The Thought of Movies

It must be the nature of American academic philosophy (or of its reputation), together with the nature of American movies (or of their notoriety), that makes someone who writes about both, in the same breath, subject to questions, not to say suspicions. The invitation to deliver this year’s Patricia Wise Lecture is the first time I have been questioned about this combination of concerns, or obsessions, by a group of people committed to sitting quietly for the better part of an hour while I search for an answer.

The question has, I think without fail, come my way with philosophy put first: How is it that a professor of philosophy gets to thinking about Hollywood films?—as though becoming a professor of philosophy were easier to accept than thinking and writing about movies. So defensive have I grown that it took me a while to recognize that for most of my life the opposite direction of the question would have been more natural: How is it that someone whose education was as formed by going to the movies as by reading books, gets to thinking about philosophy professionally?

For a long time I believed the connection to be a private crossroads of my own. It became explicit for me during that period in my life I learned later, in a calmer time, to call my identity crisis. I had, after college, in the late 1940s, entered the Julliard Conservatory as a composition major, following some two years of increasing doubts that music was my life. Almost as soon as I arrived in New York and established myself in school, I began avoiding my composition lessons. I spent my days reading and my nights in a theater, typically standing for the opera or a play, and then afterwards going to a film revival on 42nd Street, which in the late forties was a rich arena within which to learn the range and randomness of the American talkie. What I was reading all day I privately called philosophy, though I knew no more about what other people meant by the word than I knew why it was in philosophy that I was looking for the answer to the question my life had become.

Since I had spent my undergraduate years torn between the wish to be a writer and the fact of composing music for the student theatre—for anything ranging from numbers for our annual musical revues to incidental music for nothing less than King Lear—what I learned in college would scarcely, I mean by European standards, have added up to an education at all. But I was encouraged to go on learning from the odd places, and the odd people, that it pleased my immigrant, unlettered father and my accomplished mother to take me to—he who was in love with the knowledge he never would have, and she who while I was growing up made a living playing the piano for the silent movies and for vaudeville. The commonest place we went together was to movies. So while before I entered college I would not have heard a performance of, say, the Beethoven Ninth, and lacked any obvious preparation for it in the history of music and of German culture, I had known enough to attend carefully, for example, to the moves of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Jerome Kern, so that when the chorus in the last movement of the Ninth sings the two principal themes in counterpoint, the ecstasy this caused me had been prepared by my response to the closing of Swingtime, in which one of the pair is singing again “A Fine Romance” while the other is singing again “The Way You Look Tonight.” This would not have constituted the preparation I claim for high art unless it had gone beyond cleverness. It is essential that each of the Kern songs is as good individually as it is, so that when the pair cast them together in the reprise, each can be seen capable, so to speak, of meaning the separate song he and she have on their minds.

In the same way the lyrics of such songs were preparation for the high poetry I had yet to discover. In my early adolescence lines such as

a stanza such as this was what I thought of as poetry—nothing else will be poetry for me that cannot compete with the experience of concentration and lift in such words. It seems to me that I knew this then to be an experience not alone of the behavior and the intelligence of the words with one another, nor only, in addition, of the wit and beauty of invoking the gambler’s run of luck, but that it was an experience of these (though I would have lacked as yet words of my own in which to say so) together with the drama of using the vanishing of the streak, which is a bad thing, as a simile for the vanishing of cares and the access to heaven, which is a good thing—as if beyond bad and good there were a region of chance and risk within which alone the intimacy emblematized or mythologized in the dancing of Astaire and Rogers is realizable. Eventually I would be able to note that happiness and happenstance spring from the same root, that the pursuit of happiness—whether this is an occasion for a step into selfhood or into nationhood—requires the bravery to recognize and seize the occasion, or as Emerson had put it, “the courage to be what you are.” I am not claiming that I, then, on 42nd Street, had already planned my book on the Hollywood comedy of remarriage; but rather that that book is in part written in loyalty to younger versions of myself, some of whom were, or are, there. Certainly I can sympathize with Steve Martin’s half-crazed hero in the recent Pennies from Heaven when he says, crying from the heart about the songs he peddles and believes, “Listen to the words!” And I am, I guess, claiming that that younger version of myself, playing hooky from Julliard and in the poverty of his formal education reading all day and spending half the night in theaters, was already taking to heart Henry James’s most memorable advice to aspiring writers. In “The Art of Fiction” James says:

