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 can be achieved only through suffering and loss. Nathan Arizona expresses his feelings of tenderness for his wife in terms of his fear of losing her and suggests that Hi and Ed may yet discover such tenderness for each other and that they “should sleep on it” before they do anything rash like breaking up their marriage. I take it that they do sleep on it and that Hi's final dream is a dream of the tenderness made manifest in the world, specifically in Utah, the state above Arizona.
The Uberty of Liberty
There is some question about whether America really is exceptional and about the value of thinking about ourselves as exceptional. If there is something exceptional about us, it seems to me that it would have to do with the way we think of ourselves as being free, as having a right to our own opinions, as being both free to develop ourselves into the selves we want to be and responsible for what we become. It is quite true that, as a cynic might insist, many in America do not really have much freedom to develop themselves into anything other than what they were born to, that the idea that we are “free” in America, that this is a “free country,” is a myth and a harmful one at that. Without denying that, I still want to say that there is a freedom that is not just granted, but in some sense honored, in America, and that is the freedom to dream.
“Uberty” is a somewhat archaic word for fruitfulness, for something that generates growth and abundance. The freedom merely to dream is, in one sense, no real freedom at all, but in another sense, in this philosophical sense in which any authentic choice must begin in something like a dream, then the freedom to dream is the only kind of real liberty that there is. Ultimate happiness may depend less on how much money we accumulate and more on having a sense that our life is our own life, that we have lived a life in which we have made some choices and lived according to the consequences of those choices. To accept responsibility for the consequences of our choices and actions is what makes us fully human, and it is what makes us tender. If there is any truth in that, then the stuff of comedy, the material to make the ends of our lives better than the beginnings, may be as accessible as our dreams. The most important thing, then, is to keep dreaming, and that is precisely what Hi is doing at the end of Raising Arizona, making it, in my estimation, a comedy not only because it is funny but also because it holds out the possibility, in the classic sense, that we can make our end better than our beginning. We can laugh in welcoming, like Plato's philosophers, the new recruits to the realm of tenderness for each other. As Walter says in The Big Lebowski, “If you will it, Dude, it is no dream.”
Notes
Epigraphs: Peter Körte and Georg Seesslen, eds., Joel & Ethan Coen (New York: Proscenium Publishers, 2001), 172; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist,” in The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode with Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 99.
1. See the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings song list for the album Darling Corey and Goofing Off Suite by Pete Seeger (1993), catalogue #40018 at www.folkways.si.edu.
2. See the poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time, or, A Full-Time Interest,” in Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose & Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995), 251.
3. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), available as part of the Hanover Historical Texts Project, which is part of the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Available at http://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html, 47.
4. In the original VHS format the title had a colon followed by the phrase “An Unbelievable Comedy.”
5. Aristotle, Poetics I, trans. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
6. Dante's own title was (in translation): “Begins the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Florentine in Birth, Not in Custom.” “The Divine” was added later. A translation of Dante's letter to Can Grande can be found at http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/jod.cangrande.english.html.
7. This is what Jean Paul Sartre calls “mauvais foi” (bad faith).
8. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 328.
9. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2002), 67–69.
10. Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (New York: Continuum, 2004), 52.
11. Georg Seesslen, “Looking for a Trail in Coen County,” in Joel & Ethan Coen, ed. Körte and
