But when I spoke a moment ago of the depicting of the disposition of fantastic sums of money I did not mean that the sums had necessarily to be large but that large or small the amounts had to be significant. In It Happened One Night Clark Gable is not interested in a $10,000 reward but he insists on beng reimbursed in the amount of $39.60, his figure fully itemized. The economic issues in these films, with all their ambivalence and irresolution, are invariably tropes for spiritual issues. (Which is not to deny that they can be interpreted the other way around too, the spiritual conflicts as tropes for the economic. These conflicts are bound up with the conflict over the direction of interpretation, the question, say, of what money, and how you get it, can make you do.) This is what we might expect of American romantic, or Utopian, works. The figure Gable claims is owed to him is of the same order as the figure, arrived at with similar itemization, Thoreau claimed to have spent in building his house, $ 28.12 1/2. The purpose of these men in both cases is to distinguish themselves, with poker faces, from those who do not know what things cost, what life costs, who do not know what counts. It is as essential for the settings of our films to be such that we can expect the characters in them to take the time, and take the pains, to converse intelligently and playfully about themselves and about one another as it is essential for the settings and characters of classical tragedy to be such that we can expect high poetry from them. Our critical task is to discover why they use their time as they do, why they say the things they say. Without taking up the details of the films we should not expect to know what they are, to know what causes them.

[...] Malcolm Cowley, sifting his attentive experience of the period and of its writing, picks out three features for emphasis that our films may be seen to share. The transcendentalist possibility I was noticing seems to be what Cowley calls the period's millennialism, as if under the depression an ecstasy were discernible; he also mentions the presence in a number of the period's good novels of the theme of death and rebirth; and he finds a chorus of witnesses to the dignity of man. As we progress these themes will be found to play curiously sensitive roles in our set of films. But to see this we will have to develop a certain skepticism about appearances. For example, it will be a virtue of our heroes to be willing to suffer a certain indignity, as if what stands in the way of change, psychologically speaking, is a false dignity; or, socially speaking, as if the dignity of one part of society is the cause of the opposite part's indignity, a sure sign of a disordered state of affairs.

What is it about the conversation of just these films that makes it so perfectly satisfy the appetite of talking pictures? Granted the fact, the question can only be answered by consulting the films. Evidently their conversation is the verbal medium in which, for example, questions of human creation and the absence of mothers and the battle between men and women for recognition of one another, and whatever matters turn out to entail these, are given expression. So it is not sufficient that, say, the conversation be sexually charged. If it were sufficient then the genre would begin in 1931, with Noel Coward's Private Lives, a work patently depicting the divorce and remarrying of a rich and sophisticated pair who speak intelligently and who infuriate and appreciate one another more than anyone else. But their witty, sentimental, violent exchanges get nowhere; their makings up never add up to forgiving one another (no place they arrive at is home to them); and they have come from nowhere (their constant reminiscences never add up to a past they can admit together). They are forever stuck in an orbit around the foci of desire and contempt. This is a fairly familiar perception of what marriage is. The conversation of what I call the genre of remarriage is, judging from the films I take to define it, of a sort that leads to acknowledgment; to the reconciliation of a genuine forgiveness; a reconciliation so profound as to require the metamorphosis of death and revival, the achievement of a new perspective on existence; a perspective that presents itself as a place, one removed from the city of confusion and divorce. One moral to draw from the structure of Private Lives is that no one feature of the genre is sufficient for membership in the genre, not even the title feature of remarriage itself. Another moral is that the fact that Private Lives seems closer than our comedies do to the spirit of Restoration comedy is a good reason not to look to Restoration comedy (as I have periodically, for obvious reasons, found myself tempted to do) as a central source of the comedy of remarriage.

The intimacy of the connection between these excerpts and the themes of the films of remarriage will not, I think, make itself felt unforgettably until one is well into the studies of the individual films; certainly, as I indicated, I did not see the intimacy until I was just about through composing them. A Doll House is a structure in which an apparently orderly life shatters into fragments which assemble with raging velocity an argument concerning the concepts of forgiveness, inhabitation, conversation, happiness, playtime, becoming human, fathers and husbands, brother and sister, education, scandal, fitness for teaching, honor, becoming strangers, the miracle of change, and the metaphysics of marriage. The argument of a comedy of remarriage requires, with others, each of these concepts. In A Doll House a woman climactically discovers that her eminently legal marriage is not comprehensible and therefore, before her own conscience, that she is dishonored. She demands an education and leaves to seek one that she says her husband is not the man to provide. They could find a life together (and so perhaps find or create marriage between them) only on the condition that a miracle of change take place. I have described the genre of remarriage in effect as undertaking to show how the miracle of change may be brought about and hence life together between a pair seeking divorce become a marriage. A Doll House thus establishes a problematic to which the genre of remarriage constitutes a particular direction of response, for which it establishes the conditions or costs of a solution.

There is in these closing pages of the play an unfolding of actions amounting to what I should like to call continual poetic justice. The intellectual or spiritual succession of concepts,’ dismantling the doll house, have this quality as certainly as the more obviously Ibsenist gesture in which Nora refers to her changing her clothes as her being changed, or the final sound of the slamming door of the house, which counts not as the interruption of an argument but as its continuation by other means, and specifically its ending. Her action is not the preventing but the abandoning of words, and of the house of words. The actions and words of our films characteristically work with these poetic densities — the subverted embrace at the close of Bringing Up Baby; the darkening screen, empty of figures, at the close of It Happened One Night; the photographs that close The Philadelphia Story; sitting down together in His Girl Friday; a song and dance in The Awful Truth . . . The Ibsen, and these films, declare that our lives are poems, their actions and words the content of a dream, working on webs of significance we cannot or will not survey but merely spin further. In everyday life the poems often seem composed by demons who curse us, wish us ill; in art by an angel who wishes us well, and blesses us.