After their dark and downbeat debut, the Coen brothers said they wanted to make a film ‘as different from Blood Simple as possible – galloping instead of languorous, sunny instead of lurid, genial and upbeat instead of murderous and cynical’ (Allen 2006: 17–18). The result was Raising Arizona, the story of H. I. McDunnough (Nicolas Cage), a loopy small-time criminal who specialises in convenience store hold-ups. During one of his frequent stays at the Maricopa County jail, Hi (as he likes to be called) conceives a desire for a better life as a free and law-abiding citizen. When he meets pretty prison photographer Edwina (Holly Hunter), who goes by Ed, Hi begins to see the path to a better future in which he will finally put his lawless years behind him, settle down with Ed, and live a ‘normal’ family life. The discovery that Ed is unable to conceive children makes this dream seem unattainable, until the widelypublicised birth of the ‘Arizona Quints’ to local businessman Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson) and wife Florence (Lynne Dumin Kitei), an event that offers an alternative way of acquiring the baby that Ed insists she must have. Hi is dispatched to kidnap one of the Arizona quintuplets, the first in a series of kidnappings as the stolen quint quickly becomes a hot commodity, sought by a bounty hunter (Randell ‘Tex’ Cobb), the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse, as Hi calls him, who hopes to collect the reward put up by Nathan Arizona. When Hi’s prison buddies, the Snopes brothers Gale (John Goodman) and Evelle (William Forsythe), get wind of the McDonnough’s subterfuge, they join the chase, kidnapping the kidnapped baby. Hi’s boss Glen (Sam McMurray) and his wife Dot (Frances McDormand), who already have more than they can handle, covet Nathan Jr. as well. Hi and Ed’s struggles to possess, and re-possess, the stolen baby constitute the remainder of the narrative.
Upon its theatrical release, mainstream critics gave Raising Arizona mixed reviews, divided along critical lines established in earlier reviews of Blood Simple. Some reviewers raved. Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss, an ardent supporter of Blood Simple, hailed Raising Arizona as ‘exuberantly original’. David Denby of New York admired the Coens’ ‘deranged fable of the New West’, which, in his estimation, turns ‘sarcasm into a rude yet affectionate mode of comedy’. Rita Kempley, writing for the Washington Post, had nothing but admiration for the Coens’ new movie, labeling it ‘a wacky, happy, daring, darkly comic tale’. Dissatisfied critics repeated criticisms leveled at Blood Simple, especially the movie’s lamentable triumph of ‘empty’ style over ‘human’ substance. Pauline Kael thought Raising Arizona pure cinematic artifice, describing the movie as a ‘contraption’, well-built in a technical sense, but ‘storyboarded like a comic strip’, racing from one sight gag to the next. Writing for the New York Times, Vincent Canby complained similarly that like Blood Simple, the film is ‘full of technical expertise but has no life of its own’. For critics like these, the Coens’ latest effort was too mannered, too self-conscious and therefore ‘lifeless’, as if the weight of the film’s stylisation had crushed the human spirit of its characters. In one of the most damning reviews, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times complained that everyone in the movie talks in a ‘funny’ and ‘distracting’ way, which presumably means in an unnatural, affected idiom. ‘I have a problem,’ writes Ebert, ‘with movies where everybody talks as if they were reading out of an old novel about a bunch of would-be colourful characters.’ Adding to his distractions, it bothered Ebert that, as a cinematic narrative, the film failed to make a clear distinction between reality and fantasy, which, he believes, causes viewer confusion and disorientation. For Ebert, Raising Arizona is a movie that ‘cannot decide if it exists in the real world of trailer parks and 7-Elevens and Pampers, or in a fantasy world of characters from another dimension’.
Ebert’s complaint that Raising Arizona cannot decide whether it exists in the ‘real world’ or the realm of fantasy is symptomatic of those detractors who judged the movie by conventional standards of cinematic realism, with the expectation that unless presented explicitly as fantasy, a movie should depict a unified and credible reality. Movies can be either realistic or fantastic, but apparently not both simultaneously. What such assessments overlook, however, is the possibility that the entire narrative could be a product of Hi’s imagination, an escapist fantasy dreamed up to pass the time in jail. The story’s epilogue hints at this possibility, intimated in Hi’s final speech: ‘I don’t know. You tell me. This whole dream … was it wishful thinkin’? Was I just fleein’ reality, like I know I’m liable to do?’ As James Mottram points out, the film is designed to blur the boundary between fantasy and reality, not only with its contrived comicbook story and characters, but by formal means such as the avoidance of conventional continuity techniques (fades or dissolves) to signify transitions from dream to reality (2000: 38). What bothers Ebert and others is the Coens’ refusal to make clear distinctions between the planes of reality and fantasy. Unlike Blood Simple, which was fashioned as a realistic ‘slice of life’, Raising Arizona asks to be read as a cartoonish fantasy that renders not a specific social reality but a peculiar state of mind.
Hi and Ed enjoy ‘the salad days’.
An Amalgam of Genres
Asked if they prefer to work in specific genres since their first two films were so clearly genre pieces (crime and comedy), Joel responded: ‘We were more conscious of working in a genre with Blood Simple than with Raising Arizona. Arizona seems more absurd, an amalgam of genres.’ Ethan adds that in writing the screenplay ‘we didn’t begin by thinking of diving into a genre. We wanted to broadly make a comedy with two main characters. We concentrated on them, more than the movie in a general sense’ (Allen 2006: 25). Instead of a genre movie, the Coens conceived Raising Arizona as a character-based narrative, but despite the initial focus on character, the finished motion picture contrives much of its humour by blending standard movie genres with diverse styles of film comedy, orchestrating these forms to create an amalgamation of filmic discourses Jim Collins terms ‘ironic hybridization’ (1993: 243). Like Blood Simple, Raising Arizona exemplifies a broader category of postmodern cinema: reflexive films that explore the possibilities of genre by intertextual means, conducting referential dialogues with previous generic models. As one of the first theorists to establish the centrality of hybridisation in the literary text, what Mikhail Bakhtin writes about the novel can be applied equally to the filmic text: ‘The novelistic hybrid is an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another’ (1984b: 361). As Bakhtin continually reminds us, all texts are pastiches of citations, pluralised by the plethora of generic discourses. This is particularly true of the artistic text, which in Bakhtin’s view is by definition a ‘hybrid construction’.
