What Goes without Seeing: Marriage, Sex and the Ordinary in The Awful Truth

My experience is that most texts, like most lives, are underread, not overread. Stanley Cavell This paper offers a detailed reading of The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) in order to meditate further on Stanley Cavell’s articulation of the themes of the ordinary and perfectionist marriage as exemplified in the genre of films he calls the Hollywood comedy of remarriage.2 Unlike other writers on the genre of remarriage comedy Cavell sees an intimate connection between marriage and theme of the ordinary in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, hence between marriage and the threat of skepticism.3 This paper takes up that idea and another idea that Cavell comes close to articulating without quite doing so – namely, that the medium of film itself provides a unique and unprecedented access to the ordinary, one which goes some way to countering its condition of being ‘a moving image of skepticism’.4 Film and the Ordinary Invisibility of the Everyday Ludwig Wittgenstein famously remarks, ‘The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.’5 An important theme of the medium of film – the projection and screening of reality – is to raise the question ‘What is seen? ’ in such a way as to invite the further question of what is not seen, of what we, for the most part, do not or cannot see even if it is, in some sense, right before our eyes to be seen. Here I do not mean the way that film is framed always implies an unseen world outside the frame but the ways in which we, for various reasons, cannot see, or read, each other. Our everyday powers of being fully 1 University of Sydney