This week I was a speaker in a Gender Colloquium at Rider University and I decided to include a shortened version of my speech here about Adam’s Rib, Legally Blonde, and the patriarchal unconscious connection in law and film. Enjoy.

The law is seen as an ideal system that mediates all and shouldn’t be altered; but there is the presence of the patriarchal unconscious which creates flaws in this system. The patriarchal unconscious is that unknowingly, just as males are the fathers and head of the households, males are in control of the law system and how it functions. George Cukor’s 1949 film, Adam’s Rib, is a screwball comedy about a married couple, who are also both lawyers that take on the same case defending opposite sides. Adam Bonner tries to prosecute Doris Attinger who is accused of attempting to murder her uncaring husband; while Amanda Bonner defends this woman on the basis of “equal rights under the law,” which Amanda insists if the person on trial were a man he would be vindicated for trying to kill the lover of his unfaithful wife in order to protect his home. Adam’s Rib seems to be a film fighting for women’s rights and against the biased patriarchal unconscious, but on closer analysis one can see that the message seems to lose its hold in the end when Adam wins over his wife, Amanda, and the argument is dropped

The scene in which we see Amanda start to become passionate about fighting for women’s rights is the next scene as they drive to work. Amanda is driving which seems like the film’s way of showing that Amanda is equal and has power, but then this is undermined by portraying her as a stereotypical bad woman driver with all the other male driver’s beeping and yelling. The shot composition throughout this scene distinguishes the divide between Amanda and Adam’s views as they are framed by the windshield with a divide down the middle. We first hear Amanda’s view when she says, “There’s lots of things a man can do and in society’s eyes it’s all hunky dory. A woman does the same thing, the same mind you, and she’s an outcast.” When she makes this strong statement she is looking forward, facing the camera because she is driving, so her view is clearly and strongly conveyed. When Adam states his point that anybody who commits a crime, whether it’s a man or woman, should be punished; rather than fully understanding Adam’s view we are distracted by Amanda trying to get a parking spot. This lack of acknowledgment of his view could be because in society we are too aware of this view as an excuse of the patriarchal unconscious to suppress women, or it could be because this is leading up to Amanda winning the one case in court, but finally losing in the long run with the ending of the film.

This film falls under the category of being a genre film, a screwball comedy, which causes the film to follow the patriarchal unconscious by not allowing the audience to take the lessons of women’s rights seriously. One particularly humorous scene is when Amanda asks the people of the court to imagine Mrs. Attinger, Mr. Attinger, and Mr. Attinger’s mistress as the opposite gender than what they are, in order to prove a point. In this scene when the females are transformed, their facial expressions and posture remain the same and we see the people around them acknowledge the change by sitting up or murmuring to each other. When Mr. Attinger transforms into a woman we hear Amanda say “try, try hard,” as if to imagine a male as a female is a very hard task. Then when he is dressed in the women’s clothing he changes his face into softer expressions, he stops slouching and sits straight, turns his hand up, and raises an eyebrow. His transformation seems more elaborate as he tries to be more feminine and we hear people gasp with much more surprise. This humor undermines Amanda’s strength as a lawyer. This sex change is supposed to support Amanda’s statement when she says, “an unwritten law stands in back of a man who defends his home. Apply this same law to this maltreated wife and neglected woman.” Her statement is strong and accurate but people miss it because of the distraction of the patriarchal unconscious which causes us to find a male in women’s clothing humorous since it seems such a contradiction from the dominant and anti-feminine role the male is given and the strong focus of heterosexuality in our society.

The ending of this film emphasizes the fact that Amanda, a female lawyer, has failed in altering the legal system. Again because this is a screwball comedy, there must be rules that are followed as a genre film which also affects the ending of this film. While Amanda may have won the case, this win caused a riff in their marriage which is typical in screwball comedies in order for the ending to be a happy moment where the couple forgive and embrace. In this last scene, Adam shows Amanda that men can use the trick of tears just as women and Amanda uses this as further evidence toward her point: that men and women are the same and should be treated this way. But Adam uses the “little difference” between men and women to finally win his argument once and for all and drop the subject forever. The patriarchal unconscious exists because of this “little difference” in which men feel that they should be in more power than women; and at the end of this film Amanda shows that she agrees with this ideology because there is a happy ending embrace to this screwball comedy.

At the start of this film Amanda seems to have a strong stance of pro-women’s rights and equality, but as the movie progresses Adam’s argument becomes stronger and Amanda becomes weaker by the falling out of their relationship as husband and wife. Therefore the film simply shows the injustices of the law and the prejudice of women but it does not truly fight for women’s rights because in the end the “little difference” is rewarded and the woman is merely wife to the man.

You might be wondering why the title of this blog is: The Patriarchal Unconscious: From Adam’s Rib to Harvard. That’s because in my original paper I compared Adam’s Rib to the 2001 film Legally Blonde because like Adam’s Rib it also seems to question the injustices of the law system, especially sexism. It was interesting to compare a film from the 1940s to that of one from the postfeminist era. But again with a close analysis of Robert Luketic’s Legally Blonde, one can see that it seems to start out unknowingly fighting against the patriarchal unconscious, and in the end Elle appears to be accepted for doing things her own way, but the major fight to change the system and the patriarchal influence is lost. Elle’s original fight in the film is actually for her ex-boyfriend to propose, but through this she came to realize her real fight should be for women’s rights. Just as in Adam’s Rib, Elle won the small fight by winning her case in court, by her terms; but she loses in the end because instead of standing up for women’s rights and trying to alter the law system she merely supports the law and actually claims that it is just, by giving credit to the patriarchal system for accepting her even though she was different in her hyper-feminine ways. Although these films are 52 years apart, and there’s the period of the feminist movement between them, they both seem to question the flaws of the law system, but unfortunately they each end with happy comedy endings allowing female inequalities in law to be masked by Hollywood genre conventions.

~Shaboomer~