Marriage as Madness

Abstract

Aside from being one of the best books ever written on film, Stanley Cavell’s 1979 masterpiece Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage is surely also one of the best investigations we have into the institution of marriage. Here as elsewhere, Cavell has multiple targets in his sights. Along with mapping out a new subgenre within the screwball comedy and moving the then-newly christened discipline of film studies forward, his aims are also philosophical (searching for the ways in which these films “disquiet the foundations of our lives”), sociological (searching for cultural connections between the two waves of feminism), and matrimonial. Cavell is trying to discover what makes marriages work, and under what conditions a married pair might be able to find the “thirst for remarriage” that he takes as its essential element. Moving well beyond accounting for filmic portrayals of the married state, Pursuits is a virtuosic exploration of marriage itself, with countless insights to offer.