Читать книгу The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers - Mark T. Conard - Страница 9

Richard Gilmore

We grew up in America, and we tell American stories in American settings within American frames of reference.

—Ethan Coen

Our American literature and spiritual history are…in the optative mood.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist”

Raising Arizona (1987) begins with what sounds like the slamming of some prison doors. It is, to be sure, an ominous sound, and proleptic in at least two ways. First, it anticipates the sound that our protagonist is about to hear within minutes of our first meeting him, and second, it anticipates one of the major themes of the movie, which is, in the words of Ethan Coen, “family life versus being an outlaw.” That is, presumably, to the outlaw, family life can seem like some prison doors swung shut. Immediately following the sound of the slamming prison doors there is banjo music and an image of what we learn is a police height measure for photographing suspected criminals. A young man (Nicolas Cage) is thrown into the point of view of the camera so that we can take his measure against the height chart. In a voice-over we hear, “My name is H. I. McDunnough. Call me Hi.” I understand Hi's name (constructed from his first two initials) to suggest a spatial metaphor, a description of his ambitions, which are, I want to say, very American ambitions. The banjo music in the background is Pete Seeger's “Goofing Off Suite,” which, like America itself, is a fascinating medley of American folk music, motifs from high European classical music (Bach and Beethoven), Russian folk music, and even yodeling.¹

Hi is the central protagonist of the film and provides the voice-over narrative that accompanies the regular narrative of the film. Although Hi is the main protagonist, it is Ed (Holly Hunter), short for Edwina, who engages the action of the plot of the movie with her strong sense of what she wants and what constitutes natural justice, as did Antigone (except in this case the natural justice takes the form of stealing a live baby from a family that, it could be argued, has too many, rather than burying one's dead brother against the laws of the state).

Goofing off pretty much describes the sense one gets of what the Coens are doing in the opening sequence of the movie. There is one disjunctive discontinuity after another, each one constituting a kind of slapstick joke, and yet each one reverberates with a deeper truth. There is the overall structural discontinuity between Hi's voice-over narrative and what we see him doing. Hi sounds, in the voice-over, like he speaks from a place of detached, even philosophical, wisdom, but what we actually see him doing shows him to be a not very bright repeat offender, a petty criminal with an enthusiasm for robbing convenience stores. That disjunction is funny. His enthusiasm for robbing convenience stores is funny in itself, as is his evident incompetence at it, which is why he goes to jail so often. He seems to accept jail time as just part of life, and it is a significant part of his life. That he uses his time between crimes, that is, his time being booked for the crimes he has committed, to woo Ed, who is a police officer and the photographer for his mug shots, is funny and ridiculous. Their marriage, “starter home,” “salad days,” infertility, despair, and kidnapping scheme are all a little ridiculous, and yet, even though they are presented as basically funny, there is a sort of underlying truth to all of it. America does have a fascination or love affair with the image of the outlaw, so choosing to be an outlaw is not really that crazy. And it is hard starting a family in this modern world, even if, or especially if, you are an outlaw by trade. And starter homes sometimes are little mobile homes in the desert. And sometimes, in spite of your best efforts, nature does not cooperate; infertility is a fact of life.

When Hi says, for example, “I tried to stand up and fly straight, but it wasn't easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House…. I dunno, they say he is a decent man, so…maybe his advisers are confused,” it is such a mishmash of deep political wisdom, weird, folksy compassion, and just raw, self-serving excuse that it is hard to find one's way with it. It is funny and true and crazy all at the same time. It also has a vaguely socialist ring to it, and of course Pete Seeger, the creator of the “Goofing Off Suite” we are hearing in the background, was a famous socialist and defender of the people, which further suggests some deeper political message behind the craziness. This, one might say, quoting the American poet Robert Frost, is “play for mortal stakes.”²

The Optative Mood and America

We, in America, are weaned on the milk of aspiration. This is what I understand Emerson to mean when he describes our spiritual history as being in the “optative mood.” “Optative,” from the Latin optio, meaning “free choice,” is Emerson's slightly archaic word for the American sense of being free to determine one's own life, to be whomever one wants to be. The great advantage of this spiritual history is the energy and the inventiveness it calls forth in American people. The downside of this ethos is how demanding and difficult it is on a person. There is very high expectation that everyone will be an “individual” and that a person will have high aspirations, but not much direction is given to us about what aspirations to have or how to achieve them, except that one should aspire to work hard. So much is expected of us to be something original and so little is given to us about how to do that that the problem of who we are to be can drive us a little crazy. We do not inherit an identity so much as find ourselves tasked with (to use a Coen expression from Fargo [1996]) creating an identity. That is an easier task for some than for others, and certainly there are some deep deceptions in the American mythos of self-creation, deceptions about the irrelevance of the conditions of one's birth, the role of social class, or money, or race. So, on the one hand, we have more freedom than most in history to make of ourselves what we will. On the other hand, that puts a considerable burden on each of us as individuals to come up with a unique self to be.

