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ABSTRACT
In recent years, Stanley Cavell has become one of the canonical reference points for film scholars. In particular, his work on ‘comedies of remarriage’ has become one of the most fertile arenas of contemporary scholarship in film studies. However, Cavell’s work on remarriage comedy has rarely been subjected to criticism. For the most part, scholars interested in Cavell’s work on remarriage comedy have either sought to elaborate on his readings of the seven principal films which for him make up the core of the genre, or they have sought to expand the genre by incorporating additional classical or contemporary Hollywood romantic comedies. In this article, I reconsider Cavell’s canonical work on the subject, and critique and provide alternatives to what are to my mind the most pressing problems in Cavell’s conception of remarriage comedy, problems which fall into three broad categories: theoretical problems, historical problems, and critical problems. In so doing, I hope to provide better theoretical models, broader historical understanding, and more nuanced criticism vis-à-vis the genre of remarriage comedy in and beyond classical Hollywood cinema.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The only substantial critiques of Cavell’s work vis-à-vis genre are from the decade in which the book was originally published, first in the form of short review essays by Noël Carroll (Citation1982); David Thomson (Citation1982) and second in the form of a longer article by Edwin Curley (Citation1989). Contemporary scholars, by contrast, appear committed to avoiding criticism at all costs, often because they align themselves so completely with Cavell that they evidently feel that his points are beyond criticism, but also on occasions when they feel that criticism is warranted. For an example of the latter, in his chapter in the section of David LaRocca’s recent collection Movies with Stanley Cavell in Mind entitled ‘Rethinking Remarriage’, Paul Schofield explicitly states his intention to ‘avoid becoming bogged down in [any] disputes’ over the concept of remarriage, Cavell’s arguments in relation to specific films, etc (Schofield Citation2021, 132). For my part, I hope with this article to find a middle ground. Whether scholars who are interested in the concept of remarriage think that Cavell’s thoughts on the subject are beyond criticism or whether they think that criticizing Cavell’s thoughts on remarriage is beyond the point of scholarship on the subject, I submit that both positions not only betray a false picture of scholarship – of what it is, or should be, to be a scholar (cf. Barrowman Citation2022) – but that they even more problematically represent a hindrance to the type of conversation and the potential for transformation that is at the heart of Cavell’s thinking on remarriage and indeed at the heart of Cavell’s lifelong philosophical enterprise. In this way, then, despite my interest in subjecting Cavell’s thoughts on remarriage to criticism, my larger interest is in remaining true to the spirit of Cavell’s thinking.
2. On this point, I am invoking both verbal and sexual intercourse in the same manner as Cavell, who explains in Pursuits of Happiness that, for as much as he emphasizes the concept of conversation, ‘our concept of intercourse’ is perhaps more appropriate since it ‘explicitly’ carries with it ‘sexual significance’ (Cavell Citation1981, 87).
3. On this point, I am invoking the Freudian idea that ‘the finding of an object is in fact a refinding of it’ (Freud [Citation1905]2000, 88), of which Cavell was so fond, and found so germane to the concept of remarriage, that he cites it in Pursuits of Happiness along with a handful of other quotes from the likes of Emerson, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein prior to undertaking his readings of his chosen films (Cavell Citation1981, 43).
4. On this point, I am invoking Cavell’s distinction between knowing and acknowledging, which he memorably articulated in the following manner: ‘Acknowledgment goes beyond knowledge. (Goes beyond not, so to speak, in the order of knowledge, but in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge)’ (Cavell [Citation1969]1976, 257).
5. Though I find his animus uncalled for, Henderson is nevertheless correct when he observes that, in Pursuits of Happiness, ‘determining Cavell’s definition of the genre of remarriage comedy is a considerable problem, finally insoluble’ (Henderson Citation1982, 23).
6. Cavell was (in)famously accused of sexism by Tania Modleski, an accusation which Cavell responded to with characteristic equipoise (Cavell and Modleski Citation1990; see also Glitre Citation2001; Constable Citation2011) and which he kept in mind as he continued to work on classical Hollywood cinema (cf. Cavell Citation1996). Indeed, Cavell himself has framed this dilemma most perspicaciously: ‘This demand for education has to do with the woman’s sense that she stands in need of creation, or re-creation. Now comes the moral cloud. Does creation from, even by, the man somehow entail creation for the man, say for his use and pleasure and pride? If not, how does the woman attain independence’ (Cavell Citation1996, 116)? For a more elaborate consideration of Cavell's film scholarship in the context of feminist theory, see Barrowman (Citationforthcoming).