When the time came for me to write my book on a set of Hollywood romances, I had come to count on myself as one of the people willing not to be lost to his or to her experience, hence able to survive the indignities of sometimes guessing unconvincingly and of sometimes tracing things in thin air. So, for instance, in my book I build a sense of the shared structure of the comedies of remarriage out of an understanding of Shakespearean romance; and I discuss the blanket in It Happened One Night in terms of the censoring of human knowledge and aspiration in the philosophy of Kant; and I see the speculation of Heidegger exemplified or explained in the countenance of Buster Keaton: and I find in The Awful Truth that when the camera moves away from an imminent embrace between Cary Grant and Irene Dunne to discover a pair of human figurines marking the passage of time by skipping together into a clock that has the form of a house, that in that image something metaphysical is being said about what marriage is, that it is a new way of inhabiting time, and moreover that that is a way of summarizing the philosophy, among others, of Thoreau and of Nietzsche.

So I suppose I should not be surprised that this book of mine has met with some resistance from its reviewers; more than once it has been called pretentious. Put aside for the present the possibility that its ideas are poorly executed or voiced in the writing there is nothing I can do about that now. If that is not the whole story, then the charge of pretension must have to do with the connections I make between film and philosophy; at any rate, the charge levelled against either separately would hardly be worth responding to. But what in the connections may strike one as pretentious? It is important to me to bring out what I find to be a harmless way of issuing the charge, and a harmful way.

The harmless way takes the connections as a matter of preference, and on this basis I can see that one who is not familiar with the texts I mention may prefer that I not drop their names. I have two excuses for doing so. First, since I find in movies food for thought, I go for help in thinking about what I understand them to be thinking about where I go for help in thinking about anything, to the thinkers I know best and trust most. Second, as is typical of a certain kind of American, I find what I do to be pertinent to any and all of my fellow citizens, and I secretly believe that if they saw it as I do, they would all immediately devote themselves to doing it too. This accounts in part for an American’s readiness to lecture his fellows, a practice that made an impression on de Tocqueville during his visit to us in the 1830s, the decade before Thoreau moved out to Walden to prepare his kind of lecturing, or dressing down. It is a practice some will find insufferable and others generous. The practice raises for me the issue whether Americans have anything to their name to call a common cultural inheritance, whether you can name two works of high culture that you can be sure all the people you care about have read or seen or heard. This lack of assured commonality would be another part of the cause for our tendency to lecture rather than to converse with one another.

The harmful way of charging my book with pretension takes it for granted that philosophy and Hollywood movies occupy separate cultural intentions, with nothing to say across their border, indeed with not so much as a border between them. The immediate harm in this view lies in its closing off an exploration of what those Americans to whom it matters may be said to have instead of a common inheritance of high culture, namely an ability to move between high and low, caring about each also from the vantage of the other. This has its liabilities, naturally; for example, of indiscriminateness and of moments of incomprehensibility to the outside learned world. But it also, to my mind, accounts for what is best, or special, in our work; for example, for the reach in Thoreau’s prose from the highest sublimity to the lowest pun. I am reminded that de Tocqueville also remarked a liveliness among the populace of our democracy that he missed in his populace at home and which he attributed to the fact that in America there is genuinely public business which requires learning and intelligence to take part in. This seems to me the condition for the kind of mutual respect called upon in putting together the high and the low.

