You and me’s just a fool’s paradise
Raising Arizona (1987)
Welcome to another installment of my series on the films of the Coen Brothers. This is the fourth article in the series, following a general introduction, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, and Blood Simple.
In the Poetics, Aristotle asserts that a good tragedy is driven by plot, not character. The situation itself should be a tidal wave that engulfs the characters and sweeps them to their doom. This is surprising advice because the modern view is very much the opposite—we believe in character-driven stories in which the situation is created by the characters’ actions, which stem from their innate qualities. I’ve always wondered if Aristotle would have reversed this rule in the second, lost book of Poetics that covered comedy. If there’s something heartbreaking about a character being destroyed by circumstances beyond their control or creation, watching someone make a clear set of choices that leads them to ruin might be very, very funny.
The archetypical Coen Brothers characters are a couple of nitwits who come up with the worst plan in the world and reap the inevitable consequences when things go sideways. That wasn’t the case for their first movie, Blood Simple, though. Yes, its trail of bodies begins with Ray and Abby having an affair. Yes, that misdeed is exacerbated by Ray going to talk to Abby’s husband Marty. Yes, Ray makes fatal mistakes when he returns and finds Marty’s corpse. But love (or even just lust) is the most visceral, most primordial version of something that sweeps over you and washes away prior intentions. After that, everything is reaction to that fundamental fact. Love is plot at its most pure.
It’s only with their second film, Raising Arizona, that character comes into focus as the driving element of the story and along with it half-baked schemes and the potential for comedy. The Coens seem to have recognized that a character-first approach was necessary to make a comedy; Joel and Ethan outlined the difference in their initial creative process themselves in a 1987 interview with the French film magazine Positif. “With Arizona… we’d wanted to broadly make a comedy with two main characters,” Ethan said. “We concentrated on them, more than the movie in a general sense.” “The story was a way of talking about the characters,” Joel continued. “For Blood Simple, we started with a situation, a general plot. The characters went from there. So, the reverse.”
H.I. “Hi” McDonnough (Nicolas Cage) is a repeat offender convenience store robber who falls in love with and marries Edwina, or “Ed” (Holly Hunter), the police officer who takes his mugshot each time he’s arrested. As H.I. outlines in voiceover during the whirlwind first ten minutes1 that get us to the real starting point for the plot, the early years of their marriage passed in easy bliss: “These were the happy days, the salad days as they say, and Ed felt that having a critter was the next logical step. It was all she thought about. Her point was that there was too much love and beauty for just the two of us, and every day we kept a child out of the world was a day he might later regret having missed.”
But Ed is barren, or, as H.I. puts it, “Her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.” They’re devastated until hope arrives in the unlikeliest of forms: Florence Arizona (Lynne Kitei), the wife of local unpainted furniture magnate Nathan Arizona (Trey Wilson), has given birth to quintuplets and he joked to the paper that it’s too much for them to handle. Thus, with hardly a word, the McDonnoughs have their plan: they’re gonna kidnap one of those babies.
The Coens are such effortless and charming storytellers that it’s easy to overlook what a high-wire act this premise is. They’re stealing a baby for Christ’s sake! Maybe I’m the fool for taking the stakes too seriously but as a parent it’s hard for me to find kidnapping funny. My son being kidnapped is on the short list of “worst things that could possibly happen to me.” Just thinking about it makes me queasy.
And yet the movie wins me over! It’s worth considering how it pulls it off. For starters, the Coens are very specific about how they show us the parents’ reactions to the crime. We see Mrs. Arizona scream when she makes the discovery; then she vanishes from the film. To continue to see her suffering in the aftermath would be too distressing and would extinguish the comedy for good. Instead, the film focuses on Nathan, whose distress comes out as anger and frustration with the amateurish antics of the local police. The scene of the cops interviewing him amid their investigation of the home is a chaotic comedy of errors that ends with his fancy coat being ruined by the fingerprinting ink, a small indignity piled atop the crisis. It was this scene that let me breathe easy again—the dramatic tension was severed and it was suddenly clear that this situation was, above all else, very stupid.
