On movies, sacred time and marriage

Reading some film interpretation theory, I came across "Pursuits of happiness: the Hollywood comedy of remarriage" by Stanley Cavell. It tells the tales of Hollywood's typical romantic comedy where the estranged couple is reborn from its ashes. Focusing on seven such films made between 1934 and 1949, this work is still quite actual.




"A running quarrel is forcing apart a pair who recognize themselves as having known one another forever, that is from the beginning, not just in the past but in a period before there was a past, before history. This naturally presents itself as having shared childhood together, suggesting that they are brother and sister. They have discovered their sexuality together and find themselves required to enter this realm at roughly the same time that they are required to enter the social realm, as if the sexual and the social are to legitimize one another. This is the beginning of history, of an unending quarrel. The joining of the sexual and the social is called marriage. Something evidently internal to the task of marriage causes trouble in paradise - as if marriage, which was to be a ratification, is itself in need of ratification. So marriage has its disappointment - call this its impotence to domesticate sexuality without discouraging it, or its stupidity in the face of the riddle of intimacy, which repels where it attacks, or in the face of the puzzle of ecstasy, which is violent while it is tender, as if the leopard should lie down with the lamb. And the disappointment seeks revenge, a revenge, as it were, for having made one discover one's incompleteness, one's transience, one's homelessness." (Cavell, Pursuits of happiness: The Hollywood comedy of remarriage, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1981, p 31).

This passage came to my attention for the way the author refers to the time before time in one's individual history. It strikes me as essentially being what Mircea Eliade used to call illo tempore of one's personal mythology, the sacred time from before time and "history" begins. Regarding the cinematic industry, Eliade called it a "dream factory" in relation to archetype and myth-activating phenomenology of (post)modern man. It is rather interesting that the romantic feelings are one of the last fields in which the sacred sense of time, nostalgia of origins and all the other myth-related mechanisms described by Eliade seem to still function. As if love in its romantic sense is one of the last major myths not completely de-mythizised. Perhaps that could be a reason for it being the most common media content.

The second part of the transcribed fragment is again, a classic ingredient in movies nowadays also. The marriage that complicates and un-stabilizes things instead of settling them. The never ending dispute between prophets of marriage's demise or its endurance. Dispute similar with Nietzsche's "God is dead" versus religious revival. And what is more typical to post-modernity's discourse that its critical gaze cast on towards itself? Re-analyzing every pre-given data, re-estimating every gain, questioning every structure. When this meets the emotional register of romantic feelings, nostalgia, "love-makes-someone-a-better-person mythology" and sacred time, we have, again, the recipe for the type of movie made of modern angst: desperate to find peace, but bitterly hacking every detail of what it desires through its magnifying scope. Of course, the viewer does get some kind of satisfaction in the end, and all the doubts lead back to the original unity. Worked in the '30s, works now. Seems fit that all the gallop was named in Cavell's work "Pursuits of happiness". All the emotional drama is, in the end, the way the world understands and defines the concept of happiness today and what it thinks it should search for.