Part of the American mythos, part of the sense of what is especially unique about America, is captured in the idea of “American exceptionalism.” This idea is usually traced back to Tocqueville's Democracy in America (originally published in two volumes in French in 1835 and 1840), but it can be found even earlier in a famous sermon given by John Winthrop in 1630, in which he describes a future for America in which “wee will be seen as a citty upon a hill.”³ This expression of American exceptionalism, of a future America as “a city upon a hill,” is aspirational in at least two ways. It is aspirational in the sense that it is describing not only a hoped-for state of the country that can be achieved if we are true to certain principles but also what we should aspire to for our future country; it expresses a dream of what America could be. It is also aspirational in the sense that this hoped-for state, once achieved, will itself represent an aspirational goal to the rest of the world.

The idea that there is something special about America, something not just unique but also superior, the idea of America as an idea of some kind of better possibility, seems to pervade our thinking about ourselves, as well as the thinking of others about us, and it is, as most things are, both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is the way the idea of America's exceptionalism empowers us to pursue our own dreams of what we want to be. It is part of the American ideal that we are not necessarily limited by birth or class or race. On the other hand, the expectations of individual achievement are very high, and often we fail to measure up. It is not an incidental detail, I think, that the first image we see of Hi is of him thrown against a height measure, which, under the circumstances, indicates a certain failure to measure up to the high expectations of society.

Comedy

Raising Arizona is a comedy.⁴ I take it to be a comedy in at least two senses. First, it is a comedy because it is very funny. The second way that I see Raising Arizona as a comedy is in the classic sense of a comedy (which derives from Aristotle's definition of a comedy) as a narrative that begins in a bad place but, in its narrative unfolding, ends in a good place.⁵ This is why Dante's narrative of a descent into hell and subsequent journey through purgatory and paradise is called The Divine Comedy.⁶ It is not so much that it is a humorous work, although there are some very funny passages in it, but that it follows the classic trajectory of a comedy as described by Aristotle.

This claim, that Raising Arizona is a comedy in this classic sense, depends on an interpretation of the ending of the movie as being an affirmation of a better future for Hi and Ed. The ending of the movie seems to be ambiguous. Hi is having another one of his dreams (although all of his previous dreams in the movie have turned out to be connected with reality), and he is dreaming of a better and more fruitful future, but their actual situation seems to be worse: they are babyless, and Ed has pronounced, in her definitive way, their (Hi and Ed's) complete unsuitableness to each other and her determination to leave him. Whether they stay together or not remains undetermined by the narrative of the movie. To affirm the movie as having the form of a classic comedy means finding in this very ambiguity some kind of affirmation that transcends the early hopefulness and excitement of their original courtship and marriage.

I interpret the title of the movie, Raising Arizona, to indicate the most fundamental theme of the movie, namely, the aspirational theme of self-improvement that is so central to the American identity. The basic trope is the idea of height, so I take Hi's name to be a kind of spatial metaphor of his aspirations. What constitutes growth, what constitutes the necessary change in condition, from a worse to a better condition (so that the movie can fulfill the form of a comedy), will be a change in one's aspirations. At the beginning of the movie, I take Hi's aspirations to be relatively uncomplicated. What he wanted to be was also what he was, an outlaw. The outlaw is a kind of American aspiration, an American ideal. The outlaw is just an extreme form of the American ideal of the frontiersman, the adventurer, the one who braves the wilderness and does so because of the excess of wildness still in him or her. The classic American movie genre of the western is filled with figures that straddle the line between law and lawlessness, so that the good westerner is just barely across the line on the side of the law and the only one wild enough to go after the bad westerner, the one who has slipped to the far side of the law and into a lawless wildness. The connection with the American movie genre of the western is made explicit with some allusions to westerns in Raising Arizona, as, for example, the location of the film in the Southwest, the long-coat dusters worn by Gale (John Goodman) and Evelle (William Forsythe) when they rob the bank, and the showdown between Hi and Leonard Smalls (Randall “Tex” Cobb).

The problem of creating an identity for oneself can be framed in terms of the relationship between universals (or generals) and particulars. That is, to be something is to participate in some form of a universal: one is a lawyer or a teacher or a fifth grader or an American. But to participate too much in a universal, to identify oneself too deeply with a general idea, is to lack any particular identity at all.⁷ On the other hand, to be too idiosyncratically particular is, in a way, also to lack an identity; it is to have no continuous identity at all. We construct our identities, therefore, out of a combination of some kind of general or universal idea inflected by our own particular characteristics. In part, our particularity is constituted by just the particular array of general ideas that we participate in, so one way to develop one's identity is in choosing which combination of general ideas in which to participate. So, one is a midwesterner or a teacher, someone who drives a Ford or likes baseball, and so on—our identity being, more or less, just the complete list of these general descriptions. A way to improve one's identity is to improve somehow on the complex array of universals that we participate in, making them all more harmonious or more beautiful or maybe just more complex.