For someone, or most people, to take for granted that there is no border between philosophy and movies, for this to carry its apparent conviction, there must be available fairly definite, if unconscious, interpretations both of what philosophy is and of what the Hollywood movie is. Philosophy would have to be thought of as a more or less technical discipline reserved for specialists. But this would just interpret what it is that makes philosophy professional; and however internal that state is to philosophy and indeed to the growing professionalization of the world, it does not say what makes philosophy philosophy. I understand it as a willingness to think not about something other than what ordinary human beings think about, but rather to learn to think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them, sometimes in fantasy, sometimes as a flash across a landscape; such things, for example, as whether we can know the world as it is in itself, or whether others really know the nature of one’s own experiences, or whether good and bad are relative, or whether we might not now be dreaming that we are awake, or whether modern tyrannies and weapons and spaces and speeds and art are continuous with the past of the human race or discontinuous, and hence whether the learning of the human race is not irrelevant to the problems it has brought before itself. Such thoughts are instances of that characteristic human willingness to allow questions for itself which it cannot answer with satisfaction. Cynics about philosophy, and perhaps about humanity, will find that questions without answers are empty; dogmatists will claim to have arrived at answers: philosophers after my heart will rather wish to convey the thought that while there may be no satisfying answers to such questions in certain forms, there are, so to speak, directions to answers, ways to think, that are worth the time of your life to discover. (It is a further question for me whether directions of this kind are teachable, in ways suited to what we think of as schools.)

It would not become me to proceed, in speaking on this occasion of my interest in movies, other than by way of faithfulness to the impulse to philosophy as I conceive it. Apart from the best I can do in this attempt, I would not have approached the question whether the same sensibility that is perplexed about philosophy is perplexed about movies.

There is, I suggested, an interpretation of Hollywood movies that is the companion of the interpretation of philosophy as a specialized profession. This interpretation takes movies as specialized commodities manufactured by an industry designed to satisfy the tastes of a mass audience. Conventional capitalists as well as conventional Marxists can equally take such a view. It is no more false than is the interpretation of philosophy as a profession, but it is no less partial, or prejudicial. Just as it would be possible to select films carefully with an idea of proving that film can attain to art (people interested in such selections will on the whole not include Hollywood talkies in this section), so one could heap together abysses of bad and meretricious movies with an idea of proving one’s bleakest view of Hollywood. These are not my interests, and have nothing special to do with assessing the life of movies.

What interests me much more in these terms about Hollywood is that for around fifteen years, say from the middle thirties to the early fifties, it provided an environment in which a group of people, as a matter of its routine practice, turned out work as good, say as that represented by the seven movies forming the basis of my book on remarriage comedies—work, that is to say, as good, or something like as good, as It Happened One Night (1934), The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), The Lady Eve (1941), and Adam’s Rib (1949)—work that must participate in any history of film as an art that I would find credible. I am not, perhaps I should say, claiming that this work is the best work in the history of world cinema, nor that these films are better than the experimental or non-fiction films contemporary with them. I am, I guess, claiming that they are good; worthy companions of the best; and also that we have as yet no way of knowing, no sufficient terms in which to say how good they are. So it is no part of my argument to insist that major work can only come from such an environment nor to deny that significant movies continue to be made in Hollywood. But I expect that no one still finds that they come almost exclusively from there, and routinely, say every other week, something like twenty or twenty-five times a year. Over a period of fifteen golden vears, that comes to between 300 and 400 works, which is a larger body of first-rate or nearly first-rate work than the entire corpus of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama can show.

How could we show that it is equally, or anyway, sufficiently, worth studying? Now we are at the heart of the aesthetic matter. Nothing can show this value to you unless it is discovered in your own experience, in the persistent exercise of your own taste, and hence the willingness to challenge your taste as it stands, to form your own artistic conscience, hence nowhere but in the details of your encounter with specific works.

It is time for some more extended examples. I choose two principally, one beginning from a question I have about a moment in The Philadelphia Story, the second from a question I have about the mood of Pennies from Heaven.

The Philadelphia Story is in some ways the central member of the remarriage comedies brought together in Pursuits of Happiness, but beyond allowing me the pleasure of saying something consecutive about my commitment to these comedies, the example here is meant to isolate for attention one of those apparently insignificant moments in whose power part of the power of film rests. If it is part of the grain of film to magnify the feeling and meaning of a moment, it is equally part of it to counter this tendency, and instead to acknowledge the fateful fact of a human life that the significance of its moments is ordinarily not given with the moments as they are lived, so that to determine the significant crossroads of a life may be the work of a lifetime. It is if an inherent concealment of significance, as much as its revelation, were part of the governing force of what we mean by film acting and film directing and film viewing. We need always to be returning to the fact of how mysterious these objects called movies are, unlike anything else on earth. They have the evanescence of performances and the permanence of recordings, but they are not recordings (because there is nothing independent of them to which they owe fidelity); and they are not performances (because they are perfectly repeatable).