In Raising Arizona this interplay of diverse generic models engenders a referential dialogue that is both resonant and dissonant, but always calculated to produce laughter. The introductory montage recounting Hi’s frequent incarcerations in the Maricopa County jail and his courtship of Ed invokes the conventions of a prison movie. The desert setting, outlaw motif and frequent gunplay evoke Hollywood westerns. These are supplemented by elements of apocalyptic science fiction (with specific references to the Mad Max movies) and the gangster genre (a kidnapping committed by a Bonnie-and-Clyde outlaw couple). As generic hybrid, Raising Arizona relies on these standard forms, but the over-arching genre is comedy, and as such it depends heavily on the crude farce of slapstick that was an integral feature of early silent comedies. Thus many sequences in Raising Arizona are staged like the early silent comedies of Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle and Harold Lloyd, getting laughs primarily from the idiotic and improbable pratfalls of foolish characters enacting harmless violence on each other. Many of these early comedies were produced by Mack Sennett, best known for the Keystone Kops, the motion picture precursor of animated cartoons. As critics rightly noted, Raising Arizona has a cartoonish quality, disconcerting for some, who scorned the movie for being written and performed like a manic comic strip. In Raising Arizona this ‘animated’ effect is created by highly stylised camera movements incorporated into elaborate sequence shots that mimic the visual mannerisms of animated comedy, particularly the antic kinesis of the Chuck Jones Road Runner TV series which, like the Coens’ movie, takes place in an imaginary Arizona desert. Like the hapless Roadrunner antagonist, Wile E. Coyote, Hi endures endless physical abuse without ever suffering serious injury. He is punched in the face (by Ed), shot at (by police and town-folk), hurled against and through walls (by Gale Snopes) and dragged over highway asphalt behind a motorcycle (by Smalls) without suffering so much as a scratch. The Woody Woodpecker/Mr. Horsepower tattoo shared by Hi and the apocalyptic biker offers a visual clue to their shared identity within a cartoon-inspired dream world where the boundary between fantasy and reality is permeable and unstable.
Apparent in the visual conception and technique of Raising Arizona’s cartoon-like stylisation is the influence of Sam Raimi, with whom the Coens had recently collaborated on the movie Crimewave. This Coen/Raimi collaboration, also known as The XYZ Murders, is an outrageous black comedy whose humour results in large measure from the slapstick violence of two exterminators who target human victims as well as rodents (their advertising slogan is ‘We Kill All Sizes’). Raimi’s influence on Raising Arizona is evident in applications of technical excess, especially in Raimi’s trademark ‘shakicam’ shot, achieved by mounting a camera with wide-angle lens on a wooden board and pulling it manually close to ground level. One of the most notable examples occurs at the end of Hi’s dream-vision of the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse. To convey the ‘fury’ that Hi imagines Florence Arizona will feel when she realises her baby is missing, the filmmakers construct a fast-motion sequence in which a wobbly camera rushes toward the exterior of the Arizona’s mansion, leaps over a parked car, then quickly scales the rungs of a ladder leading to the open window of the quints’ bedroom, halting abruptly on a close-up of Florence Arizona’s gaping mouth as she screams. The sequence, divided into three segments, employs the ground-level shakicam shot plus footage from a remotecontrolled camera as well as some tricky upside-down point-of-view shots, all of it overcranked to create the desired zany intensity. To heighten the visual sense of animation, the Coens had cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld use wide-angle lenses for the highspeed tracking shots to create an unnatural distortion of the images and intensify their cartoonish energy.
One of the most memorable illustrations of Raising Arizona’s ‘pinball animation’ occurs in the Huggies hold-up sequence, a slapstick tour-de-force worthy of Sennett’s Keystone Kops. It begins innocently enough when Hi stops at a 7-Eleven to pick up Huggies for the baby. Once inside the store, however, Hi’s outlaw nature takes control and he can’t resist the urge to take what he needs at gunpoint. Hurriedly exiting the store with the stolen Huggies, he realises that Ed has abandoned him. As he freezes in terror and disbelief, the camera rushes toward him at ground level, visually capturing his sense of panic and initiating the frantic action that ensues. In seconds, the cops show up, guns blazing, joined by the store clerk wielding a Dirty Harry-sized hand cannon, all of them firing furiously at Hi as he gallops madly down the street, unharmed. Seeking refuge in a suburban backyard, Hi is attacked by a ferocious dog which appears suddenly from the darkness. Here the camera itself seems to attack Hi, assuming the dog’s point-of-view as it rushes toward him in a high-speed, shakicam tracking shot. The attacks are now coming at Hi from every direction. Suddenly he is hit by a truck – but again, no harm done. Racing to his rescue, Ed finally returns to the store and as they speed away Hi casually scoops up the Huggies he had dropped while madly dodging gunfire. Tightly edited and optically intensified by hyperkinetic camera movements, this remarkable piece of action filming reads simultaneously as homage to the Keystone Kops and as parody of the free-wheeling, high-octane violence-for-entertainment that fuels contemporary Hollywood action movies.
‘I’ll be takin’ these Huggies and whatever cash you got.’
