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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

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