If what I might call the historical evanescence of film will be overcome when the new technologies of video cassettes and discs complete the work of late-night-television and revival theaters, and the history of movies becomes part of the experience of viewing new movies—as we take for granted in the rest of the arts—this should serve to steady our awareness of the natural evanescence of film, the fact that its events exist only in motion, in passing. This natural fact makes all the more extraordinary the historical fact that films are still on the whole viewed just once and reviewed on the basis of just one viewing, hence that the bulk of the prose even dedicated movie-goers read about movies is the prose of reviewing, not the demanding criticism and the readings and appreciations one takes for granted as being devoted to other arts. It will compensate my having to choose examples that I cannot be assured we have in common if doing so serves to bring this contingency of film viewing and reading into question.

The moment in The Philadelphia Story occurs late, when Katharine Hepburn, hearing from Jimmy Stewart that he did not take advantage of her drunken state the previous night, turns from the assembled audience and says, in a sudden, quiet access of admiration, “I think men are wonderful.” Nothing further comes of the line; its moment passes with its saying, like a shadow passing. Struck with the strangeness of this moment, I found in composing Pursuits of Happiness—and it is something that one of my reviewers, and on the whole a sympathetic and learned one, found more hysterically inappropriate than any other of my perceptions—that to my ear this line alludes to the moment in The Tempest at which Miranda exclaims, “How beauteous mankind is!” Evidently I had not, for that reader, made sufficiently clear my general need for the Shakespearean connection in relation to remarriage comedy; nor had I gained sufficient credit with him to get him to put his sense of appropriateness in abeyance for the moment and specifically to try out what I called an allusion amounting almost to an echo. This is something I am going to ask you to consider doing. Let me go over what I am basing myself on in such cases.

The point of the title “remarriage” is to register the grouping of a set of comedies which differ from classical comedy in various respects, but most notably in this, that in classical comedy the narrative shows a young pair overcoming obstacles to their love and at the end achieving marriage, whereas comedies of remarriage begin or climax with a pair less young, getting or threatening their divorce, so that the drive of the narrative is to get them back together, together again. The central idea I follow out along various paths, but roughly the idea is that the validity or bond of marriage is assured, even legitimized, not by church or state or sexual compatibility (these bonds, it is implied, are no deeper than those of marriage), but by something I call the willingness for remarriage, a way of continuing to affirm the happiness of one’s initial leap. As if the chance of happiness exists only when it seconds itself. In classical comedy people made for one another find one another; in remarriage comedy people who have found one another find that they are made for each other. The greatest of the structures of remarriage is The Winter’s Tale, which is, together with The Tempest, the greatest of the Shakespearean romances.

But I want the Shakespearean connection with remarriage comedy also for less stupendous structural reasons. Shakespearean romantic comedy lost out, so a way of telling the history goes, to the newer Jonsonian comedy of manners as setting the standard for the future of the English stage. Now I claim that the emergence of film, especially of the talkie, discovered another theater, several centuries later, for that older, Shakespearean structure. Some features of the older comedy that found new life on film are, for example, that it is the woman rather than the man who holds the key to the plot and who undergoes something like death and transformation; that there is some special understanding she has with her father, who does not oppose (as in conventional comedy) but endorses the object of her desire; that the central pair are not young, so that the issue of chastity or innocence, while present, cannot be settled by determinations of literal virginity; that the plot begins and complicates itself in a city but gets resolved in a move to a world of nature—in Shakespeare this is called the green world or the golden world, in four of the seven major Hollywood comedies of remarriage this world is called Connecticut.

