Abstract
Stanley Cavell’s comedies of remarriage sometimes end up in court. When they do, the law featured in these films is not be mocked. In all seriousness, Cavell claims that these courtroom comedies pertain to the morality of law. To be sure, these films are not about front-page moral dilemmas. They are about what usually remains unnoticed about morality: its being engrained in everyday life. The special courtroom setting lets the everydayness of morality come into view. Adam’s Rib makes clear that the private lives of its lawyer protagonists sometimes are on public display in the courtroom. This turns out not to be a mistake but a precondition for their marital success. Mr. Deeds Goes to Court uses the courtroom stage for the display of the privacy of public moralities. In terms of Charles Sanders Peirce, morality in courtroom cinema works as the habit that comes into view because a change in that habit retrospectively makes us realize that we had a habit in the first place. These courtroom comedies are not asinine pastimes; rather, in so far as they bring into view what before remained unacknowledged, that is, the morality of everyday life, they are, as Peirce would have it, intelligent entertainment.
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Notes
- 1.
In Film and the Law (2001), Greenfield et al. systematically address different purposes of law on film, particularly for scholars of law. Their work aims beyond stating obvious differences between “screen law” and “real law”: “There seems to us little point in spending too much time pointing out that screen law does not obviously mirror real law” (26). Their point is that even though it is hard enough to determine what to understand by screen law, it would be impossible to describe what real law is independent of what representations of law make of it. In other words, according to Greenfield et al., what we might compare is not so much the representation of law on the one hand and the law itself on the other. Our understanding of the law is what it is, not least because of popular representations of the law. Hence, if there would be an appropriate comparison at all, then “the proper comparison to make is between the cinematic portrayal of law with the cinematic myth of law” (27).
- 2.
In Thomas Leitch’s book on Crime Films (2004), for example, the “lawyer film” is just one of nine subcategories. Still, the fact that there are many problems inherent in defining the law film as a genre per se should not be sufficient ground for labeling the law film as a minor or marginal subgenre. Genre theory in film studies is fraught with problems of definition. Even the Western is not as clear-cut a genre as it would seem.
- 3.
Stanley Cavell born (1926) is a philosopher by training, but he has written several books about film appreciated by philosophers and film scholars alike. Cities of Words is the condensation of a lecture course on Moral Perfectionism and combines chapters on canonical philosophers with chapters on melodramas and comedies from the 1930s and 1940s.
- 4.
Cavell has written earlier about Adam’s Rib in particular and about the remarriage comedy in general. The high stakes involving the theory of democracy, then, are not new to Cities of Words. In Pursuits of Happiness. The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), Cavell writes: “It is not remarkable to be told publicly that the integrity of society depends upon the integrity of the family. But it is something else to be told that the integrity of society is a function of the integrity of marriage, and vice versa” (193–4). This is, Cavell continues, “the dialectic of remarriage” (216).
- 5.
Soviet filmmakers Sergej Eisenstein (1898–1948) and Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) examined and propagated the revolutionary potential of the new medium film. Vertov made news reels which he called Kino Pravda (“Film Truth”), because he believed film could unravel truths the naked eye could not see. Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” compared the movie camera to a surgeon’s scalpel and lauded the penetrating insights with which film would mobilize the masses. But Benjamin also warned for the aestheticization of politics, to which use Nazi propaganda has exploited the same medium. Benjamin was therefore suspicious of mass entertainment through film, although he has also written appreciatively about comedy. For Benjamin, Charles Chaplin’s comedies have addressed one of the major issues of modernity and technology in a critical albeit entertaining way. For Cavell, however, comedy and melodrama are not first and foremost palatable ways of addressing, by way of everyday-life situations, what Cavell calls front-page moral dilemmas. On the contrary, as everyday-life situations are central to, and not detours from our understanding of morality in film, the effort to substantiate morality in film by referring to the death penalty, abortion, technological manipulation, climate change, etc. would be a byway itself.
- 6.