In addition to its cartoonish slapstick, Raising Arizona also borrows and reworks fundamental elements of classic ‘screwball’ comedies, drawing to a large extent on two directors widely considered masters of this kind of comedy: Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges. Hawks’ comedies such as Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday (both released in 1940) find their humour in marital or romantic conflicts and the comic confusion caused by clashing gender roles, usually pitting an independent woman resisting traditional feminine roles against the more conventional expectations of her husband or lover. Romantic conflict is also at the heart of comedies by Preston Sturges. As noted in the Introduction, in movies like The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story, Sturges invented a witty and acerbic brand of screwball laced with cynical satire. One of the Coens’ favorites by Sturges, The Palm Beach Story, takes a satirical look at sex and its uses in the acquisition of wealth, as Sturges lampoons the idle rich and the American obsession with money and social status. Its story concerns Tom and Gerry, a married couple in financial straits. Tom is an inventor who struggles to provide the good life for his wife Gerry, who like any good American woman wants to ‘get ahead’. To do so, she uses her feminine wiles to manipulate a wealthy suitor for money, which she (virtuously) plans to use to subsidise Tom’s commercial success. The romantic conflict engendered by her enterprising flirtations provides a rich context for a story that exploits the changing social definitions of masculinity and femininity for screwball laughs.
Initially conceived as a character-driven story, Raising Arizona’s narrative is grounded in the classic conflict of masculine vs. feminine. But while the comedies of Hawks and Sturges generally play out this conflict in a glamorised middle- or upper-class milieu, the McDonnoughs inhabit the lower socio-economic regions of American society. Yet despite cultural and class differences they are caught in the same comedic predicament as their upscale screwball predecessors. The incongruous marriage of Hi and Ed (whose names are only the most obvious manifestation of their confusion about gender roles) presents an improbable variation on the classic themes of conflicted romance and the reversal of gender roles. As a prison guard, Ed is an atypical variant of the classic independent woman. Hi plays the confused husband unsure of his masculine identity and trying to find his place amidst the progress of social changes. As her name suggests, ‘Ed’ has pronounced masculine characteristics, starting with her work in the maledominated profession of law enforcement. Her job has taught her to be an authoritarian taskmaster, a habit she carries over into family life where she is clearly the one in charge. Her habit of laying down the law is well illustrated when she commands the Snopes brothers to leave their ‘decent’ family home, prompting Gale to express doubts about Hi’s patriarchal status when he suggests that Ed seems to ‘wear the pants’ in the McDunnough household. Doubts about Hi’s status as family breadwinner reach a zenith after Hi has assaulted his obnoxious boss and lost his job, as Ed asks: ‘Where does that leave me and Nathan Jr.?’ Hi can only think to reply: ‘With a man for a husband.’ Hi’s insecurity about masculine identity is humorously underscored by implying his femininity. Such implications become a running joke. In contrast to the masculine formality of Ed’s monochrome police uniform, Hi prefers the bright colours and floral patterns typically associated with female apparel. In contrast to the no-nonsense formality of Ed’s police talk, Hi prefers a more affectionate, sometimes poetic, idiom adorned with floral metaphors (he calls Ed his ‘sweet desert flower’). The joking about Hi’s ‘femininity’ reaches a crescendo in a sight gag during the Huggies hold-up when he pulls a nylon stocking over his head as a mask. The baffled hayseed driver who later gives Hi a lift can only say, ‘Son, you got a panty on your head!’
At the conclusion of Hi’s story, as he narrates his dream vision of a brighter future, one senses again the influence of Sturges. After having decided to return Nathan Jr. to his real family, devastated by the surrender of the baby that had brought them so much joy, Hi and Ed contemplate dissolving their improbable union. Maybe it was, as Ed says, ‘just a fool’s paradise’; Nathan Arizona cautions prudence and deliberation, telling the couple they should at least ‘sleep on it’. That night Hi has a dream of the future, one in which he and Ed stay married, raise a family (whose members are not too ‘screwed up’) and finally grow old together in peaceful harmony. But even in his dream of wish fulfillment Hi has doubts yet still harbours hope, saying ‘But me’n Ed, we can be good too … And it seemed real. It seemed like us. And it seemed like … well … our home … If not Arizona, then a land, not too far away, where all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all children are happy and beloved … I dunno, maybe it was Utah.’ His conclusion is as inconclusive as it is laughable. Realistically, it is doubtful that Utah, just as barren and uninhabitable as Arizona, could offer anything approaching the utopia of Hi’s dream vision. In Sturges’ Palm Beach Story the ultimate fate of Tom and Gerry’s marriage is likewise put in doubt in the film’s final frame which poses the question: ‘And they lived happily ever after – or did they?’ The ending of Hi and Ed’s story is similarly ambiguous, leaving in question the outcome of a perhaps ill-fated marriage of two ‘screwed up’ Arizona hayseeds.
Sturges is well known for his use of comic stereotypes but, in a manner analogous to the Coens, he tended to exaggerate the characters to make them more, rather than less, sympathetic, slyly using stereotypes to insinuate biting social commentaries. The stereotyping in Raising Arizona follows a similar strategy. Critics objected to what they perceived as the film’s mocking arrogance toward its characters, but the Coens do not see the condescension: ‘If the characters talk in clichés,’ says Joel, ‘it’s because we like clichés’ (Allen 2006: 24). Nevertheless, the Coens were censured by a Tempe, Arizona reporter who read an unauthorised copy of the script during production and published a newspaper article scolding the brothers for their hayseed stereotyping of Arizonans. Ethan mounted a public defence of the movie, saying that their portrayal of Arizonans as backward hicks was not meant to be realistic: ‘Of course it’s not accurate,’ said Ethan. ‘It’s not supposed to be. It’s all made up. It’s an Arizona of the mind’ (Levine 2000: 56). The most extreme call for censure was, however, yet to come. After its national release Mike Zink, pastor of Family Life Centers in Seattle, Washington organised a demonstration against the movie because, in Zink’s words, ‘it encourages people to view children as objects and, in that way, encourages child abuse, child neglect, and kidnap’ (Robson 2007: 71). The Coens did not dignify this accusation with a response, but they might have said, as Gale does when Ed accuses the Snopes brothers of being a bad influence, ‘we sure didn’t mean to influence anybody’.