But such structural connections are in service of a further reason for the Shakespearean connection, namely to locate the mode of perception called upon in movies, anyway in movies of this kind. The connection in effect implies that what allows film to rediscover, for its own purposes, Shakespearean romance, is that unlike the prose of comic theatrical dialogue after Shakespeare, film has a natural equivalent for the medium of Shakespeare‘s dramatic poetry. I think of it as the poetry of film itself, what it is that happens to figures and objects and places as they are variously moulded and displaced by a motion-picture camera and then projected and screened. Every art, every worthwhile human enterprise, has its poetry, ways of doing things that perfect the possibilities of the enterprise itself, makes it the one it is; each of the arts has its own poetry, of course, so has each sport, and so I am sure have banking and baking and surgery and government. You may think of it as the unteachable point in any worthwhile enterprise.

I understand it to be, let me say, a natural vision of film that every motion and station, in particular every human posture and gesture, however glancing, has its poetry, or you may say its lucidity. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton live on this knowledge, and perhaps bring it to its purest expression; it is my claim in Pursuits of Happiness that the Hollywood talkie finds an equivalent for this expressiveness, this expression of lucidity, in the way certain pairs of human beings are in conversation. (An implied threat to their happiness is that they are, somehow because of this fortune, incomprehensible to everyone else in the world they inhabit.) Any of the arts will be drawn to this knowledge, this perception of the poetry of the ordinary, but film, I would like to say, democratizes the knowledge, hence at once blesses and curses us with it. It says that the perception of poetry is as open to all, regardless as it were of birth or talent, as the ability is to hold a camera on a subject, so that a failure so to perceive, to persist in missing the subject, which may amount to missing the evanescence of the subject, is ascribable only to ourselves, to failures of our character; as if to fail to guess the unseen from the seen, to fail to trace the implications of things—that is, to fail the perception that there is something to be guessed and traced, right or wrong—requires that we persistently coarsen and stupefy ourselves. Business people would not run a business this way; this was something Emerson admired about American business; it is why Thoreau asks for what he calls “a little more Yankee shrewdness” in our lives. And Emerson and Thoreau are the writers I know best who most incessantly express this sense of life as missed possibility, of its passing as in a dream, hence the sense of our leading lives of what they call quiet desperation. The movies I name comedies of remarriage find happiness in proposing that there is relief from just that Emersonian loss, that there are conditions under which opportunities may be discovered again and retaken, that somewhere there is a locale in which a second chance is something one may give oneself. (It is my argument about The Philadelphia Story in Pursuits of Happiness—which I won’t try to go into here—that the Philadelphia in its title is the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution of the United States, so that America is the name of the locale of the second chance, or it was meant to be. Remarriage is the central of the second chances.)

Now I’m taking that apparently insignificant moment of The Philadelphia Story, the evanescence of the seven syllables “I think men are wonderful,” as one in which a character is taking such an opportunity, and the movie proposing one to us. It may help to note that the companion line from The Tempest—“How beauteous mankind is!”—is also seven syllables long and that both lines occur at the late moment in their dramas at which the principal female is about to undergo a metaphysical transformation. The Hepburn character is to move from the state of chaste Goddess (a state each of the four men in her life either accuses her of or praises her for) into what she calls feeling like a human being; and in The Tempest, in response to Miranda’s exclamation, Ferdinand’s father asks whether she is a goddess, to which Ferdinand replies:

By the way, while the line of Miranda’s I am measuring Hepburn’s with does not contain the word “wonderful,” its more familiar, wider context runs this way:

Remember that we are what has become of the new world, the idea and the fact of which so fascinated Shakespeare and his age.