Of course, many of the universals in which we participate we do not have a choice about, or not much of a choice. We do not choose (for the most part) our gender, whether we will be born rich or poor, in the Northeast or the Southwest. It seems clear that we make some choices, and it will be in those choices that such identity as we can make we do make.

Hi, at the beginning of Raising Arizona, has what seems to be a fairly simple identity structure. He seems to identify himself as an outlaw. He blames President Reagan (or his advisers) for his outlaw ways, but that really seems to be more a function of his outlaw ways than a real explanation of them. (When he really wants a job he seems to have no trouble getting one. When he wants a newspaper, he prefers to steal it than to pay the thirty-five cents, and that seems to be a matter of preference and principle rather than need.) The life of an outlaw is a kind of “primitive,” pre-Christian, precapitalist kind of existence. It is lived in the present moment much more than toward any particular future. It is cyclical, like the seasons. There is the excitement of doing the crime, and then the over-structured time of being in jail, then back to the crime and back to jail. As Hi says, “Now I don't know how you come down on the incarceration question, whether it's for rehabilitation or revenge. But I was beginning to think that revenge is the only argument that makes any sense.” We hear this voice-over as we watch Hi commit another crime after just seeing him being let out of jail. Furthermore, we see that he has pretty much botched this crime by accidentally locking himself out of his car, and the signs (we hear a police siren in the distance) indicate that he will soon be back in the slammer, and so his perspective pretty much mirrors his reality vis à vis the incarceration question.

In a sense, however, these simple primitive cycles and his relatively simple identity structure are already, for Hi, on their way to being things of the past, and they become that in, as it were, the blink of an eye. Heidegger speaks of how the possibility of a new encounter, a new way of encountering the world, will occur to us in the blink of an eye (an Augenblick in Heidegger's German).⁸ The French philosopher Alain Badiou talks about a similar phenomenon as an “event.”⁹ An “event” is something that happens that does not quite fit into our established system of knowledge, and so it will appear to us as something unaccountable, something that we cannot quite get our minds around even as we recognize the great importance of the encounter. Badiou identifies four realms, four general categories, of events: politics, science, art, and love.¹⁰ If we consider the final category, then, an event in love will be an encounter with another person that, as it were, opens up possibilities to us that we had never understood were possibilities; it creates a disturbance for us that we do not quite know how to quell. We will always be tempted, in the presence of an event, to turn away from the event, to pretend it did not happen, because the event is always experienced as being beyond us, beyond what we have the capabilities for. Ethics, for Badiou, is about having the courage to be true to, to be faithful to, the event.

The Event

I consider the flash of light when Ed first takes Hi's mug shot at the beginning of the movie to signal, as well, the occurrence of an event. What is the event? If Hi's identity is constituted according to the general idea of the outlaw, Ed's identity seems to be constituted primarily in terms of the law. Her cold-sounding, apparently indifferent, and oft repeated “Turn to the right!” is a kind of pure expression of the law. In that flash of a light, however, a mutual recognition seems to occur. Hi and Ed see in each other the possibility of another narrative, another way of being that would supplement and reconstitute their present ways, and in ways that neither quite understands, but for which both feel an attraction and a need.

Indeed, their marriage generates such a powerful sense of love for both of them, during what Hi refers to as “the salad days” of their marriage, that they felt, in Hi's words expressing Ed's feelings, “that there was too much love and beauty for just the two of us and every day we kept a child out of the world was a day he might later regret having missed.” They feel, I want to say, the great potential of their marriage but do not yet understand how to unleash the power of this potential. The antilaw, joy-in-the-moment life of the outlaw has no future, and the pure form of the law is itself barren. The rocky road that Hi and Ed have to follow, then, is the road from the unworkable antinomy of trying to combine in their pure forms lawlessness and lawfulness, to a way of finding, for each, the virtue of the other that will unleash the potential powers of both. That is, Hi has to learn the value of law, and Ed, the value of ad hoc life in the moment in a way that makes possible a shared future to which they can both aspire.