As far as the Coen brothers are concerned, ethnicity is essential to character identity: ‘If you want to make a character specific, his ethnicity is part of who he is.’ In their view, if characters are to have validity, the filmmaker has to be ‘specific about how they talk, and how they behave, how they do everything. And their ethnicity is naturally going to be part of that’ (Allen 2006: 124–125). Thus to lend their characters the necessary specificity, the Coens give them an exaggerated drawl accentuating a (supposedly) Southwestern dialect. This regional idiom, at least in the Coens’ imagination, is peppered with colourful expressions, many of which are voiced by Nathan Arizona Sr. Describing his employees, the unpainted furniture baron says, ‘Without my say-so they wouldn’t piss with their pants on fire.’ Speaking to an employee on the phone, Nathan Sr. barks: ‘Yeah, and if a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass a-hoppin’.’ Cultural stereotyping is reinforced by costume and make-up. Criminal types like Hi and the Snopes brothers wear flamboyant floral-pattern shirts. Glen’s attire reflects his personality: gaudy and tasteless. In his TV commercials wealthy businessman Nathan Arizona appears in a cheap polyester suit and cowboy hat. Hairstyles also comment on social class. After their jailbreak the Snopes brothers get spruced up by slicking their hair back with a thick layer of pomade, a practice only the ‘greasers’ of a past era would consider a cosmetic improvement. Meanwhile, Hi’s disheveled hair seems to fly in all directions, at times sticking straight up like Woody Woodpecker’s spiky head tuft. Ethan recalls that during the filming Nicolas Cage was ‘obsessed by his hair, like Woody Woodpecker. The more depressed the character was, the more flamboyant the tuft became. There was a curious capillary rapport!’ (Allen 2006: 29).
It should hardly be surprising that Raising Arizona relies on stereotyping for comedic effects. Stereotypes are common in many forms of comedy, especially situation comedy and stand-up routines. More to the point, in one form or another, stereotypes of gender, race and ethnicity have always been a staple of mainstream Hollywood comedies. Unlike the classic Hollywood comedies of Sturges and Hawks, whose stereotypes are drawn from the middle- and upper-classes, the Coens choose to focus on lower-class ‘trailer trash’. Their residence is a tiny mobile home parked in an expanse of desert on the edge of town, which Hi politely refers to as ‘suburban Tempe’. After his release from prison, Hi takes a job ‘drilling holes in sheet metal’ where his workmate Bud (M. Emmet Walsh) regales him with bizarre stories from his paramedic days about severed body parts found on the highway, stories that Bud finds hilarious. Hi is surrounded by such idiots. His company during stints in the county jail consists of moronic cell mates and dunces like the Snopes brothers who are quite happy to think of crime as their professional calling. ‘Work,’ says Evelle, ‘is what’s kept us happy.’ The world outside of prison does not offer Hi much better. Hi’s foreman Glen is a bigoted fool who thinks tasteless Polish jokes are hilarious. The real joke, however, is that Glen, who stereotypes ‘Polacks’ as stupid, is the one who looks stupid, so stupid in fact that he can’t even tell his simple-minded Polack jokes right. Rather than mocking the local ethnicity, as some may have thought, Glen’s lame attempts at joke-telling reveal ethnic stereotyping for what it really is: an expression of stupidity. The Coens’ stereotyping operates on a much different level and serves very different purposes than Glen’s mindless jokes.
Theories of Laughter and Humour
A major objection to the humour in Raising Arizona is that it assumes a posture of superiority toward its characters, a concern first voiced by Sheila Benson who thought that the film came ‘swathed in a caul of superiority towards its characters’. Subsequent commentary reinforces Benson’s critique. In R. Barton Palmer’s view, the Coens’ oeuvre generally manifests ‘a consistent authorial tone, an unsympathetic, cynical, and derisive attitude toward the characters and their desires for success or release’ (2004: 54). Historically, the idea that superiority is the basis of humour has its origins in ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. The superiority theory was promoted by the eighteenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, whose view of humour is based on the presupposition that all humans compete for social power or status. In this eternal struggle for advantage, when our competitors fail, we feel successful or superior. Humour, therefore, arises from the pleasurable recognition that we are better, or better off, than others who have failed and are thus inferior. To the charge of superiority the Coens plead innocent. If some viewers were offended by the characters, say the Coens, it was not their intention to be condescending. Says Joel, ‘the characters were certainly supposed to be sympathetic. We got a lot of pleasure out of writing them’ (Allen 2006: 32).
Another philosophy of humour better suited to account for Coen comedy was advanced by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who proposed an aesthetic of humour and laughter based on the principle of incongruity. As Kant explains, when we encounter something that does not correspond with or violates our routine expectations, it causes laughter. Laughter arises when there is a discrepancy between abstract concepts of the normative and that which in everyday experience exceeds the bounds of normality. He also emphasises the physical aspect of amusement. The pleasure of humour, Kant theorises, is not the kind of ‘high’ pleasure we experience in the contemplation of aesthetic beauty or the sublime delight we take in moral goodness. For Kant, humour is a sensory experience based on feelings of physical, visceral well-being that come to expression in laughter.
In Raising Arizona the Coen brothers exploit the comic potential of incongruity fully, generating comedy by juxtaposing characters as opposites and forcing them into incongruous relationships and absurd situations. Actually, the entire narrative hinges on the central (laughable) incongruity of marrying Hi, a recidivist convict, with Ed, the straight-arrow cop, a disjunction visually highlighted in their wedding ceremony, where half of the celebrants gathered for the occasion consists of Hi’s criminal friends dressed in Hi’s fashion-signature floral shirts, while the other half, representing Ed, are policemen dressed in dark monochromatic uniforms. One of the most striking incongruities is certainly Hi’s double-voiced speech – the humorous disjunction, that is, between the elevated, faux-literary diction of his voiceover narration and the generally dim-witted remarks of his spoken dialogue. In his voiceover monologues Hi often holds forth in a style that is oddly philosophical and sage. Lying in his jail bunk, he spouts lines of melancholy jail poetry: ‘The joint is a lonely place after lock-up and lights out, when the last of the cons has been swept away by the sandman.’ Speaking of Ed’s obsessive need for a child to complete the McDunnough ‘family unit’, Hi waxes philosophical: ‘Her point was 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.’ Describing Ed’s infertility, Hi intones with biblical inflection: ‘Her insides were a barren place where my seed could find no purchase.’ Speaking of the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse, Hi’s rhetoric assumes a folksy kind of literariness: ‘I didn’t know where he came from or why. I didn’t know if he was dream or vision. But I feared that I myself had unleashed him for he was The Fury That Would Be, as soon as Florence Arizona found her little Nathan gone.’ Indeed, even Hi’s nightmarevision of the Lone Biker is rendered with poetic flourish: ‘He left a scorched earth in his wake, befouling even the sweet desert breeze that whipped across his brow.’ At the end of his story the idiot-poet in Hi ascends to new heights of lyricism: ‘That night I had a dream … I dreamt I was as light as ether, a floating spirit visiting things to come … The shades and shadows of the people in my life wrestled their way into my slumber.’
