Breaking Up (and Making Up) With Stanley Cavell

This past Valentine’s Day, Emily Gould published a personal essay for The Cut about her marriage, titled “The Lure of Divorce.” The piece, which quickly went viral, details the arc of her union to fellow writer Keith Gessen in the lead-up to the release of his memoir Raising Raffi, about their son. “In the summer of 2022,” it begins, “I lost my mind.” Growing “distant and impatient with Keith as the book’s publication approached,” Gould continues, “I became convinced that my marriage was over and had been over for years.”

While Gould’s piece opens with an account of why she felt compelled to leave her husband (career envy, feminist resentment, motherhood), it soon turns into justification for why they decide to stay together. After reading it, a friend texted me: “The Emily Gould essay is kind of a comedy of remarriage?”

Comedies of remarriage are everywhere, at least for those who know how to see: instances of couples breaking up only to reunite with greater self-knowledge and commitment. In fact, the term has become so prevalent that I sometimes forget it originates from Stanley Cavell’s academic study Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, published in 1981 by Harvard University Press. The book’s seven chapters each focus on a different classical Hollywood screwball comedy—The Lady Eve, It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, Adam’s Rib, The Awful Truth—that, in Cavell’s hands, gets reframed as, well, a comedy of remarriage. Before Emily Gould and Keith Gessen, there was Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, as well as Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. The repetition of certain actors across these films only adds to Cavell’s interpretation of them, given that the comedy of remarriage is itself a theory of repetition.

In retrospect, Pursuits of Happiness (which, published 43 years ago, is nearly as old as a happy marriage) seems a curious text to have broken into popular consciousness: Not only is it a scholarly monograph but, moreover, it’s a work of academic philosophy. Cavell explicitly describes his book as offering “readings” of films, approaching Hollywood romcoms as seriously as philosophical texts. In comparing the films of Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, and George Cukor to the works of Nietzsche and Freud, Cavell insists that screwball comedies might have just as much to tell us about the human condition as a Shakespeare play. Pursuits of Happiness reaches both high and low—juxtaposing Kant with Capra, Hegel with Hepburn, Wittgenstein with women’s stories. The result is something known today as “film philosophy,” an entire subfield born from the marriage of popular film studies and continental philosophy.

That an academic book’s central concept has since become a common term is perhaps reason enough to say that it has indeed held up. It doesn’t hurt that Cavell’s coinage is both straightforward and succinct. In the comedy of remarriage, “the drive of its plot is not to get the central pair together, but to get them back together, together again.” The process by which couples reunite may vary—and because not all Cavell’s examples involve literal remarriage, they’re often absent the threat (or even the lure) of legal divorce. One thing these romances all share is an initial conflict (“It’s so over”), followed by reconciliation (“We’re so back”). As a result, the endings to these films are often murky, if not simply anticlimactic. They conclude not by “starting over, but [by] starting again,” writes Cavell. “Put a bit more metaphysically: only those can genuinely marry who are already married.” One reason to ask whether Cavell’s book still holds up is because “Does it hold up?” might be described as the central question of the comedy of remarriage itself.

How do we know whether something—be it a book or a marriage—holds up? In Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell’s answer is simple: by rereading it. “Most texts, like most lives, are underread,” he contends. Writing in the early 1980s, Cavell was addressing a film culture in which most people did not—because they could not easily—watch a film more than once. Video rental stores were just taking off, and many early Hollywood movies remained difficult to track down. But it’s often hard to know what one really thinks about something after experiencing it just once. For Cavell, to give a reading of a film, then, is always to reread it. “A reading of a film,” he explains, “sets up a continuous appeal to the experience of the film.” As with remarriage, the second time’s the charm.

What’s more, to reread a film is always also to reread oneself—to compare the you who recalls a past viewing to the one revisiting it in the present. “To take an interest in an object is to take an interest in one’s experience of the object,” Cavell muses, “so that to examine and defend my interest in these films is to examine and defend my interest in my own experience, in the moments and passages of my life I have spent with them.” For Cavell, this process of criticism is “a natural extension of conversation” and an investigation of “what it is to have an interest in your own experience.” At the risk of repeating myself, we might just say: that to take these screwball comedies seriously is to take ourselves, in all our flawed and stupid everydayness, seriously as well.