The plot of the movie is all about the beginning of this journey. The beginning of this journey turns out to be quite funny. Perhaps it should not be, involving as it does a recidivist criminal offender, the kidnapping of an infant, a brutal “warthog from hell” biker who kills small animals with an indiscriminate zeal, and two escaped criminals, among other miscreants and malfeasance. Yet, as bad as a description of the characters and acts involved sounds, what we feel for these characters doing these things is, as Georg Seesslen says, “tenderness.”¹¹

This leads me to Plato's not exactly explicit theory of humor. In Book VII of The Republic, in the section known as the allegory of the cave, Plato describes two different kinds of laughter.¹² The first kind of laughter he describes is the laughter of the people who are trapped inside the cave, the people who take mere shadows for reality. They laugh at the people who return to the cave from outside because when those people return, from out of the bright light of reality back into the darkness of the cave, they stumble around, blinded by the darkness of the cave. To those inside the cave, those whose eyes are used to the darkness, this stumbling around looks like incompetence, and the people inside the cave think it is hysterically funny to see such bumbling. The second kind of laughter, however, is quite different. The second form of laughter is the laughter of the people outside the cave as they watch each new person who escapes from the cave and tries to walk in the bright light of day (reality) before his or her eyes have gotten used to all of the light. They stumble too, and this makes the people whose eyes are now used to the light laugh. On the surface these two forms of laughter seem quite similar, but, in reality, they are completely different. What is the difference? The difference is that the first kind of laughter is a laughter of ridicule, of supposed superiority at the expense of a supposed inferior. It is a laughter that separates and makes other. The second kind of laughter is like the laughter of parents seeing their child take her or his first wobbly step. It is a laughter of joy and love and inclusion. It is a laughter that welcomes and bonds.

Jokes

Raising Arizona is full of jokes. Some of the jokes are explicit. Although Hi woos Ed with a joke about a tipped cement mixer and some escaped hardened criminals (a joke Ed had heard before), most of the explicit jokes are of the “bad laughter” variety, and they are told by Glen (Sam McMurray). The rest of the jokes in the movie are implicit. They are not presented explicitly as jokes, but if you see them, if you get them, they are quite funny and also, generally, more or less tender, that is, including you and affirming our shared humanity rather than excluding or reinforcing a sense of otherness. Ted Cohen, in his book Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, describes the purpose of jokes in terms of “relief from certain oppressions, and the attainment of a very special kind of intimacy.”¹³ With jokes, one has to do some work, do some thinking. Frequently jokes work by ellipsis—something is left out that has to be supplied by the hearer. So, at first, the missing element occurs as just a sort of puzzling non sequitur, then you get it and see how the missing piece solves the puzzle. The result is an intimacy based on a shared understanding, based on “the sense held mutually by teller and hearer that they are joined in feeling.”¹⁴ So the philosophical importance of jokes has to do with the way they free us from things that oppress us, by giving us a certain distance, a certain detached perspective on those things, and by the way they foster intimacy and community between the teller and the hearer of the joke.

In a movie like Raising Arizona, the implicit jokes are frequently signaled only by an oddness, and one may laugh at them without being fully aware of what is funny, as though we got the joke subconsciously, if not quite fully consciously. Hi's enthusiastic and energetic seduction of Ed from the position of the one who is being booked and sent to jail is funny because it is a very odd situation in which to begin a seduction, since the very fact that one is a convicted criminal would seem to disqualify one as an appropriate partner, especially for a police officer. The tenderness, the good laughter of these sequences, resides in the way that it is in the nature of wooing to be, to feel, more or less unworthy, and yet we do it anyway. There is always something suspicious about wooing, a question of reliability and of motives that shades every wooer with a taint of criminality. The wooer understands this, as does the wooed, and yet we woo and are wooed. From inside the process, all of this causes anxiety, and from outside, it looks kind of funny. It is funny that Hi tells Ed that her ex-fiancé knows where to find him, “in the Munroe County Maximum Security Correctional Facility for Men, State Farm Road Number Thirty-One; Tempe, Arizona,” since it is at once gallant and ridiculous. It is funny the way words work as things outside of us, with a kind of logic of their own that can be confounding, the way “Well, okay then” can be both the words that set Hi free by the head of the parole board and the identical words used to make him married. It is funny when someone says, “You're not just tellin’ us what we wanna hear?” and you say, “No sir, no way,” and then they say “'Cause we just wanna hear the truth,” and you think, well, I am telling the truth, and so you say, “Well then I guess I am tellin’ you what you wanna hear,” and then they say, “Boy, didn't we just tell you not to do that?” Okay then. I hate it when that happens.

All of these jokes seem to be doing just what Ted Cohen says about jokes. In our laughter at these scenes from the movie we feel ourselves getting some distance from, and some perspective on, the kinds of things that cause us anxiety and oppress us. In our laughter, we feel a certain tenderness for Hi and Ed, and maybe even for Dot (Frances McDormand) and Glen, as well as for ourselves, and this feeling of tenderness is a feeling of an intimacy with these characters. If we are in a movie theater and our laughter is shared by others in the audience, this feeling of intimacy and shared feeling, shared community, is created in the actual movie theater itself.