It’s also at this point that things accelerate wildly. The viewer simply can’t hang on to Florence’s off-screen grief when John Goodman is birthing himself from a muddy hole in a rainstorm2 before pulling his brother out backwards by the leg (breech delivery).
To focus on Goodman for a moment. He is one of my favorite actors, primarily for his five collaborations with the Coens. Their longtime association feels almost too obvious in a way—if the thesis of this essay series is that the Coen Brothers are chronically taken-for-granted as filmmakers because they’ve been so good and so consistent for so long, Goodman occupies a similar space for actors. He has done it all: sitcoms, studio comedies, silly roles for the Coens, deadly serious roles for the Coens, and he’s never stopped—he’s 72 and currently making both The Conners and The Righteous Gemstones. And yet his name never comes to mind when people start naming their favorite actors. It’s not right!
In Raising Arizona, Goodman plays Gale, one of H.I.’s friends from prison who has sprung the coop along with his brother Evelle (William Forsythe). They show up on H.I. and Ed’s doorstep in the middle of the night, the very night they’ve stolen Nathan Jr. from the Arizonas. This is an early instance of the way that, no matter if it’s a comedy or a tragedy, the Coens can never let their characters be happy. H.I. and Ed have briefly fantasized about their new life of parental bliss but before they get to experience even one day of it these two disgusting buffoons have plopped down on their sofa, ruining the vibe and also threatening to bring the law to their door.
Raising Arizona’s plot has an interesting fuel-injector quality to it: the story constantly threatens to settle into domestic normalcy so the Coens must repeatedly step on the gas to keep the wheels spinning. Gale and Evelle perform this function so well—their unwelcome presence disrupts H.I. and Ed’s tidy vision of their new lives as parents and fuels great character moments but also necessarily give the story ways to grow. “They’re there to shake up the story, the other characters, everything,” Joel told Positif. “It’s like an old idea from Dashiell Hammett: an external character3 intervenes in a situation and we observe the reactions he provokes.” Added Ethan: “At some point we said to ourselves: let’s make two rough characters enter the story and watch what effect it’ll have on the relationship between the heroes.” Even here, the emphasis on character dynamic is paramount.
Gale and Evelle are also an example of a character type I love, the nuisance you never deal with until they become a real problem. Disarmed by their lunkheadedness, H.I. and Ed make the same mistake the audience does, underestimating them and forgetting they’re dangerous escaped convicts. You can see the instant regret in Nic Cage’s eyes when he realizes they plan to tie him up and take Nathan Jr. from him to collect the reward—he knew he needed to get them out of his house but he never got around to it and now it’s coming back to bite him in the ass, hard. I know there are other good examples of this type of character but the only one I can think of right now are the three dweebs from season six of Buffy who are just kind of pests—until they get their hands on a gun.
In the Positif interview, the brothers note their admiration for Flannery O’Connor, with Ethan praising her “true knowledge of Southern psychology” and her “great sense of eccentric character.” That all scans and the Coens certainly love their eccentrics. But then Joel says this: “As far as O’Connor is concerned, our characters haven’t the same mystical obsessions as hers. Ours are terrestrial!” Now, okay, sure, Raising Arizona’s gigantic mid-film setpiece is a chase centered around buying a box of diapers, that’s terrestrial enough. But what an odd thing to say about a movie that includes H.I.’s dream.
As I wrote in the introduction to this series, the first time I saw H.I.’s dream was a watershed moment in my cinematic life. It’s basically impossible to write about this film in a linear way and the dream is the reason why. It’s with the dream that the movie shatters apart and begins moving in a million different directions simultaneously. Suddenly the terrestrial plane Joel claims his characters are exclusively concerned with looks much more fraught. For H.I., there’s little difference between the dreamworld and real world, unsure as he is whether the Biker of the Apocalypse is “dream or vision.” It’s natural, in his estimation, that his actions could reverberate in this way, that his actions could call into being a spirit of fury and vengeance beyond his human powers.
