The activity of distracted drawing was first named “doodling” at a very particular moment: in the 1936 Frank Capra film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. To be clear, the word “doodle” already existed. It possibly derives from the German dudeltopf, meaning “simpleton,” cementing a strand of aimlessness or surplus value that persists in its current form. Before the twentieth century, it was used to refer to a “simple or foolish fellow.” It is in a courtroom scene toward the end of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town that the word was coined in its current meaning: distracted drawing. The film’s oddball protagonist Longfellow Deeds has been proclaimed insane by his relatives for, amongst other things, playing the tuba and giving away his inheritance money. In his defense, Deeds argues that he plays the tuba to help himself think, and points out that everybody is subject to such inane, or insane, distracted fiddlings (or in the idiom of the film, “everybody’s pixillated,” meaning something like “away with the pixies”). Not least pixillated of all is the court psychotherapist, Emile von Haller, who has been trying to make a case for Deeds as a manic depressive. It is the psychotherapist’s own doodle that Mr. Deeds triumphantly exposes in the film, calling von Haller a “doodler,” which, he explains, “is a word we made up back home to describe someone who makes foolish designs on paper while they’re thinking”:
Our modern understanding of a doodle thus has its premise in a fictional work. What Deeds shows us is the first doodle to be called a doodle, but of course it’s not one; it’s a drawing of a doodle. It’s as if here the scriptwriter has aimed to include all those archetypal forms that we are likely to find ourselves drawing when bored—stars, numbers, swirls, figure eights—drawing them together into the shape of a manic-looking face, such that it can be easily “read.” This gives it a satisfying finish, the snap of recognition. The fantasy of a doodle here, as a signifying system, bears witness to the investments we make in them—those investments have to do with clear, correspondent meaning. If it is mad it is also productive in a quiet and legible manner.