There is at least one Freudian joke in the movie: the way the gynecologist (Ralph Norton) is using his cigar—what Freud would call a phallic symbol—as a pointer to the diagram of a woman's reproductive system. In the way he manipulates the cigar against the diagram he seems to be simultaneously explaining the problem of Ed's infertility and simulating sex. This is a doctor joke, a Freudian joke, and a joke on Freud (who famously said “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” and died, tragically, of oral cancer, suggesting that the great psychologist was not entirely in control of his own psyche).

Polysemousness

A narrative that has multiple levels of meaning can be called polysemous. Polysemousness not only characterizes the scene with the gynecologist but also is characteristic of Raising Arizona as a whole. Dante, in his famous letter to Can Grande, describes how his Commedia is polysemous. Dante says that each scene in the Commedia has four levels of meaning: first, the literal narrative, then the allegorical meaning, then the moral meaning, and finally the anagogical meaning (by which he means its spiritual significance). For example, the Commedia begins

Midway in our life's journey, I went astray

from the straight road and woke to find myself

alone in a dark wood….¹⁵

The four levels of interpretation for this opening scene would be, first, that the narrator, Dante, was literally sleepwalking and woke up after having veered off the road he had meant to be on, finding himself lost in a dark wood. The allegorical meaning is that this is a thing that has happened to virtually everyone and that many of us are, too, lost in a dark wood (of sin and error). The moral significance has to do with the recognition of this fact of our lostness and the need to recover our moral bearings and that the subsequent story may help us with this. The anagogical meaning is that this is not just a practical moral problem but also a spiritual problem and that our lostness is not just a reflection of our being out of sync with our own moral convictions but that we are also out of sync with the universe as whole, or with God, and that radical steps must be taken to remedy this dire condition.

Although the Coen brothers do not claim this kind of polysemous content for Raising Arizona as explicitly as Dante does for his Commedia, there are too many signs of it in the film to be ignored. I am not sure that Raising Arizona has the same interpretive levels as Dante's Divine Comedy, but certainly, I would say, there is more going on than just a literal story. There are too many odd parallels and peculiar events within the movie that seem to require some kind of interpretation, that seem to indicate other levels of meaning. Some quick examples are the tattoo (of Mr. Horsepower, but it also looks a lot like Woody the Woodpecker) shared by Hi and the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse, Leonard Smalls. There is the similar gesture of dragging someone out from under something by the foot, committed first by Hi, with one of the Arizona infants from under the crib, and the same gesture performed by the lone biker on Hi (dragging him out from under a car). There are weirdly unbelievable sequences like the whole Pampers-stealing, gun-blasting, dog-chasing sequence or just the strangely quiescent and unharmable baby who falls, twice (!), from the top of a moving car, yet survives untouched and unperturbed.

Take, for example, the polysemous character of the visit by Glen and Dot. The experience of their wayward undisciplined kids is a repetition of Hi's first experience with the unruly Arizona quintuplets when he is trying to kidnap one of them. It is a subjectivized representation of Hi's worst fear of what having a family will be like. It does not take a particular side on the nature versus nurture question, but it does definitely uphold the proverb about apples not falling far from the tree. Each of Glen's children seems to be an active embodiment of Glen's concept of a joke, a thing said or done at someone else's expense that can be laughed at. Not only does one of the children squirt Hi in the crotch with his squirt gun because he thinks it is funny but they also all laugh at their father's broken nose because they think it is funny. Empathy is not part of the family ethos. All of this is surely also a comment on American child-rearing practices, since, I would guess, most of us have encountered such a family in the United States, but I have never seen such a one, nor would I expect to, in Europe. And we laugh at this joke, and this is a good laughter. It is a laughter that, as Cohen suggests, frees us from certain oppressions, the oppressions of families, our own and other people's, the oppression of our guilt about feeling the oppressions of families, the oppression of anxiety about entertaining, which rarely turns out quite as badly as this experiment in entertaining turns out.

So there are many things going on simultaneously in this sequence, and all of them tie into different narrative levels that the movie sustains throughout. All of these narrative levels, however, address this question: how does one achieve happiness, how does one create a happy home, in this complex, wonderful, terrifying, maddening America? What is the answer to this question suggested by Raising Arizona?

The answer that this movie suggests seems to have something to do with the nature of comedy, something to do with the way seeing the comic can lead to a life lived as a comedy, that is, as ending better than it begins. This, it has to be acknowledged, would have to be the metanarrative lesson of the movie since no one in the movie itself seems to really pick up on the comic dimension of life.