In comic contrast to the elevated style of his voiceover narration, Hi’s spoken dialogue reveals a simpler mind. When, for instance, Hi asks for Ed’s hand in marriage, he proudly announces, ‘I’m walkin’ in here on my knees, Ed, a free man proposing’, completely oblivious to the hilariously mixed metaphor he has concocted. When Ed begins to worry about the moral implications of kidnapping Nathan Jr. Hi responds with absurd illogic: ‘Well now, honey, we been over this and over this. There’s what’s right and there’s what’s right, and never the twain shall meet.’ His crude, unenlightened dialogue is consistent with his ‘bone-head’ behaviour: locking himself out of his own car during a 7-Eleven stick-up or punching his boss in the face.
Another form of humorous incongruity in Raising Arizona is the paradox of adults acting like children. Needless to say, Hi is a man who still acts like a kid, the ‘bad boy’ who fails to mature into a productive, law-abiding man. Chronically incapable of assuming the adult responsibilities of husband and father Hi seems destined to return continually to jail, his repeated imprisonments a metaphor for his infantile return to the womb-like security of incarceration. The Snopes brothers, reminders of Hi’s regressive tendencies, also act like spoiled children, loafing around in Hi’s trailer home, eating junk food and generally causing a mess. Like defiant kids, they refuse to observe Ed’s house rules. When something goes wrong they scream at the top of their lungs, as happens (several times) when they realise that they have sped off and left the kidnapped baby in the middle of the highway. Their lack of mature development is given symbolic shape during their escape from prison. Turning sight gag into a visual metaphor of childbirth, Gale crawls from a hole in the ground, amid mud and pouring rain, as if emerging from the womb. Reaching back into the mud hole, he assists Evelle’s emergence in a kind of breach birth. Then, covered in muck and mire, they both begin to howl with infantile enthusiasm in celebration of their entry into the outside world of adults. Glen is not much farther along in his emotional development. The proverbial ‘bad father’, he imposes no limits on his children’s behaviour and acts like one of the kids, encouraging their childish pranks and joining in. Aside from Ed, who also has some childish moments, the only characters who consistently act with adult restraint are, ironically, the babies. The Arizona quints are never seen to fuss like real-life babies. In the published screenplay the Coens compare them to ‘a small but distinguished panel on Meet the Press’ (2002: 139). Nathan Jr. is especially notable in this regard. Even when he is knocked off the roof of the Snopes’ getaway car, baby Nathan is always seen peacefully observing the adults around him as they howl in fits of hysteria.
Another theory of laughter and humour applicable to Raising Arizona is found in Freud’s study Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), which proposes the idea that the function of jokes and laughter is to assist in the regulation of the psychic economy, releasing pent-up energy caused by repression, thus often referred to as the ‘relief theory’. In Freud’s psychoanalytic view, humour and laughter work to breech the boundaries of repression, giving sublimated expression to forbidden feelings or thoughts, momentarily suspending social limits on propriety and transgressing cultural taboos, especially those relating to sexuality and destructive anti-social behaviours. Laughter and humour have the power to transform what would otherwise be acts of destructive violence into occasions for laughter, instances of which abound in Raising Arizona. The release theory applies particularly to the excesses of ‘low’ comedy which drive the humour in the film, drawn from early Hollywood slapstick as well as from contemporary cartoon mayhem. Here we should note the proximity of Freud to Bakhtin’s theory of humour where Bakhtin stresses that humour is linked to ‘the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and reproductive organs’ (1984a: 21). In his study Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin brands this kind of humour ‘carnivalesque’, a form of comedy derived from the medieval celebration of carnival as a publically sanctioned period of freedom from restraints on social behaviour, a time of farce, masquerade and role reversals. As Bakhtin demonstrates in his analysis of Rabelais’ fiction, the carnivalesque puts on display bodily functions otherwise repressed by social taboos, inventing a literary style Bakhtin calls ‘grotesque realism’. In this way Rabelais is able to bring the body and its material world into the abstract realm of art, enacting a comic degradation of ‘high’ art by bringing it ‘down to earth’. The degrading humour of the carnivalesque has an important social function too, working to defeat hierarchies of power and class differences by setting aside social divisions, creating a social space of freedom and equality. As residents of the ‘white trash’ trailer slums, Hi and Ed are surrounded by carnivalesque characters: boorish Glen who lets his tribe of brats run wild and whose idea of adult fun is wifeswapping; the Snopeses who are symbolically reborn in their prison escape but literally emerge into the outside world from the filth of the sewer; the grotesque leatherclad Lone Biker as representative of the outlaw subculture associated with the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gangs while simultaneously evoking the savage post-apocalyptic bikers of the Mad Max movies. The Lone Biker’s death by grenade also has a carnivalesque quality, playing the gross-out effects of violent corporeal dismemberment found in horror movies for ‘low’ comic pleasure.
Gale Snopes emerges from the sewer.
