadelphia Story” bourgeois? I mean, thematically it is about a wealthy, and I mean fucking loaded, family living outside of, you guessed it, Philadelphia, the daughter of which divorces her good-for-nothing alcoholic playboy childhood love to get engaged to George Kittredge (John Howard), a good-natured proletariat-turned-money-making mogul who turns out to be an asshole anyways.

But what confounds the movie is the way in which it navigates class dynamics, which seems to omit structural oppression. And coming from an all girls’ school, where a minority of shrill, superficial, privileged … individuals, can out-voice a group of strong independent women, questions of class and representation become ever so important. There is something about Tracy Lord’s ambivalence, the way in which she stands confused between working-class-Joe Macaulay and upper-class C.K, not to mention her cross-class wonder of a fiancé, that make this a very confusing and problematic work of cinema.

Take, for instance, Tracy’s sincere admiration for her beau’s presumably arduous climb to the top. When C.K shows disdain towards his ex-wife’s choice of fiancé she accuses him of classism, to which he replies that if she were to marry “Mack, the night watchmen” he’d applaud, for class background alone, be it working class or elite, does not make the man. While I can’t really contest the veracity of this statement and I think it might be a useful sentiment, there is a part of me that feels incredulous. After all, she’s not marrying Mack the night watchman, and for all the movie’s confounding of class boundaries through the various romantic relationships presented throughout the film, the story concludes with all of the characters going back to their respective class milieus anyways.

And then there’s Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey), Macaulay’s working gal girlfriend. I’ve always had this secret fantasy where at the end of the movie Tracy forsakes all three of her selfish male suitors and runs away with Elizabeth. Poor, unglamorous Elizabeth. Unwanted precisely because she is so unglamorous, yet so steadfast. But is her reliance, her ability to stick by Macaulay in spite of his hooking up with Tracy Lord, really because of some inherent honor, or simply because she has no other options?

Now, what does this all have to do with real life? Well, Katharine Hepburn was a Bryn Mawr alum, and is also symbolic of a specific cultural moment; her mother was a suffragette, she came from a WASP-y background and is pretty much emblematic of the women who originally attended all-female institutions such as Bryn Mawr. I would say that not only does “The Philadelphia Story” stand in contrast to the professed politics of the college (meaning the majority of the student body at Bryn Mawr, or the ones whose opinions I think matter), but Hepburn’s legacy and politics stand in sharp contrast as well. This problem is not anomalous to Bryn Mawr, obviously. And surely a movie is not the cause of the college’s image problem, or troubling internal dynamics, with regards to racism, classism, heterosexism and other forms of oppression. I would just like to suggest that part of the problem about the society in which we live is our lack of an ability to critically analyze and dialogue about the symbols we choose to surround ourselves with. Developing those skills and attempting to produce new symbols and works that are commensurate with progressive ideas of inclusion and that do not efface differences of experience within a society in which privilege is unequally distributed is the first step in a long and arduous process of liberation.

Lauren is a sophomore. You can reach her at lramana1@swarthmore.edu.

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