Gotham Diary:
We’re Not Married Until We Aren’t
27 March 2013
At Crawford Doyle yesterday, I bought three books: Alexander Stille’s memoir of his parents, The Force of Things (which I’ve very nearly finished), Herman Koch’s novel, The Dinner, and Jeanine Basinger’s new film book, I Do and I Don’t. I haven’t read any of the cinema doyenne’s earlier books, but I bought this one because I’m up for a rethink. Over a quarter of a century ago, my way of watching movies was strikingly upgraded by James Harvey’s Romantic Comedy in Hollywood. In those heady days, videocassettes, while not exactly new, were beginning to make it possible to conduct personalized movie festivals, and to see films that had become all but inaccessible. Had The Awful Truth ever appeared on television? I don’t think so. And it wasn’t easy to obtain — the first copy that I could get my hands on was a laser disc. Now at or near the top of almost everybody’s list of comedies from the studios’ golden age, The Awful Truth was not well known when Harvey put a still from it on the cover of his book.
In a preliminary Author’s Note, Basinger hails the work of Stanley Cavell, who developed the concept of the “comedy of remarriage” to reformat the screwball comedies of the Thirties and early Forties into fodder for philosophical reflections on marriage. “My book differs in one simply way: he uses movies to think about philosophy. I use them to think about movies.” What she really means is that, while Cavell considers marriage from its breakdowns, Basinger wants to have a look at how marriage — committed domestic life — is presented in the movies. On the first page of her Introduction, Basinger notes that, when asked to name a few “marriage movies,” friends would almost invariably name The Awful Truth. But Jerry and Lucy Warriner are never, in Basinger’s sense, married in the movie. They have effectively broken up before the movie begins, and the film closes on their almost illicit reunion. They never actually live together.
So, The Awful Truth is not a “marriage movie.” I was a little sad to read this, true as it is. But it confirmed my need for a rethink. I’ve never given marriage movies any particular thought. And if The Awful Truth isn’t about marriage, well, then, what is it about? Beyond the comedy of remarriage and all that.
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Fans of the movie will complain that the second scene of The Awful Truth takes place in the Warriner’s drawing room — so of course they’re married at the start. Here’s why I disagree. Jerry has brought a group of carousing friends back for egg nog; then Lucy shows up with her music teacher. Everything they say about where they’ve been and why is dubious if not obviously untrue (as Lucy points out by tossing Jerry an orange stamped with the name of a state other than the one he’d pretended to visit). But let’s consider the drawing room. It is the most white-on-white stateroom that I’ve ever seen on screen. Full of Georgian furniture, it is not so large as the huge hall of the Seton house in Holiday, but, in it’s way, it’s grander: all that fine furniture and intricate plaster work crowd the scene with a jungle of curlicued pomposity. At the end of the film, this room will be mirrored in the larger drawing room of the Vances, who are pompous and vacuous. And by then we shall have seen the rooms that Jerry and Lucy have chosen for their separate journeys toward divorce, rooms of the latest art-déco sophistication and restraint. Modern rooms. What were the Warriners doing, living à la Chippendale? One can draw any number of conclusions. Jerry and Lucy have outgrown an earlier, less considered taste. Or they have inherited the house, and never bothered to redecorate. But it is obviously not their house. Their marriage is technical. All they have to show for it is a dog. (And only in the comic inversion at the Vance’s will they ever be so incongruously attired.)
It is also fairly clear that the Warriners haven’t just started playing with matches. They’ve been pursuing their respective indiscretions for some time, but now each of them has begun to feel sore about pretending not to know what the other one is up to. The “comedy of remarriage” reading of the movie holds that Lucy and Jerry have never really been married, and that only the pratfalls and humiliations that attend their separation can bring them really and truly together. I’m not so sure. I think that there’s more of Les Liaisons Dangereuses here that is entirely comfortable. Jerry and Lucy are rich, handsome, spoiled and sexy. Fending off boredom is their principal occupation in life. I have this awful feeling, which came to me last night as I was reading Basinger, that the reconstituted Warriner marriage is going to differ from its predecessor by having an explicit policy about “sidebars.” Which will make the Warriners even more worldly and European than they were at the start. But what about the havoc that such people wreak in the lives of others? What about the hopes of next year’s Dixie Belle Lee or Daniel Leeson? The cabin in the woods in which The Awful Truth comes to an end is no more faithful to the aesthetic that the Warriners share than was the lobby at the beginning.
Basinger writes that, “watching marriage movies, I felt that they were pitched at the audience’s own level of experience more closely than any other type of movie I had seen. These movies were about content. They were talking to an audience who knew the subject, knew the subtext, knew the reality. I think this is one of the reasons that the topic of marriage in the movies, unlike the American West, horror, melodrama, combat, crime, and others, has not yet captured the full attention of academics.” I’ll be very interested to see how infidelity figures in the movies Basigner chooses to write about.