Despite its reliance on carnivalesque humour, not all of the joking in Raising Arizona is ‘low’. Among its more cerebral jests, the film includes several jokes relating to Freud. The first one occurs during the McDunnough’s visit to a gynecologist who explains to them the cause of Ed’s infertility using a Freudian sight gag. To illustrate Ed’s ‘barrenness’ the doctor uses his cigar – an obviously Freudian phallic symbol – to point out the female reproductive organs on his anatomical chart. Other Freud jokes are made in passing comments by Evelle, as when he gives Ed parenting advice on breast-feeding: ‘Ya don’t breast feed him, he’ll hate you for it later. That’s why we wound up in prison’ – alluding to the reductive Freudian cliché that childhood trauma leaves an indelible mark on the psyche. This cliché is repeated visually for comic emphasis in a close-up of Smalls’ tattoos, one of which bears the inscription ‘Momma Didn’t Love Me’. The jesting with Freud is elevated to another level in the mythic symbolism attending the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse, who in Freud’s terms represents Hi’s doppelgänger, his psychic ‘double’ or dark alter-ego. As Freud explains in his essay ‘The Uncanny’, the doppelgänger is a manifestation of ‘the return of the repressed,’ an event arousing in us ‘dread and creeping horror’ (1955: 217). Freud illustrates his theory of the uncanny with a fictional story by German writer E. T. A. Hoffmann entitled ‘The Sandman’, where in keeping with Freud’s oedipal theory, the uncanny doppelgänger (the titular ‘Sandman’) is symbolic of the protagonist’s dread at the return of his castrating father. In a broader sense, the Freudian doppelgänger represents any repressed or disavowed conflict that returns to consciousness, typically as a dangerous and destructive force. The eruption of the doppelgänger from the unconscious breaks through the barriers of repression, releasing pent-up psychic energy in acts of violent destruction.
A central theme of Raising Arizona is the tension between Hi’s desire for domesticity and his compulsion to rob 7-Elevens. Hi wages a war between his civilised self and the outlaw doppelgänger inside him. The Snopes brothers (themselves a literalised form of the ‘double’) serve to remind Hi that the outlaw is his ‘true nature’. Gale and Evelle (whose name suggestively conflates both ‘evil’ and Eve, the biblical temptress) are humorous embodiments of Hi’s dark side, agents of the doppelgänger risen from Hi’s unconscious to draw him back into a life of crime. As Hi’s psychic twin, the Lone Biker is frightening precisely because he represents the return of Hi’s repressed yearning for the outlaw life. As such, he presents a threat to the happy idyll of marriage and family Hi hopes to create. As if rising from Hi’s unconscious, the Lone Biker appears out of nowhere, a figure rising from the darkness of Hi’s dreams to become a mythic embodiment of Hi’s repressed criminal and self-destructive tendencies. Raising Arizona parodies this release of destructive energy in comically intensified images, as when the Lone Biker appears in Hi’s dream-vision bursting through a wall of hellish flames, erupting into life as a force of ruthless devastation destroying every creature that crosses his path, especially the ‘little creatures’ – cute bunny rabbits, tiny colourful lizards, even the house fly Smalls snatches out of thin air.
‘In-Jokes for a New In-Crowd’
When New York Times film critic Vincent Canby accuses the Coens of over-quoting other movies, complaining that the copious references in Raising Arizona ‘seem mostly a film-school affectation’, he echoes a number of critics who found the movie’s central fault in its over-reliance on the kind of postmodernist pastiche that Jon Lewis has labeled ‘in-jokes for a new in-crowd’ (2002: 110). Again, the critics assume that this kind of referential play indicates the filmmakers’ attitude of superiority toward their viewers. Certainly, the humour in Arizona is a different kind of joking. But if not an expression of intellectual elitist superiority, what then?
Philosopher Ted Cohen offers several alternatives to the superiority theory of humour that detractors attribute to the Coens. In his study Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters Cohen theorises that jokes have two basic functions. The first function, rooted in the Freudian release theory, is to give expression to psychic energies that have been repressed by cultural taboos. Cohen’s second, more useful definition of humour concerns the joke’s capacity for creating a relationship between teller and listener. In contrast to the comedic clowning of slapstick comedy, which relies mainly on pranks and sight-gags that have a direct and visceral impact, jokes – understood as verbal texts – make us think. Several jokes of this variety are told in the movie, for example, the simple joke Hi tells Ed as a way of flirting: ‘Hear about the paddy-wagon collided with a cee-ment mixer, Ed? … Twelve hardened criminals escaped.’ To get the humour of such a joke the listener must understand the punch line, which requires the listener to join the teller in a thought process that establishes what Cohen calls ‘a special kind of intimacy’ in the recognition of the humour. When the joke is told badly – as when Glen tries to tell Polack jokes – the intimate relationship fails. In Bakhtinian terms, all jokes foster a ‘dialogical community’ by creating a shared understanding between joke teller and recipient. Such a dialogical approach to jokes is useful in explaining how postmodern pastiche generates humour. When the reader or viewer recognises a quotation and its source, a relationship of intellectual familiarity is established. Like the punch line of a common joke, the so-called ‘in-joke’ produces the gratification of shared recognition. For this reason postmodern pastiche is often characterised in general as ‘jokey’. Fundamental to the aesthetics of postmodernism is the production of texts that generate the most referential resonance, maximising the dialogical exchange between texts and between texts and audience. In the 1980s some might have still considered such ‘in-joking’ an elitist practice, but from today’s perspective, referential humour has become conventional, even mainstream, practiced not just by elite artists but in every form of mass media, especially television advertising.
