a movie like Raising Arizona, the implicit jokes are frequently signaled only by an oddness, and one may laugh at them without being fully aware of what is funny, as though we got the joke subconsciously, if not quite fully consciously. Hi's enthusiastic and energetic seduction of Ed from the position of the one who is being booked and sent to jail is funny because it is a very odd situation in which to begin a seduction, since the very fact that one is a convicted criminal would seem to disqualify one as an appropriate partner, especially for a police officer. The tenderness, the good laughter of these sequences, resides in the way that it is in the nature of wooing to be, to feel, more or less unworthy, and yet we do it anyway. There is always something suspicious about wooing, a question of reliability and of motives that shades every wooer with a taint of criminality. The wooer understands this, as does the wooed, and yet we woo and are wooed. From inside the process, all of this causes anxiety, and from outside, it looks kind of funny. It is funny that Hi tells Ed that her ex-fiancé knows where to find him, “in the Munroe County Maximum Security Correctional Facility for Men, State Farm Road Number Thirty-One; Tempe, Arizona,” since it is at once gallant and ridiculous. It is funny the way words work as things outside of us, with a kind of logic of their own that can be confounding, the way “Well, okay then” can be both the words that set Hi free by the head of the parole board and the identical words used to make him married. It is funny when someone says, “You're not just tellin’ us what we wanna hear?” and you say, “No sir, no way,” and then they say “'Cause we just wanna hear the truth,” and you think, well, I am telling the truth, and so you say, “Well then I guess I am tellin’ you what you wanna hear,” and then they say, “Boy, didn't we just tell you not to do that?” Okay then. I hate it when that happens.
All of these jokes seem to be doing just what Ted Cohen says about jokes. In our laughter at these scenes from the movie we feel ourselves getting some distance from, and some perspective on, the kinds of things that cause us anxiety and oppress us. In our laughter, we feel a certain tenderness for Hi and Ed, and maybe even for Dot (Frances McDormand) and Glen, as well as for ourselves, and this feeling of tenderness is a feeling of an intimacy with these characters. If we are in a movie theater and our laughter is shared by others in the audience, this feeling of intimacy and shared feeling, shared community, is created in the actual movie theater itself.
There is at least one Freudian joke in the movie: the way the gynecologist (Ralph Norton) is using his cigar—what Freud would call a phallic symbol—as a pointer to the diagram of a woman's reproductive system. In the way he manipulates the cigar against the diagram he seems to be simultaneously explaining the problem of Ed's infertility and simulating sex. This 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
