The Philadelphia Story

Tomorrow, there will be an all day conference celebrating the life and work of the philosopher, Stanley Cavell at Harvard University. In his 2005 book, City of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life, Cavell considers the intersection of two of his longstanding interests — Emersonian philosophy and the Hollywood comedy of remarriage. He artfully links masterpieces of moral philosophy and classic Hollywood comedies to fashion a new way of looking at our lives, learning to live with ourselves, and perhaps reorienting the perception of Western philosophy. Here is a bit from his analysis of The Philadelphia Story.

For the moment, let’s consider the form the issue of questioning takes in the narrative of The Philadelphia Story, or questioning the right to question. Any moral theory will require of itself that it seek the ground of rationality in moral argument, the thing that makes conduct criticizable by reason. Utilitarianism seeks rationality in the maximization of value (it is irrational to achieve less pleasure for fewer persons if you have the choice to achieve more for more). Kantianism seeks rationality in the universality of the principle on which one acts (it is against reason to exempt oneself from the judgment of one’s principles). Kantianism focuses on the disruption of principle by the infection of inclination; for example, the value of charity is lessened if it is given out of either a feeling of pity or a swell of benevolence or for the acclaim it will command (in other words, if the left hand knows what the right hand is doing). Perfectionism also focuses on the one acting, but detects irrationality in failing to act on one’s desire, or acting in the absence of sufficient desire, in the case where an act has value (positive or negative) essentially as a function of whether one desires it. Dexter says to Tracy about her proposed marriage to George that “it doesn’t even make sense”; and when Mike tells her “You can’t marry that guy,” it turns out that he too means not that it is provably bad or wrong but that it just doesn’t fit. Tracy accuses them both of snobbery. What they are both doing is appealing to her to recognize that she does not desire what she protests she desires. They are trying, as Dexter will put it, “to get those eyes open.”

This is the aim of moral reasoning in perfectionism, not to assess pluses and minuses of advantage, nor to assess whether the act is recommendable universally, but yet to see to what those two standard theories wish to accomplish, namely that the one in question make himself intelligible, to others and to himself. Perfectionism concentrates on this moment. First, it recognizes difficulties in the moral life that arise not from an ignorance of your duties, or a conflict of duties, but from a confusion over your desires, your attractions and aversions, over whether, for example, you want the duties associated with marriage at all, whether you can bear the sense of failure in another divorce, whether your inability to act on your self-confessed longing to be useful in the world is based on anything more than fear or your vanity in wanting to be perfect, intact, without the need of human company. Second, it proposes that such muddles essentially stand in need of the perception of a friend. Third, it underscores that for one to confront another with her confusion, especially when she has not asked for advice, requires the justification of one’s moral standing with her. To whom are reasons owed? Dexter asks Tracy, when she begins to confess to him that she doesn’t know what happened between her and Mike, “Why [are you saying this] to me, Red? Where do I come into it any longer?” — not as rhetorical questions, but to get those eyes open to the fact that she continues to regard him as her helpmeet.

The moment of encounter, or challenge, does not exist in utilitarianism, in which, as Rawls remarkably observes, the individual does not exist. Nor does it exist essentially in Kant, where the challenge comes from the moral law alone.

The general cause of intervention in the films of remarriage comedy — given that the fact of these marriages means that the pair are in conversation — is to educate; to begin with, to respond to the woman’s sense of her lack of education, her demand to know something that will change her dis- satisfaction with the way things are, or reveal her role in it, or her, after all, greater satisfaction with this way than any other. In Adam’s Rib, the Hepburn character will not place this demand explicitly until the next-to-last line of the film, in which, as the pair are about to get into bed together, she asks her husband, evidently in all comic seriousness (as it were, as a test of whether to get into bed with him again), what the difference is, or means, if anything much, between men and women. In The Philadelphia Story, the demand, to my ear, is placed in that outcry of Tracy’s to George, “Oh, to be useful in the world!”

Tracy has, like Portia, three men to choose from; in her case the choice lies in determining who can help her answer that demand, which means, finding whom she can talk to, whom she believes. George on the spot rules himself out by failing to take her demand seriously; one question of the comic plot is to figure out how this news, of the foundering of an engagement to marry, is to break. To believe Dexter is to believe him when, for example, he says, an hour or so earlier, that Tracy was no helpmeet, she was a scold; their conversation had run aground; has it started again? Mike seems to have reached her, after a passionate exchange ending in a kiss, but the result of their reenacting a favorite scene from her earlier life with Dexter — having a midnight swim together after a party — is that she links up again with her desires, as Dexter keeps hoping for and holding up to her, but this time the immediate result is the scene with her and all three men, as Mike is carrying her from the swimming pool to her bedroom. Here she sings out in full giddiness that she has feet of clay, meaning roughly that she is subject to desire. It is here that she describes her condition, in response to Dexter’s expression of con- cern, as that of being “not wounded, Sire, but dead.” (This provided a signal moment of confirmation for me in working out the characteristics of remarriage comedy against Northrop Frye’s characterization of New and Old Comedy. Frye remarks of Old Comedy that in it the woman undergoes something like death and resurrection and holds the key to the plot.)

The playful dig in Tracy’s in effect addressing Dexter as “Sire” is good enough in itself, but it is obvious that Tracy is quoting something. It is only within the past year that, after desultory spurts of unsuccessful rummaging in Kipling and Browning, I am able to report, with some pleasure and relief, that the source is Robert Browning’s “Incident at the French Camp,” as follows:

“You’re wounded.” “Nay,” the soldier’s pride Touched to the quick, he said:
“I’m killed, Sire!” And his chief beside Smiling the boy fell dead . Of course Tracy Lord would know Robert (and Elizabeth Barrett) Browning. I note that, having re-found her playfulness in response to Dexter’s concern, a quality in her he has told her he relished (I am remembering her having described Dexter, to George, as “my lord and master”), and, leaving aside the question of who is the chief who is present “beside” her (it could be George, but the idea that her pride in battle is touched rather suggests that it is Mike), I note further that what has died is specified in Tracy’s allusion to herself, via Browning’s poem, as a boy, hence she is in effect acknowledging that the “garçonne” quality associated with Katharine Hepburn (fully recognized on film in her playing a boy in Sylvia Scarlett, directed by George Cukor in the mid-1930s) is part of why she requires resurrection as a grown woman.

Or is this worth noting? Can this little radiation from Browning’s poem have been intended? By whom? These are questions I know will, even should, arise often. My advice is not to ignore them, but also not to let them prevent your imagination from being released by an imaginative work. To deflect the question of intention you have to say something to yourself about how, for example, just this poem by just this poet is alluded to just here in this work. So if you tell yourself it is an accident, then take that idea seriously.

What is the accident? That it is this poem by this poet? That it is said just this way by just this actress playing just this role in the presence of just this set of characters at just this moment in this plot in just this notable posture (the unique time in the film a character says anything while being carried)? This is a conjunction of seven or eight accidents, to go no further. Is it more satisfying intellectually, or as a point of common sense, to attribute this conjunction of events to a set of accidents than to suppose that it was intended that Tracy Lord allude, with understanding, to Browning’s line? Why resist it? (I am asking this in all seriousness. Is intention dismissed, or resisted, less in response to the traditional arts than in response to film? Of course the concept of intention is in need of analysis. There is hardly a concept more in philosophical need.)