If one is interested enough to go this far with the conjunction of Hollywood comedy and Shakespearean romance, one will be bound to ask what the point of such a moment is, I mean why this crossroads of wonder is marked so carefully in these dramatic structures. My answer for the comedies of remarriage would run in something like the following way. I think of them, as a group, to be dedicated to the pursuit of what you might call equality between men and women (and of this as emblematic of the search for human community as such—but I am letting this pass for the present), the pursuit of their correct independence of, and dependence upon, one another. What the comedies of remarriage show is that, as the world goes, there is an unfairness or asymmetry in this pursuit, because women require an education for their assumption of equality, and this must be managed with the help of men. The first task for her, accordingly, is to choose the best man for this work. Because of the history between them—both their private history and the history of their culture—they are struggling with one another, they have justified grievances against one another; hence I sometimes characterize these movies as revenge comedies. If their relationship is to go forward the pair must get around to forgiving one another, and, continuing the asymmetry, it must primarily be the woman who forgives the man, not just because she has more to forgive but because she has more power to forgive. And yet in these movies it may be hard to see what the particular man in question needs such radical forgiveness for. He has done nothing obvious to harm the woman, and the specific charges the women bring against the men—Clark Gable’s disdainfulness in It Happened One Night; Cary Grant’s craziness in The Awful Truth, and his deviousness in His Girl Friday, and his gorgeous thirst in The Philadelphia Story; Henry Fonda’s sappiness in The Lady Eve; Spencer Tracy’s forcefulness, even brutishness in Adam’s Rib—these are features the woman honors as well as hates the man for, which is doubtless why she can forgive him. It is not fully explicit until the last of the definitive remarriage comedies, Adam’s Rib in 1949, that what the woman has against the man is fundamentally the simple villainy of his being a man; hence that is what her happiness with him depends on her getting around to forgiving him for. The form this takes in the line from The Philadelphia Story about men being wonderful, I take, accordingly, as an expression of admiration at the sheer fact of their separateness, wonder as it were that there should be two sexes, and that the opposite one is as such admirable. This is hardly the end of anger between them; there are always their differences. But it is a kind of promise to spend as long as it takes—say till death them do part—to work out what those differences are, what they come to.

At some point—always supposing that one can believe that a conjunction of Shakespeare and Hollywood comedies is not hysterically inappropriate—a more sympathetic doubt about the conjunction may seem called for, prompting one to want to know how serious I am about it, whether when I say, for example, that film has a natural power of poetry equivalent to the power of Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry, I really mean poetry in the same sense. Here might just respond by saying that that is not a question to which I have an answer apart from the thinking and the writing I do and have done, about movies among other matters. But I want to pause, before turning to my concluding example, to sketch an answer more openly philosophical, in particular one that accounts more openly for the periodic appearance of Emerson and Thoreau in my thoughts, those here tonight and those in Pursuits of Happiness. Because while my insistence on writing about philosophy and movies in the same breath, insisting on both of them, but especially on their conjunction, as part of my American intellectual and cultural inheritance—while this has caused me a certain amount of professional tension, it has caused no more than my insistence on inheriting Emerson and Thoreau as philosophers.

Do I really mean philosophers? in the same sense that Plato and Descartes and Kant are philosophers? While this is not a moment to argue the point, I take the moment to ask you to conceive the following possibility: that Emerson and Thoreau are the central founding thinkers of American culture but that this knowledge, though possessed by shifting bands of individuals, is not culturally possessed. It would be an expression of this possibility that no profession is responsible for them as thinkers. Mostly they do not exist for the American profession of philosophy; and the literary professions are mostly not in a position to preserve them in these terms. They are unknown to the culture they express in a way it would not be thinkable for Kant and Schiller and Goethe to be unknown to the culture of Germany, or Descartes and Rousseau to France, or Locke and Hume and John Stuart Mill to England. I do not think it is clear how we are to understand and assess this fact about our cultural lives, but you can see that someone with my interests might wish not to miss the occasion for noting the fact out loud in the nation’s capital.

(Here I am seeing our reception of our best writers, like our reception of the best Hollywood movies, as part of America’s tendency to overpraise and undervalue its best work, as though the circus ballyhoo advertising of Hollywood movies were covering doubts we have that they are really any good at all. I guess this is a preachy thing to say; and maybe that is what’s meant sometimes when I’m called pretentious. But preachiness is equally part of the American grain in me, a risk you run in hanging around Emerson and Thoreau as much as I have lately. It is a tone associated in remarriage comedies especially with Katharine Hepburn’s high-mindedness. She gets lectured about it by the men in her life, repeatedly dressed down. And once, in Adam’s Rib, Spencer Tracy allows himself to say to her, “You get cute when you get causey.” Of course this makes her sore. And I think I know just how she feels.)