While Cavell saw close reading as a form of philosophical conversation, the most telling conversations in Pursuits of Happiness come from the Hollywood films themselves. The comedy of remarriage unfolds through dialogue—talk and telling, banter and bickering—that form the very medium in which romance and renewal can occur. The importance of conversation is also why Cavell dates the birth of his genre to the advent of sound cinema, often known as “talkies.”

It Happened One Night features “almost incessant bickering” between Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert “from the instant they meet and dispute a seat on the bus.” It is as though bickering, Cavell confesses, “is itself a mark, not of bliss exactly, but of caring. As if a willingness for marriage entails a certain willingness for bickering.” Such willingness is crucial to the endurance of the comedy of remarriage, in which the pursuit of happiness always entails the risk of unhappiness. Over the course of their squabbling, Gable and Colbert are ultimately “learning to speak the same language,” down to the if-you-know-you-know allusion to the “walls of Jericho.” (Spoiler alert: it’s about sex. What begins as discourse in these films frequently slides into intercourse.)

Throughout Bringing Up Baby, Grant and Hepburn seem forever to be arguing, whether over golf balls or lions. If anything, the central couple appear at times to want nothing but to get as far away from each other as possible. “The pair’s efforts to extricate their lives from one another,” explains Cavell, also justifies their inclusion in his book: the fact that neither Grant nor Hepburn can quite quit one another is why their zany back-and-forth courtship ultimately resembles a comedy of remarriage. In The Philadelphia Story, Grant and Hepburn—despite playing a very different kind of couple—similarly reconcile through a series of difficult conversations. In contrast to the mild-mannered professor of Bringing Up Baby, Grant is Hepburn’s patronizing ex-husband in The Philadelphia Story, who reinserts himself into her life on the eve of her marriage to somebody else. Grant’s attempts to woo his ex-wife back are conversational: talking is flirting, but flirting—at times—is also negging. Hepburn, in the role of a socialite, is something of an airy ice queen, and Grant’s aim over the course of the film is to take her down a few notches, to bring her a little closer to earth. As Grant tells her: “You’ll never be a first-class human being or a first-class woman until you’ve learned to have some regard for human frailty.”

Aspects of Cavell’s readings have aged poorly insofar as they have an underlying note of baseline sexism. “For some reason,” begins one sentence, “Katharine Hepburn seems to inspire her men with the most ungovernable wishes to lecture her.” Yet I’m loath to throw the baby out with the bathwater, not because Cavell evinces any self-awareness regarding his own misogyny, but because the way gendered discourse works in these films—and in Cavell’s interpretations of them—still feels relevant today.

I often find myself most moved by the final chapter on The Awful Truth, not just because the film is the clearest example of a remarriage comedy, but also because it is so clearly Cavell’s favorite film of the book. After a breathless recap of its convoluted plot, Cavell lands on the titular phrase “the awful truth” which Dunne uses to describe the compromising situation Grant finds her in with her music teacher. Cavell’s reading of The Awful Truth—in which the scandals of love are at once mundane and monumental—also strikes me as the best philosophical take on what it means to be, and stay, married. The awful truth of marriage is that we love and marry who we love and marry not because of grand gestures or irrevocable betrayals, but through ongoing acts of faith and daily trials of talk.

Cavell’s prose can be impossibly irritating. Given that his writing on philosophy often aims to perform that which it theorizes, things can quickly turn dizzyingly recursive. On some days, I find the introduction to Pursuits of Happiness a bit of a drag—so much throat clearing, so much talking around the texts. Though on others, I find these same writerly impulses to be almost endearingly earnest. He’ll just say anything, I marvel. What felt like gratuitous free association one day might appear, on another, like a spiritual exercise in trailing someone else’s mind. And in my most receptive moods, I encounter Cavell’s tangents, deferrals, and lateral proliferation not as tedious than a relatable symptom of writerly anxiety—of a palpable desire not to be misunderstood.

At times, Cavell’s defensiveness about putting philosophy and Hollywood films into conversation can sound a bit like intellectual trolling. He repeatedly admits that what he is doing might appear “outrageous.” “I am not insensible,” Cavell writes, “whatever defenses I may deploy, of an avenue of outrageousness in considering Hollywood films in the light, from time to time, of major works of thought.” But while such statements might sound like protesting too much now, they’re also a reminder that, Cavell was writing during the early institutionalization of film studies in the American university (and from the position of a philosophy professor no less).

