Clutching Our Pearls Together in the Dark: The Philadelphia Story (1940) Theater Experience
Okay spoilers ahead, but I am going to assume 84 years has been enough lead time for people to watch The Philadelphia Story, which I watched through the Philadelphia Film Society’s (PFS) summer programming. PFS’s series makes a space for a group of people to sit in a movie theater setting and collectively feel what hits or does not with a contemporary audience.
It was genuinely surprising that the romance story had enough twists to be engaging, even through the haze of the silver screen and transatlantic accents without subtitles. The three main romantic storylines converge with divorcee high society Katharine Hepburn at the center, who is due to be married to the ‘least deserving’ candidate, a ‘reaching’ business tycoon.
Suddenly she is intrigued by a tabloid writer commissioned to write a piece on her wedding. But is it a ruse to control the fate of the article? She checks out his “serious” work from a local library. As he spies her reading his work and hears her flattery, he is overtaken by the thought of glamorous high status Hepburn who he just met. Although Hepburn knows he is dating the photographer on assignment with him (and that the photographer has been waiting and hoping for a marriage proposal), and the writer knows that Hepburn is engaged, over the course of 24 hours, the two get so heated in this reciprocated limerant gaze that he proposes to her—in front of his long time partner/photographer and Hepburn’s ex husband. When Hepburn rejects the author, all the cast then turn to the humiliated photographer. The photographer makes some quip about how she is fated to care for such a man(?) (I need subtitles lol). It was at this moment that you could feel the modern movie theater audience collectively gasp (with just the usual awkward silence throughout at the old-school Racist throwaway remarks). Hepburn’s craft actually did keep you on your feet, but she still resolves on the most plot-armored traditional-values choice. She chooses to return to her ex-husband who she has a history with.
I will likely forget this movie in ten years, but I am sure if something sticks, it will be the dagger of that lens pointed at the second-choice photographer and her sincere expression of heartbreak. But then it raised for me a 2024 genuine question I have when I watch romance films: am I just guilty of kink-shaming a potential humiliation fetish? Am I bringing in the baggage of a monogamizing gaze on all these peoples’ arrangements? It feels there’s a lot of exploration to come in this genre in the coming decade.