But now if our central thinkers are unpossessed, unshared by us, it will not be expected that we can readily come to intellectual terms on the issues that matter most to us, as say the fundamental issues of art and of philosophy can matter to us. Emerson and Thoreau fully knew this difficulty in getting themselves understood. I have taken as a parable of Emerson’s dedication of himself as a writer the following sentences from one of his early, most famous essays, “Self-Reliance”:

Two remarks about this. First, shunning father and mother and wife and brother is, according to the New Testament, required of you when the Lord calls you and you seek the kingdom of heaven. And according to the Old Testament, writing on the lintels of the door is something you do on Passover, to avoid the angel of death, and it is also where writings from Deuteronomy are placed, in mezuzah, to signify that Jews live within and that they are obedient to the injunction of the Lord to bear his words and at all times to acknowledge them. So Emerson is putting the calling and the act of his writing in the public place reserved in both of the founding testaments of our culture for the word of God. Is he being serious?

My second remark about Emerson’s passage is that it acknowledges his writing to be posing exactly the question of its own seriousness. In the parable I just read, he both declares his writing to be a matter of life and death, the path of his faith and redemption, and also declares that everything he writes is Whim. I understand this to mean that it is his mission to create the language in which to explain himself, and accordingly to imply both that there is no such standing discourse between him and his culture, and that he is to that extent without justification before himself. The course open to him is to stake the seriousness of his life, his conviction, on what, before his life’s work, we will have no words for: call it whim. So if I answer that my insistence on, for example, aligning movies and Shakespeare and philosophy is based on whim, you will know how to take me.

Now I’m ready to offer as my concluding example, to challenge our conviction in the worth of movies as subjects of thought, Pennies from Heaven, a much less lucky movie than, say, the seven thirties comedies I listed in the original genre of remarriage. Those movies are likeable and comprehensible enough to be worth taking and treasuring as light comedies, without working to consciousness any more of the material in Pursuits of Happiness than occurs to you casually. Whereas if the brilliance of Pennies from Heaven doesn’t strike you right off, if you don’t become convinced at any rate fairly swiftly that the shocking juxtaposition of attitudes it presents are part of a study, among other things, of the unsettling power of movies, it is likely to seem too unpleasant and confused to think about at all. It is bound to be somewhat hard to think about since it is a Hollywood musical that apparently seeks to undermine the conventions that made possible the Hollywood musical. The subsequent paradox is that its success depends on its undermining itself. If it absorbs the power of conviction of the Hollywood musical then it has not undermined that power. If on the other hand it does not absorb the power of the Hollywood musical then it lacks the power of conviction altogether. It would answer this paradox to say: This movie has the conviction of a work that undermines the conventional sources of conviction in its medium, precisely by reconceiving the sources of that conviction. This sounds like something that might be said of the course of modernism in the other major arts; it is a reason I have sometimes said that art now exists in the condition of philosophy, since it has always been the condition of philosophy to attempt to escape itself, which for several centuries has taken the form of each new major philosopher wishing to repudiate the past of the subject—I mean repudiate it philosophically. As famous, and successful, as any such effort in the arts is Bertolt Brecht's repudiation of theatricality by means of theatre itself: theater, hence, reconceived. But in thinking about movies this is so far merely words; it is an idea that has no commonly appreciated and acknowledged realization in film itself. It tells us nothing about whether, for example, Pennies from Heaven succeeds or fails in the new terms we allow for it. The moral remains that nothing but the details of the individual work can tell.

Take the two most obvious details in which this film calls into question the conventions of the classical Hollywood musical, the fact that it employs the dubbing of voices, and the fact that it will go to any fictional lengths in order to motivate realistically its fantastic songs and dances. When the small-time hero, refused financing by the banker, breaks into a happy duet with him, his voice dubbed by a woman’s; or when the crippled, mumbling beggar takes on an athletic, dazzlingly mounted performance of the title song; the violence of emotion I felt as I stared at the conventions of the Hollywood musical brought to trial was only increased by the fact that I found the numbers expert and gripping. So if Pennies from Heaven is parody, it is at the same time tribute, homage: it acknowledges that the reputedly naive musicals on which it lives were as artful and as mysterious as anything it can claim for itself. It shows that conventions of the Hollywood musical are deeper than we may have thought, that their discovery of human desires and satisfactions cannot be undone or outpaced merely by exaggerating them, and indeed in no obvious way at all. And if this is true of the Hollywood musical, where in successful film, or in art generally, is it not true?