Dreams and Freedom

An important and recurring theme in Raising Arizona is Hi's dreams. Dreams, if Freud is right, are inherently polysemous. They have, at the very least, two levels of meaning, what Freud called the manifest and the latent levels of meaning. The manifest meaning is what we literally dream, while the latent meaning is what the dream means, what an interpretation of the dream will tell us about ourselves. At least one commentator on the movie has raised the possibility that some, or all, of the movie may be a dream, which would make Hi's explicit dreams, dreams within a dream.¹⁶ Nietzsche claims that metaphysics begins with the fact of dreams.¹⁷ That is, with dreams we have a direct experience of a counternarrative, an alternative reality, to that of our everyday experience. This creates a need to determine which is the true narrative or the true reality, and that question calls forth metaphysics. If Nietzsche is right, this suggests a deep connection between dreams and philosophy. The idea of a counternarrative is what sets us free from the constraints of whatever narrative we happen to find ourselves in. This is the way in which philosophy can set us free, by empowering us to imagine other ways of being. Movies, in general, are very dreamlike—oneiric is the word for that—and, like dreams, seem to call for some interpretation and, also like dreams, can be a road to a new kind of freedom from what oppresses us.

“In dreams begin responsibilities,” wrote Delmore Schwartz.¹⁸ That is, in dreams we confront the pieces that are missing from the narrative that we are working with in our everyday lives. Hi's dreams are important to the movie because the movie itself is a kind of working through the issues that are raised in his dreams. The two escaped convicts, Evelle and Gale, are like emissaries from Hi's unconscious, come to remind him of his “true” nature. They emerge just as Hi is beginning to settle down into family life, and they can be seen as the part of his identity that he is not quite sure that he wants to give up yet. They are childlike, sloppy, and lawless, and they live only for the moment. They are literal and figurative remnants of Hi's earlier life, when all he lived for was to be an outlaw and when time moved in cycles so that he always knew where he was in time just by knowing where he was in a particular cycle.

At the beginning of the first section of Dante's Commedia, the “Inferno,” after Dante awakes in the dark wood, he sees a distant peak with the bright light of the sun, representing goodness, shining atop it. He turns to make his way toward it, but his way is blocked by three beasts: a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf. These beasts are, allegorically, his own sins that he is not yet quite ready to give up, things that he cannot quite convince himself are really evil. Similarly, Hi has to confront his own outlaw ways, which have been at the core of his identity. In some sense, he knows that he has to give up those ways, but in another sense, he does not know that at all and really wants to hold on to those parts of himself. That is part of the conflict within himself that Hi has to work through during the course of the movie. When Hi does manage to work through some of his issues, these two emissaries from his unconscious go back down into the dark hole from which they escaped. We are never completely free of those desires we once nurtured but now suppress, but we can keep them in a prison so that they never see the light of day.

The prison escape is also a kind of a joke. Their emergence from a viscous hole in the ground looks a lot like birth. As Gale explains in Hi and Ed's living room, “We don't always smell like this, Miz McDunnough. I was just explainin’ to yer better half here that when we were tunnelin’ out we hit the main sewer,” which is a lot like what William Butler Yeats has Crazy Jane say to the Bishop in the poem “Crazy Jane and the Bishop”: “Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement.”¹⁹ Life is a weird, messy business, and there is just no getting around that fact. Wisdom has to do with coming to grips with the messiness of it, the way it does not always go the way we would want it to go.

For Hi, something begins in that flash of light in which he first sees Ed, but that something takes an additional turn when Hi begins to process the remark by the prison counselor (Peter Benedek) about most people having a family at their age, that sets Hi to musing, then dreaming, then acting on an idea based on that remark. The hardest part of acting freely, if this is what freedom is, is staying true to one's original choice, remaining faithful, as Badiou says, to the event. The over-determining forces that would direct us along more predictable routes, including our own habits, do not suddenly vanish. On the contrary, they kick in with more force than ever. That is what Dante is talking about when he describes the three beasts that suddenly appear just as he tries to set off on a new direction in his life. The beasts overwhelm his resolve, and it is only with the intercessionary help of Virgil that he can go on. Hi will find himself driving past convenience stores on the way home from work, and, like Dante, he will find it too difficult to resist this particular beast in his own soul.

Andrew Pulver, writing for the Guardian about an encounter with Joel and Ethan Coen, identifies a passage from Ethan's book of stories, Gates of Eden, that Pulver suggests may have some biographical relevance but, in any event, does seem to tie in to a recurring theme in the Coen brothers’ movies. In the story “I Killed Phil Shapiro” there is a summer camp director, Rabbi Sam, who says, as words of welcome to the new camp recruits, “If You Will It, It Is No Dream.”²⁰ As Pulver mentions, this phrase occurs in The Big Lebowski (1998) when Walter (John Goodman) says to the Dude (Jeff Bridges), attributing it to Theodor Herzl, “If you will it, Dude, it is no dream.”²¹ This phrase captures the central metaphysical and narrative tension of Raising Arizona, which has to do with what is a dream and what is reality: are the two separable, or are they, somehow, intimately related?