In asking whether Pursuits of Happiness holds up today, we inevitably face the fact that it perhaps never really held up to begin with. As many critics have pointed out, Cavell’s case studies don’t entirely make sense; nearly half are not even technically about remarriage. In It Happened One Night, Cavell’s earliest example of the genre, Gable and Colbert’s characters start off not married, but as strangers on a bus that she is riding to meet her real husband. Over the course of their journey, however, the two fall in love and end up getting married—though not before a series of conflicts and confusions. Similarly, Bringing Up Baby begins with Grant, playing a timid paleontologist, engaged to a dour Virginia Walker, but ends with him in the arms of Hepburn. In both, “remarriage,” so to speak, only happens after one of the partners divorces somebody else first.

Contemporary reviews by academics and journalists alike also took issue with Cavell’s prose style, including Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, who describes his “pervasive…digressions” as “an intellectual game of free association.” Michael Wood’s review in The New York Review of Books notes how “Cavell has a way of making announcements like ‘it is a leading thought of mine’ and ‘I wish to teach us to say,’ and he speaks of ‘my ambitions’ as if he were Ralph Bellamy remembering his several cups.” Meanwhile, in The London Review of Books, Geoffrey Hawthorne responds by sarcastically positing: “There might be records. Cavell does not consult them. His is not that kind of criticism. His is a ‘reading’ of the films as we see and hear them now. And he sees and hears them now with a good part of Western drama and the larger part of Western philosophy in his ears.” Elitism, scholarly laziness, and wordiness are fair enough accusations to lob at Cavell, who has at times conceded the charges without much protest.

Though it was perhaps feminist film critics who most took issue with Cavell’s broad pronouncements. These films from the 30s, made not long after women won the vote, Cavell argued, presented a vision of independence. As women gained greater legal freedoms in the public sphere, the comedy of remarriage showed them developing what he called a “new consciousness” in the domestic one. According to Cavell, screwball comedies imagined a world in which equality and reciprocity between men and women could be achieved through simple conversation. While this notion of remarriage engaged with feminism, many feminist critics saw Cavell as simply folding feminist ideas into his own tradition of male-oriented philosophy. In her 1995 book Feminism Without Women, feminist film scholar Tania Modleski described Cavell’s later work as “garrulously appropriating” the “voice he is claiming to help bring forth.”

Love and conversation are a luxury, of sorts. Not unlike film and philosophy. This is one reason why it’s important that these comedies of remarriage unfold in relative opulence, where lovers have the freedom to fail, and then fail better. (A running joke throughout the book notes how the Hollywood comedy of remarriage trades paradise for the rarefied pastures of Connecticut, where half the films take place.) Just as these films are set in spaces of relative luxury—where lovers can experiment and play and make the necessary errors for their reunion—the same might be said for the setting in which Cavell made these claims. Cavell wrote his book from the comfortable seclusion of a tenure professorship, at a moment when the academy was expanding and jobs and resources were (relatively) plentiful.

Pursuits of Happiness occupies an ambivalent space in the world of film criticism, where we might imagine it belongs. Speaking personally, one reason some English scholars still admire it is because the readings are just so good—seductive even when they’re being outrageous and annoying, and oftentimes seductive precisely because they drive us up the wall. The idea that negging or mansplaining (always by the right man, naturally) is a winning strategy of seduction both makes sense in the context of these films, and also remains a difficult pill to swallow. Is that just the awful truth? Cavell’s readings are ones that I find I both sometimes can’t stand, and also know I can no longer do without. And if many of his claims about genre no longer hold, part of the value of his definition of the “comedy of remarriage” for me is that it is so loose, and it’s a looseness that he licenses.

If one of Cavell’s arguments is that films teach you how to read them, then it might be no surprise that his book also teaches you to read it. Through the Pursuits of Happiness, the reader confronts an abundance of what Cavell finds interesting. It may not all interest you, and at times, I find that not all his experiences interest me. That said, it doesn’t quite seem to be the point either. And what might annoy some other readers of Cavell is also what could ultimately beguile me or, perhaps, you: which is to say that while of course I’m interested in what he has to say, I’m much more interested in how he goes about saying it. Cavell models a way of reading that informs how we might go about reading our own experiences, reading our lives.

As a work of scholarship, Pursuits of Happiness would never pass peer review today. Though I’d like to make a case that its outrageousness, to use Cavell’s word, is exactly why we might learn to treasure it anew. As with any enduring marriage, our ongoing rereading of Cavell’s book might rest not only in the book itself, but in our relationship to it—by which I mean, in our relationship to it, our relationship to our past selves.