7. To be clear, my point is neither that Cavell never followed through on his idea that remarriage comedies ought to be conceived of as comedies of equality (and hence that equal emphasis ought to be placed on the woman and the man as individuals and as pairs) nor that in his film criticism he never emphasized the importance of the man alone or the couple together. My point, rather, is that he did not consistently follow through on this idea and that the lion’s share of his attention was devoted to the woman alone, and that such equivocal theorizing and imbalanced criticism has caused serious problems with respect to how we ought to understand the genre. Throughout his career, Cavell endlessly waffled on the gendered nature of remarriage comedy, sometimes acknowledging the importance of mutuality and emphasizing the remarried pair, but more often emphasizing the woman at the expense of the man and even the couple. Even in a late work like Cities of Words, Cavell claims that the ‘cause’ of remarriage comedy is not to explore the nature of (re)marriage, or what it means to be a woman/wife and a man/husband, or even the importance of such issues between men and women as love, sex, communication, trust, etc., but rather ‘to respond to the woman’s sense of her lack of education, her demand to know something that will change her dissatisfaction with the way things are, or reveal her role in it, or her, after all, greater satisfaction with this way than any other’ (Cavell Citation2004, 43). It is therefore not surprising that subsequent work on remarriage comedy has been plagued by the same equivocations and imbalances. William Rothman, for example, introduces the concept of remarriage comedy by describing the genre as ‘chart[ing] the stages of a woman’s education’ (Rothman Citation2014, 2), not the man’s or even the couple’s; proceeds to reverse course and claim that ‘what is at issue in [remarriage comedy] is not simply whether the leading woman and man will marry, or remarry, but whether the kind of marriage they create together will be a relationship worth having, one that enables them, as individuals and as a couple, to embrace every day and every night in a spirit of adventure’ (Rothman Citation2014, 2); and then reverts back to the claim that ‘in comedies of remarriage the narrative revolves around the creation of the woman’ (Rothman Citation2014, 69). Paul Deb, for another example, sees no problem in describing the genre of remarriage comedy as chronicling ‘issue[s] faced by their female protagonists’ (Deb Citation2021, 252), not their male protagonists or their male and female protagonists together; nor does he find it problematic to argue that the ‘constant factor’ in all remarriage comedies is ‘the creation or re-creation of the woman’, not the man or even the couple (Deb Citation2021, 254). In short, my point is that the precise status of the woman, the man, and the couple in remarriage comedy is unclear in Cavell’s theory of the genre and that this is a problem with serious theoretical, historical, and critical ramifications.
8. Indeed, Cavell rather humorously observes that ‘we are being clunked on the head with an invitation to read [much in remarriage comedy] through Freud’ (Cavell Citation1981, 54).
9. I have no doubt that some will bridle at my desire to right the historical wrongs in Cavell’s consideration of remarriage comedy on the grounds that Cavell was technically a philosopher and not a film scholar and so should be given a pass for producing flawed film scholarship. Leaving aside the question of what makes someone a film scholar if not publishing countless articles, book chapters, and monographs on film in addition to teaching and publicly speaking on film for more than half a century, the salient fact is that this does not give Cavell critical immunity. Cavell chose to venture into film studies waters and so I submit that he is subject to the same scrutiny and potential criticism as anyone else who chooses to write about film. As Cavell himself once admirably acknowledged, ‘If you live by the pen, you perish by the pen’ (Cavell Citation1989, 80). I hope that readers will accept (if not embrace) my criticisms in this Cavellian spirit of philosophical argumentation.
10. Cavell even acknowledges himself – rather begrudgingly, and in a dismissive parenthetical – that ‘Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night [is] I suppose the last comedy to study remarriage’ (Cavell Citation1981, 58).