By embedding in-jokes from a wide spectrum of sources, literary as well as filmic, Raising Arizona engages its viewers in an entertaining game of recognition. Thus, the biker-bounty-hunter’s name, ‘Lenny Smalls’, is an allusion to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, a novel featuring a dim-witted giant-of-a-man named Lennie Small who, like the Coens’ Lenny Smalls, takes perverse pleasure in hurting small creatures. Smalls himself is likened to a creature when he says, ‘I’m a tracker. Some say, part hound-dog.’ Ed calls the biker a ‘warthog from hell’, an appellation borrowed from Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, whom the Coens name as a point of reference for Raising Arizona (Allen 2006: 26). The name of Hi’s jailbird buddies, the Snopses, signals the Coens’ referential play with another Southern writer, William Faulkner. The surname ‘Snopes’ is pirated from Faulkner’s so-called ‘Snopes Trilogy’, which includes the novels The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). Set in the fictional rural county of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, Faulkner’s trilogy narrates the family history of the Snopes clan, rural Southerners who speak a regional dialect rich in American vernacularisms and whose quirky first names (Flem, Lump, Mink and I. O.) resemble characters’ names in Raising Arizona, in particular ‘H. I.’ McDonnough. Populating his stories with a grotesque assortment of provincials, Faulkner exploits these human oddities and their eccentricities to create trenchant black humour. These are ready-made models for the rubes of the Coens’ Arizona-of-the-mind. The same can be said of O’Connor’s characters who also have unusual names, like Hazel Motes, the atheist preacher in her first novel Wise Blood (1952), a man on a mission to spread the ‘gospel of anti-religion’. (Wise Blood was adapted in 1979 by John Huston, one of the Coens’ favourite filmmakers.) More than just sources of odd-ball names, the fiction of these Southern writers offers itself as a rich source of darkly comic narratives that comment satirically on the moral and social injustices of an earlier period of American culture, though in many ways not so different from the world of Raising Arizona.
Along with these literary citations there are abundant references to cinematic texts. For instance, when Hi says ‘Sometimes it’s a hard world for little things’ he is quoting lines spoken by actress Lillian Gish in The Night of the Hunter (1955), Charles Laughton’s Gothic tale of a sinister Southern preacher (Robert Mitchum) who stalks little children in the night. Hi recites these very words just after awaking from his nightmare vision of the boogie-man biker stalking Nathan Jr., seen in a cut-away blowing up a harmless little rabbit with a grenade. The Lone Biker also references the Australian Mad Max movies by George Miller, set in a post-apocalyptic world populated by savage motorcycle thugs. The image of the Lone Biker’s burning boot – all that remains after Hi, with no little poetic justice, has blown him to bits with a grenade – presents a direct (and darkly humorous) visual quotation of the first film in the series, Mad Max (1979), where the footwear left on the highway belongs to Max’s brutally murdered wife. Surely one of Raising Arizona’s most obscure ‘in-jokes’ references Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964). In the scene following their jail break, as the Snopes brothers clean up and slick their hair in a public toilet, we see written on the washroom door the letters P. O. E., reverse-reflected in a mirror as E. O. P. Those familiar with Kubrick’s movie will recall that these letters are abbreviations for the phrases ‘purity of essence’ or ‘our precious essence’ – the secret code needed to stop a catastrophic nuclear attack in Kubrick’s dark satire on the Soviet-American Cold War. Later, on the trail of Nathan Jr., the Lone Biker’s mythical aura as avatar of the Apocalypse is visually emphasised when he too visits the encoded washroom, linking his image with Kubrick’s vision of nuclear apocalypse.
In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Mikhail Bakhtin introduces the concept of the ‘hidden polemic’ in artistic discourse, arguing that every artistic text, regardless of apparent intent, refers to or anticipates a dialogue with a plurality of responses. Without exception, every artistic text ‘senses its own listener, reader, critic, and reflects in itself their anticipated objections, evaluations, points of view’ (1984b: 107). The artistic text ‘senses alongside itself another discourse, another style’ – the style of peers, rivals and precursors, which it may reject or try to replace, or to which it might also pay tribute, honour and seek to emulate. The text’s sensitivity to its potential interlocutors also has socio-political consequences. As Linda Hutcheon explains in The Politics of Postmodernism, the self-reflexive parody of postmodernism underscores ‘the realization that all cultural forms of representation – literary, visual, aural – in high art or the mass media are ideologically grounded’ and thus ‘cannot avoid involvement with social and political relations and apparatuses’ (1989: 3). Any work of art, particularly one as self-consciously situated in the history and culture of American society as Raising Arizona, is inherently aware of its audience and reception; it is constructed to anticipate and invite dialogical responses and readings. Ethan and Joel Coen might disavow any intention to make political, moral or philosophical statements, claiming that their films, especially an absurd comedy like Raising Arizona, have been emptied of ‘serious’ meaning. Whether intended or not, the film has nevertheless stimulated numerous socio-political readings, ranging from Erica Rowell’s broad assessment of the movie as an ‘indictment of capitalist greed’ (2007: 59), to Richard Gilmore’s more tentative observation that it offers a ‘fairly piquant critique of America’ (2009: 21). Like these interpreters and others, I think one can reasonably discern in Raising Arizona varying degrees of social consciousness, however elusive and hidden beneath its layers of comedic farce. The voice of critique might be nearly drowned out by the movie’s cartoon zaniness, but here as in all their subsequent films, the Coens drop hints, often obscure, insinuating but never fully enunciating a submerged commentary on American society. Speaking of Raising Arizona, one interviewer observed that the Coens like popular culture, yet at the same time take an ironic stance toward it. The Coens responded: ‘Yes, we have that relationship with American popular culture. We have an attitude, a commentary with regard to the material. We make jokes with it’ (Allen 2006: 32; emphasis added). If we take them at their word, Raising Arizona does appear to convey an ‘attitude’ towards popular culture, even if it is all but smothered by silly jokes. Like their favourite filmmaker Preston Sturges, whose comedies examine the social conventions and mores of American culture with cynical wit, the Coens understand that comedy, parody and satire are often more effective forms for purveying commentary than the explicitly ideological social problem drama.
With a southwest desert setting as the stage for its characters’ cowboy/gunslinger antics, Raising Arizona first invites a reading as a parody of the Hollywood western. A cartoon version of the cinematic Wild West, the Coens’ filmscape is shaped fundamentally by the tropes of the western, including outlaws, gun fights and bank robberies, culminating in a final High Noon (1950) showdown between Hi and Smalls in the dusty street fronting the ‘hayseed bank’ of La Grange. The generic parody is embellished with the appropriate details such as the long-coat dusters worn by the Snopes brothers during the bank robbery and their use of the old-time word ‘scatter-gun’, as well as the long-barrel Colt revolver that Nathan Sr. (who also wears a cowboy hat) brandishes when he catches Hi and Ed returning Nathan Jr.
