Victoria,
My apologies for the late review! As you are well aware, starting grad school has pretty drastically changed our reading/writing/film viewing habits. Luckily, a movie as idiosyncratic as Raising Arizona leaves an indelible enough of an impression that, though we viewed it together an embarrassingly long time ago, I should still be able to say something about it.
Let me focus in on the humor and the way it works in the film. As you discuss in your review, this movie is funny, but in something of an unusual way. Rather than relying strictly on pratfalls, jokes, or quirk (though these are, of course, present), the Coens source the bulk of their comedy in the language itself. You rightly indicated that there is something aspirational about the way these characters speak, and suggest the Coens are trying to do something with the concept of class in Reagan America. I don’t disagree. Going a step further, though, I think the Coens are trying to suggest something even more basic: people are funny.
This of course sounds redundant. A good comedy film couldn’t work without people, without actors, writers, etc. There is more going on here, though. By sourcing the humor of the film in things like diction, elocution, and word choice, the Coens are drawing upon an idea that they return to again and again across the span of their oeuvre. This idea is that people, as they are, in any situation, in any social environment, with any set of desires or motivations, are a peculiar species worthy of befuddlement and (gentle) ridicule. There is something comedic about the fact that people are the way they are, that they make seemingly unconscious choices about language and dialect. As an example, I point you to a line of dialogue H.I. speaks early in the film: “There’s what’s right and there’s what’s right and never the twain shall meet.”
This is naturally a funny line of dialogue. Let’s look at why, though. H.I.’s getting turned around trying to make a linguistic distinction between right and wrong, and he’s doing it by misquoting the opening line from a Rudyard Kipling poem, of all things. The original line reads, “Oh East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” H.I. is drawing on murky cultural knowledge, then, in his mistake. Furthermore, he’s saying this to attempt to justify a particular action (a particularly unjustifiable one for most people - stealing a baby). These factors coalescing, this line becomes a profoundly human thing: H.I. is misspeaking (only possible if one can speak in the first place), he’s drawing on his cultural background (only possible if one is a part of a culture/society in the first place), and he’s trying to reason his way into bad behavior (a uniquely human activity). He’s speaking this, I’ll add, with a goofy, quasi-Southern low-class accent that feels anachronistic and exactly right at the same time. These kinds of lines are all over the film, and even though they aren’t always as overtly funny as this one, their ubiquity suggests that H.I. isn’t some kind of linguistic Vitruvian Man; everyone is like this.
The Coen’s achieve this by heightening the dialogue just enough. It was enough to bother some critics at the time (Ebert, writing in 1987, says, “I have a problem with movies where everybody talks as if they were reading out of an old novel about a bunch of would-be colorful characters”), but it’s this silly subtlety that is the point. If it were completely over the top, it would be caricature. Because it feels like window dressing to the narrative, it becomes satire.
Satire, not of any particular institution or idea, but of human beings ourselves.
Love,
Adam
