A fictional book about snakes in the 1941 film “The Lady Eve” and its nod to Freud

Are Snakes Necessary? Hugo Martzditz

A book with this title is being read by the hero of the 1941 film The Lady Eve, Charles Pike, heir to millions, in the bar of an ocean liner sailing from South America.

He has spent a year in the jungle studying snakes. Which renders the mise-en-scène absurd: a serpentologist who has observed snakes in their natural habitat has still failed to work out whether they are necessary?

Or perhaps it is not snakes that are meant at all? The camera pulls back, and we see that the young researcher has landed in an environment far more dangerous than the South American forests: he is surrounded by predatory huntresses after his fortune. Whom, incidentally, he ignores with great success. After all, for him the question remains open: are snakes necessary?

It is interesting to discover that no such book ever existed, and the screenwriter introduces an invented title into the plot, but the hint can be deciphered: in the 1930s the volume Is Sex Necessary? was fairly popular. And if we note the rich young biologist's awkwardness with women, and his admission that in a year in the jungle he has managed to forget everything about them, the solution fits the puzzle perfectly.

But it is wittier still that the real collection to which the author sends us was itself a kind of hint, or parody: of the works of Freud and the texts that accompanied the Freudian theory of sexuality.

So it is no accident that the snakes, seemingly not quite in place, are written into the film. Take the snake that frightens the card sharper Jean when she finds herself alone with Charles in his cabin. No wonder she is frightened, after a year in the Amazon! Remember Runaway Bride with Julia Roberts? Her grandmother too supposed that the girl simply was very afraid of snakes, and that was why she kept running away.

Nor is it an accident that in one scene a snake escapes from its terrarium and is spotted on the bed, yet is never mentioned again. The snake becomes a gun that never fires, evidently like Charles's own gun: a simpleton thrice seduced by a charming adventuress, who by the final scene has still not consummated their liaison.

He simply did not finish the book, and is not sure whether snakes are necessary, be they a symbol of woman or of more obvious Freudian analogies.