Within and beyond the generic parody of the Hollywood western, Raising Arizona reads as satire on the mythology of national identity. Among other things, it lampoons the American love affair with firearms. In the Coens’ vision of America, everyone seems to own a gun and is anxious to use it. Hi, the Snopes brothers and the Lone Biker all serve as cartoonish send-ups of the American outlaw, and the police are caricatured as reckless, state-authorised gunslingers. Even average folks like convenience store clerks and grocery store managers are armed to the teeth and eager to pull the trigger. This comically exaggerated depiction of American gun culture also contributes to a reading of Raising Arizona as spoof of the American romance with the outlaw as the dark side of the American pioneer spirit. Hi confirms the myth when he claims, in defense of his criminal tendencies, that he comes from ‘a long line of frontiersmen and outdoor types’. In the Coens’ contemporary ‘Wild West’ story Americans are still gun-toting frontiersmen and contemporary American society is just as violent as the imaginary Old West inscribed in the national imagination by the motion picture industry for over a century. As Gilmore observes, the Wild West violence so relentlessly satirised in Raising Arizona ‘reflects something deep in the nature of capitalism’ (2009: 21) linked with its underlying ethos of cut-throat competition. This American spirit of competitiveness is most clearly brought to expression in Nathan Arizona, the shamelessly selfpromoting merchandising tycoon who typifies the aggressively competitive attitude needed for success in a free enterprise economy. His contentious attitude is evident in his blustery egotism and in his hostile arrogance toward other people, especially toward his employees whom he berates as incompetent fools. His motto is: ‘Do it my way or watch your butt.’ His advertising slogan epitomises his compulsive self-promotion: ‘And if you can find lower prices anywhere, my name ain’t Nathan Arizona.’ In truth, his name ain’t Nathan Arizona, but Nathan Huffhines, a Jewish name he had changed in order to market himself more effectively in the furniture business. A send-up of the American businessman, Nathan Arizona is the first in a series of bad bosses that become familiar fixtures in the Coens’ body of work.
The kidnapping and the repeated attempts by various parties to re-kidnap little Nathan drive the plot, but also function as (comically exaggerated) instances of the competition for commodities that drives market capitalism. The purloined baby becomes the most valuable asset in the marketplace and as such a metaphor for the material goods Americans ruthlessly compete for in their pursuit of the American Dream. To Ed and Hi’s way of thinking, Nathan Arizona, the rich business tycoon, has more than his share of the wealth, so why not steal one of his babies? ‘We thought it was unfair,’ Hi comments, ‘that some should have so many while other should have so few.’ Thus, the crime of kidnapping is morally justified as a Robin Hood method of redistributing wealth, and Hi and Ed’s simple-minded rebellion against economic injustice can be ideologically sanctioned as an act of ‘underground socialism’ (Gilmore 2009: 22). In the struggle between the haves and the have-nots in Raising Arizona the McDunnoughs are not the only couple who covet the Arizona’s wealth of offspring. Glen and Dot are also greedy consumers, conniving to possess the baby, even though they already have more than they can handle. The Snopes brothers join the competition for Nathan Jr., initially seeing the child’s value only in terms of a monetary reward, but quickly growing fond of him. The biker bounty hunter sees the ‘little critter’ strictly as a market commodity, to be sold to the highest bidder, if not to Nathan Sr., then on the black market, where Smalls himself had been brought and sold when he was just an infant.
Set in 1983, early in the two-term presidency of Republican conservative Ronald Reagan, the story of the McDunnoughs and their attempts to realise the American Dream can be read broadly as a comically satirical comment on capitalism in the era of ‘trickle-down’ economics and its ideological commitment to the ‘free market’ as the ‘natural’ way of distributing wealth in a capitalist democracy. To sharpen the satiric point, Raising Arizona targets specific political figures who conceived and promoted the market philosophy of Reaganomics. Remarking on his efforts to find a place in the current economy, Hi complains that he tried ‘to stand up and fly straight, but it wasn’t easy with that sumbitch Reagan in the White House. I dunno, they say he’s a decent man, so maybe his advisors are confused.’ If this isolated reference, mentioned in passing, were the only jab at American politicians in Raising Arizona, it would do little to support a reading of the movie as political satire. There are, however, additional hints embedded in the movie’s mise-en-scène that point to extra-textual contexts.
Historically speaking, the state of Arizona is the appropriate setting for a critique of neo-conservative political ideology. In the 1960s Arizona senator Barry Goldwater was instrumental in forging a new, more aggressive Republican strategy. Goldwater, who ran for president in 1964, did much to bolster the resurgence of the Republican Party after the Kennedy-Johnson administration, making possible the eventual success of Richard M. Nixon, elected to the presidency in 1968 and again in 1972. Significantly, Goldwater’s portrait appears in several scenes, silently presiding over the proceedings in the parole room of the Maricopa County jail, where the wax-like figures of the parole board meet to assess Hi’s fitness for social reintegration. Later we hear from the Snopes brothers that they got the idea for the La Grange hold-up from ‘a guy in the joint named Lawrence Spivey, one of Dick Nixon’s undersecretaries of agriculture’, in jail for soliciting sex from a state trooper – a reminder that America’s elected officials are often no better (perhaps worse) than common criminals.
The Coens have said, somewhat axiomatically, that they can’t make a movie, even a dark or serious one, without adding a little comedy. Perhaps this axiom also applies in reverse: They can’t make a comedy without at least a substratum of seriousness. They may hide their seriousness behind a cartoonish façade, disguising cultural critique as silly slapstick, but inevitably they take an ‘attitude’ toward their stories and characters, an attitude congruent with the fictions of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Preston Sturges, and for that matter, with the Road Runner adventures of Wile E. Coyote.