Yet this film fails its own knowledge at the end and strikes, to my ear, so false a note as to help ensure its lack of consideration. What happens is this. The hero is arrested for a terrible crime we know has been committed by the crippled beggar, and the film’s examination of the human voice and the sentiments of popular song climaxes with the hero’s finding his own voice not in song but in plain speech as, on the gallows, he speaks the words of what may be recognized as the verse to the song “Pennies from Heaven.” To ask a writer’s words to be so sound that they can be said on the gallows is an ambitious test of writing; I find that these words, said by Steve Martin, passed well enough. If so, then nothing should stand in the way of the fiction’s happy ending. The Governor might have driven up in a limousine, his way cleared by screaming motorcycles, and sung a song of pardon to our hero. Instead the movie slinks to a conclusion by having the hero reappear to his sweetheart for no reason within the fiction, mouthing something like, “We've worked too hard not to get a happy ending.” This is roughly to suppose that the conventions that lend the movie its power are disposable at will.

How wrong this is is reinforced if we notice that the climax of the movie alludes to a more famous dramatic work with pennies in its title, the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera, which concludes with its bourgeois criminal hero singing on the gallows and being brought a reprieve by a messenger on horseback. So in failing to find out how to say that its hero deserves a pardon, perhaps in the form of an ironic consolation, Pennies from Heaven is faithless at once to its Hollywood medium and to its source in the Brechtian theater of estrangement.

Let us end on this movie’s other and most dangerous moment of imitation and homage, the reenactment by Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters of the Astaire-Rogers routine on Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” What the movie is studying here most extravagantly is the nature of what is called our identification with the figures of drama. This reenactment, along with the voices that take over the characters as they go into song, reveals the identification with figures on film not as a process of imitating them but as a product of being possessed by them. Now of all the impersonations one might have tried of the distinctive stars in the history of Hollywood, from Chaplin to Gable and Hepburn, the one no normal person in his right mind would have tried to translate from the realm of fantasy into the public realm is the sense of himself in an Astaire routine: no one else could perfectly enough lend his body to the demands of that spirit. So one must ask how good the Martin-Peters enactment is of this impossible possession. And I find the answer to be that it is convincing enough to make me ask how convincing the original is, whether it fulfills its own dramatic invitation to face the music and dance.

I note that it is perhaps the most weirdly motivated of all the memorable Astaire productions. He prefaces the dance with a little drama in which he loses his money at a casino and then, wandering outside with a pistol to use on himself, sees a woman in an evening gown mount a parapet; he grabs her before she can leap, throws away the pistol, and begins the song and dance. Described in this way, apart from its experience, it may be wondered how they get through all this without laughing. But within the experience, or in remembering such experiences, we know that Astaire has thought about what motivates dancing, about what provides its occasions, as well as anyone who ever lived; so we had perhaps better think further about it in the present case. The little opening drama, in which the actions set in music are neither spoken nor sung nor danced, invokes the condition of mime, of what the Elizabethans called a dumb show, of the sort used in Hamlet by the players of the play-within-the-play who act out their entire drama silently before they speak their parts. If you take this undanced prelude or invitation to dance in this way, as a kind of prophecy or parable of Astaire’s understanding of his dancing, then he can be taken to be declaring that it is meant as a removal not from life but from death. Though the idea of escaping life is a more common view of dance and of comedy, and I guess of art in general, than Astaire’s idea of redeeming death, it is no less meta physical. Astaire’s view of dancing as facing the music, as a response to the life of inexorable consequences, which turn out to be the consequences of desperate pleasures, would then be a concrete translation of what such a thinker as Nietzsche meant bydancing (as when Zarathustra speaks, urging: “Raise up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And don’t forget your legs! Raise up your legs, too, good dancers . . . !”) something I guess he would have learned, among other things, from Emerson, from such a passage in another of Emerson’s early essays as this: “All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations and dance before our eyes.” Can an Astaire-Rogers dance, projected on a screen, be this good? How good would this good have to be?—This is serious business.