11. To my knowledge, Adrian Martin (Citation2018, 306–310) was the first scholar to even acknowledge the necessity of extending considerations of remarriage comedy beyond film to encompass television: He rightly argues that to do justice to the vicissitudes of remarriage ‘would mean allowing in everything and everybody: not only Doris Day and Rock Hudson, but also Burt Reynolds and Madeline Kahn, Robert Downey, Jr. and Molly Ringwald, Justin Timberlake and Emma Stone. It would [also] mean roping in as much television as cinema, especially in the era of Sex and the City, Gilmore Girls and beyond’ (Martin Citation2018, 307). More recently, Enrico Terrone has analyzed TV through a Cavellian lens, although he makes a medium specificity argument against the possibility of such a thing as what I am calling sitcoms of remarriage: To Terrone’s mind, remarriage comedy is a specifically cinematic thing, and whatever a TV series might do in a similar vein, it is by definition some other thing because TV is a different medium. To my mind, leaving aside the unconvincing medium specificity thesis, it is a leap too far to say that sitcoms of remarriage like Everybody Loves Raymond and The King of Queens ‘struggle to achieve the sharp closure that characterizes the comedy of remarriage’ and thus render ‘the moral progress advocated by Cavell meaningless or vain’ (Terrone Citation2022, 60). For one thing, the closure in many remarriage comedies is by no means ‘sharp’: Just among the Tracy and Hepburn pairings, films like Woman of the Year, State of the Union, and Adam’s Rib conclude but there are plenty of questions raised by the endings and plenty of speculating to be done with respect to what will transpire between the characters on the other side of the end credits. For another thing, the cinema is home to many film series, and just as a season of a sitcom opens out onto another season, so a film in a series opens out onto another film. If, as Terrone argues, the fact that sitcoms require more episodes (and more conflicts) precludes the possibility of closure (sharp or otherwise), does this mean that something like the Thin Man series would have to be disqualified from consideration as remarriage comedies? (More problematically for Terrone, does this similarity between film series and television series invalidate his medium specificity thesis?) For a final point, there is an argument to be made that, with reference to what D.N. Rodowick has emphasized in Cavell’s thinking on remarriage as the ‘diurnal testing’ of marriage which is ‘in principle unfinished and interminable’ (Rodowick Citation2015, 186) – for, in the spirit of ‘Till death do us part’, the only conceivable ‘closure’ to a true marriage is death – the ‘diurnal devotedness’ (Rodowick Citation2015, 244) of the married pairs in sitcoms of remarriage allows this storytelling form, with its many episodes over many years and its many retreads over familiar matrimonial territory, to cut even closer to the core of what Cavell thinks remarriage is (and, by extension, how it should be represented), which is to say that the sitcom of remarriage might just be the purest form of remarriage comedy.
12. Ironically, Cavell actually discusses the famous duck-rabbit and Wittgenstein’s distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘seeing as’ in Pursuits of Happiness (Cavell Citation1981, 36–37; Wittgenstein [Citation1949]2009, 203e-219e).
13. Rodowick states this point very plainly: ‘The pursuit of happiness [in the form of remarriage is] another way of expressing the desire for sociability … [which is to say that remarriage amounts to] the reaffirmation of community’ (Rodowick Citation2015, 250–251).
14. Rothman and Rodowick both nicely articulate this connection between the micro (the couple) and the macro (the society). Rothman observes that the ‘question about marriage is also a question about what it is to be human, a question about human relationships in general [and] a question about community’ (Rothman Citation2014, 2), while Rodowick marvels at the fact that ‘communities can dismantle and rebuild themselves, and do so in the absence of violence, though not conflict, and through the most ordinary of means [namely, through conversation] … Remarriage comedies focalize and dramatize this process [of change], projecting it into an ethical framework … The pair is engaged in a conceptual and experimental journey, where marriage is pictured as an intellectual undertaking, a certain demand for understanding’ (Rodowick Citation2015, 252).
15. Cavell himself expressed a similar sentiment with respect to his engagements throughout his career with Austin’s teachings and writings. Even at times when Cavell worried about having ‘gone too far’ with criticisms leveled at Austin, he imputed to Austin a generous and welcoming attitude based on his sense of Austin’s intellectual spirit. This, to Cavell’s mind, showed, first, ‘a certain faithfulness to what I learned from him’, and, second, ‘that I [think] of [such] exchanges … as episodes of one conversation – one, I am always happy to discover again, that … while not continual, continues’ (Cavell Citation1985, 537).
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Kyle Barrowman
Kyle Barrowman is a media and cinema studies lecturer in Chicago. He received his PhD from Cardiff University. He has published widely in and between film studies and philosophy, on subjects ranging from authorship, genre theory, and camera movement to skepticism, perfectionism, and ordinary language philosophy. His work can be read at the following address: https://depaul.academia.edu/KyleBarrowman.