This places us in a universe where justice, or at least retribution, are real forces that act in the world. H.I. is aware that stealing a baby is an act of evil powerful enough that it occasions a response from the universe, that bends reality around his need to be punished. H.I. knows that he will never have another good night’s sleep as long as Nathan Jr. remains in their care. Of course, one of the hallmarks of having a newborn is not getting a good night’s sleep,4 which makes H.I.’s punishment particularly funny but also implies that whatever higher powers might be at work in the Coens’ cosmology have a wicked flair for irony.5
It’s this promise of justice gives the ending of the film its incredible emotional power. After returning Nathan Jr., H.I. has another dream. In it, he dreams “he was as light as the ether, a floating spirit visiting things to come.” He sees Gale and Evelle return to prison and comments, “Probably that’s just as well…they’re a swell couple guys but maybe they weren’t ready yet to come out into the world.”6 But he dreams on, seeing Nathan Jr. grow up, back with his family. And then he dreams on into the far future and sees himself and Ed as an old couple being visited by their children and grandchildren. “And I don’t know, you tell me… this whole dream: was it wishful thinking? Was I just fleeing reality like I know I’m liable to do? But me and Ed, we can be good too,” H.I. says.
I believe this vision, wholeheartedly, and not just because it moves me to tears every time. I believe H.I. and Ed will have the family they dreamed of. Why? Because they gave the baby back. In a world where God’s justice can make itself known, this vision is possible. Abraham and Sarah also thought they couldn’t have children.
Stray Notes/Unused Quotes/Coenisms
I am a certified Nic Cage Respecter and man is he fantastic in this. He is an effortless movie star. So many future Coen Brothers characters follow in his footsteps, to the point it’s hard to think that they never made another movie together. It’s such a shame that their working styles didn’t mesh and Cage was frustrated with the creative process. From David Edelstein’s 1987 set visit: “Joel and Ethan have a very strong vision and I’ve learned how difficult it is for them to accept another artist’s vision. They have an autocratic nature.”
Holly Hunter is also really great. Her performance is easy to miss because she’s somehow both frequently quite angry but also lowkey, Ed is always trying to keep her cool, but on repeat viewing she really shines. Joel to Positif: “The character of Ed has a restrained sympathy, which is very interesting, something very mature.”
I should say clearly that this movie remains extremely fucking funny.
The actual baby theft scene, in which all the quintuplets get loose, required a lot of babies. From Edelstein’s report: “We kept firing babies when they wouldn’t behave,” says Joel. “And they didn’t even know they were being fired, that’s what was so pathetic about it. Some of them took their first steps on set. Ordinarily, you’d be pretty happy about something like that, but in this case it got them fired.” “They’d make the walk of shame,” intones Ethan.
Frances McDormand has a small role as Ed’s friend Dot, who is very kooky. McDormand’s character in Blood Simple was serious and not like many of McDormand’s later, kookier, iconic roles. Dot is much more in line with what we expect. The Coen Universe continues to take shape.
The ending of H.I.’s first dream has the camera slithering across the ground at astonishing speed as it approaches the Arizona’s house. This move is what I call the Evil Dead Cam, as I trace it to Raimi’s work and to Evil Dead 2 specifically (I’ve never seen Evil Dead 1). Joel was an assistant editor on Evil Dead 1 and Raimi was something of an early mentor to the brothers. I hope to explore this more at length eventually.
Imagine if the first ten minutes of Up were “art” instead of “shameless emotional manipulation.”
Shawshank Redemption legit stole this huh?
I find this interesting because in Hammett, at least in something like Red Harvest, that external character is the protagonist, unlike here.
ASK ME HOW I KNOW
We will treat the Coens’ engagement with Christianity and religion more generally at a later date.
If we follow this metaphor through, that makes prison the womb, which is bizarre.