LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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