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