In “The Good of Film” (2005), Cavell explains that he is less interested in films concerning “front-page moral dilemmas, say about capital punishment (as in Dead Man Walking [1995]) or about whistle blowing (as in The Insider [1999]) (…) since such films, whatever their considerable merits, tend to obey the law of a certain form of popular engagement that requires the stripping down of moral complexity into struggles between clear good and blatant evil, or ironic reversals of them” (334). Given Cavell’s many pages dedicated to remarriage comedies, it is safe to assume that in Cavell’s view, these comedies may actually honor moral complexity and avoid the law of popular engagement according to which morality is presented in terms of clear goods and blatant evils.
- 7.
In an appendix to Pursuits of Happiness about “Film in the University,” Cavell describes the reduction of the significance of a particular film to what we already know as follows: “It represents just one more instance of using film as an illustration of some prior set of occupations rather than constituting an effort to study the medium in and for itself, to gather what it specifically has to teach” (272).
- 8.
In 1959, Erving Goffman wrote about The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. He used the theater as his main source of metaphorical reference to make sense of the staging involved in both public and private appearances. Goffman emphasizes that public and private appearances cannot be understood in isolation. According to Goffman, frontstage behavior cannot be understood without reference to backstage behavior and vice versa. He emphasizes the remarkable possibility that front- and backstage activity often contradict each other; Goffman interrelates “front regions where a particular performance is or may be in progress, and back regions where action occurs that is related to the performance but inconsistent with the appearance fostered by the performance” (134). Unlike Goffman’s examples, the public and private lives of the Bonners in Adam’s Rib are not really inconsistent. Very much like Goffman, however, Adams Rib lets us understand public appearance by way of private life and vice versa.
- 9.
Three years later, Capra upped the political ante with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). In this film, set for a large part in the United States Senate, the cynicism and corruption of corporate business and politics are explicitly thematized in opposition to the small-town honesty of boy scout leader Mr. Jefferson Smith (James Stewart). Compared to Mr. Deeds, however, Mr. Smith does not need encouragement to speak and take part in democracy. In fact, the film’s finale is Jefferson Smith’s filibuster—he does not stop speaking until he collapses from exhaustion.
- 10.
Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life also proves interested in the significance of inadvertent gestures: “the audience may (…) read an embarrassing meaning into gestures or events that were accidental, inadvertent, or incidental and not meant by the performer to carry any meaning whatsoever” (51). Goffman does not, however, go into much detail as to what exactly triggers the audience’s attention to detail.
References
Bergman, Paul, and Michael Asimow. 1996. Reel justice. The courtroom goes to the movies. Kansas City: Andrews and McMeel.
Cavell, Stanley. 1981. Pursuits of happiness. The Hollywood comedy of remarriage. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Cavell, Stanley. 2004. Cities of words. Pedagogical letters on a register of the moral life. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Cavell, Stanley. 2005. The good of film. In Cavell on film, ed. William Rothman, 333–348. Albany: SUNY Press. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City: Anchor Books.
Greenfield, Steve, et al. 2001. Film and the law. London: Cavendish Publishing Ltd.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The presentation of self in everyday life. Garden City: Anchor Books.
Klevan, Andrew. 2000. Disclosure of the everyday. Undramatic achievement in narrative Film. Trowbridge: Flicks Books.
Leitch, Thomas. 2004. Crime films. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931–1935. The collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. I-VI, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Films
Adam’s Rib. 1949. Directed by George Cukor, written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. 101 minutes, MGM, USA.
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. 1936. Directed by Frank Capra, written by Robert Riskin and (uncredited) Miles Connolly, based on the story “Opera Hat” by Clarence Budington Kelland. 115 minutes, Columbia Pictures, USA.
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. 1939. Directed by Frank Capra, written by Sidney Buchman and (uncredited) Myles Connolly, based on the story “The Gentleman from Montana” by Lewis R. Foster. 128 minutes, Columbia Pictures, USA.
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Staat, W. (2014). The Representation of Law on Film: Mr. Deeds and Adam’s Rib Go to Court. In: Wagner, A., Sherwin, R. (eds) Law, Culture and Visual Studies. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9322-6_34
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