To paraphrase Delmore Schwartz, reality begins in dreams. That is, insofar as our reality is to be really ours, is to be a reality of our own choosing rather than what simply happens to us, then it will begin for us as an event to which we will remain faithful. The act will have consequences, and those consequences will entail responsibilities. Our freedom, somewhat ironically, will depend on our being true to, upholding, our responsibilities. This strict notion of being responsible, however, is ameliorated by the fact that these responsibilities are our responsibilities, that is, our own chosen responsibilities, rather than inauthentic responsibilities that are imposed upon us by others or by the system at large.

The Uses and Abuses of America

Raising Arizona does present a fairly piquant critique of America. The Pampers-stealing, gun-blasting, dog-chasing sequence is, for me, one of the funniest pieces in the whole movie. It is so funny to me, in part, because it captures something of the wild craziness of life in America, the way that the simplest acts, like getting something from the store, can become a kind of race for one's life. It is also so funny to me because of the way it picks up on a particular fear that I have about my fellow Americans and their (our) love of guns and violence and their (our) desire to shoot and destroy things. The store clerk, his mouth full of braces, has a mad gleam in his eye at the opportunity to pull out the shotgun and start blasting away. The cops behave in the same way. Even the neighborhood dogs seem to pick up the scent of bloodlust and get into the chase.

All of this, also, reflects something deep in the nature of capitalism, which is at the very core of our democracy. Capitalism does foster a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all. On the surface all of us are (mostly) very polite and cooperative, but there is a kind of cutthroat competitiveness that lurks just below the surface and is deeply imbued in the spirit of capitalism itself. The Arizona family reflects many of the features of capitalism. Nathan Arizona's (Trey Wilson) relentless commitment to selling himself and his furniture is a paradigm of what it takes to be successful in a capitalistic system. The irony of his oft-repeated claim, “And if you can find lower prices anywhere my name ain't Nathan Arizona!” is, of course, that his name ain't Nathan Arizona, or it wasn't before he changed it, so I guess it is Nathan Arizona but, as it were, barely, which does put kind of a spin on his famous claim for his prices.

Nathan Arizona is an example of someone who has literally created his own identity out of his own dreams of what he wanted to be. I would say that what he wants to be seems a little shallow, and this is part of the movie's critique of America and American life, but he has been remarkably successful at achieving it. Clearly, to achieve his dream he has had to adopt a basically antagonistic stance with respect to virtually everyone around him. As he says, “My motto is do it my way or watch your butt!” It is an excellent, even a necessary, motto for being a successful capitalist, although it's less good for making friends. Nathan's relationship with his wife seems to lack all intimacy, but we learn that there is a little more to Nathan Arizona than just pure capitalist.

There is a kind of fairness to capitalism and a kind of unfairness. There is a sense in which those who are willing to devote themselves to accumulation deserve what they manage to accumulate. There is also a sense that in capitalism, some have much more than they need or deserve. The balance between these two notions associated with capitalism, of its fairness and its unfairness, is difficult to parse. Certainly, Hi and Ed feel the unjust side of it and decide to act to right it. Their act is a kind of underground socialism, a redistribution of the wealth from those with a surfeit to those with a dearth. Political scientists often remark that America has never had a really viable socialist movement, not, at least, in the ways Europe has. There are various speculations about why that is so. I see Raising Arizona as, as it were, raising the question of socialism and then turning in an ambiguous answer. The movie makes the idea of kidnapping another couple's child seem almost reasonable, almost a fair redistribution of wealth, and yet it really does not work out for anyone.

The Double Plotline or: The Good of the Bad

Dante's Commedia, much like Augustine's Confessions, can be described as having a double plotline. That is, one could diagram the narrative of these works in either of two ways. The first way would be in the shape of a check mark, that is, the first part of the narrative seems to be a descent, but then, at the crucial turning point, there is a turn for the better and that would be shown as an ascending line. That is the structure of a comedy in the classic sense. The other way of diagramming such a narrative, however, would be as simply an ascending line because the subsequent ascent is completely dependent upon the prior descent. This is what Augustine means when he refers to “felix culpa” (happy or fortunate sin). That is, in the case of Augustine, for example, he would not have reached his spiritual enlightenment if he had not fully experienced the degradation of his sin, so his sin was a great gift, a great boon to him. Dante has to descend through hell, the Inferno, because it is only by seeing it that he will be able to understand Heaven. So it is not just that the good comes after the bad but that the good is completely dependent on the experience of the bad.

