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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’

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