Philosophy through Film: Using Cinema to Do Philosophy

Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981) analyzes a cycle of classical Hollywood films — including Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940), Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940), and Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941) — as dramatizing the Emersonian and Thoreauvian tradition of "moral perfectionism," the pursuit of one's "unattained but attainable self" achieved, in these films, through the remarriage of an already-divorced or estranged couple rather than through a first romantic conquest. For Cavell, the genre's recurring structure of conversation, reconciliation, and self-transformation embodies philosophical claims about marriage, equality, and moral education that Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays had articulated in a different register a century earlier.