Hi and Ed unquestionably experience a narrative descent. Their hopes for having a family are dashed. They have lost their jobs. Even their marriage seems to be in danger. And yet, they have become real people, something that neither really was at the beginning of the film. At the end of the movie they are complex enough to see how complex the pursuit of happiness is, they are complex enough to understand other people's pain and loss—even if those people do have a lot of babies already. To get to the way of thinking and feeling that leads Ed and Hi to return Nathan Jr. is an achievement, one that could not have been attained without all of the difficulties of their descent. Nathan Arizona, the unregenerate huckster and über-capitalist, reveals a surprising tenderness toward his returned son, toward Ed and Hi, and, most surprising of all somehow, toward his wife, Florence (Lynne Dumin Kitei). It is in this tenderness that I see the authentic aspiration of America, and maybe that is not just an American thing.

The real goal is not about money or fertility so much as about achieving this tenderness toward others. It may be that such tenderness can be achieved only through suffering and loss. Nathan Arizona expresses his feelings of tenderness for his wife in terms of his fear of losing her and suggests that Hi and Ed may yet discover such tenderness for each other and that they “should sleep on it” before they do anything rash like breaking up their marriage. I take it that they do sleep on it and that Hi's final dream is a dream of the tenderness made manifest in the world, specifically in Utah, the state above Arizona.

The Uberty of Liberty

There is some question about whether America really is exceptional and about the value of thinking about ourselves as exceptional. If there is something exceptional about us, it seems to me that it would have to do with the way we think of ourselves as being free, as having a right to our own opinions, as being both free to develop ourselves into the selves we want to be and responsible for what we become. It is quite true that, as a cynic might insist, many in America do not really have much freedom to develop themselves into anything other than what they were born to, that the idea that we are “free” in America, that this is a “free country,” is a myth and a harmful one at that. Without denying that, I still want to say that there is a freedom that is not just granted, but in some sense honored, in America, and that is the freedom to dream.

“Uberty” is a somewhat archaic word for fruitfulness, for something that generates growth and abundance. The freedom merely to dream is, in one sense, no real freedom at all, but in another sense, in this philosophical sense in which any authentic choice must begin in something like a dream, then the freedom to dream is the only kind of real liberty that there is. Ultimate happiness may depend less on how much money we accumulate and more on having a sense that our life is our own life, that we have lived a life in which we have made some choices and lived according to the consequences of those choices. To accept responsibility for the consequences of our choices and actions is what makes us fully human, and it is what makes us tender. If there is any truth in that, then the stuff of comedy, the material to make the ends of our lives better than the beginnings, may be as accessible as our dreams. The most important thing, then, is to keep dreaming, and that is precisely what Hi is doing at the end of Raising Arizona, making it, in my estimation, a comedy not only because it is funny but also because it holds out the possibility, in the classic sense, that we can make our end better than our beginning. We can laugh in welcoming, like Plato's philosophers, the new recruits to the realm of tenderness for each other. As Walter says in The Big Lebowski, “If you will it, Dude, it is no dream.”

Notes

Epigraphs: Peter Körte and Georg Seesslen, eds., Joel & Ethan Coen (New York: Proscenium Publishers, 2001), 172; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode with Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 99.

1. See the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings song list for the album Darling Corey and Goofing Off Suite by Pete Seeger (1993), catalogue #40018 at www.folkways.si.edu.

2. See the poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time, or, A Full-Time Interest,” in Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose & Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995), 251.

3. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), available as part of the Hanover Historical Texts Project, which is part of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Available at http://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html, 47.

4. In the original VHS format the title had a colon followed by the phrase “An Unbelievable Comedy.”

5. Aristotle, Poetics I, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).

6. Dante's own title was (in translation): “Begins the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine in Birth, Not in Custom.” “The Divine” was added later. A translation of Dante's letter to Can Grande can be found at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod.cangrande.english.html.

7. This is what Jean Paul Sartre calls “mauvais foi” (bad faith).

8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 328.

9. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2002), 67–69.

10. Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (New York: Continuum, 2004), 52.

11. Georg Seesslen, “Looking for a Trail in Coen County,” in Joel & Ethan Coen, ed. Körte and Seesslen, 230, 277.

12. Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), bk. VII, 516e–518c.

13. Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 10.

14. Ibid., 25.

15. Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. John Ciardi (New York: Mentor Books, 1964), 28.

16. R. Barton Palmer, Joel and Ethan Coen (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2004), 129.

17. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. Marion Faber (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1986), sec. 5. That section begins, “In ages of crude, primordial cultures, man thought he could come to know a second real world in dreams: this is the origin of all metaphysics.”

18. Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, and Other Stories (New York: New Directions, 1978). Schwartz borrowed and adapted the line from an epigraph to W. B. Yeats's volume of poems, Responsibilities (1914). I am indebted to the anonymous reviewer of this manuscript for this citation.

19. William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 251.

20. Andrew Pulver's original essay from the Guardian, entitled “Pictures That Do the Talking,” is from 2001 and is reprinted in The Coen Brothers: Interviews, ed. William Rodney Allen (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2006), 158.

21. Pulver, quoted in Allen, Coen Brothers, 157.