Can Hollywood do hip?

Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire

At first sight, two Hollywood films I watched recently had little in common. Ball of Fire (1941) is a Hollywood screwball comedy about a team of rather elderly encyclopedia editors getting mixed up with gangsters. Booksmart (2019), made all of 88 years later, is a coming-of-age movie about teens graduating from high school and partying on their last night before going on university.

You could not imagine two less similar films. Yet there are interesting similarities. Both films contrast studying versus being hip, almost as if the American dream could not envisage life without popular music and wisecracks. In Ball of Fire, the seven encyclopedia editors, with an average age of around 65, apart from the very noticeably younger Gary Cooper, as Professor Bertram Potts, are struggling to complete their vast encyclopedia, over time and over budget. They are stuck at the letter “S”, and specifically, Gary Cooper is unhappy with the entry for slang. To improve the article, and get more real-world awareness of slang, he ventures into metropolitan New York, and meets Barbara Stanwyck, a singer (and more importantly, a frequent user of slang) mixed up with gangsters. Unfortunately, the slang is rather prim, and not helped by being laboriously and frequently explained for the benefit of the (presumably) less hip cinemagoers. Slang might be hip, but constant translations are not. I longed for the light touch (and enjoyable slang) of Damon Runyon.

In Booksmart, two teenage girls discover on the very last day of their schooling that although they have sacrificed their social life to get into to a prestigious university, that many of their peers have achieved the same result as well as partying hard. So they decide to make up for all the lost months and years of study with one night of dedicated socialising.

So you can see the connection. Here are two films that propose a very similar thesis: in Hollywood-world, you can study all you like, but it counts for nothing if you aren’t hip. Hip can be any or all of clubbing, drinking, cool music; it is above all social, and noisy Here is a message for the masses: yes, there are people who study like mad, but we, the viewers, represent the majority, and social life is our milieu.

For such a premise to work, the presentation of “hip” is all-important. You could describe the vast majority of Hollywood films as an attempt to depict hip, so directors and actors have had plenty of opportunity to get it right. But on the subject of hip, Ball of Fire fails miserably. Barbara Stanwyck, as Sugarpuss O’Shea, has to provide pretty much all the hip elements, and for all Howard Hawk’s many skills, his idea of hip leaves much to be desired. Stanwyck is no night-club singer, and her solo performance, and her outfits, are both underwhelming (and not helped by a very curious and misguided attempt to have one verse of her song accompanied by nothing but the sound of striking matches on a matchbox). Subsequently, she attempts to display eroticism when she arrives late at night at the shared home of all the encyclopedists, but her attempt at suggestive undressing is vastly inferior to Stanwyck’s own performance in The Lady Eve (also 1941). Perhaps trying to appear erotic in front of seven males is well-nigh impossible: it’s burlesque rather than suggestive. The film ends with Cooper marrying Stanwyck, leaving the problem of the six other bridesmaids, who aren’t going to disappear any time soon. Doesn’t look like a recipe for paradise.

Booksmart also has its problems. In this high-school film, “hip” is restricted to eighteen and under with no experience of life apart from institutions which is not very hip. The parties depicted seem to be mainly about the display of wealth: rented yachts, vast houses with unlimited drink and lavish, tasteless bourgeois interiors. More challenging, and undermining the serious study versus hip theme, the two protagonists, Molly and Amy, have a relationship that is anything but comic. Their union appears to be a defensive alliance, with the main aim of reducing or removing the need to interact with their peers. They know little about each other: Molly is unaware of Amy’s intention to spend a gap year in Africa. Worse, Molly clearly bullies Amy. They have a code word, malala, which when triggered by either demands immediate and absolute acceptance of any action from the other. When Molly says the magic word, Amy complies, but when Amy asks for the same favour, it is rejected. Matters come to a head in a blazing row in the middle of a party, observed by all the other partygoers.

By the end of both films, we have come to realise two things. Hollywood for the most part isn’t very good at depicting hip, and neither film manages to end on a comic high. Based on these films, I would prefer either compiling encyclopedias or reading in a library to any of the depictions of hip on offer.