Abstract

Gregory La Cava’s 1936 screwball comedy film My Man Godfrey is structured by consubstantiality, which will be defined here as the reification of a second, oppositional element in response to the negation of a first. Because the second element is conditioned by the very thing it negated, a third element is required to reverse the (subjective) point of view as corollary to the first, objective reversal. The film takes place in the depths of the Great Depression; its story centers on the discovery and restoration of ‘the forgotten man’, represented by Godfrey Parke, who has renounced his wealth and social position to live in a shanty-town under the pseudonym of Smith following a failed love-affair. After being ‘claimed’ during a scavenger hunt, he becomes the butler of the family of a New York industrialist, Alexander Bullock. One daughter, Irene, falls in love with him; the other, Cornelia, attempts to frame him by planting ‘stolen’ pearls. Godfrey eludes her trap and uses collateral from the pearls to invest in the futures market, where he rescues his host’s company’s shares to save the family from ruin. With surplus funds he reclaims the shanty-town site and builds a modernist night-club, employing his former ‘forgotten men’ companions. Consubstantiality is played out visually and dramatically. Its component parts are encoded into a visual paradigm to demonstrate the toroidal logic that connects consubstantiality to Jacques Lacan’s theories of discourse and sexuation. Here, topology qualifies Freud’s contention that ‘Psyche is extended; knows nothing of it’ by showing how the non-orientation of the 2-d manifold becomes the self-intersecting traps of 3-d immersion – traps that are already well-known as dramatic devices.